MLJ: Hijo Del Santo vs Blue Panther 6: Hijo Del Santo, Rayo de Jalisco Jr., Tito Santana vs Blue Panther & The Headshrinkers

1995-10-06  WWO Triple Power 2
Hijo del Santo, Rayo de Jalisco Jr, Tito Santana vs Blue Panther, Nikozuna, Wild Samoan (Head Shrinkers)

Ok, so this might have been at TRIPLE POWER 2, which was a joint UWA, AAA, and WWO show. Triple Power 1 had Doink The Clown, La Parka & Villano IV vs. El Hijo del Santo, Gran Hamada & Tito Santana so basically why the hell can't be Triple Power 1 that I'm watching? If that was Matt Borne as Doink, it's basically the coolest match ever. It was probably Keirn though. Ah well. Wait, I just checked the WON from the time because I couldn't find this show on cagematch. There's a Borne + Fuerza + Fishman match on Triple Power 2 and I bet that's on youtube too. I need to go watch that. I'll be back.

Yeah, so everyone go watch that Doink match. The primera wasn't so great except for the Solar vs Fuerza exchanges (unsurprisingly), but the rudos took over in the segunda and Borne was amazing as a fish out of water, just trying to figure out what the hell he's supposed to be doing and filling time and when Fuerza and he finally started to sync, it was pro wrestling beauty. The comeback was nothing to write home about though. Still, thing of beauty:

On to the match itself. For tecnicos, we have Rayo, Tito, and Santo. Nikozuna is Fatu, working a pre-Sultan Yokozuna gimmick, and from all indications Wild Samoan is Samu looking gaunt and mostly bald. They bill them with a Headshrinkers image in the pre-match introduction. Rayo I've seen back in the 80s. This was a very different setting however. The match was broader, more of a spectacle than what I'm used to. There's a sense of tightness and formula and, I'm not going to say sameness because that's not the right word, routine to a lot of the more polished lucha, the 90s AAA and the 00 CMLL that I've been watching. This feels a little more like the wild west which is both the interpromtional setting and the fact you have a couple of non-lucha guys in there, as well as Tito who is very much his own creature.

You know what? I want to talk about Tito for a bit. There are a couple of Tito Santana interviews online if you go looking for them. I talk about formula here sometimes, but Tito, more than any other wrestler I've ever heard talk or really watched in the ring, seems to believe in the sanctity of it when it comes to a wrestling match. He outwrestles his opponent. The opponent cheats or gets in a cheapshot to get an advantage. Tito sells. He makes his comeback. One. Two. Three. Shine. Heat. Comeback. If you were going to distill wrestling into its most primal form, it would probably be Tito Santana vs Tully Blanchard and it would be a hell of a match. Now that's not the only thing wrestling can be, of course, but there's a beauty in the simplicity of it all. Tossing him into a setting like this, where there were all sorts of other cultural nuances and then teaming him with Santo who was the epitome of a tecnico and Rayo, who felt here almost like a prototype in the tradition of the overblown tecnico like Wagner, Jr., looked to be fairly interesting on paper.

I'll be honest, though, for the most part, and even though this does follow a pretty straightforward A-B-A formula, Tito was just kind of there there. He had an exchange in the primera with Fatu and one with Samu in the segunda, but past a very nice dropkick nothing stood out. He did seem to try to put on some weird stretch plum submission in the tercera. That's not to say there weren't fun exchanges in the match, though. Fatu cosplaying as Yokozuna made for a great foil for Santo and it was nice to see. I hoping there's more of Hijo del Santo vs Monsters out there. I got the impression that Santo saw a wrestler like Fatu and just saw all of the opportunities in what he could do with him. The Headshrinkers also hit the best double clothesline I've ever seen, stiffing the heck out of Rayo's chest to get rid of him so they could take the segunda on Tito and Santo. There was a fun little comedy moment to end the primera with the rudos all splashing each other and the tecnicos jumping on top.

Really, though, Rayo vs Blue Panther was what stood out. Sure, Panther had a nice sequence with Santo early on, but we've seen that before we'll see it again. What I hadn't seen before was the level of stooging and comedy work he was able to pull together against Rayo, with ridiculous selling for butt bumps, even more ridiculous attempts to pull off a but bump of his own, where he ends up sailing over the top, and just extremely expressing selling and taunting from Panther. It was a breath of fresh air to see him break out of his mold a bit. In the matches I've seen so far, he really hadn't had to because he had Fuerza as a partner. Here, he almost acted as comic relief, which made for a great showing of versatility and range.

The finish was fairly unsatisfying but then this match felt like it existed in a vacuum, so that made it somewhat more forgivable. The tecnicos took the primera. The rudos took the segunda. In the tercera, chairs were bandied about and the comeback was decent enough, even if the camera missed Santo's dive. It ended with Fatu nailing his own partner by accident and then crashing into the ref for the DQ. A fun match, mainly for Panther stooging and Santo getting to work against a wildly different sort of opponent. If you're going to watch one match watch the Doink one though.