Found Footage Friday: APACHE~! SKAYDE~! HECHICERO~! RAYO~! FIERA~! LUCERO~! SANGRE~! ULTIMO~! ATLANTIS~!

Gran Apache vs. Skayde DTU 4/18/10

MD: We're all happy that Black Terry, Jr. is posting matches. He's posted this one here and on Facebook, so give him clicks:  https://www.facebook.com/reel/1681600072845956. Here we got up close and personal for a super enjoyable encounter. Apache was able to keep up with Skyde on the mat the whole way through and had a bunch of thunking power moves, while also bringing multiple dropkicks, a moonsault attempt in the middle, and then the two dives at the end. There was something a little clunky about him at times. When he went over for the rolling Boston crab set up for a rowboat, he had a hard time getting over, but it never felt collaborative. It just added to the grit, and, in my mind, set up the finish where while he took Skyde out, he was spent from the effort he put in on the dives and couldn't beat the count either. 

What made this jump off the screen, however, was how sharp the holds were. They were so good at unlocking holds with little shots and bits of positioning: a twist of the arm one way so as to twist it another, a cradle that wasn't meant to be a pin but to set up the next hold, a transition from a kickout right into the next thing. For the most part Apache pressed the advantage. He had bit of a size, came off as an all arounder. Where he stumbled was not accounting for the fact that one side of the ring happened to have barbed wire all over it and he careened into it on rope running. Later on, there was a bit of added drama that for him to get a rope break on a hold, he'd have to grab the ropes on that side of the ring. It didn't play into the match too much past that but it created a more interesting environment for them to joust in.

While the crowd groaned a bit at the finish, they had no reason to complain with the action up til then. Apparently BT, Jr. is going to be posting every Monday so we'll have lots to look at over time. 

PAS: The 2010's period when Black Terry Jr. was just releasing incredible indy lucha every week (and we would get new FUTEN shows) was one of the most rewarding periods of my pro-wrestling fandom. IWRG and the smaller lucha promotions were just on fire, awesome cool matches every week with guys like Black Terry, Negro Navarro, Dr. Cerebro and many more just killing it. Lots of that stuff has been only sporadically available in recent years, and I am pretty sure this is a match which is completely new. Apache is a guy who dipped into that 2010s indy lucha world, but wasn't a mainstay, so it is especially neat to get to see him stretch, and more Skayde is also always a treat. This is a match which just fulfilled expectations, I came in expecting great looking Llave, some cool exchanges and a little Apache high flying and it just checked the boxes. My expectations are pretty high for this stuff, and while it didn't exceed them, just hitting them is pretty great.  

ER: Had I been there live this is something I still would be thinking about. Black Terry Jr. is back and puts you in the front row of lost lucha libre like few. Phil isn't exaggerating about how much the original BTJ handhelds meant to his fandom, I remember all the excited phone calls and texts about every single new upload, leading down the Black Terry rabbit hole, documenting some of the coolest lucha that had mostly to that point gone unseen by all but the most dedicated lucha heads. I don't think I've ever seen Gran Apache in any of BTJ's handhelds, and the sight of Apache in an environment like this looks totally foreign to me. It's beautiful. Live, seeing two old guys (well, 50 and 45, youthful for our brand of lucha) working llave and the hardest fucking mat possible, it's the thing I want from my lucha. We see them fully up close rolling through exchanges, Apache rolling through leg locks that get tighter with each roll, going through what feels like a 12 step process to knot up Skayde's legs. Apache's llave somehow looks more graceful while Skayde's moves more heavily. I don't mean that as an insult to Skayde's work, I thought the heaviness added to the pendulum swings of his llave, his floating majistral looking like an act of magic physics rather than fast Quackenbush precision. Skayde's single legs and cinched in crabs looked ligament tearing, and Apache is wise to just start slapping and punching him the longer we go. 

Apache's punches and slaps were one of the first things that got me into actual lucha libre, believe it or not. I was mostly familiar with lucha through WCW, and Psychosis/Rey/Juvy matches from Japan or ECW. When my family finally got cable TV in the year 2000 it wasn't long before I found Galavision, and discovered Gran Apache slapping the shit out of Oscar Sevilla in his little Sears portrait matador suit. I was fully onboard the Apache express from one match, and here every punch and slap to Skayde brought me back to those first ones I saw. I never got to see Apache live (I saw Skayde once, during a period where he had gained weight and got outshone by a 60 year old Solar) and the sound of his strikes live must have been incredible. 

7 minutes into this I yelled "There's barbed wire in there?!" to my living room, as BT Jr. had kept that angle hidden. There's a whole side of the ring with barbed wire around the ropes and while these men mostly stay away from the wire, Apache does accidentally hit it once and yelps loudly, a hilarious camera reveal. It also leads to my actual favorite shot, late in the match, as Apache punches Skayde in the face. The afternoon sun glows behind them and The Barbed Wire Side of the Ring looms in the foreground unused, the kind of lucha vision only seen in outdoor tent lucha. Now that BTJ is back, who knows how many more similar visions we will see. We'll write about every one. 

Atlantis/Rayo De Jalisco Jr./Ultimo Dragon vs. La Fiera/Sangre Chicana/Charles Lucero 9/6/92 Plaza De Toros Monumental

MD: Lucero was a replacement for Tugboat Tyler. They didn't even update the graphics. But he's part of what made this fun. We've seen the rest of these guys go at it, and yeah, I'll always be glad to see Chicana and Fiera, but a relatively young (relative to a lot of the footage we have of him fifteen years later) Lucero in the mix was novel.

A lot of this is the rudos stooging all over the place, Lucero pretending Atlantis fouled him, Fiera having Ultimo run over his back, everyone playing into Rayo's act. Again, some of the novelty is seeing Lucero feed into it. Eventually Chicana punches Rayo in the skull while he has a hold on and the rudos take over. Atlantis comes back with a chair on Chicana and it feels a little unwarranted maybe but who knows what these guys were up to otherwise. The tonal shift is especially weird as they go into everyone-in-a-headlock-at-once and la estella and a celebratory finishing bit for the tecnicos but hey, we're not going to complain too much about mean Atlantis chairshots. This too, like everything else this week, was fun. 

ER: I love when 15 minutes of VHS tape trader quality lucha shows up, talk about a trip back. There's always something new to observe, always somebody who stands out that you weren't thinking about earlier that week, month, or year. Charles Lucero was someone I didn't know about until his matches with Hechicero, Rayo a lot of people didn't know about until he was older and lazier and up his own ass (complimentary, and pejoratively) and here they're both a perfect set of rivals. In the primera there's this great early moment where Rayo is teasing his matador attacks on Chicana, before just rushing past him to double hammer fist Lucero off the ropes to the floor, just swinging that Mexican Polish Hammer into his chest. His misdirections to throw off Lucero's timing are wildly entertaining. I enjoyed old conceited Rayo but whenever I see the stop-start routines done in younger Rayo speed it feels like some of the best lucha trickster work we have. La Fiera was also a standout, because early 90s Fiera is always going to be a standout, and here he was especially gifted at making 1992 Ultimo Dragon's offense sing. Great pairing, an accompanist who knew how to make a guy feel like a star.  

Caifan Rockero I vs. Rey Hechicero 2/13/09

MD: Likewise, Rob's gone through a channel posting a ton of things and pried out what seems to be new or lost or recovered, perfect for us. And for us, it doesn't get too much more perfect than an incredibly blurry match between Caifan and Hechicero from 09. I'm pretty certain AEW fans have no idea how old Hechicero is and how long he's been doing this. I saw my share of his stuff back when I first started getting into lucha, including an apuestas match with Caifan from a year after this one, so this is like going home in some ways.

They go almost 30 and it feels like a series of a hundred mostly disconnected exchanges, each one interesting and experimental in its own right. They're all full of struggle. For a lot of it, Caifan is the aggressor and Hechicero has to get out of something, though he has his share of hefting Caifan up as well. Sometimes it's clear what they're going for and it works beautifully. Sometimes you're left to wonder. There's a shoulder breaker Hechicero does twenty minutes in where I'm not sure if that's what he meant to start with. Other times, though, the struggle is wonderful. When Hechicero went for a tapitia, he only got it after slamming Caifan's head into the mat a few times in a way that I'm not sure I've ever quite seen; simple but it worked very well within the sequence. Caifan hit his arm cradle suplex twice. There was a bit more of a sense of build for the second one, but you still wonder about him having to go to the well in such a long match like that.

They did escalate to rope running but then they'd take it back down. So much as there was a narrative, it was one of increasing exhaustion and damage over time. You believed it because they were doing so much. The moves did get bigger to a degree, more off the top, for instance. When Hechicero finally stunned Caifan enough to get the hold he really wanted, it felt more like him outlasting Caifan than anything else. I wouldn't call this particularly focused, but it was certainly imaginative and fun. 

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Belief (AEW Five Fingers of Death 5/11 - 5/17 Part 1)

AEW Dynamite 5/13/26

Darby Allin vs Konosuke Takeshita

MD: Wrestling isn't about being real.

It's about being true.

And the engine of truth is belief.

Darby Allin is the rare sort of wrestler that makes us believe. It's in the name, definitional, right? A huge aspect of belief is making our suspension of disbelief as easy as possible. If our disbelief isn't suspended, we spend all of our time looking at the strings, thinking about how the trick is done, feeling like we're smarter than what we're watching, focusing more on the craft than the narrative unveiling before us. 

And that can be ok, especially on a second watch, but it's a level of distance, a level of disconnect. 

With Darby matches, we don't have to worry about it. Our disbelief is suspended. There are plenty of ways to accomplish it. I'll talk about some more when I get to Takeshita. But Darby? He does it the hard way. Maybe you could call it the hardcore way. He crashes and burns again and again in order to keep our eye on the ball, so that we stay focused, so that we don't blink. 

He takes hellacious bumps, not just at the hands of his opponents, but at his own hands, utilizing his own body as his deadliest weapon, making the diabolically brave and foolish calculation that whatever his opponent might take, he can take just a little more. He sells it all, grasping, crawling, scraping, writhing, and it feels like the sort of trick he can only do once, to blow himself up so that he can express that pain to the world and draw every viewer in. Except he does it again and again and again.

And over time, that builds up a second sort of belief, the belief that he can survive it all. Endless kickouts are a problem with all modern wrestling, but not with Darby, because Darby is the exception that proves the rule. With him, it never feels excessive, because he lives and breathes a different sort of more tangible excess, and it makes us believe that you just can't keep him down for three seconds. What's three seconds in the face of everything else he gets up from?

Then there's Konosuke. If Darby is reaction, then Takeshita is action, the other side of belief. He towers over opponents, has precise technique, moves with such ease and explosiveness. Darby Allin survives explosions. Konosuke Takeshita is the explosion. 

When he hits Darby with a German Suplex off the top and holds the bridge, it's a seemingly impossible physical act made believable, plausible, immersive, by his presence, how he carries himself, and that little extra bit of we know about him, the fact that he wrote his thesis on the German Suplex. 

In that regard, they're two sides of the same coin, both able to make the impossible seem possible and the possible seem incredible. 

There's another aspect of belief, however. That presence of Takeshita? It's partially because the character of Konosuke Takeshita believes in himself completely. He believes that he is the Alpha. He believes that he is a World Champion waiting to happen. He believes that he is better than Okada. He believes that he can beat Darby; he did so once before after all.

I'm not convinced that Ciampa believed that, that Brody King believed that, that Kevin Knight believed that, not deep down. PAC wasn't a rational actor to begin with, so let's leave him out of this. Knight wrestled conservatively, right until he couldn't. Ciampa compensated with a wild streak, Brody with a bestial streak. They overcompensated, overstretched.

Takeshita did not overstretch. He did not take foolhardy chances. When Darby tried to throw himself at Takeshita, Takeshita stood firm and swatted him down. He had answers for everything Darby tried and Darby had so few answers for the problem of Takeshita. Too big. Too strong. Too sure. Darby moved out of the way causing Takeshita to crash knee first into the stairs. Takeshita brushed himself off and took back over. Darby cleverly vaulted over him and then kicked out that selfsame knee and locked in a guillotine like he did with Knight. Takeshita just hefted him up and escaped. Too much.

Darby does outlast his opponents. He sends them both through the meat grinder and he comes out of it, sinew hanging off of bone to match his painted up face, more in his element, more able to survive. But he outlasts them another way as well. He breaks their spirit by surviving all of their best offense, their best attempt to put him down; by kicking out again and again. 

Eventually, Takeshita (being too much) finally did hit that power drive knee. And Darby kicked out. Takeshita was not shaken. He had other tools in his arsenal. Or maybe he'd just slam his knee into Darby's skull until his head was no longer attached to his shoulders. He had options. 

Don Callis, however, did not have that same sort of faith. He had been provided the Dynamite Diamond Ring before the match, an extra piece of insurance from an MJF who does not quite believe in himself enough to put his hair upon the line, not unless he has absolutely no other choice. Once Darby kicked out of the knee, Callis' belief in Takeshita was shaken and he enacted Plan B. Clon rushed to ringside to distract the ref. Callis gave Takeshita the ring. 

In doing so, he did far more harm than good. Takeshita refused to use the ring, for to be forced to need it would shatter his confidence in himself. And he was momentarily distracted in getting rid of it, which helped to let Darby recover.

There was a bigger issue at play though. He realized in that moment that Callis did not believe in him nearly as much as he believed in himself. Darby may have been able to survive up until that point, but he couldn't crack Takeshita's armor, armor forged through faith and confidence, through belief. 

Callis did that hard work for him. 

And Takeshita, instead of pressing on, went back to the well, back to the stairs on the outside even though the gambit had failed before. Thus shaken, he fell to the same overcompensating, overstretching, of Darby's previous opponents. Darby reversed things, and Takeshita ate a Scorpion Death Drop onto the stairs because of it.

The beginning of the end.

Belief is everything. Wrestling is not just a series of loosely connected spots. It is action and reaction. It is a building built over time. The cement that holds it all together is belief. Sometimes it is created by bumps, selling, execution; sometimes by confidence, presence, body language; and sometimes by the characters' belief in themselves and how that shapes a narrative and touches our hearts out in the crowd or through a screen.

You may think that what makes Darby Allin great is the daring, the bumping, or even the selling, but those are just the means. You may think what makes Takeshita great is his execution, his intensity; even, I suppose, simply his moves, but those too are just the means. 

Darby and Takeshita are great because they are so good at getting us to believe.

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