MLJ: Enter: King Haku 1: King Haku, Pierroth Jr., Vampiro vs Dr. Wagner Jr., Emilio Charles Jr., Negro Casas

1993-08-22 @ Arena Coliseo
King Haku, Pierroth Jr., Vampiro vs Dr. Wagner Jr., Emilio Charles Jr., Negro Casas

Back to 2010 next week, but I need to break things up now and again or I go a little nuts. I've got a few things I'm going for here. First, I need to watch scattered amounts of Negro Casas in the early 90s because of something I'm going to do with OJ later on. I'm behind on that. Second, I really want to see some Haku in Mexico. Yes, I've more than learned to love lucha for the sake of lucha but I like seeing some wrestlers I'm familiar with in this setting as well. I'd say that seeing some prime Vampiro would be important too, just for historical value, but it's really not. Seeing Wagner, Jr. under 30 was kind of interesting though.

So this was a pretty weird match. It was two falls, and two fall matches can do weird things structurally. This one had a long showcase primera, where everyone pretty much got to wrestle everyone else, where the action kept flowing, and where the tecnicos got to look great. Then, between the falls, there was a beatdown on Vampiro on the outside, a pretty vicious one at that. You'd think the segunda would be a numbers-game beatdown on the remaining tecnicos, but it never really picked up that way. It was, instead, about them beating the odds (and the rudos) in a pretty convincing fashion until Casas made a desperation foul on Haku to end things.

I'm not 100% sure how to write this up, because I have about 10 gifs I want to post but I'm not sure I really want to go into too much depth on the action. I think I'm going to talk about it a bit more and then just post away. In general, the storytelling broke down both at the beginning and the end. In the beginning, it's because they gave away some match ups too early. For instance, Wagner was dodging Pierroth and that could have made for an interesting start to the match but after a bit of stalling they went right to it. Wagner was already good at letting things breathe, even if he, in the rudo role, didn't really get to show much of his charisma. Pierroth was pretty fiery though. I liked Haku's matwork stuff a lot. You forget that he could do stuff like this. It wasn't high end or anything, but it was simple and straightforward and effective, the sort of stuff you could see him doing in Montreal in the mid-80s against Martel or Bockwinkel. Neither Charles nor Vampiro showed me much. The crowd seemed split for Vampiro, with the girls cheering for him and others booing. He had some energetic rope running exchanges but nothing memorable. Charles was fine but just didn't get to do enough. He was definitely the third guy on his side. In some ways, I like (and miss) primeras like this. Right now, in CMLL, they'll run long falls, usually terceras, but they are more structured, with quick cut offs and switches, and a lot of tecnico vs the world sequences, and I like structure, but how wide open this was can be really enjoyable sometimes. Yes, they didn't keep a clean throughline of story but they also didn't lose things completely.

The best interaction of the match was Casas vs Haku, because Casas wasn't afraid to bounce off of him and eat all of his stuff and cower in utter fear. You'll see it in the gifs, but he just got completely killed, flying across the ring after a chop, eating an insane power bomb to end the primera and an even more insane choke slam later on, and my god, the foot choke! It's probably the best I've ever seen and Casas was so good in both taking and trying to fight back to prevent it. Haku had press slams and this crazy loose powerbomb where he almost pressed him. At one point (though I didn't capture it), he even caught Casas off the top with a press. He just looked like an absolute beast here.

The destruction of Vampire was well done too. I'm sure that went somewhere later. It was mostly Charles but Wagner got in on the act too. They took out the arm and then posted him heinously, and whenever he started to get up, while the action was going on in the ring, they'd just keep on him. It's just a shame that it never really led to a rudo advantage of any length. By the end of the match, Haku was just hitting bombs and the numbers game was there mainly to just break up the pins. It was really meandering by that point. Sure, the rudos didn't completely lose their heat between the destruction of Vampiro and the DQ finish (to avoid a German which I swear would have been the nastiest German ever), but this could have been far less one sided, especially after the power play began and still gotten the point across.