Joseph and Colette Discuss Sara Del Rey vs. Mercedes Martinez

BIG EGG's SHIMMER month starts out with a classic match from two of the promotion's signature talents.

Welcome to SHIMMER month, y’all. For the entirety of March, Joseph and I are covering one of the most important American independent wrestling promotions in history, featuring nine wrestlers across six years of the company’s history.

SHIMMER

To do that, you have to start at the beginning, so here we are, talking about a match from a rivalry that put SHIMMER on the map early, the no time limit bout between Sara Del Rey and Mercedes Martinez. Our essays are below, if you’ve yet to read them.

Joseph: Sara Del Rey vs. Mercedes Martinez Takes Its Time
Colette: Mercedes Martinez Needed a Minute. Sara Del Rey Needed Three Seconds.

Next week: The main event of SHIMMER Volume 15, Sara Del Rey vs. Amazing Kong, is Del Rey’s second defense of the new SHIMMER Championship, and it comes against the rare woman in the world, let alone in SHIMMER, who can rival her for strength and sheer, concussive force. In terms of women’s match-ups in the late 00s are concerned, it gets no bigger than this!

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Colette Arrand
Before we get into this match, maybe we should spend a little time with SHIMMER as a whole. I wrote a little about its meaning to me, and you just did an incredible video about the Nicole Matthews vs. Madison Eagles feud that is a definitive arc in the promotion's history — both of us are clearly fans. It was a pretty easy "yes" when the idea to cover SHIMMER for a month was floated, but I'm curious as to what your thoughts were about the promotion before we started digging into this project.

Joseph Anthony Montecillo
Discovering SHIMMER over the end of 2022 and through researching the Nicole/Madison video has been incredibly rewarding for me. There's a real coziness to the promotion as a whole that warms my heart. It's a promotion based in a single, very intimate venue that tells stories that vary from the silly to the classic. There's a million people on the card, so all the matches rarely go over ten minutes which is a selling point on its own, and it's this astonishing bottleneck through which every significant women's wrestler in North America in the last two decades came through. Just a real comforting watch from the moment you dip your toes in.

Colette Arrand
Oh, you're new here, damn! Welcome! Welcome to the Berwin Eagles Club, haha. It's as distinct a venue as The American Legion Post #308 was when PWG ran it, this local fixture that means so much on a national (if not global) scale, the kind of intimacy people claim indie wrestling has in general.