2019 Ongoing MOTY List: Alvarado Family Feud

24. Maximo vs. La Mascara AAA 2/1

ER: What a tremendous bit of family theater. This was a hair vs. hair match, except that Maximo was fighting for Super Porky's hair, and Mascara was fighting for Goya Kong's hair. It starts pretty simply, two very quick falls, but Maximo gets busted open in the segunda, serving as a sign of the drama that was coming in the tercera. Everybody played their role tremendously, and the fans were literally jumping out of their seats for nearfalls down the finishing stretch. Maximo turns in one of the great tecnico performances of the year, really eating some hard shots from Mascara before finally snapping. Maximo snaps off a couple nice headscissors, hits a plancha off the apron into his sister (with Mascara awesomely moving at the last minute so Goya takes the hit), and then goes nuts in the crowd throwing hard rows of sharp chairs at Mascara's head. Maximo was really throwing those things and suddenly this is an Alvarado take on a Park/Rush brawl. But Maximo manages to hit a better tope than any tope in a Park/Rush match. Maximo has an argument for best tope in lucha, and this is one of his finest ever, his chest and head battering Mascara hard into the barricade, like booby trapped tree knocking a storm trooper down a hill on Endor. I loved all the family interaction: You had Mascara slapping Porky, Porky hitting Mascara in the face with the handle of a ring squeegee, Porky hobbling after Goya - Porky was moving pretty poorly but has lost weight, looked like a lucha Sebastian Gorka - and smacking that handle against the ground with every step before hitting his daughter with it (!), and later an awesome nearfall when Goya runs in to interfere and splats Mascara with a great elbowdrop. The nearfalls down the stretch were fantastic, and the fans were dying with them. They wanted to see Goya without her great head of hair, and every single Maximo kiss into a schoolboy lead to the crowd going bonkers. Maximo even pulls out a triple dip kiss for a nearfall, the ref eats a kick to the back of the head, some other guy gets involved and kicked to the floor; that kind of overbooking can feel like a total mess but here I thought it all added to the chaos and the fact that a couple heads of hair were on the line! This tercera (which was basically the whole match) was too much fun. Maximo is a guy I've pretty much checked out on post-CMLL, but he does always seem to turn in one big early year performance. For all I know he's putting on shows like this all over town.

PAS: I feel like I need to get the backstory of this match with a brother fighting his cousin while wagering the hair of their invalid father and sister, respectively.  The weirdness of this match was really elevated by everyone being family. Porky can barely walk but he is still bleeding and hits a splash on an imposter who he thought was his nephew, and hits his daughter with a giant cane. Maximo ends up getting multiple near falls after he kisses his cousin on the mouth. Hell of Maximo performance, if this had been a bigger match the image of him hurling rows of chairs at his bloody brother would have been iconic, this was a small Arena Lopez Mateos match and only available via handheld, but it felt like a huge main event. Lots of goofiness and shortcuts, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

2019 MOTY MASTER LIST