MLJ: Hechicero Spotlight 8: Hijo Del Centurion Negro, Rey Hechicero, Símbolo vs Black Spirit, Charles Lucero, Golden Boy

2013-07-21 @ Arena Coliseo Monterrey
Hijo Del Centurion Negro, Rey Hechicero, Símbolo vs Black Spirit, Charles Lucero, Golden Boy

I've spent a number of weeks going through this exercise with both Cavernario and Hechicero and frankly, the results looked a lot better for Cavernario. That's not a fair comparison though. Almost all of Hechicero's problems in these years stem from his environment. His opponents were generally of a lower quality, though I have come to like Caifan a lot. He had less coaching, I imagine, less editing certainly, more freedom, and very likely, a crowd that demanded much of what he was giving them. It felt indy because it was indy. It felt unpolished because it wasn't being polished. Even when he was in matches with high level talents like Ultimo Guerrero and LA Park, they used the environment as an excuse for excess.

He was lauded in this period, even in the years before it, and I just haven't seen the matches to back that up. Yes, he had cool moves. Yes, he had cool matwork. Yes, he had a lot of attitude, even if he was stuck as a tecnico for more of these years than I'd expect, but he didn't always use the moves well, or hit the matwork smoothly. My only conclusion so far is that going to CMLL was a godsend for him because it constrained him in ways that improved his game immensely.

Something in my gut (and in the comments of reader Rah) says that might be inaccurate so I'm hoping this might just be the turning point instead. Maybe he only needed the right opponent, and that opponent might have just been Charles Lucero.

There's not a ton about Lucero online, not in English at least. He was fifty-four (and about to turn fifty-five) when this match took place. He was a local Monterrey wrestler and just looking at what I can find here, his big claim to fame was losing hte UWA World Welterweight Championship to El Hijo del Santo in 1990. He doesn't show up on cubsfan's match finder until 2000 as anything more than a blip. He definitely comes off as a maestro however and he's the foil for Hechicero that I was hoping we'd get in Blue Panther and that we might have were it not for wrong pairings.

The Hechicero vs Lucero matwork is the real deal.

That doesn't look like much necessarily, but it was looped organically from what came before, and Lucero went with it, making it work and then cycled out of it successfully. I've seen other guys stammer about. Hechicero doesn't have the ability to move people around that let's say Virus does, but that's counterbalanced by the fact he does absurdly complex things. So if he does have someone who's game, they can really make what they do interesting. They traded inverted deathlocks and this was just good stuff.

They ended it with a handshake.

After that the other pairings cycled in. Black Spirit and Hijo del Centuro Negro were fine when they kept it simple and focused on the arm. That was actually a good contrast to what came before. When they started to do something more advanced to follow the act they had to follow, it broke down a bit. This was cute though:

I didn't get a great sense of Simbolo or Golden Boy here, but they picked up the pace and it was all nice and balanced. Shortly thereafter, things broke down and they went to the finish of the fall, which had a lot of armdrags around the ring that could have been a bit more polished and submissions with the tecnicos on top.

Segunda had a reset and some switching of pairs, at least briefly, as Golden Boy got to face off against Hechicero. This was pretty rough though, with a fumbled roll up submission. Lucero, totally tossing away the handshake from before, chose this moment to come in and stomp and let the rudos be rudos (it was a mercy, really). He immediately had great intensity but I'm not sure I followed the character shift. This was a fun beatdown, with Irish whips down the ramp and plastic trash cans and what have you before the rudos locked in submissions. Golden Boy really drove his elbow in on an abdominal stretch which is always appreciated.

The Tercera had one of my favorite lucha tropes, the comeback that stems from the rudos getting too cocky and doing something completely ridiculous. In this case, it was a three man submission, complete with posing, that let Simbolo charge in and get them from behind. I was going to make a gif of this, but I can't quite get that to work right now. Here's a screenshot instead:

The comeback was loose and chaotic but more focused and effective than, let's say, the match with Parka and Ultimo Guerrero. It was heated in a good way with a few moments of payoff before Lucero scored a nice looking submission to set up the singles matches to come. This wasn't perfect by any means but it was on the more enjoyable scale of indy, where the lack of polish gave it, at times, a chaotic or organic feel. The Lucero vs Hechicero stuff definitely has me excited for their singles matches to come.