My Lucha Journey: El Hijo Del Santo One-Shot 2: El Hijo Del Santo vs Ultimo Guerrero

2005-11-25 @ Arena Mexico
El Hijo Del Santo vs Ultimo Guerrero

This is another case of me killing a couple of birds with one stone. The next thing I'm going to take a big look at is Los Guerreros de la Atlantida, which is really an excuse for me to watch a lot of matches from 2006 in vaguely chronological order. This match (like the previous one) gives me something of a springboard into that, while getting to also watch another Santo match vs a luchador I'm fairly familiar with in Guerrero. What I should REALLY do is head back to 2001 to check out the Infernales War, but I'm pretty sure what footage is easily available there might be a bit spottier than this.

Anyway, onto the match. Looking at both, back to back, I liked this more than the Atlantis match, even if that had a much stronger finish. In fact, speaking of the finish, when I was trying to date this one, the first thing I found was a message board thread in Spanish with people complaining how AAA this finish felt to them. Ultimately, I didn't mind it. It's frankly amazing there aren't more BS finishes in general. In general, CMLL has to put on weekly wrestling in front of the same crowds, building to matches on the quick, while keeping wrestlers over while they trade wins. Part of me thinks that the 2/3 fall structure helps here, because it means each side USUALLY gets at least a fall in almost every match helping to protect just about everyone without blunting wins and losses like you see elsewhere. That's just a thought though.

I liked this one more because it was given a little more room to breathe in the tercera caida as opposed to the one fall, very frenetic affair that was the Atlantis match. That's not to say that both guys don't go all out; they do. Santo has extra motivation, past just getting revenge on UG for what happened at Leyenda de Plata. This was almost immediately after Eddy Guerrero passed away and Santo, being a former rival, wore a Who's your Papi shirt to the ring and sported an EG armband. Both luchadors took some big bumps and worked hard, but balanced it with crowd interaction and selling.

The first two falls were extremely short. I don't think the primera caida went more than two minutes, but it was action packed. UG started things with an ambush and a big press slam from the rampway to the ring. Santo then took a nasty bump as Ultimo repeated the move on the outside into a row of chairs. He then took a big bump of his own, missing a corner splash and hitting the ringpost on the way to the floor. A moment later, he ate a top rope 'rana to the ramp and then was back body dropped back into the ring. Later on, in the tercera caida, he'd take another huge one, this time hitting the top turnbuckle with his knee and flying out over the top. Add in a couple of dives, a missed senton, and a massive top rope reversal into a very dangerous looking super powerbomb on Santo and you can tell that they were definitely working hard. The primera ended with Santo's full rotation sunset flip, which he had hit on Atlantis for an early nearfall a few weeks before. The segunda caida had just the start of Santo's flurry of tecnico armdrags and fluid control, but it really didn't get the time I thought it should have. He worked the sequences quite well, and the match would have probably been more robust with a minute or two of this. Instead, UG went to the floor, ate a nice tope suicida, missed a senton, and locked on a savvy reversal role up off of a submission attempt. It was well done, but in general, I would have liked a but more substance in the segunda.

The tercera struck a better balance. Ultimo had control, broken up with near falls and bursts of offense, for the better part of it. Santo is very good at, I'm not even going to say working from underneath, but portraying a struggle to overcome adversity. Here, the high point of that was fighting his way out of a modified Gory Special. Once things got going they would sell and look to the crowd after every move or short sequence, which, after the brevity and speed of the first two falls, imposed a sense of build to the match. There were a couple of parallel spots and roll ups and some submission attempts that seemed a bit askew, but still, somehow totally believable due to the skill of the luchadors involved. The reversal into a super powerbomb was pretty harrowing considering UG seemed to lose Santo's leg on the way down, but it was an effective way to roll into the finish given that both guys sold it so thoroughly.

The finish had UG escape the caballo attempt only to get backdropped. Santo hit the top but Atlantis came out. This allowed Mistico to rush in behind the ref's back and hit a missile dropkick. Santo wouldn't capitalize though and frustrated, Mistico put the boots to UG when the ref could see it. I thought it was a fairly good way put more heat on the rudos while still protecting Santo and highlighting Mistico's youth and frustration. It was the sort of thing that might keep the match, in and of itself, from being more memorable, but that would lead to more business the next week, so long as there was some semblance of payoff in the future. Definitely a good showing from both guys and a match I'm glad I saw.