MLJ: Hijo del Santo vs Blue Panther 11: El Hijo Del Santo & Mil Mascaras vs. Blue Panther & Arkangel de la Muerte

Taped 1/28/01 @ All Japan
El Hijo Del Santo & Mil Mascaras vs. Blue Panther & Arkangel de la Muerte

This is a very specific sort of lucha match. I know this because I've seen the sort before. I would call this almost more of an exhibition than a match. It was in front of a large (though apparently disappointing) All Japan Egg Dome crowd for a monumental Baba Memorial show which also had the Hansen retirement ceremony. It was the third match a card that also had Rotunda, Hennig, Windham, Liger, Funk, Onita, Abdullah, and Kamala on it. It was celebratory and was meant to be celebratory.

It was also sort of a parody and exactly what you'd expect. I say parody because the difference between Mil and Santo was night and day. To the crowd, Mil was the bigger star. They were excited for his elaborate costume in his entrance, for the first time he got into the ring, for his big plancha towards the end of the match. I'd go so far as to say that he tried in his pairing against Arkangel. He had good reason considering how Panther and Santo started the match.

By this point I've seen the two of them work against each other a number of times. They may have been flashier or more energetic earlier in their careers, but by this point, with Santo at 37 and Panther at 40, they were absolutely masters of their craft. The opening matwork jumped off the screen. There was a sense of elaboration and complexity, both in moves and counters, but none of it felt collaborative. There was always a sense of struggle, yet such direction and momentum. At no point did they have to compromise on either smoothness nor competitiveness. It's the sort of stuff I could watch all day. In their second exchange, they had some headscissors spots that were just out of this world. The match didn't have much else, but it definitely had this.

So, as I said, when it was time for Mil to have a go at it, he tried, but he tried in a very Mil Mascaras sort of way. He gave Arkangel absolutely nothing. Instead he bullied him from one hold to the next. There was no ebb and flow. There was no back and forth. I wouldn't even call it shine because there's at least an aura of competition there. It was squash. There wasn't any heat to the match. The rudos got to take over on Santo for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds here or there, but when you have a lucha tag match with no heat, you have a match with no drama, with no heart or meaning or weight. It was also a match with a ref who wasn't part of the program. After Santo's first tope suicida the match just stopped. The dives work in trios matches because they serve to create shifts in the action. They're page breaks, built to and then allowing for something else to begin. Here, everything stopped until they were able to stumble back to the ring to tag. It was a hell of a dive too, with Santo and Panther going right over the barrier and then a table. It was a shame that they then had to make a tag before the match could keep going. It sort of defeated the structural purpose of the dive.

I would have liked to see more out of Arkangel. He just didn't have many opportunities. He did sell to a huge extent for Mil, so that was something. Really, I think they gave the crowd what they wanted, some fun matwork, a few big moments from Mil, a couple of dives. I think it's not Santo's best performance. There was confusion with the ref and his tope after the somersault senton seemed off. They ended it with the big flipping roll up on Panther with Mil leaping over them to hit the body press on Arkangel and it all served its role. Post match there was a great moment when Mil called the Destroyer over and the fans went nuts. The match is worth seeing for that but more especially for the opening Panther/Santo matwork but it really didn't have much else going for it.