Day: December 10, 2015

Alfonso Dantes is always treated as one of Guadalajara’s great legends of lucha libre, and it’s not hard to see why when looking at the times he’s wrestled in the building. He’s got the most years with the most main events, and he’s got the most matches over all, thru the period I checked.

I put together a list of the three most frequent main eventers each year. I’ve split it up by building, for the few years where there was competition. It’ll kinda give you an idea of how the top stars changed over time.

Alfonso Dantes has the most main events in five years. No one else has more than 3 (Ringo Mendoza & Solitario if you count his busiest self promoted year.) He’s one of three biggest main eventers from 1967 to 1981, and is still around in a lesser role thru the end of the period and likely beyond.

The names all do change from year to year; it’s rare for someone to be in the most main events two straight years, and the top 3 never stays stable. I think this is because Guadalajara is used as a place to for up and coming talent, maybe a little bit before they were used in the same roles in Mexico City. Once they got hot, they were spending their Sundays (and maybe some Tuesdays) working arenas around Mexico City.

The 10 match list has a lot of familiar names.

495 Alfonso Dantes
375 Ringo Mendoza
274 Rayo de Jalisco Sr.
265 El Santo
240 René Guajardo
234 El Faraón
231 Ray Mendoza
229 el Halcón/Danny Ortiz
225 Rolando Vera
219 Blue Demon

Again, Dantes has 100 more matches than the next nearest person, and 200 more than anyone besides Ringo. Maybe this would look a lot different if we had the full lineups for these shows – maybe Dantes just made the top matches quicker – but Dantes is a pretty dominant presence. I’ve got a stronger idea of how important el Halcon and El Faraon were for a time, and I think we’d see guys like Atlantis, Rayo de Jalisco Jr. and the Dinamitas on this lift if I had lineups into the 90s.

There’s plenty of big names not included. Angel Blanco, el Solitario and Perro Aguayo are all among the top 20. The relationship between EMLL and UWA was friendly enough that UWA wrestlers did work in Arena Coliseo Guadalajara from time to time, but only infrequently. Solitario’s attempt to run his own promotion – basically only weeks when the bullring wasn’t running bullfights – didn’t seem to be on any regularly scheduled. It’s possible they were running smaller local venue which didn’t show up in the paper, but UWA also seemed to put together a regular loop of towns that were generally closer to Mexico City, and so may have not focused much on Guadalajara.

Another thing that stuck out to me about the top guys in Guadalajara is the era of Santo, Demon and Rayo de Jalisco is a lot shorter than I thought. Santo’s retirement isn’t until 1983, and Demon and Rayo are still around until the start of the 90s, but they’re not wrestling here all that often. Santo’s working heavily for the opposition group when Arena Coliseo Guadalajara opens and is pretty much down as a big star there in the mid 60s. Demon’s barely around long before that. I’d guessed Rayo was a top star for a long period of time, but he’s not really after 1970. It’s the Mendozas, Sangre Chicana, early Perro Aguayo and Alfonso Dantes carrying things thru the 70s. The Perro Aguayo/Ringo Mendoza feud itself seems to carry long stretches of time the way nothing else does.

One last thing: check out Satoru Sayama cracking the list in 1979. Sayama’s booked like a top guys of a promotion, in a promotion that rarely has build around foreigners. (Benny Galant in the 1963 is the previous one.) Sayama was so good that EMLL got over it’s usual preoccupations to actually use him as a shooting star.

I shouldn’t even have a post here. The title seems good enough, but I might as well walk thru the case.

The Occidente championships – the championships of Arena Coliseo Guadalajara, basically – haven’t been used in much of a meaningful way for years. They seem like they may come in the 1940s, following the naming scheme of the Norte championships. The Occidente championships are still around. I can name a stunningly high amount of them (test at the bottom), but they’re rarely defended and frequently held by people who don’t actually wrestle in Arena Coliseo Guadalajara much, or by young luchadors hoping to soon stop wrestling in Arena Coliseo Guadalajara. There seems to be no purpose to them outside of making everyone feel better about the things they don’t have by giving them a shiny belt, and they’re never used as a draw or show any capability of being a draw. It’s not a lot different than many lucha libre championships, but the high rate of Occidente championships just being given up because the champion can’t be bothered/allowed to lose them in the ring makes them stick out in a negative way.

Perhaps, I thought, these were formally useful championships in times past and the best uses of them just hadn’t carried over to more modern times?

Nah.

These Occidente championships were never used in the main event or as drawing card; the national and world titles would, but also super libre matches. These were distinctly treated as third rate championships, and the titles either went vacant or mysterious changed hands without a title change many times. By title:

• Welterweight: four different tournaments for vacant titles (two ending where the winner never apparently defends the title), and one other unexplained title change
• Middleweight: five tournaments for vacant titles (three without clear winner), five other unexplained title changes
• Light Heavyweight: two tournaments for a vacant title (one with unknown winner), six other unexplained changes
• Heavyweight: one tournament (because champion wins better title)
• Tag Team two vacant title tournamnets, five times an unexplained title history.

The tag title belts are actually the best handled ones for quite a while. There’s plenty of defenses, the title changes are easy to follow. It falls apart later on. The trios title doesn’t come into being until the very end of the period. There’s a women’s championship which appears to exist for two shows seven years apart. Lightweight and featherweight (!) champions are mentioned earlier on, but completely disappear. And they’re not the only titles who disappear for a time. The light heavyweight title goes with disappears for two years. The tag team and middleweight championships are invisible for three years. The welterweight championship goes six years without a mention, and the heavyweight championship just vanishes after 1959 never to return. Life continues on, maybe better than ever in some cases, without these championships.

To be fair, I’m working off incomplete records. Maybe some of those missing title changes (and defenses) took place in the those early matches that aren’t recorded. Maybe the heavyweight championship or other titles changed hands at a smaller show in Guadalajara, or changed hands elsewhere in the region. I could imagine a loop of places like Lagos de Moreno, Tula, Tonala, Ciudad Guzman or wherever else got regular shows, and the Occidente championships have a use on those since they’re too small to get bigger matches.

Even if those things were true, which I’m not sure if they were, they’re no longer that way. The belts are rarely defended, in the top or bottom of cards. There is no loop of other towns, and they barely appear on shows outside of Arena Coliseo Gudalajara. No one seems to see Occidente title matches as a important item and it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to bring in an Occident title match to draw a crowd; they’re just some place else’s local wrestlers, not stars because they’re defending a prestigious belt.

There are solutions to this

• get rid off all the belts! Or, if you can’t do that, get rid of most of them. Pick an in between weight belt and just treat it like an open weight belt (like they do with all the titles right now), and then you’re less likely to forgot about them if you don’t have as many of them, and you don’t really need six belts when you’re running 2 shows a week.
• if you can’t just get rid of them, farm them out to other promotions – maybe htey’ll make more use of them they you can.
• obviously, none of the CMLL Mexico City roster members should hold one of these belts. It should be completely beneath them. They’re minor league championships and CMLL DF guys should come off as above that.
• if the belts aren’t going to be defended more than once year, than why not just run more tournaments instead? Single week tournaments are not great shakes, but most of the title matches happen with no plan for the future after the big victory at the end. Save yourself the embarrassment of having no plan by having a tournament that doesn’t need a follow up (and then there you can have the local guy beat the Mexico City guy without having to figure out how you’re going to get out of it next week.)
• make a list of who’s champion somewhere? Maybe so you’ll remember, maybe so the fans might know? You shouldn’t really be needing to rely on me for this info.

But if you are relying on me, the current champions are

Welterweight: Sadico (maybe), last defended July 19, 2015 at Arena Coliseo Guadalajara on a show where they didn’t post results.

Middleweight: Virgo, last defended May 15, 2015

Light Heavyweight: Puma, last defended June 23, 2015

Heavyweight: Diamante Azul, last defended May 6, 2014

Tag Team: Gallo & Esfinge, last defended July 18, 2015

Trios: Cuatrero, Forastero and Sanson, last defended November 11, 2015

The last one is pretty recent, but they’re also the guys who say they’re headed to the Mexico City roster pretty soon (and haven’t been around these shows much since the title change anyway.) Everything else hasn’t been defended in five months. Maybe they’ve beat me to it and got rid of the titles already.