Espectáculos Promociones Panama: El Idolo! Celestial!

MD: Quick note before we begin. I've been posting for a bunch of years now, and this has been just a really great outlet for me. I wouldn't be here without Phil or Eric certainly. But I also wouldn't be if not for Dean Rasmussen and years of reading and interacting with his singular, joyful take on pro wrestling. He finds the great in the good and the sublime in the terrible. I'm sure most people who read Segunda Caida have seen this already, but if you saw it and didn't click or clicked and hesitated and didn't give yet, please do so now and keep him and his family in your thoughts. Thanks. 

El Idolo vs Celestial

MD: One of the best things I can say about the older footage here is that when you see these guys, you immediately want to know more about them. That's true whether it's Sergio Galvez or Sandokan or Gemelo Infernal II. It's true here with Idolo. There's something about the way he carries himself, a hand gesture (maybe teasing his claw strike?), how he'll get knocked out of the ring and duck away to avoid the potential of a Celestial dive but then lean into the heat he's getting by charging at the crowd. To a big degree, he presented himself as a star and you get the impression that the fans bought into it.

This was in three falls. The first was mostly back and forth wrestling and while it flowed, you'd maybe want just a bit more contact and torque on some of the holds (even for the style) and counters. That was probably true throughout the match. The things that felt more like "spots" didn't work nearly as well as the outright violence. Said violence began right after the end of the first fall with Idolo crashing Celestial's head into the post and never really let up. They did a good job of having Celestial fight back, capitalizing on Idolo's mistakes, only to make a mistake of his own. Sometimes that was a missed elbow drop; sometimes it was getting overzealous by biting through the mask or swinging a chair and rushing into a counter-shot. Idolo had a range of offense, including a Gilbert-ian hotshot, a drop down off the top into a sitting vertical splash, and a great charging knee while Celestial was sitting in the ropes (he missed the second and went careening to the floor; one of those bits of hope for Celestial). The finish was gnarly, with Celestial charging in too headstrong and getting pressed up into a face first posting, of the sort that could work in lots of other settings but that you never see exactly at that particular angle. Post match, Idolo went after the mask and a gentleman apparently called Máscara Negra made the save. This felt like a solid stop on the road to something bigger.

GB: Latin American wrestling fascinates me. There’s a lot of fluff. A lot of sentiment. A lot of rose-tinted glasses to this stuff but it’s all captivating in one way or the other. There’s such a rich, diversified history to it all just waiting to be untapped, with anecdotes and matches that sometimes seem to challenge what we already know. For instance, the story goes that El Hijo del Santo made his Mexican debut as El Korak in February 1982 without his father's blessing and was only given the gimmick in October of the same year. However, contrary to this, the young wrestler had already been honing his skills as El Hijo del Santo in the Dominican Republic a year earlier! This being the same country that gave us the lore of Flair/Veneno. Despite Flair’s insistence of it being an impromptu switch to stave off a riot, it was an ending that was, in total premeditated detail, used to drive both an already planned out rematch between Flair/Veneno and heat up the ongoing Veneno/Relampago storyline.

Controversy and contradiction follows history. In Panama, perhaps none more so than for El Idolo. In contradiction, whether it’s Sandokan or El Idolo, promoters, fans and newspapers seemingly disagree on who Panama’s biggest star was. Either way, El Idolo would rack up an impressive number of apuesta matches against a litany of local and international wrestlers. 40 masks and 38 hairs, in total. 78-0 is an impressive number and while not quite Super Muñeco level, it’s certainly the highest I’ve seen in Panama by quite some way. In controversy, El Idolo would lose his mask to El Olimpico on December 16th 1973. Having been unmasked, Ricardo Diaz threw a towel over Idolo before the press could snap his picture. Sandokan and Diaz would then rush Idolo back to the dressing rooms to remask. When he returned, the Neco de la Guardia erupted. Their hero was back. Idolo wouldn’t accept the loss and the crowd “pardoned” him to wear his mask once more - never to lose it again. Of course, El Idolo maintains, to his dying breath, he won the hair of Olimpico that day.

As for his origins, El Idolo got his feet wet with wrestling in the late 1950s, before debuting on the national stage in March 1962 as a substitute for the slightly famous wrestler, "La Amenaza",  who no-showed an event due to stomach flu. With the promoter furious, El Idolo lavished the opportunity and asked to take his place. "If you have the equipment and mask, enter and fight," replied the promoter. The young Idolo put on a mask, took the place and name of "La Amenaza" (in English: the threat), and won. A fitting name to a wrestler who would go on to dominate the landscape for the next thirty seven years and retired holding the World Middleweight Championship, a title he first won in 1970 from the journeyman Steve Clements.

The more I read about El Idolo, the more I liken him to El Hijo del Santo in the manner in which he took his matches. What I mean by that is Idolo was a true babyface that fought adversity and persevered through pain. The audience lived and died on every blow he absorbed and every drop of blood he poured. They would hang on with bated breath for his comebacks and eventual finisher, a kneeling firemans’ carry into a piledriver. A rather inventive move he’d keep on hand whenever his opponent swooped in for their coup de grâce. This move was the ace up his sleeve and would see him victorious over many Mexican luchadores, most notably Perro Aguayo and Espectro II. It would be fitting, then, that Sergio Gálvez would go on to become his career rival. Fans would come in their thousands to watch Gálvez massacre Idolo and for their bloodsoaked hero to triumphantly fight back, despite doctors trying to restrain him and call the match off.

Unlike most other wrestlers in Panama, El Idolo made good money from the sport. One would think with its success in popularity, money would be more free-flowing but most had to see lucha libre as a hobby to pursue and not a means of making ends meet. This financial freedom allowed El Idolo to pursue a career in education where he used his position as a physical education teacher to bring “lucha libre” to schools and hoped to inspire the future generation of  wrestlers.

What most set El Idolo apart from others, though, was something that couldn’t be taught. Again, while promoters will argue between Sandokan and Idolo as the country’s biggest attraction, none seem to argue that Idolo was the most charismatic of all Panamanian luchadores. While Idolo comes off as a star in this match, I’m not sure if we quite get the full sense of how big a star he really was in this footage. That said, I’m not quite sure we should be getting the sense of anything this early into our journey. I had mentioned to Matt that a lot of these wrestlers are Olympically trained athletes. Idolo was a very successful amateur wrestler who moved to professional wrestling out of novelty alongside encouragement from Shazán. They should be skilled technicians yet it doesn’t quite play out that way in their holds. Everything seems a little light. It’s more about “appearance” than “execution”. There’s no torque as Matt puts it in his review. Nevertheless, I've also noticed that in a lot of the other South American wrestling I've watched. I don't want to give bad work a pass but I also don't want to dismiss something without knowing the whys first. It's quite the quandary I have. It’s something I hope we can pursue and understand as this journey progresses. After all, it’s naive to approach a style that is, in many ways, novel with old lenses.