Putting his WCW Cruiserweight Championship up against Mysterio’s mask, the 14 minute match wasn’t just revolutionary-it still stands, for me at least, as the best wrestling match ever put on pay-per-view. When you narrow the scope to that year, that iteration of his character, there’s really only one thing you can talk about: The lucha de apuestas match he had against Rey Mysterio Jr.
#Eddie guerrero frog splash how to#
It’s an immensely difficult task, choosing how to do so, but as I’ve so often admitted in this space, I’ve been watching wrestling since I was four years old and I was a WCW kid during the Monday Night War, so the Eddie Guerrero I hold closest to my heart, the one who frankly changed my conception of what professional wrestling could be, is the heel Eddie Guerrero of 1997.
Old fans, new fans, wrestlers, it doesn’t matter-when Eddie’s birthday and the anniversary of his death come around, it’s a bittersweet occasion-we have cause to celebrate one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, but have to acknowledge both the gigantic hole his death left in the fabric of the medium in which he excelled and the role that medium and its relentless demand for aesthetic physical perfection played in his passing. Universally beloved, and often for wildly different periods of his career (that championship win, Los Guerreros, his relationship with Chyna, the Custody of Dominick Ladder Match, the LWO, his time as Black Tiger, his team with Art Barr, pick your poison), Eddie was a relatively young man with an absurdly great body of work behind him. Wrestlers die young-it’s an unfortunate reality of an industry whose primary corporation lobbied away state athletic commission oversight, largely looked the other way on steroid usage and drug and alcohol abuse, and created a concussion-heavy product that only changed in the wake of one of the biggest tragedies to strike wrestling-but Eddie’s death at 38 years old, one year removed from one of the most emotional world championship victories in the history of North American wrestling, is one that still hurts to meditate on.
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