Pirata Morgan Chooses Valor Where El Satanico Chooses Victory

With nine years of history between them, Pirata Morgon seems caught off guard when his partner/rival El Satanico immediately goes for the eye.

AAA

I spent a lot of time during this match thinking about Pirata Morgan’s eye, how well and truly Professional Wrestling it is to lose your eye in a match, adopt a pirate gimmick, and spend the rest of your career not just wearing an eye patch, but working towards moments, such as this, where the aim was to convince the crowd that your opponent hated you enough to focus their attack on whatever’s just behind it. He taps a gusher about three minutes into this match and spends the rest of the night sweating and bleeding onto his eyepatch. Through the age of the footage and the quality of the transfer, it often looks like he’s wrestling through an injury no less gruesome than a hole in the head.

Running the razor so early in a three fall apuestas creates a slow-burning drama that he and El Satanico — his partner-turned-rival-turned-partner-turned-rival — let play out masterfully in small, vivid detail. Satanico picks up the first fall easily, blood seemingly dripping from his mouth, Morgan caught on his back foot to an alarming degree. He begins the second fall in total control, hitting Morgan with slow, measured jabs and a massive bulldog, playing to the crowd while continuing to focus on Morgan’s eye. When Morgan does fire back, it’s with a side kick to the gut — it’s mid-belly, but the referee isn’t in position to see it, so Satanico gestures to his groin, trying to draw a foul.

It doesn’t work, but it establishes how razor thin Pirata Morgan’s chances of success are here. He’s not an entirely honorable man, but his assumption of something like respect between he and Satanico was ill-founded — his Los Infernales stablemate just wants his hair and doesn’t care how he gets it.

You can’t win against a man who is willing to go that low without getting dirty yourself, but Morgan gives it his best shot, winning the second fall by catching Satanico in a figure four leglock that Satanico allows to go on a bit too long. He busts Satanico open early in the third, brawling on the outside — when an exhausted Satanico stumbles in the ring showing off his crimson mask, it’s a sign, at least seemingly, that momentum has turned finally, irrevocably in Morgan’s favor.

It’s a red herring, though. Satanico manages to struggle out of four straight submissions in the third fall, which is never a great sign if you’re trying to lock down a win via submission. El Satanico is on the defensive, but his shots, like a knee to the gut, land thunderously. Morgan is still seemingly on top, firing away at Satanico’s gut with a series of kicks, but he pauses to confer with the referee. This gives Satanico the space to breathe and regain his composure. When he ends up in a double-arm submission, it’s because that’s where he wants to be. Instead of complaining to the referee as he did the last time he was in a similar position, he blocks the official’s sight and lets rip with an astonishing low blow.

That doesn’t end it for Morgan — in fact, it spurs him to throw his biggest bombs of the match — but it is the symbolic end of his chances. Having spent 20 minutes getting pounded, bloodied, and gouged by El Satanico, it’s the foul that compels him to abandon his plan, taking to the air when he’d been focusing on the submission. His late-game shift to high-flying yields some fruit, but he also eats a counter powerbomb and is too exhausted to maintain his momentum. When Satanico fires back with a boot, spinebuster, and standing figure four combination, he’s forced to tap out.

One of my favorite kinds of wrestling match, and I suspect one of the most difficult to actually pull off, is one where a wrestler enters into it with exactly the wrong gameplan and is handily defeated by the bad guy; a chess vs. checkers match, if you will. Usually I tend to think of them in terms of those great John Cena squash matches where he figures that he can Be John Cena at a guy like Brock Lesnar or The Undertaker, only to find out that he’s sorely mistaken. Here’s it’s something else entirely. Two rudos with nearly a decade of history between them clash with hair on the line, and one of them had the crazy idea that there would be honor among thieves.

Pirata Morgan’s loss is tragic, but it is deserved, and, frankly, he deserves it when El Satanico talks shit while the barber does his work. It’s his own medicine he’s tasting, in front of Jake “The Snake” Roberts and everybody. It’s not the kind of hubris you often see in professional wrestling, but when it is executed with the grueling, double-fisted precision of this match, you get something hideously beautiful.

Rating: **** & 1/2