The beautiful lucha libre. This is the sort of match where there isn't a lot for me to say because eventually, if I was to say everything I WANTED to say, it would turn into a full minute-by-minute play-by-play. In fact I'm not sure I could even manage that. I'm not much of a penman and nothing I can write would be as FULFILLING to you, the half-dozen gentle readers of Whiskey & Wrestling, as watching the thing with your own eyes would be. I could not explain half of this matwork on my best day, brothers and sisters. Virus is one of the all-time great mat wrestlers and maybe at some point over the last 15 years I forgot that Dr Cerebro probably is too. Lucha can be a fickle mistress sometimes though, so you look at a match that has this much potential on paper and there's a part of you that wonders if it won't end up being six minutes long and merely a backdrop for the cornermen to further a feud with a bent referee. Thankfully there was none of that and this was two masters doing what they're great at for about 16 minutes. I don't think a single strike was thrown until 12 minutes in. Maybe three strikes total were thrown the entire match and none of them were thrown in the midst of a chop battle. The ropes were run maybe two times? And one of those times led to someone getting hammered into the barricade with a tope, which is really the best outcome of a wrestler running the ropes. The first eight minutes was one long exchange where it started on the feet before moving to the ground and I don't think they broke contact once until they stood up. There's probably no other type of wrestling that lets me just sit back and lose myself in it the way this sort of lucha grappling does. I'm not sure there's a better example of it in the 2010s.
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