Video link to the match over at Youtube : https://youtu.be/DAfvVhrwZr0



No cagematch page for this match/event.



Who’s Who?

El Hijo del Santo

Making his debut in 1982, El Hijo del Santo is the youngest of 8 son’s Santo had with his first wife. The original El Santo died shortly after in 1984 after famously showing his face briefly on a TV appearance.

If you want to bask in the glory of Santo by watching him wrestle, you are basically out of luck as the original Santo doesn’t have much tape for various reasons. Luckily, his son became one of the best wrestlers on the planet during his storied career and lucha tape became more aplenty. If you want to see Santo wrestling his son is your best bet, but Santo’s luchador films did normally include some wrestling to establish him as a wrestler in those films and was a close as many people could get to wrestling if you lived too far away from an arena.

Like many talents in the 1980′s El Hijo del Santo worked with both EMLL and UWA which wasn’t odd and in fact was the norm for many talents at the time. 1992 came around and like many people El Hijo del Santo made his way to AAA, but unlike most people he left before the peso crashed going back to CMLL in 1996 and working there for a decade before leaving to form his own company in 2007 Todo X El Todo which still runs shows. He has retired for the most part now, but is still a public figure. Writing think pieces on current lucha events and still running his own indie company.

By this time in his career El Hijo del Santo had won the UWA World Lightweight Championship(x3), WWA World Lightweight Championship(x2), UWA World Welterweight Championship(x2), WWA World Welterweight Championship(x7), AAA World Tag Team Championship(with Octagon), Mexican National Trios Championship(With Angel Azteca & Super Muneco), Mexican National Welterweight Championship, Mexican National Middleweight Championship, CMLL World Tag Team Championship(with Negro Casas x3, which he was currently holding with Casas in their 3rd reign).

If my count was correct by this time his record was 52-0-0, which I think is the highest we have had and for good reason. Many luchadors obviously are basically no bodies when they start. Being son of hands down the most famous luchador meant that El Hijo del Santo started with a spotlight on him. Luckily, he thrived with the attention and while his father was the most famous luchador, El Hijo del Santo has an argument for being the best wrestler to don a mask and wrestle across the Mexican countryside.

La Park

La Park made his debut in 1982 a decade before AAA would be founded. He would hold no titles in that time. Before the La Parka(The reaper) gimmick Parka was most notably Principe Island a mask he lost in 1987 to El Hijo del Santo. ending his 5-0-0 streak. I’m sure he had his fans, but he wasn’t super well known at all as those gimmicks his first decade in the business.

1992 came around and the AAA walkout happened. Antonio Pena, the leader and head booker of AAA who use to be a CMLL booker came to La Parka with the idea for the gimmick. The skeleton based loosely on the Day of the Dead tradition Mexico practices each year. The character was a hit out of the gate and the first major match was vs Lizmark at the first ever Triplemania for Lizmark’s Mexican National Light Heavyweight Championship. Not covering that match because I talked about it last year when highlighting Lizmark.

That belt would be around Park’s waist before too long. That and the WWA World Light Heavyweight Champion were the only 2 belts Parka had held at this point in 2001. He held the Mexican National Light Heavyweight Championships 3 times and the WWA title 2 times.

1992 to 1996 he worked with AAA until 1997 came around and the peso crashed. Like many people he left the company at that time following many other luchadors to bolster WCW. Where despite becoming a household name and one of the most memorable guys on the roster… he never really won any accolades. After his run in WCW he would return to Mexico working indie and CMLL dates from 2000-2008.

Which is when clashing between La Park and AAA happened. They debut a new La Parka while he was doing dates for WCW as La Parka Jr. the two didn’t clash in the late 90′s because Parka wasn’t working with CMLL or rival companies instead being a WCW ad for their character and working US indie dates. So around this time in the early 2000′s La Parka would go from that name to La Park which is what he has used for the last 15 years or so.

This match is one of many indie dates La Park did in the early 2000′s after WCW which raised his stock and made him from a person CMLL called in from time to time, to someone who they used more regularly on TV as demand for the chairman grew thanks to some of the classics he had in smaller promotions outside of CMLL and AAA ontop of having more mainstream exposure from his time in WCW when they were using luchadors most weeks.

How is the match?

Fantastic, It’s another fun match in this series and is probably the bloodiest. Which is something I think normally worked for El Hijo del Santo, but is certainly La Park’s bread and butter, even more so in the post 2000′s Lucha Libre ecosystem. Having brutal brawls like this one and of course his feud with Dr. Wagner Jr. that would be happening over the next decade + and would even come to involve both men’s sons in tag matches as well.

The match starts with corner man for El Hijo del Santo cheating almost right out of the gate tripping La Park only to get a stern talking down to by El Hijo del Santo who doesn’t feel like he needs the help of his cornerman to beat La Park. Which seems true in the early goings, with El Hijo del Santo picking up the first falls pretty easily with a clutch like his father before him.

The 2nd doesn’t go so smoothly, in fact from the beginning in a silver mask that’s unripped and looking like he hasn’t broken a sweat, to the end of the 2nd covered in blood, mask ripped and seeming like he’ll be lucky to not pass out from blood loss. Both himself and the white bodysuit of La Park coated in a thin layer of blood from the son of the saint himself.

The second round seeing La Park mostly brawl with his opponent on the outside. Throwing him into rows of chairs, the corner post and worst of all using a bucket as a foreign object bashing it into the silver masked son of a legend while standing over him in front of the crowd of people who came to see a contest and instead were witness to a murder or at the very least and assault.

The one thing I think sorta sours this match is the finish. Still, I don’t think the intense action that happens in the preceding 3 rounds is ruined by the meh finish. You don’t often get matches anywhere that feel as intense as this match. I wish the two met for a belt at some point, but as far as I can tell they didn’t at least not for a singles title. Great match, between two of the greatest not only of their era and of Mexico, but just in general. If it weren’t for the messy and awkward ending this might be the best match we have looked at this month.