My Lucha Journey: The Marco Corleone Experience Part 1: Marco Corleone vs Mr. Niebla

Now that I'm done with Rush vs Shocker, I thought I'd go back and take a look at another wrestler that I can't get a great handle on. No one really talks up Marco Corleone, except for in some odd amazement that Mark Jindrak ended up where he ended up. I think people don't talk enough about Maximo but they talk even less about Marco. He's the third guy in his trios and maybe the Superman Body Press can be a little awkward at times, sure, but I think he plays his role extremely well, both takes offenses and dishes it out (especially his punches) pretty well, and works a lot of his character into his matches. I just don't remember him being all that great in the early 00s when I last saw him. You can learn a lot about a wrestler just by watching trios, but you learn something different in singles matches where more of the structuring and execution of the matches will fall upon his and his shoulders alone. I'm going to take some time and look at both.

aired 2013-09-21 

taped 2013-09-15 @ Arena Mexico 

Marco Corleone vs Mr. Niebla 

This was an interesting match. I'm not entirely sure how they got to this point. Youtube's amazing translation features makes me see that Niebla was pushing hard the fight for Mexico and his neighborhood and what not against the foreign interloper, even though said interloper was the tecnico. That meant we got a much more serious Niebla than usual. I've seen these two work their shtick against each other a bunch of times, so this was actually a bit refreshing. Of course, there are limits. Niebla still came out with the fro and he still took his through the ropes bump and fell off the ropes once. It was only once though and while yeah, it led to a transition, it came right after a dive and wasn't the least logical thing in the world.

One of my favorite things about watching Marco is the way that other luchadors have to deal with his size. You can get comedy sequences with Casas or him going toe to toe with someone larger like Kraneo (and I want to look at some of those), or you can have a fall end with someone rolling through his giant awkward body press, like Niebla did to win the primera caida after an equally awkward but still sort of impressive top rope clothesline (he later hit one from the apron outside too). I saw him lose to that reversal in the parejas increibles tournament too. Here, it set up a small litany of body presses and reversals throughout the match. I liked that when he hit his next one, off the top rope, he rolled through so that Niebla couldn't reverse it again. This led right into the end of the fall as he was able to powerbomb Niebla immediately thereafter. It also meant things mean more when he finally hit the superman version (after two of his spin out belly to backs, making him earn it) to win the match.

Even with the good punches, my guess on why we don't hear more about Marco is that he's fairly awkward. That's something I'm still getting used to with lucha. Most places I talk about wrestling look at execution as a secondary trait. With lucha, it seems a primary one, if not THE primary one. His character stuff, however, remains really fun. Here, he was great at portraying attitude when taking ineffectual chops or when Zacarias was menacing his leg. He kicked out the Rick Rude swerve at the right time to pop the crowd. There was another awesome callback, one that sort of led into the finish of the tercera caida: after the powerbomb, he had used his height to get his feet on the ropes for advantage. This played into the slight heeling he was doing here after Niebla made it about nationality and because the Arena Mexico crowd doesn't love him, but it was also visually interesting and sort of appropriately shtick worthy. Later on Niebla tried it but came up (literally) short. I think it was a sign of how just a little bit of the funny CAN go a long way even in a more seriously worked match like this.

In the end, no one is going to mistake this for a Match of the Year contender but it was smartly worked and entertaining while still having more weight behind it than if it was just a comedy match. So after this first glance, my feeling is that while he's not a maestro, and while his execution is a little awkward, I think he can more than hold his own in a setting like this.  I liked a lot of what he did in this match more than I liked, for instance, a lot of the far smoother and more artful things I saw Valiente do in his singles matches, not because of what they were but because of how they were used.