CMLL live! (sorta)

Alrighty, then. Since I have both no life and a nagging cold that is apparently never going away, I've decided it is time to do a live CMLL wrestling blog. By "live," I mean "show that I Tivo'd two weeks ago that I'm finally getting around to watching," and the shows being aired on Galavsion are five months old, but it is live to me. Here goes:

The show begins with a bang. Dr. X is putting his Mexican national welterweight title on the line against La Mascara.

I've done some research, here. The Mexican national weight class championships are actually controlled by the athletic commissions and not the wrestling promoters. They treat them like real sports titles, and only wrestlers actually from Mexico can hold or challenge for the belts. I kid you not. That's got to make for some interesting behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing.

Anyway, keen followers of Dave's World's Mexican wrestling coverage (all three of you) may have noticed that never once have I bothered to mention the name of La Mascara, not even in passing. Why La Mascara is being given this golden opportunity to show he is the best welterweight in Mexico is beyond me.

In the time it took me to write that last paragraph, Doctor Equis has already claimed victory in the first fall. His submission move looked like a soccer team trainer stretching out a player's hamstring and appeared roughly as devastating, but, you know, I've never set foot in the ring at Arena Mexico, so I'm not going to question these gladiators.

So, Dr. X, who usually wears a menacing looking costume but tonight is dressed head to toe in white for some reason, recklessly careens into the turnbuckles to start the second fall, as LaM gets out of the way. I mean, I know Dr. X has a 1-0 lead and you want to put your opponent away when you can, but that was just a needless gamble. Within moments, LaM evens the score with a bizarre looking submission hold. Basically, La Mascara stands over Dr. X, hooks the Doctor's feet up to his hips, grabs his arms, and swings him back and forth between his legs.

One might logically ask, "Why doesn't Dr. X just drop his feet off La Mascara's hips and break the hold?" One can only assume Dr. X was in such blinding pain that he could not think straight.

Alright, time for the third and deciding fall. Back and forth action, but La Mascara gets the upper hand with a pretty cool headfirst dive through the ropes that has the announcer screaming "suicida!!!" over and over. LaMa applies the same move he used for the second-fall submission -- you'd think Dr. X would have looked to avoid this the second time around -- and within seconds, we have a winner. La Mascara is now the No. 1 welterweight in all of Mexico (so long as you ignore CMLL welterweight champ Mephisto and WWA welter champ El Hijo Del Santo) and has a snazzy new belt for his wardrobe.

*****

Next match, six-man tag. They didn't tell us who beforehand, so we'll just watch the entrances for now.

Oh lord. Here comes Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal comes out to the ring to Rainbow in the Dark by Dio. I'd quip "Heavy Metal is so old he's been using this song since Dio was popular," but Dio was never popular.

From bad to worse … next up is Mascara Magica. "Magic Mask" does not wear a mask. Perhaps the mask is invisible, and that's why it is magical.

And the final partner is Negro Casas, one of the all-time greats. This team is sort of like having David Ortiz surrounded in the lineup by Craig Grebeck and Ed Sprague. Which is probably Larry Lucchino's plan for next year, but that's for another day.

OK, the opposition … Hector Garza comes out first. Hector Garza is phenomenal. He's with the team of Halloween and Damian 666. Ehh. Halloween and Damian are decent performers, but they have a low-budget look and a 1997 NWO-type routine. If I wanted to bore myself with yesterday's news, I'd turn on Monday Night Raw.

So it is basically Casas vs. Garza and a bunch of extras. We're just going to fast forward to the end, here -- and a spectacular finish it is. Casas is laid out about two-thirds of the way across the ring, and Garza hits a moonsault, getting about as high in the air as I've ever seen anyone hit it. Metal and Magica are of course no help and Garza scores the pin.

*****

Now it is time for Momentos Estelares, which is sort of like SportsCenter's Top Plays. In order: Ricky Marvin, who looks like one of the British Bulldogs, uses a flying head scissors to knock Hooligan from the ring apron to the floor. That had to hurt. Incidentally, it just dawned on me that Hooligan has a union jack on his mask, so I think he is supposed to be a soccer thug. . . . La Mascara scored a submission over Dr. X in a tag team match. Man, there's a Patriots/Peyton Manning dynamic going on between these two. . . . Marvin lays out Virus with a dive through the ropes . . . Dos Caras Jr. whips Universo 2000 into the buckles, comes after him, jumps, and kicks U2K in the chin with one foot, then nails in him the back of the head with his other foot, all in one motion. Both kicks look like they landed way too hard.

*****

Wow … they are teasing a mano-a-mano matchup between Mistico and El Hijo Del Perro Aguayo later in the show. That is HUGE. That's like just suddenly mentioning "oh, by the way, in about a half-hour we'll have Ali fight Frazier" out of the blue.

The best tag team in the world, Ultimo Guerrero and Rey Bucanero, are talking to each other backstage. I don't speak Spanish, so I am going to assume they are talking about how their careers in the States will take off if Dave's World keeps writing about them.

*****

Match No. 3: Tiger Mask, Ultimo Dragon, and Dos Caras Jr. against Guerrero, Bucanero, and Tarzan Boy. Let's just take a look at the subplots here instead of the match itself:

*Tiger Mask is a sad sight. Real old-school wrestling fans might remember him as a huge star from Japan in the early 1980s, an innovative high flyer who made a splash in America. He was about 5-7 and 140 pounds at the time. Now, he basically looks like Mike Scioscia dressed up in a tiger costume. The 2005 version of Mike Scioscia. In his prime, TM used to spin kick his opponent out of the ring and then follow up with a lightning-quick dive. He tried it here, but it was sort of watching Paul Coffey play for the Bruins.

*Ultimo Dragon is a Hall of Famer. He's a Japanese guy who made his name in Mexico and has wrestled all over the world. He's Guerrero's original trainer, so there is a teacher-student undercurrent here.

*Dos Caras Jr., nephew of Lucha legend Mil Mascaras, is a legit mixed martial arts fighter. Unclear on whether he fights MMA with his mask on.

*Tarzan Boy's presence as Bucanero and Guerrero's partner usually gives away who is going to get pinned to end the third fall.

*And most importantly, the tecnicos are accompanied by Que Monito, the midget gorilla formerly affiliated with Shocker. Shocker, you may recall, took the coward's way out and jumped to the AAA promotion, where the competition is nice and soft for little babies who can't handle the rough-and-tumble world of CMLL. Que Monito, however, is a primate with an innate sense of integrity and loyalty who understands that jumping from company to company to company kills your reputation dead.

Surprise finish to this one … Dos Caras ripped apart Guerrero's mask, then dumped him backwards for a nasty German suplex and got the pin.

*****

Main event time. Mistico against H. del Perro. How do I explain the sheer huge-ocity of this match? Imagine going to the ballpark and getting a pitching matchup of Dontrelle Willis and Johan Santana; or Peyton vs. Brady in football; or better yet, Brady Q. vs. Matt Leinart. Here you have the two hottest rising stars in the biz, one on one, no six-man tag with partners to hide behind. The crowd at Arena Mexico --they just panned the building, attendance looks to be roughly eight billion -- is going absolutely nuts in anticipation.

First fall -- The highlight was Mistico doing this insane running dive out of the ring in which he grabbed the ropes, went head over heels, did a 720 degree twist in midair, and nailed Perro. Now, if there are still any wrestling nonbelievers out there, they're snickering and calling that an unrealistic fighting move, but I'll have them know I was once in a bar brawl and performed the same maneuver, doing the same twist as I dove over a table and hit my target. The guy never messed with me again; in fact, he ran home crying to his mama.

Either way, Perro rebounded to score the pin after his signature running double foot stomp to the chest. The slo-mo replay might make it appear to the untrained eye that Perro doesn't put much force into his stomp, but let's please be realistic here and not get carried away -- Perro just wants to do enough damage to win, not get charged with murder.

Second fall -- Perro kicks the bejeezus out of Mistico for about 10 minutes and rips his mask. But Mistico catches him napping and hits his finishing move -- a wristlock, an ironic touch considering the spectacularity of the rest of his offensive arsenal.

Third fall -- Too much action for ten reporters to cover, much less one humble scribe. The match, in total, goes well over a half hour and the crowd works to a fever pitch (not a Fever Pitch. That would imply the crowd is trite and overexposed). Time for the big finish -- Perro accidentally knocks veteran ref Bebe Richards out of the ring. Perro rips Mistico's mask off (revealing that Mistico has bleached his hair blond: why someone who wears a mask would need to bleach his hair is beyond me) and goes to pin Mistico. Local newspaper El Globo runs a "Perro defeats Mistico" headline. By the time Bebe gets back in position, Mistico, with his mask back on, kicks out at two and three-quarters. Perro goes to argue with the ref, and Mistico gets up and applies the wristlock for the win.

This very well might be the Dave's World Mexican Wresling Match of the Year . . . but we're not done yet. Mistico is angry. He grabs the mic, jibber jabbers about something, and yells "mascara contra cabello!" Even I know that means he just challenged Perro to a mask vs. hair match. Matches in which the loser has to either permanently remove his mask, or get his head shaved if he has no mask, are the ultimate in dispute resolution in Mexican wrestling, the Supreme Court of the ring.

Quite a show this week. I need a cigarette. And I've never smoked in my life.