Lucha Libre Primer 101

Made this for a friend who wanted to get into lucha libre and couldn't find any pointers beyond the dirt basic shit like "the mats are harder" and "they call the first fall the 'primera caida'". So here's this, some general gestures toward how lucha is worked in the ring, how it works week to week, and how you should approach it. Hope it helps. Get at me on Twitter at @NotBrockJahnke if you have any further questions or concerns.

1. Lucha libre is not a monolith

This sounds obvious on paper but in practice it usually isn’t. For a variety of reasons, the full breadth of lucha libre has never made itself known to the casual outside observer and it might be a preconceived notion you need to work through. The average match you see on CMLL this year is going to be meaningfully different from the average match on an EMLL show from 1988, as well as different from what you see in AAA or on the indies or wherever. Even the most universal tropes and approaches can vary between regions, companies, title divisions, and individual wrestlers. If you ever find yourself discouraged by one thing, branch out to something else. With this in mind, understand also that everything else I say here isn’t going to apply to every lucha match you see.

2. Don’t dismiss, discuss

It’s so easy, especially when you’ve already been watching wrestling for an extended period of time, to see something you don’t like and dismiss it without any further thought. This is especially true with lucha libre, considering how different it is from American, European, and Japanese wrestling and how those differences tend to push people to dismiss this stuff out of hand. Instead of just balking at something and moving on, I’d recommend asking yourself why something comes across the way it does, what value it may have in this form, how it relates to your notions of what wrestling is/should be, and where those notions came from. In addition you should talk to other people, people who have more experience with lucha or who are more familiar with what’s going on in this match and promotion. You might have a good handle on how the rest of the wrestling world works or has worked but that isn’t always going to translate to something you aren’t familiar with any more than, say, an interior decorator’s skills immediately makes them good at web design.

3. Not for smarks

This is arguably _the_ big kicker about lucha, the central issue that people (don’t realize they) have. For the last 30ish years, the vast majority of wrestling around the world has catered to or been performed by smark fans. That’s come with some obvious benefits as well as some major drawbacks. By and large lucha libre has avoided this shift, focusing more on playing to what the existing fanbase wants than achieving some sort of artistic prestige. Because of that much of lucha looks more like wrestling from the 70s and earlier than what you might be used to seeing these days. Conceptions of selling, realism, pacing both in terms of individual matches as well as overarching stories, what does or does not look overly collaborative, how to sufficiently build to a finish, etc. are going to differ from what you’re used to and that doesn’t necessarily mean that this stuff is worse (refer back to Point #2).

4. Eddie, not Ospreay

Building off Point 3, I want to stress that, as a general rule in lucha libre, moves and their effects are not as important as who does them and to whom. Lucha fans are more focused on seeing their guy win and beat the shit out of the other dude than seeing him struggle through a dramatic ordeal and do a bunch of cool shit on his comeback. Think about how fans perceived Eddie Guerrero back in the day versus how fans perceive Will Ospreay now. I’m not sure that people really care about Ospreay as a character so much as what he’s doing in the ring, whereas people never cared about what Eddie was doing as much as who he was and what he was going through. This emphasis on personality, on connecting with the crowd one way or another, is the key motivator in lucha libre. The fancy flips might catch your eye but by themselves they mean nothing. You’ll find more fans chanting a wrestler’s name than the ones chanting “este es lucha”.

5. Basketball, not football

Because of what I laid out in Point 3, lucha libre has a different sort of pacing than what you’re probably used to seeing. Control segments sort of don’t exist and when they appear, they’re often applied rigidly to a three fall structure. Because of this I’d compare the pacing in lucha matches to something like basketball instead of something like American football. In basketball you get a lot of back-and-forth action as people run up and down the court and usually score on each possession. In American football one team will be in control of the ball for long stretches of time, trying to progress up the field to score. Due to its pacing, it seems like the football team is controlling the game since they have the ball more whereas the basketball teams are evenly split but that isn’t always the case. A basketball team can still be ahead by a lot even if both they and their opponents are scoring all the time because not all scores are worth the same amount of points. Keep that in mind while watching lucha, the idea that everybody running around a lot doesn’t mean one person or team isn’t in charge of the match. The momentum of the match doesn’t shift entirely because of one move being done.

6. Be a sports fan

Continuing on with this sports metaphor, I’d say that lucha libre is best enjoyed as a sport as opposed to an art. Kick your feet up, grab a brewski, learn to appreciate the rise and fall of the action, chat with your friends, enjoy the sunshine, and—maybe most of all—get into the chants. Forget that so much of your wrestling fandom has been tied up in analyzing it to death and divvying out snowflakes and just vibe along with a huge group of people being invested in a dumb athletic contest between people in silly outfits. I’m not telling you to check your brain at the door or anything but instead understand that the personal and collective experience of a match is the be all and end all of lucha libre.

7. Business, not show business

One big barrier to lucha libre is that most wrestling fans expect wrestling to look like sports entertainment even if they don’t like WWE. People expect regular marquee matchups, people expect immediate payoffs, people expect to be rewarded for following it religiously, etc etc. Lucha is not that. Never has been, probably never will be. This connects to Point #3 in that the vast majority of lucha is about pushing forward to the next big thing as opposed to trying to constantly deliver a new big thing every week. Your average lucha show—especially the weekly TV shows from the big companies—is more akin to a house show from back in the day or one of NJPW’s Road To shows these days than Monday Night RAW. You might get the occasional big angle or standout match but mostly this stuff is light and breezy, designed to give guys regular work and to slowly build up to climactic matches on the big show.

8. Repetition isn’t the enemy

Because of this pattern of booking and match pacing, it’s easy to think that if you’ve seen one lucha match you’ve seen them all. “Ugh, the rudos dominate early by cheating, the tecnicos fight back through their superior technique, and then everyone goes at it for the third fall”, that sort of thing. These complaints are most often levied at the various forms of tag team matches, as if the basic seven step structure of a singles match isn’t the most common thing in the world. As with any other sort of wrestling, I’d suggest that you look for the differences presented in a familiar archetype instead of decrying the same basic formula. Keep an eye out for reversals, subversion, fake-outs, and flash pins. Think about how the matches you’ve seen with these competitors have worked in the past and how this one might buck those trends. Furthermore, see if you can’t find value in a by-the-numbers match that doesn’t do anything new but does all the old things well.

9. No, really, it’s fine that it’s different

Even after dwelling on all this and approaching a bunch of matches with these things in mind, you may well not enjoy lucha libre. That’s fine, probably. Not everything appeals to everyone. Critically, though, not everything _should_ appeal to everyone and I think that’s an important fact to keep in mind as you discuss lucha. Between talent crossover and smark fandom and the general influence of Western culture, American, Japanese, and European wrestling have a lot more in common with each other than lucha libre. Over time that’s resulted in a great deal of stylistic homogenization across multiple continents and I for one think that’s kind of a shitty thing. That homogenization is certainly creeping into lucha libre bit by bit but, by and large, it is still a style and culture unto its own and there is tremendous value in that. Even if you don’t end up liking the thing on its own merits, I’d ask you to recognize its worth as an alternative to the rest of the shit out there.