TWoLL: The First Mask

I must link to a Deportes Martinez story every four months. Antonio Martinez created the first mask, he made it from boot material, it wasn’t great but it caught on, Victor Martinez runs run the store (and website!) today, they’re still the mask choice of many of the top stars, but Victor’s not a fan of lucha libre today, having seen it all. I could do that sentence, name drop Ciclon McKey and advise you how their quality is top notch but better bargains can be found if you’re just looking for fan-ish stuff, pretty much in my sleep. This does not mean I know the whole story.

The use of wrestling masks in the United States predates their use in Mexico. In 1916, a wrestler calling himself the Masked Marvel” debuted in Manhattan. The wrestler, later revealed to be Mort Henderson, set up a series of escalating challengers until he was unmasked by Ed “Strangler” Lewis. After that, several different US wrestlers played the role of the Masked Marvel for short periods. The Masked Marvel “himself” was never really a character, but a gimmick.

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[In 1938], a U.S. American wrestler who fought under the name Cyclone MacKay and wanted to sue the Masked Marvel gimmick in Mexico approached him. MacKay asked Martinez if he could make him a “hood”.

I’m good so far! Except, well…

As Victor Martinez recounts, when his father asked MacKay what he meant, he replied that he wanted “a hood, something you can put on, tie on, like the Ku Klux Klan or something like that.

While lucha libre masks would eventually and continue to reflect Mexican imagery and shared culture heritage, the inspiration for the first mask actually came from a US gimmick, visually compared to a US white supremacy group. The popularity of masks is often attributed to pre-Spanish native Indian cultures, but the lucha libre mask came into existence from a quite different source.