2024 Ongoing MOTY List: The Beast Mortos Debuts in AEW

 

6. The Beast Mortos vs. Rey Fenix AEW Collision 4/27/24

ER: I love a debut that feels like a real debut. The Beast Mortos is new, Debuting. Black Taurus is not new at all. Black Taurus has been almost everywhere, all over the place, constantly, for at least 5 years now. You have had multiple chances to see Black Taurus wrestle live in a city near you within the last 5 years. He's done all of the Super Indies, he's been one of the few hundred people on MLW's roster, one of the few dozen to wrestle on a show where Ric Flair died, he even wrestled multiple matches on AXS TV for a mudshow fed that airs after old episodes of That Metal Show with Eddie Trunk. He's been everywhere, doing his great thing, and now he's on real TV against a guy he's been doing that great thing against for over a decade. AEW putting guys on TV specifically to try to capture the magic of someone seeing Rey Mysterio vs. Psicosis for the first time is message board pro wrestling and it's hard not to appreciate someone paying money to try to recapture it on TV. Rey and Psicosis got to do their great thing in front of increasingly larger crowds before unleashing it on WCW, and the Beast Mortos has been doing the same. Now, wrestling is a lot different now than it was when Rey and Psicosis did Their Thing on PPV (nearly 30 years ago!). Now everybody frequently gets the chance to do Their Thing and it feels rarer and rarer that someone can show up doing something Unexpected. If you've been paying attention, there should be nothing Unexpected about The Beast Mortos. He's the best of the dozen or so animal's head wearing luchadors that have come to prominence in the last decade, and this was him doing his thing in front of the most eyeballs of his career, and he completely crushes it.  

His AEW debut is so good, that it essentially overshadows the fact that Rey Fenix hadn't wrestled in over 6 months. This is Fenix's big return and while he did Rey Fenix things, people were now also getting to see a ton of Beast Mortos things. I loved Mortos's NOAH-like sicko dedication to going after Fenix's knees after Fenix has been out a half year because of his knees. Jun Akiyama hated Kenta Kobashi's knees so fucking much and I support Mortos's hatred of Fenix's knees even if Fenix didn't seem to mind too much.  It is a fool's errand to go into depth describing what they are each capable of. I can tell you that The Beast has an incredible tornillo, with an improbably tight spiral and amazing impact, but it's something you need to see to believe. I can tell you about a bulldog that spikes Fenix vertically, but that's something you will want to see. I have no way to describe Fenix leaping onto The Beast's shoulders and kicking him in the back of the head - while standing on his shoulders - and I can tell you how cool it looked when Mortos headbutted him out of the sky but I wouldn't be able to do it justice. To see how fast and far Mortos takes a Jerry bump and how well he can catch a complicated dive, why would you just want to take my word for it. The match was filled with things almost beyond description, unless you are someone who has been seeing The Beast and Fenix reinvent how things are done for nearly a decade now. But thousands have not, and this match was for the thousands. Even for the dedicated, it played as fresh. A debut of a known quantity that felt like a new debuting force. Mortos lost this battle, but I am sure that after this he will be doing nothing but winning in AEW. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST