2 Out of 3 Falls: Rey Mysterio, Dean Malenko, Ultimo Dragon

Hey yo,

What do you when all your friends have jobs and your brother has school? You, of course, call up your septuagenarian friend and have a grand ole time playing tennis and watching ’68 Tigers World Series Campaign (Mickey Lolich hit a homer in Game 2 and Holy Shit were Denny McLain and Bob Gibson absolute beasts!). Tigers Sweep! Lets Go Tigers! Yankees Suck!

So I am going to try to be most efficient in my analysis. This is because of three reasons:

• I don’t have time to write these 10-page long comparative analysis pieces
• You probably don’t have the time to read all that
• Match reviews already exist. There is no point in rehashing it. I want to focus more on analysis

From now, I will provide links to match reviews, which will also give the reader a general feel of the consensus on the match.

Seriously, where do all these girls play tennis??!?!??!!

This week’s 2 Out Of 3 Falls was inspired by a poster (named Loss, who watches a lot of friggin wrestling) at prowrestlingonly.com forums in the 1996 yearbook. In 1996, WCW made their big push against the WWF with the New World Order angle. In addition to a hot angle on top, WCW inject their mid-card with exciting, young international talent especially in their cruiserweight division. Up until 1996, American wrestling promotions featured most of their attention on heavyweights. In an effort to further differentiate their product, WCW made the call to develop and emphasize a cruiserweight division. This division comprised mostly of Mexican luchadores was totally fresh to American wrestling fans who grew to love their breath-taking dives and cool masks.   This week’s piece will look at the beginning of the cruiserweight division through the context of three major superstars of the formative period of the division: Dean Malenko,  Rey Mysterio, Ultimo Dragon (poor Psychosis, he always gets left out). The matches evaluated will  consist of Dean Malenko/Rey Mysterio GAB ’96, Rey Mysterio/Ultimo Dragon.

Iceman

Dean Malenko – “The Iceman” was a part of a dying breed of chain wrestlers with a very workmanlike approach to his wrestling. At his best, Malenko could deliver an interesting, grind-away counterpoint to the flashy style of his opponents such as Eddy Guerrero and Rey Mysterio. However, The “Man of 1000 Holds” often had a tendency to have self-indulgent, ego-masturbatory wankfests for matches. The best way to describe Malenko is that he is like a progressive rock band such as Rush. A very talented individual with lots of moves, but all these moves do not always tell a very interesting story. Originally, he was hailed by smart mark community as one of their darlings and a very underutilized talent. However, in recent years, it seems revisionist history has taken hold and labeled Dean Malenko as boring. By the end of this blog, we will be able to better evaluate if Malenko was a boring, self-indulgent arteest or a highly skilled artist.

Eddie vs Rey what a classic

Rey Mysterio – Between the years 1994-96, Mysterio has the case of being the greatest wrestler in North America. In 1994 and 1995, he was presenting incredible lucha classics against the likes of Psicosis and Juventud Guerrera in Mexico. Lucha is a style that I personally have found very inaccessible. However, even with my hardened heart towards lucha, I have found Rey’s work in Mexico to be interesting and entertaining. In late 1995, Rey and Psicosis took their show on the road to Japan and ECW, where they exposed foreign crowds to lucha libre for the first time to great success. One of my favorite matches of all time is the 2 Out of 3 Falls match between Mysterio/Psicosis in ECW. Thus it was just a matter of time before WCW gobbled up the King of Luchadores: Rey Mysterio to be a part of their new cruiserweight division. In June of 1996, Rey made his debut against the reigning cruiserweight champion Dean Malenko at Great American Bash. I think the comparative analysis of these three matches will allow people to see how well Rey adapted to American audiences and wrestle two very different opponents.

Ultimo Dragon – O Dragon! What a headache you can be, Mr. Asai. Personally, I am a fan of Ultimo Dragon and think when he is on that he is one of best junior heavyweights ever. However, Dragon is prone to fits of laziness or weird psychology. Dragon offers a great array of strikes and high-impact moves (suplexes, powerbombs etc), which are not the specialty of Malenko and Mysterio. Actually he is probably the most well-rounded wrestler offensively of the three as he can take it to the air or wrestle on the mat as well. However, Mysterio blows him away in selling and bumping, which makes hard for Dragon to make up that gap. That is where the Dragon can really hurt his matches. He will oft neglect to sell during latter part of the matches just so he can get all of his cool shit in. His matches can also have poor transitions due to his forgetfulness of earlier psychology and the employment of moves willy nilly. When the Dragon uses his arsenal in a logical fashion and is allowed to control the match, I believe that is when his matches are at their best.

From their July Nitro Match

WCW Cruiserweight Champion Dean Malenko vs Rey Mysterio Jr.
Great American Bash June 16, 1996 ( Scott Keith GAB '96 )

This match simultaneously salvaged the fledging cruiserweight division and made it into a sensation over night. This match is the best exhibition of Malenko’s chain wrestling being entertaining and working well within the confines of the layout. Malenko knows he cannot let Rey create space between them or otherwise face the damage of Rey’s vaunted aerial attack. If he can ground Rey, he eliminates that threat. That is the crux of the match Rey trying to squirm away from Malenko and Malenko trying to wrangle Rey.

From the outset, Malenko is one who is able to strike first with a cool looking Greco-Roman knucklelock arm snapping-thingy. It looked sweet trust me. He works over that arm relentlessly and convincingly with a great variety of moves. It always feels like he is trying to gain a new advantage or add a different degree of pain to Rey’s arm to keep him off-balance. My favorite moment is a flying hammerlock into a kimura that just looks so fuckin sweet. The key in this control segment is that Rey still has hope spots. This was Rey’s debut and it was critical to have these hope spots especially when he did not get an opening shine or you run the risk of jobberizing him.

As the match progresses and Dean is still struggling to put Rey away, you come to see a recurring theme with Malenko he does show emotion. Dean is not more relatable wrestler or the best seller, but he is really good at selling frustration at the inability to put an opponent away. This combined with Rey’s resilience and sympathetic underdog selling creates a very powerful story for the audience that is rooting for the underdog in this debut match against the champion.

When Dean finally does lose control, Rey unleashes that arsenal of aerial maneuvers, which both wow the fans and does a good job displaying why Dean was working so hard to ground Rey. The finish is thrilling with Rey’s quick pinfall attempts and all his quick counters. However, he finally succumbs to a massive powerbomb by Dean, who puts his feet on the ropes for three. The finish is a satisfying climax to this cat and mouse game. Rey looks like a champ with hot finish and Dean is able to retain due to one big move.

Most of what I have read has been in favor of declaring this match a classic, but it feels that many feel the need to defend it against a vocal minority that believes Dean gobbled up Rey for too long. Now, if Dean just sat in an armbar for the entirety of his lengthy heat segment, I would agree. Dean was really active with a lot of gnarly submissions and high-impact blows into pinfalls. It truly felt like he was trying to win a match and I can appreciate that. I think where these critics have a point is that Dean should not have immediately entered into a heat segment. In their subsequent Nitro match in July, Rey has a really cool babyface shine to open it. In that match, it really sets up the idea of what Dean has to fear. If Dean can not ground him, Rey will have him going in circles and Dean really sells that frustration in that match well. In this match, you don’t really get the feeling that Dean has anything to worry about in the context of the match because Rey did not open with anything. The drama in the Great American Bash would have been greatly enhanced by allowing Rey to hit a couple big moves off the bat to demonstrate how he lethal he could be. Since I brought up the Nitro match, the big problem with that match is that Malenko’s heat segment really meanders and is not really as good as this one. The Great American Bash match is a better complete match.

In sum, I think if you tack the babyface shine segment from the Nitro match and splice it into the Great American Bash match you have a Match of the Year Candidate for 1996. As is, it is one of three best matches from 1996 in WCW (Mysterio/Psychosis, Benoit/Sullivan), but doesn’t rank that highly in the world. This heat segment definitively proves in my mind that Dean Malenko is not boring. Can he be boring? Yes and we will see that! But he definitely can be a fuckin fantastic offensive wrestler. I think Dean’s strong suit is as a heel. Malenko is one of the few American wrestlers to always be straddling the face/heel line. I think if the booking team just went full bore with Dean as a sadistic, ground-based heel he would have had more entertaining matches consistently. This match showed how effective he could be as a yin to Mysterio’s yang. Mysterio for his part continued his campaign to be best wrestler in North America. I agree that Mysterio should have worked the majority of the match from underneath. His selling endeared him to the fans, his hope spots were well-timed to keep the audience engaged, and the match was structured to give his aerial spots time to breathe and seem more important to the audience. In the Dragon match, he will not be so lucky. 

One thing I want to debunk is that at least initially the commentary team (sans the Brain) did a very good job trying to get over the cruiserweights. You could feel how excited Dusty was to watch them and how much he enjoyed their work. As time progressed, of course like with all things in the mid-card, the WCW commentary team would just ignore it and talk about the Hogan-related item of the night. 

Thats the fuckin J-Crown. Pretty Badass

J-Crown Champion Ultimo Dragon vs Rey Mysterio Jr.

World War III November 24, 1996 ( Scott Keith WWIII '96 )

[The J-Crown was a set of 8 cruiserweight/junior heavyweight titles from around the world including incidentally enough the WWF Light Heavyweight Title. That’s at the height of the Monday Night Wars the WWF Light Heavyweight Title. The J-Crown always looked impressive as Dragon would walk out with his 8 titles on TV. I actually just watched the two most famous matches from the J-Crown tournament. I highly recommend the semi-final between Shinjiro Ohtani (my choice for best wrestler in the world in 1996) and Ultimo Dragon. The final between Great Sasuke and Ultimo Dragon is a fun high-flying exhibition, but the semi-final is one of the best junior heavyweight matches ever.]

Rey Mysterio had become the centerpiece of WCW’s cruiserweight division, but had dropped the title back to Malenko at Halloween Havoc, the previous month. In this match, it is Rey’s job to cement Ultimo Dragon as the top heel of the cruiserweight division. This is the match where people rightfully so complain of Rey getting gobbled up by Dragon’s offense. Whereas, the Malenko match felt like a struggle where two men were trying to win a match with natural strategies, this match felt like an exhibition of Dragon’s spots. Don’t get me wrong, Dragon has some pretty nifty spots (he busts out the Giant Swing!!!), but never feels like he is trying to win. Instead, he is just trying to show-off all his cool moves. Here is a list of the cool moves:

• Spinning Argentine Backbreaker
• Giant Swing
• Slingshot Powerbomb
• His Intricate Outside the ring sequence
• Spinning Tombstone Piledriver
• Running Ligerbomb
• Brainbuster
• Surprisingly did not do the Asai Moonsault (named after him)

This is the type of story that always falls flat with me. It is simply because there is no story. There is not a struggle. It is just an exhibition. It is fun visually, but not emotionally. In addition, Dragon did really use anything to set up his moves. Usually, he uses a ground game to weaken his opponents before he works his shit in. Instead, it just felt like pick up Rey and do his spots.

Rey be assertive. Where were your hope spots? The match was dying because of the babyface was getting totaled out there. It looked like match I had against my stuffed bear yesterday erm I mean 15 years ago. I totally mean 15 years ago.

Dusty was cracking me up throughout the match, but this quote not only makes me laugh, but is accurate portrayal of the match “This is pants-down momma spankin you whuppin!”  Of course at the finish, Rey does make his comeback and hits his visually impressive spots like his somersault plancha. The finish was hot, but the how fuck would the finish not be hot when you have Dragon with his ZILLION moves and Rey flying around at a mile a minute. They had a perfect ending: Dragon is able to catch Rey Rey off the springboard and hit a fuckin Slingshot Powerbomb (BITCHIN~!) for the win.

I have watched this match a lot because I happen to love watching Ultimo Dragon’s offense, but it is not a very dramatic match and thus loses a lot of points in my book.

Spoiler Alert: Dragon wont sell the leg

WCW Cruiserweight Champion Dean Malenko vs J-Crown Champion Ultimo Dragon

Starrcade December 29, 1996 ( Scott Keith Starrcade '96 )

These wrestlers sure did a great job reinforcing each other’s worst behavior. It was a like a vicious feedback loop where the problems just got compounded as the match progressed. Malenko gave one of his tone-deaf performances where he was committed to wrestling HIS match rather than the match the fans wanted. Dragon was in full one-up manship mode and totally focused on getting his offense over rather than getting the match over. Together these two presented an incredibly disjointed performance. It was not horrible, just really weird and not the classic that I was expecting.

During the entrances, Malenko was surprisingly over with fans especially given he was playing a heel in October against Rey. Though, I think was more due to Dragon playing the evil foreigner archetype than Malenko tweaking his character. The problem with Malenko’s performance was that he would do a big move to pop the crowd and then immediately grab a hold in such a way to kill the excitement of the fans, who just wanted to see him let loose. Malenko clearly wanted to work a mat-based style in order to set up the exciting finishing stretch. Dragon can go on the mat with best of them. His matches with Liger and Ohtani prove that. However, Dragon did not seem to get the memo in this match. I think Dragon was under the impression that American crowds were dumb and they just wanted highspots. So he set out to deliver highspots rather working with Malenko. Ergo the transitions were non-existent and each segment felt artificial and in vacuum.

At the beginning of the match Malenko hit a back drop driver to a big pop only to slap on a chinlock and then have Dragon take over is a perfect example of bringing the crowd up only to let them down. This was another problem with the match it felt too back and forth with not real strong stretch to build heat. Dragon runs through his offense until another Malenko back drop driver wakes up the crowd. Surprisingly, Malenko is selling better than Dragon. In a weird moment, Mike Tenay, resident cruiserweight expert analyst says that Dragon should really be pronounced Dragone for some stupid reason. Dusty thinks this is hilarious and proceeds to call him Dragone the rest of the match. I love Dusty Rhodes and I don’t care who knows it.

The finish is definitely the best part of this match as they just say “Fuck the rest of the match, LETS FUCKIN GO!” Dragon busts out a powerbomb to kick things off and the reverse tombstone spot with Malenko executing is always a crowd-pleaser and a great false finish. Malenko hits a Tiger Driver for 2, which was a killer false finish with Dragon timing his kick-out for maximum effect. Dragon adds the Asai Moonsault and Malenko busts out the Texas Cloverleaf before Dragon is able to garner the victory with a Tiger Suplex.

The finish was fun in the same way a Michael Bay action movie is fun because it is just a bunch of big moves strung together. The body of the match was basically non-existent and did not factor into the finish at all. This match is a perfect case for the detractors of both men as Malenko delivered a rather tepid performance until the end and Dragon focused more getting himself over at the expense of the match.

I have NEVER seen such beautiful and ugly form at the same time!

 I do not if somebody got in Dragon’s ear in WCW or if it was his own perception how to work in America because it seems that he believed in a high-spot laden exhibition was the best way to excel in America. Ultimately, Dragon was phased out of WCW by late 1997, whereas an exciting performer like Rey, who worked hard to get the match over and himself became a two-time World Heavyweight Champion and one of the biggest stars in the WWE. For Dragon, I would check out the two J-Crown matches I mentioned early and his match against Jushin Liger in December of 1995 to illustrate how good Dragon can be.

Deano Machino would keep on plugging away in the WCW mid-card until early 2000 when he jumped to WWF and was totally lost in shuffle. However, Malenko now works successfully as a road agent for WWE. Malenko was a great chain wrestler, who sometimes worked matches that were more self-indulgent than anything else. His match against Rey Mysterio proves how his style can mesh incredibly well by building an anticipation to highspots of his opponents. I recommend his matches with Eddie Guerrero in ECW. I cant recommend his match against Benoit at Hog Wild ’96 in full conscience because I have only seen it once and I don’t remember it clearly.

Rey Mysterio became the breakout star of the cruiserweight division because of his ability to adapt his lucha style to the American style. Almost immediately, he understood the idea of playing a sympathetic babyface and timed his hope spots so well. I think sometimes he does let himself get dominated too much like against Dragon, but usually just the credible threat of his highspots is enough to keep the crowd invested. Rey Mysterio before his first knee injury in January 1998 is one of my favorite wrestlers in the world. If you want a good exposure to lucha, I recommend his 9/22/95 match against Psicosis and any of his matches against Juventud Guerrera in AAA. In addition, I would add his ECW matches against Psicosis and his Bash At The Beach ’96 match against Psicosis, which is my pick for match of the year from WCW and his match against Jushin "Thunder" Liger at Starrcade '96. Rounding Rey’s killer first run, everybody needs to see his match against Eddie Guerrero at Halloween Havoc ’97 as it is the pinnacle of the cruiserweight division and one of the top matches in the history of the WCW.

I have not done any tag team matches or matches from WWF/E so I definitely plan on doing something related to that. Until next time,

Yankees Suck! LETS GO TIGERS!!! WORLD SERIES, MUTHAFUCKAS~!