MLJ: Comando Negro b El Pollo [mask]

2010-12-26  @ Arena Naucalpan
Comando Negro b El Pollo [mask]



I actually think that Comando Negro is one of the great sympathetic figures of our time.

This is a match where you're better off not having context, but I will give you a few things. This was IWRG's day after Xmas show. Comando Negro is now Canis Lupus. He had a big rudo push in IWRG in 2010 and was hated. Pollo had only been on a small number of shows but was already very over. He was Sombra's uncle, who had wrestled in AAA as "Kevin," though I don't think people were entirely sure of that until after he lost his mask.

Imagine yourself as Comando Negro, with your confusing silver leaf-clad red mask and your guerrilla pants. You are a fearsome warrior, hated by the crowd, a force of violence, a malignant spirit. You are facing a man in a chicken costume. This is not a chicken-themed costume, like Gallo has. This is an outright chicken costume. There is a baggy outer layer. There is a beak. It is yellow. He has not only a second, but also a mini mascot who looks very much like Kemonito if he was a chicken. The crowd chants his name. You are main eventing a holiday show in hostile territory. Your mask, your identity and your pride, is on the line. If you win, you have defeated a chicken. If you lose, you lose everything.

Before you can even enter the ring, this chicken man flies through the ropes with no regard for his own body and slams into you with a tope. He dropkicks you back to the floor as you try to stumble back onto the apron and then follows after you, flipping feet over head off of said apron in an attempt to crush you. You move and hear the cracking of your ridiculous foe's bones hitting concrete. Seething from the indignity of this preemptive assault, this insult, you roll into the ring and stomp the mascot simply because he looks like the source of your ire.

Then you turn your attention back to the man-chicken. This is satisfying. It is the natural order of things, the soldier culling livestock. You stomp him. You smash a blue, plastic, non-folding chair over his head; it has no give. You roll him into the ring. You clothesline him. You rip at his mask. You press him high into the sky and powerbomb him. You spinebuster him. Then, you start to tie up his legs to begin to end this farce, to seize the first fall, to bring this night closer to its logical, its inevitable, conclusion. Out of nowhere, however, with a burst of unlikely fowl strength and speed, the chicken rolls you up and pins you. Suddenly, your insurance, assumedly unnecessary in the first place, is gone.

You see it as a fluke, though, for you still have control. It is no longer enough to defeat the chicken. You have to find the human within first, to punish him for his temerity. He has an outer layer of yellow costume. That starts to unravel around his legs as you destroy him outside the ring. You smash him with a trash can. You rip at his mask further, you bite at the burgeoning wound upon his forehead. Suddenly, there is a face emerging, inhuman beak dangling down upon a very human chin, hair clearly visible, and blood everywhere. You pound at the wound and yellow becomes covered with crimson. Your assault is unrelenting. You slam the leaking skull into a post, compact it with another unforgiving chair, and sated by your retribution for the embarrassment of the flukish first fall, decide, once again, to end this. You climb to the top, meaning to hit a moonsault, to implode the living parody's chest, to take one more satisfying step towards exiting the building with your mask intact and the winner's share of the purse. He moves.

The natural order upends. The world becomes a twisted, surreal place. The creature you had been poaching, now possessing a visage that is a gore-splattered, obscene amalgam of man and chicken, now with his own blood streaked across his chest like some sort of horrific insignia, is unleashed and vengeful. He tears at your mask to the crowd's delight. He turns your own press-up power bomb against you. He drags you to the corner and lifts you up and over for a bone-shattering superplex. As he lays over you, about to take away all that you hold dear, it is all you can do to snatch an arm and turn him over, to cravenly seize the same sort of honorless flash pin that he stooped to in the primera.

How does your newly actualized nemesis respond to your shameful moment of victory? With merciless violence. He stomps at you, pulls you out and tosses a chair (blue, unfolding, with no give) directly in your face. You have no time to recover, no time to think, no time to plan. You try to escape but he drags you back into the fray so that he may toss yet another chair. Now your mask is ripped as well and your blood, gushing but not nearly as fiercely, is intermixing with the ghoulish spectacle you had made of your foe. He tosses you around the ring as if you were a child and not a warrior, backwards over his head, straight down again with another power bomb. Small pockets of a crowd that despises you, that has been cheering endlessly for the chicken, feel your plight and have begun to chant your name.

You fight for your life, turning the tide with a dropkick, throwing caution to the wind and diving through the ropes at the chicken, mirroring that initial desperate opening gambit that he, presumably knowing he was led to the ring to be slaughtered, had begun the match with. It has an impact, but it's not enough, for he recovers before you do and your punishment begins anew. The chicken takes flight, intending a moonsault, the same move that you tried to use to finish him in the primera. Just as he had, you manage to move out of the way, and that is enough to allow for another attempt to escape this hellish night. You press him up for yet another power bomb, this time pinning him with your feet upon the ropes. The ref sees this, though, and with a shit-eating grin, points to you in satisfaction, another obstacle in your path. You still have the advantage though and set up the chicken for a top rope move. As you head to the corner, however, the mascot rushes the ring and grabs your leg. There are enemies at every turn.

You lash out in frustration, lifting the minuscule chicken high overhead and slamming his midsection down upon your knee. It is your most satisfying moment of the last many minutes, but a deadly lapse of discipline, for the delay allows the man-chicken to recover. You climb the ropes but he is there after you, armdragging you off. Even worse, you can see out of the corner of your eyes that the tiny chicken has somehow recovered already, that he has climbed the opposite corner. Your senses are a blur as your foe positions you and the mascot, who should have been forever vanquished after your killshot upon him, crashes down upon you. Both chickens pin you, one on top of the other, and the referee, his true colors unsurprising at this point, counts away despite the unfairness of it all.

Still, you fight on, kicking out, reversing a whip, reloading and firing with your most potent move of this match, that press up powerbomb. The chicken is ready this time, however, and taking away your last bit of security, reverses it with a rana and a pin that you barely escape. Despite that, your tenacity has finally paid off. By refusing to give in, by chipping away at the inhumanity of your opponent, by opening him up and tearing him apart, you have made him mortal, just another man. In exhaustion, he sheds his costume shirt revealing the skin beneath. You have torn through four layers of him: the outer shell of his costume, his mask, the skin of his forehead, and finally this inner layer. He is no longer an unholy amalgam able to draw power and protection from the sheer impossibility of his existence, but instead, once more, a mere man in a barely existent costume. He rushes the ropes but you catch him and drive what remained of his trepanned skull into the mat with a Buca Storm driver. The referee cannot resist the rules that define his existence in the ring and thus cannot help but count to three, ending this surreal excursion into twilight zone once and for all.

Hugely sympathetic figure. When I read a few reviews of this, what everyone seemed to note was the violence inflicted upon El Pollo (and his mascot), and sure, Comando Negro gets a few shots in, and far more than that, the blood on the yellow costume is plentiful and striking, but that wasn't what stood out to me the most. What stood out to me was how everything turned against Comando Negro in the match. El Pollo's costume is absurd. When he came back with an equal level of violence and frankly, a longer control section than Comando Negro had, that stood out. When Comando Negro couldn't catch a break, that stood out. When the ref seemed so damn smug in catching him in the act of cheating and then, when the mascot got involved immediately thereafter, that stood out. What a sad sack, hard luck case, this Comando Negro! I don't think it was any surprise that a pocket of the crowd had started to chant his name as he was dealing with all of this. It wasn't a large pocket, but it was something. This poor bastard's plight in an absolutely absurd situation moved them somehow, and it's one of those things that can really only exist in this crazy art form that we love so much.