MLJ: Black Terry Boot Camp 4: El Signo & Negro Navarro vs Black Terry & Shu el Guerrero

2009-08-20 @ Arena Naucalpan
El Signo & Negro Navarro vs Black Terry & Shu el Guerrero

One rule that I've kept to pretty firmly in this project is that I never start with the best stuff. It ends up making everything else feel sort of like a let down. That was the case here. This ended up on the Complete and Accurate List as Great, and I'd aim it more towards Fun myself. The most glaring flaw, relative to the Traumas/Cerebros matches, is obviously that Signo and Shu just can't go like they used to. Even with that, this could have been great, but it had some structural problems that it down.

There were definitely pockets of greatness though, and they were pockets driven by Navarro and Terry. Once again, Navarro comes out larger than life. Terry is incredibly smooth in how he puts holds, even complicated ones on, the way he makes everything look effective and hurt, the way he sells everything to make it look better than it should. Navarro on the other hand is really quite clunk. If he's dropping down on a limb to set up a hold, he's a good number of degrees out of position and there's more friction than there should be, a near stumble. It comes off as intentional, effective, and really, downright brutal though. It's like forcing a square peg in a round hole, with the hole suffering for Navarro's insistence. There's such purpose to it and the end result is grisly enough that it adds to the match instead of subtracting from it, which is something I'm not sure I ever thought possible, let alone had seen before. He's going to twist people into a knot and if he has to plow through a limb or two in order to do so, all the better. I actively felt bad for Shu when the two of them were matched up because I couldn't suspend my disbelief that he was capable of doing anything at all to Navarro.

Terry was definitely great in the match, despite some of the things going on around him. There's a short heat segment in the segunda that did more to hurt the match than to help it. They worked over Terry's arm, which on paper should have been good, but it was worked like a Southern tag, with false tags and what not. All the weight of the heat was on the refs ignoring the tags instead of on the heels using misdirection, however, so it was a waste of Terry's selling ability and Shu's fat-guy-with-a-mask frustrated charisma. The comeback wasn't that impressive either; it felt deferred. Shu did his stuff with Navarro, eliminating him, then Terry matched up against Signo and they had a great little brawl. Signo held his own with some headbutts and shots in the corner, but it was Terry driving things, bloody and with the sort of fiery comeback you'd want. It just came too late. They spilled outside and it led to a DQ when Navarro got involved. So it was a good exchange, just in the wrong place. It was magic whenever he was in there with Navarro, too. My absolute favorite bit was how he sold Navarro's punches with this wobbly head motion.

In the end, this was fun. It could have been better with a bit more discipline and without some of the heel ref bs that never got paid off anyway. I think, if nothing else, it put into perspective to me how good the other matches were, but also just how good Navarro and Terry were in 2009 relative to their temporal peers.