Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 8/16/14

Another match from the 5/18/14 Morgan Hill show.

Atlantis, Gallo Tapado Jr. & Mascara Sagrada vs. Damian 666, Zokre & Vaquero Fantasma

Gallo Tapado Jr. may be the weirdest lucha fly-in I've ever seen. I'm unsure how big a star his dad was, but his dad likely retired in the 80s or early 90s. I think I've seen this guy on an IWRG undercard, maybe. But that's a weird way to bring in guys. "I think this guy may have worked an IWRG undercard before! Fly him in!" Damian gets on the stick and talks for a few minutes, and literally 80% of what he says is muted. Then Sagrada grabs the mic and the same thing happens. I have no clue what they said, but apparently it was a) bad enough to be unsuitable for TV, and b) so important that it had to be left on the broadcast, even if you couldn't understand what they were saying. And so here we are, 10 minutes into a 30 minute broadcast, with no wrestling having occurred. This would be like Raw starting their first match at the 40 minute mark. Is this why the "Revolution" is in Pro Wrestling Revolution? I'm still completely unclear about what exactly is supposed to be revolutionary about any of this. It's a name that's dumb enough to get angry about if you actually think about it. How, in any way at all, is anything they do revolutionary, or even just a change from the norm?

Match itself was not great, but decent. Sagrada looked enormous here, and I've seen him before in this fed and he was as lazy and selfish as you remember him being. But here he really busts butt and seemed like he was really trying to not dog it. He was slow (his majistral took forever) but he took some big bumps for a fat guy crammed into a bodysuit (nice backdrop bump and a nice spill into the ropes) and while he didn't look great, he tried and that's worth something. Gallo Tapado was probably the best of the bunch here as he really worked from bell to bell, always doing something. It was not a performance I was expecting and he really tried to make this match into something more than "let's work around Damian stooging for Atlantis". He really worked hard to turn it into a tecnicos vs. rudos battle, threw some fine armdrags, nice apron work, did a nice springboard body press onto Damian onto the ground (which always looks extra great when it's outdoors and into dirt, like this was). So yeah, sorry for making fun of you up above Tapado. Damian kind of worked like 2014 Damian would work, which is wander around and punch people, take a couple spots from Atlantis, and then hit the floor to jaw with fans. Zokre had a weird billy goats beard sticking out of the bottom of his mask (unsure if it was real beard or beard on mask) but Atlantis had several fun spots involving him ripping at the beard. I especially liked Atlantis holding the beard while climbing up to the top, then doing a cool leverage "beard drag" jumping off and flinging him. The whole match is essentially arm drags, leading to multi-man pinfall attempts (the estrella, the triple sunset flip, etc.), with the big springboard body press by Tapado being the big high spot. Not a mind-blowing match, but fun enough to air for sure.