Your Saturday Evening Jerry Estrada

Jerry Estrada v Stuka (AAA, 10/31/94)

I'm not sure where this ranks among AAA apuestas matches of the 90s, but I know I dug it a ton. There are absolutely things about this that non-lucha fans would be turned off by. There are things that lucha fans would be turned off by. Estrada runs the ropes like he's concussed and probably drunk (he's always drunk). Stuka sometimes moves at the speed of moss. The first caida lasts about three minutes and the segunda lasts like thirty seconds. But Stuka bleeds and the dives are fucking nuts and Estrada is a whirlwind of whiskey-soaked lunacy, so you know, I have no problem spending sixteen minutes watching that. Right at the start Estrada takes it to the floor and instigates a brawl in the first row (with Stuka, not fans), then climbs back over the barricade like "nope, this was not a good idea after all." They really ramp up the brawling in the third caida, and Estrada in particular gets pretty violent. I loved him applying an abdominal stretch and just fish hooking Stuka's mouth. Stuka hits a couple spectacular dives in this - they were certainly graceful, but these were of the hateful variety where he's trying to put Estrada through seven rows of chairs - but Estrada's psychotic somersault senton really takes the cake. He overshoots it a little and almost mangles his spine on the barricade, then like a coke-fueled demon he crawls out from under the rubble to punch Stuka in the face some more. Feels like the tombstone behind the referee's back finish in aupestas matches is a AAA staple, but man did Estrada hit an absolute motherfucker of a tombstone piledriver. This was Owen Hart at Summerslam '97, which is sort of terrifying when you think about it.