MLJ: Atlantida Rising 13: Rey Bucanero vs Ultimo Guerrero (Light Heavyweight Title)

taped 2006-07-14 @ Arena Mexico
Rey Bucanero vs Ultimo Guerrero (CMLL LH Title)

Best to bypass the drama here and set some low expectations. This match was a huge disappointment. In fact, it was probably one of the most disappointing matches I've seen in a long time. I'll talk about why later. There are other things I want to cover first, namely the backstory and some context. We'll start with some meta, though.

As best as I can tell, this is my fiftieth MLJ review. It's nice that it just happened to work out to be Rey vs UG as that's sort of a culmination of what I've been watching. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good time to finish the GdI stuff from 2006, but I'm going to run with what I have until the end of that year, which really isn't a lot, just, you know, more than I've actually done already. The cast of characters shifts a bit and that makes it worthwhile. After that I'm thinking of hitting something like 30 matches from the Rush vs Terrible series. I just don't know, though. I'd really like to explore another time period and 2009 is one where we seem to have a lot of matches, but it might be more practical to focus on Rush vs Negro Casas from this year, starting right after the Shocker hair match and culminating with the recent hair match. OR I might try to tackle the rest of the fantastic lucha 80s set. I think I petered out midway through disc 6 and while I just can't imagine getting a ballot in, since I'd have to rewatch everything in discs 1-5, there seems to be a lot of great stuff there and it'd also help build up my foundations for the 90s a bit more. Let me know if anyone has preferences in the comments. I guess I'm still a ways off anyway. Regardless, thanks for reading. We don't get a ton of feedback through comments, so I'm not sure if people are finding this enjoyable or not, but I know I'm definitely learning a lot and having fun with it. I don't think I could have picked any of these guys out of a crowd a year ago. I knew absolutely nothing about lucha. Now I know absolutely something about lucha. Maybe in another year I'll know something substantial. For now, we're just going to keep figuring it out together.

On to Rey vs UG. This match was a big deal even though it came fairly quickly after the turn. I don't think I've done a very good job getting across the background that Rey and Ultimo Guerrero had, and some of that is because I didn't have a great sense of it until recently. As we saw last week, In 2000, the two of them were handpicked (kayfabe-wise) by Satanico to be his Nuevo Infernales and had a lot of tag team success in the years following. They kicked Satanico out in 2001 and formed Los Guerreros del Infierno with Tarzan Boy. They kept winning titles. They came in second in 2002 (during the Smackdown Six era) in the WON tag team voting. I think at some point UG really surpassed Rey as a main eventer, maybe even from the get go. They weren't called the Infernal Buccaneers after all. By the time of this match he had held the Light Heavyweight title for over three years. When Atlantis joined Los Guerreros and they changed the name, Rey really became the odd man out.

The point is that there was a lot of history and weight behind this match, and quality aside, it felt like a big deal. There was pyro. KeMonito was at ringside and doesn't it say so much about lucha that the presence of a blue monkey mascot can actually make things feel MORE important? There was a section of the crowd with Rey's name spelled out on their shirts. As far as I can tell, this was the debut of the remix of We Will Rock You that Rey came out to, which only added to the broken friendship feeling of the match. The crowd was hot the entire time. I'll admit that the seconds have me a bit confused. Rey had Tigre Metálico and I'm not even sure who UG had. I think there was some sort of junior team associated with Los Guerreros but I'm not quite sure.

It was trying to track down the answer to that question which lead me to what I want to talk about next, actually. I'm sure almost everyone who's reading this knows about thecubsfan's luchablog, but I can't stress enough how useful a resource it is. Not only is he the guy who posted so many of the matches that I watch here, but you can go back through the archives and get a really good sense of the progression of some of these matches and the context surrounding them. The matchfinder on the site is an absolute godsend. My spanish is "three years of high school" level at best so a lot of what I'm coming up here with guesswork and every bit helps. The point is this: in trying to track down the seconds, I found this post that he had written RIGHT before the match back in 2006, and I found it to be a really worthwhile bit of context and suggest people check it out before watching. It's very interesting to see the comments, from the time, of someone who had a personal stake in this match, especially considering how distanced I almost have to be from all of this, eight years after the fact.

http://www.thecubsfan.com/cmll/?m=20060713

This is all some of the most in depth build I've given any match, which is a shame, since there's just not much to talk about in the bell-to-bell action. It was a title match and a grudge match all at once, but it felt very, very slight. I'm used to things like short segundas. I'm used to short primeras in trios, too. Title matches are usually at least slightly different. Here, though, there was very little in the way of matwork and feeling out. The primera went 2 minutes. The segunda went 2-3. Ultimately, that meant that when they started to sell the big moves in the tecera, nothing really meant anything. There was no real heat. There was no real comeback.

Eric talks a lot about how current title matches have no rhyme or reason to their tercera caida, how there's a lot of hit big move-fall down, repeat, and what not. This had a lot of that, but without the build of the first two falls, you're not even really sure why they're falling down. They didn't earn the level of selling they were giving the match. There were reversals, like Rey catching UG on his corner senton, or him blocking the reverse superplex (Guerrero Special), but they weren't quite clever enough to make up for the rest of the match. Just as an example, the finish was just a mess. Rey blocked the Guerrero Special the first time, right? Immediately thereafter, he hit his Buca Storm for two. Then he went up to the top, got crotched and got hit with the Guerrero Special this time. He kicked out and immediately rolled up UG for the win. So, nothing happened to him between the first and the second attempts except for that he hit one of his finishers. What made it so Guerrero, now weaker from eating a finisher, could hit it? Are we supposed to think that it was all a ruse so that Rey could score the flash pin? In a title match, where he pretty much had the advantage, he'd eat his opponent's finisher as a ruse? I don't think nearly that much thought was put into this to begin with.

In fact, it's hard to even raise much ire about the match because it's so slight and ephemeral. There's not enough to grasp here to even complain about. In the end, the crowd was into it, extremely so at points, and the victory felt like a huge celebration. It wasn't a good start at all to Rey's reign though and for a match years in the making, it was wildly disappointing.