idea for making CMLL work better

You think the recaps are backlogged? I’ve had most of this article sitting around waiting to post for near four months now…

This is not exceedingly thought out well, but some of it’s been tossing in my head for a while and I might as well get it out. It’s not really a Push X and stop Pushing Y deal, or yet another iteration of “hey, it’s 2009, sell your stuff on the internet, you goofballs”, it’s more general scheduling ideas.

* Change the name of Reyes de Aire. It’s kind of generic, “Rey” is an AAA term and it should be put on the same level as the other annual tournaments if it’s going to be annual event. Someone can be Rey de Aires if they win, but I’ve got a better idea for the name of the match. CMLL has a Leyenda de Plata for Santo, a Leyenda de Azul for Demon, why not a Leyenda de Sombra for Black Shadow? It’s that three man feud which made mask matches in Mexico; Black Shadow losing his mask to El Santo is the most important match in lucha libre history, but Shadow’s contribution gets overlooked because he lost and Demon was the one forever looking for revenge. It doesn’t happen if Shadow doesn’t lose his mask.

Shadow’s name isn’t being forced on here either; he’s considered the father of high flying lucha libre. He didn’t create the tope, but he made them famous, and the guys on TV are doing the same. Thanks to TV coming at around the same time, Shadow got popular after his mask loss due to his spectacular style, which is what the current Reyes de Aire tournament is about. It’s a perfect fit.

* Bring more than just the discounted tickets to Puebla and GDL. One of the few interesting part of lucha libre at this time of year during late December is reading about all the Lagureno guys who go back home and wrestle on local cards during the holidays. The intermixing between big TV stars and local heroes must be fun to watch and, in the long run, it doesn’t hurt the national guy if he loses a match to a local guy. El Tackle beating Misterioso in a cibernetico at AOL doesn’t really hurt Misterioso in DF, but it makes Tackle seem a bigger star in Gomez Palacio.

To some extent, they do intermix talent in Guadalajara and even the lesser CMLL guys may end up facing the Puebla guys, but the message is always that the best of the locals are not stars and can not beat even lowly DF regulars. Why not change the message for a couple nights a year by importing some Mexico City concepts? CMLL could run local variants of Gran Prixes (Guadalajara vs the World, with CMLL GDL wrestlers going home to represent their city) and Gran Alternativas (CMLL DF wrestler paired with a local wrestler; maybe the winning local gets a DF match) to give the fans different looking matches a couple times a year.

* Focus various championships on different days: CMLL, at last count, has 17 18 different championships in play. Yet, between the erratic patterns of defenses and number of regular locations, the same audience is going long stretches between seeming defended, making them seem even more interchangeable and meaningless.

If CMLL can’t get rid of one, two, or a dozen (and apparently they can’t), maybe they can be more effective by tying them them a regular location or date of the week. Assign all the titles a base show where they’re defended (say, NWA Light Heavyweight belongs to Sunday Guadalajara shows, or the Mexican Middleweight title is for Tuesday Mexico City shows); they don’t have to only be defended on those shows, and you can do whatever title matches you want for Fridays because that’s the show that matters, but the attempt is to do 3-4 different title defenses on the show. Over time, those title defenses would start to mean something more than the 2-3 week build for them, because the previous defenses would be more real than reading a line about in the paper, more meaningful than a random fact tossed off during commentary.