Espectáculos Promociones Panama: The Ballad of Bunny Black, Part 1

El Barón/La Cobra Vs Bunny Black/El Ciclón 5/15/87

Fancam

MD: We have both the “proshot” and, through Graham, a “fancam.” The latter is interesting in that you get to see the same match from the exact opposite side of the ring and it gives us some more insight into the crowd noise at times, but you get most of the gist of things from the main footage. There’s a moment in the tercera where the tecnicos launch their second big comeback of the match. Barón basically has enough and charges forth and the crowd goes nuts as Bunny Black finally gets some real comeuppance. If the match ended around there, it would have been one of the best we’ve seen in the footage. Instead, it takes a turn and Bunny Black pulls out a spike and starts opening Barón’s forehead up. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that this one is definitely worth your time.

The rudos took an early advantage to start, with Bunny avenging a start-of-the-match clowning stumble by crushing Barón’s skull with a chair on the outside. Unless I’m mistaken he has “Guerreros Rock” on his back and the initial beatdown makes him feel like a member of the Guerreros twenty years later. He and Ciclón work in near-perfect unison with one double team after the next: flips, press slams neck first onto the top rope, double kicks, double clotheslines (and later on, things like a punch from a bearhug position or a double axehandle off the turnbuckles while Cobra was held in a fireman’s carry), ending it with a pretty gnarly double stretch. They took it too far in the segunda and miscommunication led to the first big comeback. Bunny Black was certainly a character, selling legdrops to the groin so big that you’d think he was hit by a cattleprod, begging off and spinning around like a top on every punch on the floor. Ciclón stayed with him on offense but couldn’t possibly match his antics otherwise. Cobra also had a tendency to come off as forgettable given the main focus.

I’d say that Barón held up his part, though, bleeding and writhing around when appropriate and being just dynamic enough on offense. When it looked like he was going to get his hands on Bunny the first time, the crowd pooled towards the two of them in excitement. Later on, he’d manage things like a jumping ‘rana off the ropes. Occasionally, he’d get ahead of himself. There’s one shot that looked almost like a Superman kick that I watched from both angles and at half speed and I still couldn’t make sense of and the pivotal spot of the match had him miss something off the top while Cobra had a stretch on and I have no idea what he was trying to do (We’ll call it being blinded by the blood maybe? That would be charitable). Overall, though, this had the sort of ebbs and flows, the build in tension and payoff in tecnico revenge that I love most in my lucha, especially in front of a hot crowd living and breathing with the violence and drama.

GB: I guess I walked into this one. Matt had asked for my recommendation on a match to go with, something with a wrestler I’d like to spotlight, and I instinctively chose this. Naturally, there’s almost nothing to be found for anyone here except the wonderfully enigmatic Bunny Black who is more famously known as Salsero/Hijo de Pierroth/Pierroth Jr in Mexico and Kendo Star in his home country of the Dominican Republic.

And herein lies the problem we face. The information on Panamanian lucha is scattered across newspaper articles and archives as well as social media posts with no real driving force tractioning engagement. This isn’t El Salvador where a throwaway post of mine on PWO has more background than the entirety of our journey here. Moreover, this isn’t Guatemala where, in one centralised place, I can *daily* see two to three new posts of newspaper clippings or photographs with detailed anecdotes on the histories surrounding them. In the past year, what I’ve discovered is that South America is filled with a kaleidoscope of rich history when it comes to wrestling. The only issue, of course, is almost none of it is in English so there's an intertwine of cultural as well as language barriers to the bigger, Western world over and above the foreignity of their wrestling style.

Everything I find on Panama has been gleaned from hours of scouring. There’s a lot of research behind my “I don’t knows”. It’s tiresome and frustrating. But equally rewarding. It's my goal that I can, little by little, help to unearth it to the rest of us. Let’s face it, though, if there ever was a time for Panamanian lucha to rear its head, it would be now. We’re almost four decades on from these matches taking place. A lot of these wrestlers are in their twilight years or, at least, nearing it. I hope, then, that these posts can traction that engagement. That, for nothing else, we can reach these luchadores and bring a spotlight to a country that would act as the “excursion” to many foreign stars the world over, from Solar and La Parka to Gran Hamada.

So, to make things up, I’d like to offer an exclusive, quite literally, on El Barón. From what I can gather, this will be the first time anyone has written about him and his career, either in Spanish or English. So little is known, it seems, that even his homenaje got his name wrong.

Or this could be an inside joke stemming back to at least 1989.

 

Regardless, El Barón, “el rey del tope suicida” from Pueblo Nuevo, didn’t have the easiest start to his career, despite having Ricardo Díaz as his trainer. While Shazán might have been the Diablo Velazco of Panama, Díaz was no slouch, either, having trained the likes of El Greco and El Africano. However, their training left a lot to be desired. Barón would have to learn to ply his craft on mats strewn around an open room with no sight of a ring at all in his training. It was all very rudimentary but he seemed happy. Much like Africano, Barón was trained heavily in olympic style wrestling to start. It was this that he believed taught wrestlers what true discipline was. And, despite not having trained inside a real ring, he chalked up these two years as to getting him through the “real show” when he made his debut on April 28th, 1985 against the rudo Gemelo Infernal I. It seems that he impressed and would, within months, be working tags with El Idolo. He’d also close the decade off as the country’s welterweight champion as well as being a crucial part in getting the newly debuted Azor as over as he became. He would also be given opportunities to wrestle foreign wrestlers from Mexico and Japan when they made their pit stops and, boy, did he start with a good one. Before the end of his debuting year (1985), El Barón wrestled his first match against a foreigner, Negro Casas. It was a completely mat-based fight where the two men traded holds in what I read as being a “great technical match”. Still, this was an important spot as El Barón played the valiant rookie whose loss heated up Negro Casas in the buildup to the Casas/Celestial title match on the 14th of December, 1985. A match I believe in which Casas took back the WWA World Welterweight Championship. Either way, it wasn’t Celestial that left an indelible impression on Casas but El Barón. Over three decades later, at an RGR event on February 26th of this year, Casas would say in an interview he would love to work one more time with El Barón before he retires.