MLJ: Hechicero Spotlight 4: Rey Hechicero vs Canek, Jr.

2010-08-08 @ Arena Coliseo Monterrey
Rey Hechicero vs Canek, Jr.

2:36 in

Another stop in 2010 for Hechicero. Here we're in Arena Coliseo Monterrey and apparently the matches at the arena have their own show? I see: Federación Internacional de Lucha Libre, which is apparently a local promotion in Monterrey. It has a cagematch listing. This aired on ACM (which presumably aired matches from A.C.M.), which makes me think I could maybe find some more Hechicero from this time if I dug, but I'm going to stick with what I have. Point is that I have no idea of context here (again), including what stakes, if any the match had.

Canek, Jr. was in short, Canek's kid. He's the rudo. He's in Hechicero's reds and Hechicero was in yellow. There's not a ton about him online, to be honest, which feels surprising given his lineage and the fact he's been around for a while. The idea of Hechicero as a tecnico is sort of off-putting to me, in the same way Satanico or Averno playing tecnico would be. On this more local stage, it sort of works though, because he seems to be wrestling for people who want to see him wrestle and he's definitely showy.

This was another stop on the road to him becoming the wrestler he is now. There's much more of the matwork you'd expect here, with him especially being good at moving Canek around in the primera. He almost moved him around too much because while it was believable, it didn't feel super competitive and some of Canek's stretches seemed almost too "gimme." Hechicero was still a little prone to goofiness too, like a standing flipping splash which didn't look great and took me out of things. Watching him like this, there were some elements of his game that almost worked better as a tecnico. He could fly around a bit more, including a nice tope (non-suicida) from the inside of the second rope back into the ring. I wouldn't call the primera particularly smooth but it did have a nice bit of escalation with Canek starting to work on the mask and both men escaping each other's holds until Hechicero locked in his grounded, rolling abdominal stretch, cinched up so that there was no escape.

Hechicero continued to show off his tecnico skills int he segunda, working the crowd, hitting some high level, showy offense that wasn't quite as "move" oriented, culminating with a big inside out springboard dive that barely hit. That was intentional for the most part, I think because Canek immediately took over on the leg with some really simple but effective offense and solid selling. He finished the fall with a figure four.

Third fall was good on paper, certainly, with a lot of that rare, rare creature in lucha matches, limb selling, some of which I'm absolutely giving the benefit of the doubt on. For a big chunk of it, Hechicero was fighting from the ground, or using the rope to get back to his feet and it kind of makes me sad that he's not a tecnico now because I want to see more of this. I will say that the inverted fisherman's suplex is easily the most ridiculous move I've seen in ages. It feels like something some kid came up with his action figures. Here, he barely gets Canek over and I'm not going to credit the knee selling on that at least.

Anyway, this sort of cuts off after a roll up and we don't have the next part of the TV but I'm going to say that was the finish because we know Hechicero won. Lots of good stuff here even if Canek didn't show me a whole lot in hanging. We're ever closer to getting the Hechicero of today.