Lucha! Lucha! Lucha!
February 6th, 2022
I just got home from a genuine Lucha wrestling show in Mexico. To quote Jim Cornette, it was definitely an outlaw mud show, but it was a great one. That is to say, the wrestling itself wasn’t particularly great, but I wasn’t going in expecting to see Bret Hart Vs. Shawn Michaels. The matches were fine, starting with the worst and getting progressively more decent as the night went on. But it wasn’t really about the matches; it was about the experience.
Interestingly enough, the normal match type is a two-out-of-three falls tag match, where the first team to win twice gets the victory. Every match on the card was one of these, safe for the opening curtain jerker, which appeared to be two children or perhaps two retired horse jockeys going at it, and then the co-main event, which was a brutal singles hardcore match that got bloody right from the opening bell.
It was a forty five minute walk from my airbnb, and as I showed up at the venue, I noticed a couple of interesting things. Firstly, this event was not being held at an “arena” like the flyer would have you believe. It was more of a backyard with dirt and gravel flooring and a plastic tarp overhead. Secondly, as I approached, I overheard a small group of people standing out front speaking English, my first time hearing it since I’ve been here. It’s been four days and all I’ve heard is Spanish, a language I don’t speak or understand, so it took me a little by surprise to overhear their conversation.
As I approached the English-speaking group, a tall guy by the name of Connor looked me in the face and said “Hey, have I seen you somewhere?” “That’s very possible,” I replied. He then said what I half-expected him to say, “Epic Meal Time?” Look, not to toot my own horn, but I’ve been recognized plenty of times in the past. However, considering I left that show nearly nine years ago, and it’s nowhere near as popular as it was a decade ago, the instances have become fewer and farther in between. What used to be a daily thing many years ago slowly became a weekly thing, and at this point, it maybe happens every other month. And that’s when I’m in Montreal or Toronto or LA. This was while wandering around Oaxaca, Mexico. Insane.
Connor’s a 23-year old who works at a comedy club in Kansas City, taking a few months off to wander around Mexico. We chatted for a bit; he told me about the local girl he met who he really likes and called “way out of his league”, and how she’s feeling hesitant about seeing him again because he’s only here temporarily. He also told me about how, in the 7th grade, he and his friends would get together to play Call Of Duty and watch the new Epic Meal Time episode every week. That sounds about right for our clientele.
Connor introduced me to his friend Chris, a funny dude from Germany. Chris seemed like a really happy person; he showed me photos of sunsets from his recent time in Mazunte, videos of whales and dolphins from Kayaking with his GoPro, and he even bought me a beer. At one point, I stepped outside of the venue to buy a Lucha mask for myself, and one for my friend Lawrence back in Montreal, from one of the street vendors outside. As I walked off, Chris yelled out “if they’re 150 pesos or less, get me one and I’ll pay you back!” I think they were something like 180, which was close enough, so I got him one and told him it was 150.
Chris and Connor were there with a couple of other friends they had met along their travels, but I didn’t get to interact with them very much. The couple sitting in front of us, who none of us knew, was also extremely friendly, and quite honestly, one of the coolest looking couples I had seen in a while. She had purple hair and lots of tattoos and wore a small dress, while he wore dress shoes, white pants, a floral button-up with the sleeves rolled up, and suspenders. He also had a slew of necklaces, rings, and dangling earrings on, and sported a pseudo-mullet. If that kind of guy walked into a bar in Montreal or LA, I’d say he was trying too hard. But at a Lucha outlaw mud show in an empty lot in Oaxaca? He was cool as fuck.
In fact, a large number of the people in attendance appeared to be tourists and not locals. It was probably half and half. I don’t say that as a good thing or a bad thing, just an interesting thing that I wasn’t really expecting. Since I’ve been here, all of my experiences have been extremely Mexican. I love the culture and the people here, but there’s also small level of uneasiness that comes with being in a foreign country where I can’t communicate with anybody. Hearing that much English, and talking to people and making friends and joking around, was also cool.
Then again, you don’t really need language when you have wrestling. It’s so fascinating how universal the experience of live pro wrestling is. You can be from anywhere in the world, and the OHHs and AHHs are understood by everyone. The momentum and rhythm of a wrestling match is intuitively human, and people just know how to interact with the show. Good guys get cheered and bad guys get booed, and even without understanding the taunting or chants, it doesn’t take long to figure out who is who. A resounding open-hand slap to the chest sounds the same in any language.
Wrestling really is about the characters, and characters are universal. There was Venom, a tiny man wearing all black with a poorly drawn Venom tattoo on his arm, who did not seem very enthused or excited to be wrestling, and was kind of just going through the motions. There was Phantasmo, who took a bump off the top rope through a table covered in fluorescent light tubes and cut up his back real good (also, I’ve never witnessed this before, but after that match everyone in the audience threw their change into the ring and the referee pocketed most of it???). There was also a wrestler who’s name was simply Tony, who looked like a President’s Choice brand Eddie Guerrero, and who flipped me off on the way to the ring. Fuck Tony. My personal favorite was Crazy Star, a very fat man in a star mask who had very little offense and was mostly into getting beaten up and then dancing it off. We can all learn a thing or two from Crazy Star.
After the last match, I exchanged numbers with my new friends and said my goodbyes. Then I trekked the forty five minute walk home, only this time without the use of any map app, just off of memory. And in the dark, mind you. I was proud of myself for that one. On the way home, I stopped for one of those mayonnaise-covered corn on the Cobb sticks, which cost 25 pesos (about a buck fitty in dollars) and will surely wreck havoc on my stomach in the coming hours. At one point, during my walk home, I passed a parked cab where the driver was getting blown by two women, and all was right in the world.
