2024 Ongoing MOTY List: Hechicero vs. Danielson

 

2. Bryan Danielson vs. Hechicero AEW Collision 2/3/24

ER: One of the things I really love about AEW, is that a guy like Hechicero can unexpectedly show up 5 years into the whole thing and get placed directly into a match where he gets to spin off into his thing more than maybe any time since I called him Rey Hechicero. I don't think I ever stopped calling him Rey Hechicero. We wrote a ton about Hechicero in the 2010s. I was enough of a maniac to write up weekly episodes of more than one CMLL TV show, and Phil and I were adding Hechicero matches from all over Mexico to our 2014 MOTY List. It felt like I was writing about Hechicero literally every week, because I was. And now 10 years later, there's a fed that can bring him in and let him get a whole new bunch of people addicted the way he hooked us. Honestly, I don't know of a match where Hechicero does go off into his thing more than this one. This was the one big singles match in his entire AEW run (so far?) that was allowed to Deliver. This was the match the most people wanted to see, and it delivered in a way that even those who knew what Hechicero was capable of couldn't have anticipated. 

I didn't go into this match expecting anything, really, but I didn't expect it to be such a Hechicero match. This whole thing felt designed to make Hechicero a star which is pretty incredible. I don't think there are any actual plans to bring in and use Hechicero on a regular basis, and the idea of bringing a guy in who is Not Yours just to make him look like a superstar and then hang around to wrestle AEW Miz is a weird mainstream wrestling thing that never would have happened before AEW. This was not Hechicero working a Danielson match. This was Danielson trying to work a Danielson match but instead being constantly foiled and taken for a ride by Hechicero until barely escaping with a win. Danielson looked like a guy who knew he escaped with a win. That's cool as hell. 

I love how Hechicero had an answer for all of the Danielson stuff, as if during all these years of Danielson talking about wrestling Blue Panther, Hechicero was actually doing the same and preparing to wrestle Danielson. If he didn't have an answer for it, he calmly withstood it. He walked through kicks and backed him down while also working two steps ahead of him on the mat. When Danielson started realizing his shit wasn't working - maybe after Hechicero held onto Danielson's ankle during a surfboard escape and crept into his own rolling surfboard and then later surfboard wheeled him into a rear naked choke - Danielson just started punching him a lot, and even that didn't work. Hechicero just withstood, forcing Danielson to go to more punches and headbutts. The knot he tied Danielson up in after snaring him on a missed diving headbutt was getting so painful that it looked like a spot that was actually getting away from Danielson, like Hechicero came into the Rio Grande Valley and started shooting. 

Hechicero has such explosive violence on all of his impact spots. I don't know if Danielson has done a Busaiku knee as well as the Average Hechicero Running Knee. Hechicero mangling his way through Danielson with a flying knee as a means to hook a sleeperhold from the apron is as violent as Bill Dundee's best clotheslines yanked into a sleeper. The way that he keeps twisting Danielson into different llave stretches takes me right back to that space when I was getting fully into lucha 25 years ago and branching out into older and indy lucha. Bihari's Skayde video, seeing IWRG Negro Navarro, Solar matches; Hechicero always brings that feeling but combines it with Shocker's charisma and movement and impact. Shocker was one of those guys whose best years coincided with my favorite wrestling years, where I was tape trading more than ever and seeing more new things than ever. Hechicero has the physical spark of those best years of Shocker, while also feeling like at all times older man Negro Navarro. His final roll through three different submissions and two different pinning combinations, with his arms and legs moving for constantly better and contrasting positioning, was brilliant. It's the kind of fun twisting lucha that you'd find on a 4 minute YouTube video inappropriately scored by something off Tool's Lateralus. 

2024 MOTY MASTER LIST