Espectáculos Promociones Panama: The Best Panama Match Yet? Parka! Sandokan! Celestial! Emperador! Idolo! Cirujano! Blood! Chaos!

Sandokan/Celestial/Emperador vs. Principe Island/Cirujano de la Muerte/Idolo

MD: Sometimes I'm cautious on these, because I'm just one voice, but in talking this one over with Graham, my initial thought was that this could have easily landed in the top 20 of the best of the 80s DVDVR Lucha set (you know, if anyone had voted on that). And that's probably too conservative. It's really, really good. If you guys have been on the fence on watching these, well, obviously we think it's all been a worthwhile exercise, but this is especially one to watch. This is a classic, no doubt about it.

Structurally, it's as straightforward as can be until the end. Exchanges, tecnico advantage, rudo beatdown, big comeback, finish. But it hits on all of the marks. Sandokan is such an ace and such a star. It's unquestionable here and he really overachieves even compared to what we've seen him in so far and my personal expectations for him. He's not just a slugger with a couple of big spots (though he IS a slugger with a couple of big spots), but he's on for the entire match. He kicks out multiple variations on armdrags and handsprings and one-against-two bits that I wasn't expecting at all. Everything looks smooth. Most things feel competitive. Even when he's obviously getting some assistance from the rudos, it still looks like he's switching his positioning about and working for it. During the primera exchanges everyone looked good except for maybe Idolo. His stuff was just a bit looser and he barely even eseemed to try in his first one with Emperador. He's supposed to be even a bigger star than Sandokan but we just haven't seen it in the footage yet. Meanwhile, Principe (being LA Park, of course) was flying all over the place and Cirujano was basing big for Celestial and others. Everything built to a raucious stretch of tecnico advantage including a huge wheelbarrow suplex by Sandokan.

The beatdown followed in the segunda, with Idolo getting an advantage in the ropes. They paired off with each rudo using different styles of offense. Idolo had big pro wrestling flourishes, slamming a head into the turnbuckle or leaping feet first onto shoulders in the corner. Cirujano just clubbere down and leaned on people. And Principe was a whirlwind of violence, much of which we miss as he was demolishing Sandokan on the ground. They closed this out with some stretches and a missile dropkick by Principe.

In between falls, Principe clobbered Sandokan with a chair and started to inhale his blood to spit it up into the air, which is about the most glorious and horrific rudo stylings imaginable. To say that Park understood this stuff from a relatively young age would be an understatement. He dove fully into getting as much visceral and visual heat as he possibly could. The match had started with trash strewn everywhere and it made for the perfect setting for this mauling.

Which, of course, led to a spirited comeback, Sandokan firing back and really working for it on the floor, with the crowd ebbing and flowing around him in excitement. We couldn't see everything but we could feel it all, and what we saw (with it seeming like Sandokan was clocking Principe with a shoe) was all great. Just when it seemed like the rudos were going to get their bloody comeuppance, Cirujano and Idolo snatched away Emperador and Celestial's masks and they had to scurry to the back, leaving an momentarily ascendant Sandokan to fight alone, to get the start of a visual submission on Principe, but to ultimately get swept under, absolutely clobbered by what looked to be a plastic drink holder. While I wish we could have more easily followed the action on the floor, if only because Park had a tendency to do outrageous things and take wild bumps, this had absolutely everything I would want from a match like this. The Principe Island vs Sandokan feud is such a lost classic.

GB: I honestly think Matt is underplaying just how great this match is. When he shot the idea to me that this could potentially make the top 20 of the DVDVR 80s Lucha set I said he was underrating things. This is easily the best match we’ve had so far and definitely something to go out of your way to see. An absolute whirlwind of a performance between Sandokan and Parka, who is a fresh 22 years old here. Over on the GWE Discord, this match actually prompted a little discussion that La Parka might actually need to be investigated further as a top 20 GWE case because he has all of these little pockets of matches throughout his career where he really looks like an all-timer. From this, in mid 1988, to the Villano IV match last year, we have 34 years of Parka being an absolute beast of an asskicker (though, albeit, he’s more the acrobatic chickenshit getting his ass steamrolled in Panama but you get the gist!).

Those firmly in his camp will protest that he’s more than just the “dancing skeleton” most mainstream fans know him as. I agree. However, there’s an element to that which makes Parka’s case ever the more compelling. He’s one of the very few wrestlers that can blend comedic wrestling and psychopathic brawling without the one smudging the other. In fact, he might just be the all-time greatest at it. Case in point, he sees his ass on a big tumble to the floor about 9 minutes in here. Fans swarm around him, he’s disoriented and lost so he plays into the moment. He hobbles to the wrong corner, where Sandokan is lying in wait like a shark smelling blood. He gestures his arms into the air with a groaned “dammit!” before a fan has to escort him back to the right side. This all goes on in the background of the match while Idolo and Celestial are trading moves in the ring. One of the biggest legends in Panamanian history, and a 22-year old Parka is stealing the audience’s gaze away from him. Unreal. It was this “IT factor” that helped Parka change a nothing 2-week stay in Panama to a 2-month major programme.

Looking at the history, the Parka in Panama matches are seemingly all across the board so it makes things a little difficult to recap and piece together (I’ll get to a potential stopgap later). It’s also promoted by Junior Mina’s Arena Panamá Mexico so there isn’t much out there.  However, what is crystal clear is that this is Parka’s debut match in Panama and we’re blessed to have gotten it as it kicked off one of the best feuds we’ve never heard of.

From interviews and matching up cards, Parka lost his mask to Sandokan a week before Father’s Day in 1988 at the Neco. That squares up with the 11th June date listed on the (very much incomplete) Sandokan Luchawiki profile. The next week, however, forces me to realise I had the Galvez/Solar feud down to the wrong year. Solar was in Panama in 1986 but feuding with Castro. The Galvez feud kicked off on the 17th of June 1988, the Friday after Parka lost his mask. Interestingly, Solar returned to Panama on the 17th in a tag at Neco opposite the team of Sergio Galvez and Blue Panther. The relation to the Park? Well, the Park/Sandokan feud would intertwine with the Galvez/Solar feud at this point with the tecnicos (Solar/Sandokan) having to stave off the violence of hell’s rudos (Galvez/Parka), a violence that Solar lamented would be him “encountering death”.

Despite losing it, Parka would still don his mask to interviews as a protest to the decision. He also carried with him a tape of the ending to the mask match in which he claims a conspiracy took place. It was all jingoistic bias on the part of the referee, who he says made a calculated, perhaps premeditated, “mistake” to allow Sandokan to win. Much protesting and epithets to Sandokan’s race later, Parka would remove his mask as he was doing so graciously as a “gentleman” that respected the traditions of lucha libre (and not because he agreed with the loss). Sandokan, Parka espoused, had tapped to his hold. All of Panama could see it, and their ruptured hostility was proof enough. The whole of Arena Panama could see it, except the one man that needed to most - Carlos Linares, the referee.

I’m unsure how much time had passed before the title matches against Super Parka and Sandokan but Parka now was scalped. I haven’t seen flyers nor articles to corroborate, but it appears that Super Parka took La Parka’s hair at some point in Panama. Weirdly, La Parka was billed as the older brother of Super Parka (his legitimate uncle). It’s one of the weirder tropes of Panama where names/gimmicks are sacred above logic, and once one gimmick has been debuted everything must follow suit. Much like Gemelos Infernales (Hell’s Twins) being a trio.

To my strained eyes, it appears that Parka’s hair is a smidge more grown out in the title match against Sandokan than it is against Super Parka. Again, this I’ll get to later. By this point, Super Parka is a tecnico, and can be seen as Sandokan’s second in some of the encounters. For Parka, he would be seconded by El Idolo and Nacho Vega in the mask match (the latter known to us already as Mascara Negra) and Exterminador as well as Emperador in others. The latter would be the one to demask Super Parka in Panama a few weeks earlier. Another quirk of Panama would tie in with the Parkas - that being how forgiving fans were of wrestlers. In the Emperador feud, Super Parka was the clear heat-seaker. So much so he was once physically attacked by fans on his way to the ring during the build to the Emperador mask match. This led to the lucha commission forcing action and having the national guard accompany wrestlers to the ring at each show. Yet, here, against Parka, Super Parka was the tecnico. The crowd favourite. A Mexican proudly waving the flag of Panama, claiming them as gracious hosts. In reality, a “turn” only took a handshake after the loss of their mask or hair. An acceptance that they weren’t the better wrestler that day and a thanking of the fans for coming out in support of the fight. A mask/hair loss was Panama’s reset button. That’s all Super Parka needed as his get out of jail (hospital) free card to curry favour with the locals. Note La Parka’s antagonisms and vitriol when he loses his mask against Sandokan. It directly flew in the face of what was expected of him. He was an out of control brat and he played that up perfectly. Ricardo Pitti would label La Parka as “volatile” and “excessively energetic”. The absolute perfect foil to the fiery babyface Sandokan.

As for the title in question, Parka is the current title holder of the UWA Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship and Panama’s Middleweight Championship (the title he brings to the ring). The UWA title was never officially recognised by the UWA but it was seen as a title of significant value in Guatemala (given legitimacy by local legend Astro de Oro being the first challenger and then first to capture the title in 1987). Parka beat Astro de Oro for the title on July 24th 1988. A month after Sandokan took La Parka’s mask. As mentioned, Parka was fully expected to be a Guatemala staple at this point, having finished off his short visit to Panama. However, he got over so quickly as a heel that he found himself oscillating between fighting Sandokan in Panama and Astro de Oro in Guatemala - the two biggest legends of South America at the time.

It’s here that I can potentially offer a little bit of a quickfix to the gaps in our Parka in Panama programme. Select Mexican wrestlers would travel around South America honing their craft and finding themselves in quite familiar programmes wherever they went (notably so with Parka). Thus, I’m going to outline the feud with Astro de Oro in Guatemala. What lines up lines up, what differs differs but it’s all hopefully, at worst, a look into very young Parka’s start and, at best, a glimpse into the bigger picture of the feud in Panama.

The feud began with Parka coming into Guatemala as the cocky upstart, bludgeoning an unexpecting Astro de Oro and Arriero de San Juan into pieces in his debut on the 10th of July 1988. He was accompanied by Verdugo, who had a massive chip on his shoulder after his then teammate, Arriero, turned tecnico on him. Despite the heat between Arriero and Verdugo, it was Parka that took things a step beyond by cutting up Astro and leaving him a bloody mess on the mat. Parka’s win, and performance, had him splashed across national newspapers. As quickly as he got over in Panama, Parka was a massive exclamation point in Guatemala now. He had, thus, quickly earned himself a title shot against Astro de Oro (which would play out after a bloody mano a mano “wager” shortly after the tag debut). This wager was a relatively stakeless match (in other words no titles or masks on the line) but was about betting their pride, a “put up or shut up” if you will. Astro de Oro had never been defeated in this match and, yet, Parka beat him. This, in theory, plays sister to the Sandokan/Parka singles Matt has already covered with the only caveat being the roles are reversed (Sandokan absolutely destroys Parka and not the other way around).

As the record books show, Astro de Oro lost their title match. Again making Parka the first luchador to do so. Much the same in Panama with Sandokan, the pride of Guatemala had been made a fool by the punk, La Parka. Parka, greedy for more, offered an all-in with Astro. If Astro ever wanted to see the title again, he would have to bet his mask (and permanent retirement) against it. Astro, who already had his tail between his legs seeing no other choice, agreed. While Parka dropped his mask to Sandokan before the title match, I believe the stipulation for the Sandokan/Parka title match was of a similar nature.

In opposite to Panama (though to the sentiments of the DQs), the referee in the mask match here was firmly in Parka’s back pocket. Parka blindsided Astro in the corridors of the arena on his way to the ring, incessantly beating him with a chain until he burst open with blood. As Astro attempted to make his comeback by grabbing the chain from Parka, referee César Rivas confiscated the weapon. While Rivas was distracted, Parka faked a foul which had disqualified Astro, leaving him a fall behind. The fight would continue, as both men bathed in blood by this point. Parka tried multiple times to escape but he, and his mask, would fall to a merciless, rope-aided piledriver by Astro - much like he would to a merciless rope-aided electric chair from Sandokan. Adolfo Tapia Ibarra, the Island prince, the assassin, the skeleton of death, had lost his mask but he had found himself. And so the whirlwind of violence we’ve come to love was unleashed.