Pro Wrestling Chronicle

Match # 39: Eddie Guerrero vs. Psicosis (Nitro 7/8/96)

I’m realizing as I get older and see more wrestling – perhaps too much – that while I respect the art of the Lucha style, I’m not a huge fan of Lucha. I like moves within the style, but as an overall style I like less matches from Lucha than I do from other styles. I’m more of a hybrid fan, though I lean towards the 90s Japanese strong style as my “favored” style.

I give you this preamble because while this match was very good, a lot of the Lucha movements are either to slow for more to believe them, or to intricate without much knock out force behind them. Now this isn’t true of all the moves, and there were certainly hard hitting moves like Psicosis’ twisting dive to the outside or his power bomb reversal off the top rope. Still a bit too much flipping and dancing for me, even if it became more Americanized Lucha than Mexican Lucha as they progressed.
This was apparently Psicosis’ debut on Nitro the night after a really notable match he had on PPV with Rey Jr. the Rey/Malenko match from earlier in the night (Match # 38) was given about the same amount of time and I thought Malenko made the match work more than Eddie made this one work.

Early match was a back drop for a Rey Jr. promo about Hogan betraying the fans at the famed PPV the night before. The announcers covered a lot of storylines in WCW while still paying attention to the match. Eddie was very over with this crowd. I’d forgotten how good these Disney crowds actually were for how small they were.

Psicosis worked over Eddie’s arm for the body of the match. Funny moment where they refer to an arm bar as “the code breaker”. I was wondering what the hell they were talking about until I remembered that it was Craig Pittman’s finishing submission in WCW and these guys were referencing there own forgettable history. Oh well, you say what you know, right?

Eddie wins with the frog splash in 8:30 in a very competitive match that was not smooth enough Lucha to be pretty, and not hard hitting enough Americanized Lucha in the time allotted. Fine little story though even if the selling wasn’t great. 2 ½ and 5/10.