My Lucha Journey: The Marco Corleone Experience 3: Marco Corleone, Máximo, Volador Jr. vs Dragón Rojo Jr., Rey Escorpión, Shocker

First off, I want to hit a quick point. It was raised to me the question of why I'm looking at, let's say, Marco Corleone instead of Black Terry or Negro Navarro or some real master that's WORTH writing about or whatever, and it's a fair question, I guess. In the end it comes down to timeliness, in that I'm starting with current CMLL and extrapolating backwards, and it's about sparseness. I don't want to just tackle all of the most lauded matches available and end up with diminishing returns quickly. More than that, it's about familiarity, and my attempt to gain some. The more I watch, the more I understand: that's the idea at least. I want to build towards some of these more classic matches and feuds and I do think you can learn a lot about what works and what does and the whys of it all by watching a range of talent and a lot of different matches with different goals and different players. Ideally, I'm going to get to a lot of that stuff, be it the Satanico/El Dandy feud or what Casas was doing in the 90s or some of the more interesting stuff from the mid 00s. For now though, I'm picking apart one luchador, almost at random, and trying to see what makes it all tick.

CMLL on Fox Sports (Mexico): 2014-05-24
taped 2014-05-16 @ Arena México
Marco Corleone, Máximo, Volador Jr. vs Dragón Rojo Jr., Rey Escorpión, Shocker

I'm jumping around a lot here, but some of that is that I want to get a broad picture and some is just that I feel like I have to watch something current now and again. I'm going to watch something from 2007 or 2008 next and then maybe some of the AAA Marco, but I'm not sure how interesting that is to people who are focused on the here and now. I'm striving for a bit of balance then and hey, this was aired just a few days ago!

Unfortunately, it's not very good. I think I've come off as pretty positive in general so far. It's a little bit of a conscious effort. I'm not going to nitpick things heavily while I'm still getting a feel for the wrestlers and the style and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't enjoying what I was watching. Also, there are things I watch and just don't have much to say about. This is part of a broader whole of trying to figure out how good Marco is, though, and in that regard, it's worth looking at this match, not just because it's recent.

So while this isn't good, it has its moments, namely when Shocker and Marco are in there at the same time. The two of them worked very well together. Shocker took and sold Marco's punches to make him look like a champ, but he also had even after losing his hair, this sort of bluster of standing up to the larger man that made their exchanges fun. There's not a ton of it, though, as Shocker was the rudo captain and Volador was the tecnico captain. I don't have a great sense (I know, I say that a lot, but I'm working on it) of Volador. He reminds me of the jockey who lives next door and dresses like he's about to go biking. Maximo's entrance wings were great, though.

Honestly, the wings might have been the high point of the match. There are slight primera caidas and then there was this: Marco kicked some rudos out (literally), directed traffic for his partners to make a dive, had a super brief but smooth exchange with Shocker, hit the Superman dive and that was it, maybe fifty seconds. I understand that short caidas are sort of part of the game now, and it's not a dealbreaker, but you need the right match to make it work and this wasn't it. It was kind of amusing to see Volador stumble into the Rush/Maximo/Marco super pose though. The segunda caida was going okay with Volador doing his thing and Rush having another pretty good exchange with Shocker but then Dragon Rojo Jr came in and the thing went downhill quickly. Marco does have that layer of awkwardness which comes with his size and perhaps a lost step of dexterity relative to where he was years ago. It's usually not a problem at all to me. He makes it work and his opponents make it work and within the confines of a trios, it almost always works quite well. I don't know if this spoke of Rojo or just of the skill of his usual opponents, but here awkwardness gave way to miscommunication and disruption. Some things (even just a pick up/forward slam) were botched, and others (like Marco seemingly taking a bump on a hip toss that never actually happened) were downright unfortunate. It wasn't a long exchange but it was pretty brutal and led to a sort of there rudo beatdown with the highlights being Escorpion's biting and mauling of Maximo and a pretty nice top rope knee drop from Rojo. I will say that once the tercera caida kicked in, Rojo and Escorpion worked pretty well together with some fun tandem offense. Volador can take a beating, but part of the problem is that you sort of want him to.

The whole thing sort of stumbled towards a conclusion, with a lukewarm comeback to lightly heat the way. Marco seemed a little out of position for the transition, which was him propelling Maximo overhead to block a throw into the corner. He stepped out of the ring and then right back in for the spot. Then the rudos sort of meandered around the ring until Maximo could kiss them into roll ups. Escorpion played up fury after the match, and that was nice, but in general, this was just there. It was, I kind of hate to say, a chink in the armor of the understanding I was forming so far. One bad showing, especially in a match where he did have a couple of good sequences, isn't so bad, but it did show that against the wrong opponent, there's a chance that what comes off as an affectation and even a plus a lot of the time can end up as a trainwreck.