Sangre Chicana vs. Perro Aguayo is a pro wrestling miracle

Something about this match didn’t register for me.

I am disappointed, but unsurprised. In looking at the schedule for BIG EGG, and in having had the pleasure of editing Joseph’s work and watching his YouTube videos, I entered into this project knowing that I had a lot of holes to fill. I’ve seen a lot of Mil Máscaras, and I’ve watched oddities like Canek vs. André the Giant, but I’ve never given 80s lucha libre a serious go until now.

I don’t get what’s not to like. Sangre Chicana and Perro Aguayo brawl here, throwing some of the nicest punches you’ll ever see. It’s a very meat-and-potatoes match — built on simple violence, the occasional tope or senton or submission hold serves to ramp up the tension, as if Chicana and Aguayo are admitting, in the moment, that mere righteousness won’t clinch victory for them. And it doesn’t — Chicana scores the win with a small package, the simplest of wrestling holds, and Aguayo gets his head shaved.

This should satisfy me — who doesn’t love a hair match? — but instead I find myself asking what the missing piece was. I think I know, but it’ll take me a minute to get there.

In 2016, WWE found and uploaded The Last Battle of Atlanta, the famed closed-structure cage match between Tommy “Wildfire” Rich and Buzz Sawyer that, legend has it, served as inspiration for Hell in a Cell. Even without the connection to a popular WWE concept, the match was legendary — believed not to be filmed, all you had to go on, for decades, were the photographs that appeared in wrestling magazines and the account of fans who were there at the Omni that night.

As miraculous as its existence on tape is, the Last Battle of Atlanta is much more fun as still images. That’s not entirely surprising — this is a pro-shot match that WWE found in its tape library, but it’s a one camera shoot that’s obviously not meant for commercial use. There is a distance between us, the modern viewer, and the action in the ring that does not exist for the fans in the Omni or the readers of Sports Review Wrestling, where the most famous photographs of the match come from.

That’s designed. The point of the Last Battle of Atlanta was to make it so that you wouldn’t miss the next supercard at the Omni, comprised almost entirely of matches you’d never see on television, and which the market had not yet bloomed enough to justify VHS distribution. Readily available, or at least as readily available as 40 year old wrestling gets, was Georgia Championship Wrestling television leading into the show, which allows you to piece everything about the match together so that, even without it, you understand the stakes, you understand what it means that Tommy Rich won, and you can feel good about it, even if the match doesn’t live up to the hype.

And I think that’s what’s locking me out of Sangre Chicana vs. Perro Aguayo.

When I watch wrestling, I lead with my emotional investment in the wrestlers themselves. I don’t have any for Chicana or Aguayo, and, EMLL television being hard to come by, I’m lacking a ton of context that can’t be made up for by the fact that this is a hair match. Even knowing that Aguayo and Chicano would continue their feud in future hair matches that Aguayo mostly won is no substitute for the sense of place television gives the viewer, especially the viewer of something like this.

It’s important that Sangre Chicana vs. Perro Aguayo is a fancam match. There’s something charming about the distortion and accidental clipping, but more than that, the fact that this only exists because someone in 1986 took a camcorder to Arena Mexico, shot the match well enough, and held on to the tape without recording over it until it was transferred and uploaded to YouTube is an actual miracle, so far as the preservation of the sport of professional wrestling is concerned.

In watching that miracle, however, I get the sense that I shouldn’t be here. As my first viewing bled into my fifth and sixth, I started getting the impression that it wasn’t the workers or their work that kept me from some greater understanding of the match, but the fact that, in a very literal sense, this match wasn’t meant to be seen by my eyes.

Should that matter? To you, maybe not, but for me, it does. There is, first of all, the romance of the house show. In March 1998, I went to a WCW house show and saw Sting wrestle Hulk Hogan in a cage. The match was probably terrible, but I saw it, and am one of a scant few who ever did. I have been to television shows and pay-per-views and find that being there is totally different than watching the same show live.

It’s the presence of cameras. Even this far back in wrestling history, they are a factor. The wrestlers play to them, the director live edits, the fan watches. The spectacle is different. The guy with the camcorder is trying his best, but what he’s working with is a 1986 zoom lens and the luxuriant pace Chicana and Aguayo brawl.

The match works as a filmed product, but that’s due to the small mercy of the cameraman’s seat being in view of some of the more interesting aspects of the match, like Aguayo ripping off the Corona ring apron to slam Chicana onto. The distance between the camera and a late-match tope into the front row is also nice.

It’s solid work, but neither Chicana nor Aguayo acknowledge the camera — they can’t, because they don’t know about it. So what I’m left with is not a great match, but an idea of what a great match in Arena Mexico felt like. The cheering, the whistling, the big sells, the buckets of blood. This match is for them. I’m outside of the arena listening in. I get it. I do. It’s just not quite there.