Why Dave's World is obsessed with Mexican wrestling
It is Saturday morning, and these days at Dave's World HQ in West Seattle, that means one thing and one thing only: CMLL wrestling on Galavision.
Make no mistake about it, my Saturday does not begin until CMLL is over. If for some reason I'm not home, it gets TIVOed and I catch up later.
Why the fascination with CMLL? Partly, because I work late nights from Wednesday through Friday and by the time Saturday morning rolls around and I don't have to do anything, two hours of Mexican wrestling is a reasonable way to mentally decompress.
Mainly, it is because I'm a wrestling fanatic, have been one practically my entire life, and make no apologies for this. Just about everyone watched wrestling at some point or another in their life. I never stopped.
It started when I was seven, and watched Championship Wrestling on Channel 56 in Boston, as well as All-Star Wrestling on Chs. 27 and Ch. 68. It continued through World Class Championship Wrestling on Channel 25; the national cable wars with the WWF vs. the NWA and all the assorted promotions in the 1980s; ECW in the 1990s; and part two of the cable wars between the WWF and WCW in the 1990s.
(NO! Dave's World's favorite luchador, Mistico, has been relegated this week to "Momentos Estellares," a segment in which highlights are aired from the matches that do not get shown in full. Booooooo! Unacceptable. Even stranger, they are rehashing his big mano-a-mano upset win over Ultimo Guerrero from last week (Mistico has a headlock on UG, below).
Which brings us to the wrestling business in 2005, and why I am watching the Conseja Mundial de Lucha Libre from Mexico City instead of the WWE. Vince McMahon owns about 99% of the wrestling business in America …
Gotta interrupt myself -- wow. There's this CMLL wrestler named Super Porky, who looks exactly as his name implies. He's got to be 5-foot-7, I'm guessing 350 pounds, about 40 years old, greasy hair, and a wispy moustache. Basically, put a Yankees hat and jacket on him and stick him in the $18 right field upper deck seats at Yankee Stadium and he'd blend right in.
So, all the luchadors are accompanied to the ring by the model-type chicks you see every time you stumble on a Spanish language station. Porky has stopped to do a dance routine up on the entrance ramp with his seconds and is shaking his corpulent posterior around with these hot babes. This is hysterical, trust me.
Oh no. Porky's team is going up against some sort of washed-up evil cowboy looking team. I've nicknamed them Los Vaqueros Del Nursing Home. I think I can skip this match.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the state of the wrestling business. So Vince and his WWE own everything and have a staggering collection of talent on the roster. And yet, far and away, the best wrestling program in America right now is this one out of Mexico City put on in a foreign language on a station that few cable systems carry and you basically need a dish to receive.
How could that happen?
Well, wrestling got stale. It is a cyclical business, was super hot during the late-1990s, and cooled off. Fans understand that wrestling is not a legitimate athletic competition, but it clicks with the mainstream when viewers can sink their teeth into something that seems real -- like, people knew there was a legit business rivalry between the WWF and WCW, and tuned in every week to see where it would lead. Or, Stone Cold Steve Austin became a huge star because it wasn't too hard to imagine that his redneck, anti-authority, hell-raising persona was what he was like in real life. And so on.
But it you turned on Raw and/or Smackdown this week -- something everyone did five years ago but few do now -- you'd see the same recycled, contrived characters, plotlines, stage sets, backstage incidents, etc., that you saw in 1998. With no WCW to push them to improve the product, they'll ride this formula into oblivion, and considering the obscene amount of money they made during the boom period, that could take awhile).
(Oh man … Super Porky just dropped his gigantic ass onto the chest of one of Los Vaqueros del Nursing Home. Bad times for the victim).
Which is why CMLL is such a great alternative. There are no retarded, poorly acted backstage skits and no 20-minute long snoozer interviews. Just two hours of non-stop action in the ring, in front of large, enthusiastic audiences. All the matches end in some sort of conclusive finish. It doesn't matter that I don't speak Spanish, because the themes are the simple "these guys who don't like each other are going to fight" storyline that wrestling is at its best but WWE doesn't seem interested in anymore. About 80% of CMLL's matches are six-man bouts without tags, just a nonstop whir of action; and occasionally something happens that peeve two combatants enough to challenge each other to a one-on-one match. Simple, effective, and you don't even need to follow the commentary to understand it. It is something WWE could learn from.
Alright! We're getting Mistico after all. He's wearing a title belt of some sort, which he didn't have last week. And Ultimo Guerrero, who lost to Mistico in two straight falls last week, just chased him out to the ring, looking to atone for the embarrassment of getting his tail kicked by someone half his size. Main event time. I'm out.
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