Wrestling fans understand bringing back an old name. Spend a few years working under another one, come home, and there it is on the marquee again.

I’m doing something like that, even though most of you haven’t seen this name before.

So, hi. Allow me to introduce myself. I’m J. Daniel Rollins.

Sure, most of you know me as Josh (or Pastor Josh) and that still works. But J. Daniel Rollins was the name I wrote under professionally for more than a decade, and as I’ve begun writing more on Substack, I’ve decided I wanted something a little more… well… me. It’s the byline I associate with my journalism career and I’m glad to have a reason to put it above a story again.

For those who don’t know, well before I was a pastor, I was a journalist. I began my career writing for a few outlets in Columbus, Ohio covering the Columbus Crew and what’s happening in Columbus’ Hispanic community. In 2010, I began working for a newspaper in West Virginia, where I mostly covered high school sports. I even won a few awards for my journalism.

I particularly enjoyed writing about lesser-known athletes in small towns. I got to know their stories, their families, and the people that came to watch them play. It helped shape the full story. I liked getting to know those young athletes well enough to write a story that gave them some attention beyond a box score. I even had a few athletes thank me for helping them get the exposure they needed for scholarships that led to the careers they have now.

I’m not telling you all of that to brag. I’m telling you that to show you exactly why WrestlingDispatch.com exists.

A few days ago, my friend Rich Kraetsch of Voices of Wrestling jokingly called me “blog boy” during a discussion about a match between CMLL’s Kira and Keyra. I was almost finished taking photos of my journalism awards to send to Rich before I realized it wasn’t an insult. Rich encouraged me to keep writing since there’s not a lot of wrestling content out there like I hope to provide for readers who want it.

Much like my newspaper career, I still want to uncover forgotten or unfamiliar figures, gather the interesting details, and find a reason someone else should get to know them. That’s what I enjoyed about writing a feature on Jim Londos a few months ago. I began with a wrestler I knew nothing about and had the pleasure of finding out more.

That work is what I want to build Wrestling Dispatch around. The name acknowledges both parts of the undertaking. Wrestling supplies the subjects: the luchadoras in Mexico, the independent workers here in Ohio, and the people who’s careers require a little digging to understand.

Dispatch comes from my newspaper background. It’s a familiar word on a newspaper’s nameplate. It’s also a report sent back from somewhere. I like that sense of going out, learning something, and returning with a story to tell. It suits the kind of publication I want this to be.

Wrestling Dispatch brings my two existing projects together while giving me room to pursue more of those stories.

The Luchadora Project will continue as it has since its inception, covering an underreported part of pro wrestling. Lucha libre, particularly the women’s scene remains my primary subject. And it’s not because it’s my favorite form of wrestling, but much like those coalfield athletes, I feel like they have a story to share.

The Why She Matters series will continue, along with deeper looks into the history of women’s wrestling in Mexico. For example, I’ve spent the last month researching and compiling details for a feature on Irma Gonzalez. I believe she has a compelling case to appear on the Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Hall of Fame ballot. I believe it’s The Luchadora Project’s responsibility to make that case.

I also have the possibility to do some interviews with some active CMLL luchadoras. Those interviews aren’t confirmed, but I hope to bring you those conversations. I’ve learned many of them have read The Luchadora Project and appreciate the spotlight.

Working The Crowd remains as my column, offering a sometimes humorous, sometimes heartfelt look at wrestling through my eyes as a 40-soemthing pastor and a first-time father. Following this incredibly odd business while navigating those parts of my life gives me plenty to think about — and occasionally something worth sharing.

Beyond those projects, I’d love to spend time covering independent wrestling across Ohio. Some of those workers may never appear on national television, but I’d like readers to meet them anyway.

I also hope other writers will join me here, too. I’m interested in anyone with a well-researched, interesting story to contribute. Breaking news and aggregating someone else’s work doesn’ interest me. If you have a subject you’d like to pursue, contact me. I’d like to hear about it.

For my part, I’m bringing back an old byline and giving myself a place to do work I’ve missed.

I hope you’ll be along for the journey.

When I started The Luchadora Project, the idea was simple: document the year in women’s lucha libre and leave a record that does justice to the work. The matches, the rivalries, the wrestlers who kept showing up and delivering—those stories deserve to be remembered, whether they unfolded in a major arena or on a regional card. The awards grew out of that same idea. If we’re going to look closely at the year, we should also recognize the people who shaped it.

The ballot is now open for the inaugural Luchadora Project Awards, honoring the luchadoras, matches, teams, and rivalries that distinguished themselves in 2026. Work in CMLL, AAA, independent promotions, regional groups, and other Mexican lucha libre organizations is eligible. No one promotion owns this conversation.

The awards consider in-ring performance, consistency, significance, achievement, and lasting impact. Some categories ask voters to weigh a full year of work; others focus on a particular match, team, or rivalry. We’ll also make one announcement that reaches beyond the 2026 ballot.

Inaugural Luchadora Project Hall of Famer

In January, alongside the award winners, we’ll announce the first Luchadora Project Hall of Famer. This recognition is about preserving the history behind the work we follow today. The inaugural honoree’s name will come later, but the Hall of Fame belongs at the start of this story: The Luchadora Project was built to document women’s lucha libre, and that means honoring the people who have shaped it.

Luchadora of the Year

This award takes the widest view. It recognizes the luchadora with the most outstanding overall year, weighing her in-ring performances alongside consistency, accomplishments, prominence, significance, and impact on lucha libre. A title win or a remarkable match can strengthen the case, but neither tells the whole story on its own. Who put together the year that will be hardest to leave out of the record?

Most Outstanding Luchadora

Luchadora of the Year considers the whole picture; Most Outstanding Luchadora concentrates on the wrestling. Match quality, execution, psychology, versatility, and consistency across a full body of work are the measures here. This is where voters can recognize someone whose performances were exceptional from bell to bell, regardless of whether she had the year’s biggest spotlight.

Luchadora Match of the Year

What made a match stay with you after the bell? This category considers the quality of the wrestling, the story told in the ring, the crowd’s response, and the match’s significance. Spectacular moments count, certainly, but so does everything that connected them: the pacing, the stakes, and the performances that made the finish matter.

Rookie of the Year

Recognizing the luchadora who made the strongest impression in her first documented year of professional wrestling. For the 2026 award, her first verifiable professional match must have taken place between October 1, 2025, and September 30, 2026. A dated recording, published result, or other reliable contemporary record can establish that match. Earlier professional work under another publicly established ring identity counts; a new name, mask, or promotion does not restart eligibility. Training matches and exhibitions do not count.

Consider her 2026 work in Mexican lucha libre: in-ring performance, development, consistency, accomplishments, and impact relative to her experience. The Luchadora Project will resolve disputed eligibility based on the available evidence.

Most Improved Luchadora

Improvement can be obvious, or it can arrive a little at a time: cleaner execution, stronger matches, a more convincing character, steadier performances, greater confidence. This award looks at year-over-year growth in a luchadora’s work or presentation. It isn’t simply a second breakout award; it’s a chance to recognize the progress behind the finished product.

Luchadora Tag Team of the Year

The best regular teams offer more than two strong wrestlers sharing a corner. This award considers chemistry, teamwork, match quality, consistency, accomplishments, and significance over the course of the year. How well did the partners work together? What did they build as a team that neither could have produced alone?

Rivalry of the Year

A compelling rivalry gives each new encounter a reason to happen. This award recognizes a sustained rivalry or storyline involving luchadoras, considering its progression, emotional pull, match quality, significance, and payoff. One heated exchange might catch everyone’s attention; carrying that attention through a story is the harder achievement.

International Luchadora of the Year

This category recognizes a wrestler primarily based outside Mexico, or whose regular work is with promotions outside Mexico, who made a significant impact in Mexican lucha libre during 2026. Voters should consider her appearances and performances in Mexico, match quality, accomplishments, and contribution to the scene. Eligibility is about where a luchadora primarily works, not her nationality: wrestlers competing primarily or full-time in Mexico are not eligible for this award.

Vote in the 2026 Luchadora Project Awards by Friday, December 18. The award winners and the inaugural Hall of Famer will be announced in January.

This is the third installment of Why She Matters, a recurring feature from The Luchadora Project about luchadoras working outside the spotlight, what makes them worth watching, and why their work matters.

On Cagematch, Tessa Blanchard’s name is blue.

Click it and you get her matches, championships, ratings and enough other information to put together a pretty good idea of her work.

Hécate’s name is plain black text. You can’t click it. She doesn’t have a profile.

The Cagematch page for CMLL’s August 18 show in Guadalajara places a warning above her match. It isn’t eligible for the match guide because at least one wrestler doesn’t have a profile. In this case, that wrestler is Hécate.

Why does this matter? Well, in that match Hécate pinned Tessa Blanchard. The woman whose name leads nowhere on Cagematch had just pinned one of the women CMLL almost never asks to lose.

Hécate folded Tessa into an Olympic bridge and held her shoulders down for three. A few moments later, Dark Silueta took the deciding fall from Lluvia.

Who CMLL Lets Lose

Counting wins in professional wrestling remains a questionable way to spend time. Still, I keep doing it.

For The Luchadora Project, I count only events promoted solely by CMLL. Joint cards and independent appearances are excluded. Through August 25, Tessa had worked 55 proper CMLL matches in 2026. She won 42 of them.

Lluvia had worked 47. Her record was 34-12 with one match ending without a winner.

Based on my West Virginia public schools math education, that is a combined 102 appearances with 25 losses, though I’ll admit I may have missed a couple. Of note: most of these matches were team matches or cibernéticos. A loss on the record doesn’t mean Tessa or Lluvia personally took the loss. I didn’t watch all 102 finishes because I have a family and I’d like to keep them. However, the record does show how consistently CMLL places both women on the winning side.

Along with Persephone, Tessa and Lluvia are among the most protected women in CMLL. Tessa has spent the year hovering near the CMLL World Women’s Championship, and I still believe she’ll win it before the year’s end. Lluvia entered 2026 as one half of the CMLL World Women’s Tag Team Champions and has remained one of the division’s most dependable técnicas.

Their losses tend to go to a small and familiar group. Look at this.

Persephone has beaten Tessa twice in World Women’s Championship matches, including their July 31 match at Arena México. Tessa’s other proper CMLL losses have come in a three-way won by La Jarochita, a cibernético won by Zeuxis and team matches against combinations of Persephone, Zeuxis, Keyra, Olympia, Dark Silueta, Candela and Hera.

Lluvia’s list is even tighter. Before August 18, her losses had come against teams or tournament fields won by Persephone, Zeuxis, Keyra, Olympia, Lady Frost, Dark Silueta, Miss Guerrera and Tessa. Tessa beat her in the Copa Dinastías final. Lady Frost beat her in a singles match, which I think is a problem that probably deserves its own column at some point. The rest came in tags or cibernéticos.

So, the loss to Hécate officially put the newer luchadora on my radar. Her record kept her there.

Here’s what stood out about her even more. Hécate has never appeared in an Arena México match. She has never wrestled a proper CMLL singles match or challenged for a championship.

On that night in Guadalajara, Hécate and Dark Silueta beat two of CMLL’s top women. Hécate personally pinned Tessa.

There is room to overstate this. Hécate didn’t beat Tessa in a singles match. She didn’t leave Guadalajara with a championship or a booking for Arena México. One fall on a Tuesday card can disappear into CMLL’s schedule before Friday.

CMLL still had to choose who would take it.

Twenty Matches in Guadalajara

Finding information on Hécate isn’t the easiest search in the world.

If Hécate had a Cagematch profile, this would have taken ten minutes. That probably would have been healthier for everyone involved and would help me ensure my figures are correct.

Instead, I went through event results, opponent pages and Hécate’s limited record at LuchaDB. Based on my findings, there’s 24 matches on Hécate’s proper CMLL record through August 25. Twenty came this year. Her 2026 record was 12-8.

Every one of those 24 matches took place at Arena Coliseo Guadalajara.

Arena Coliseo Guadalajara supplies one useful piece of biography. It has described Hécate as an Olympic-style wrestler who came directly from CODE Jalisco. CODE is the Consejo Estatal para el Fomento Deportivo, the state agency responsible for developing sports in Jalisco. Before CMLL started putting her on Guadalajara cards, Hécate had trained in the state’s amateur sports system. LuchaDB’s record of her under that name begins in Jalisco in 2025.

I still couldn’t find a reliable age, the name of her trainer or the interview where she says she spent childhood dreaming of this. That’s fine. We know enough to see that the Olympic bridge on Tessa Blanchard wasn’t a lucky tangle of limbs. It came from the one part of Hécate’s background CMLL has told us about.

The rest of her introduction happens in the ring, usually near the bottom of the card.

Hécate’s early assignments came against Guadalajara regulars such as Dulce Kitty, Náutica, Ivanna, Dominia, Lady Danger and Princesa Águila. Six of her first 17 proper CMLL appearances this year opened the show.

Opening matches are rarely where you put your biggest stars. Some of the crowd is still finding their seats. Someone watching online in Ohio is trying to determine whether the picture looks blurry or if this is simply what being over 40 is like.

Hécate kept returning, and CMLL kept letting her win.

On June 16, she entered an eight-woman cibernético with Dominia, Dulce Kitty, Ivanna, Náutica, Princesa Águila, Rina and Tabata. Hécate survived the field and defeated Tabata at the end.

The cibernético was the second match on a Tuesday card. CMLL runs enough tournaments that winning one does not require the immediate construction of a trophy room. It was still an acheivement. The promotion gathered much of its younger Guadalajara group, added Tabata and chose Hécate to be the last woman standing.

One week later, Hécate appeared fourth on the 67th anniversary card at Arena Coliseo Guadalajara, a show Cagematch lists at about 5,500 fans. She teamed with Lluvia and La Jarochita against Dark Silueta, Miss Guerrera and Zeuxis.

Her team lost.

Seven days after beating the local field near the bottom of the card, Hécate was working with five established CMLL luchadoras on the building’s anniversary show. The result mattered less than the company she was keeping.

Hécate hadn’t changed buildings. CMLL had changed who it trusted her to wrestle.

By July, those names included Tessa and Lluvia. On July 14, Hécate teamed with Dark Silueta and Sanely in a loss to Tessa, Lluvia and Johnnie Robbie. One week later, Hécate, Sanely and Zeuxis lost to Tessa, Lluvia and Tabata. Both results are listed beneath Tessa’s convenient blue name.

Hecate started in Guadaljara’s opening rotation, won the cybernetico and moved into matches with luchadoras CMLL uses throughout the promotion.

The first two times, Hécate lost.

The third time, she pinned Tessa.

The CMLL We Miss

Most international fans see CMLL through Arena México. I do too. Friday night gives us the major matches, the clips, the ratings and most of the discussion available in English.

It doesn’t give us the entire promotion.

Arena Coliseo Guadalajara has hosted CMLL wrestling for nearly seven decades. Its Tuesday cards have their own audience and a local roster that has to function whether anyone outside Mexico is watching or not.

Calling Guadalajara a developmental gym undersells its history and misses what Hécate has already done there.

Guadalajara is not a waiting room where she sits until CMLL decides her career is real. It’s where her career has happened, from the opening matches and cibernético to the anniversary show in front of 5,500 people.

Hécate works with Guadalajara’s regular women and the name CMLL uses elsewhere. She can work an opener against Náutica, enter a tournament with the younger group, then stand across from La Jarochita, Lluvia, Zeuxis, Dark Silueta and Tessa.

I’m not claiming she’s the next Persephone or Stephanie Vaquer.

Persephone is the CMLL World Women’s Champion. She has beaten Mercedes Moné and Tessa in title matches. Hécate has never worked a proper CMLL singles match. I would be lying if I told you I had uncovered CMLL’s next major star somewhere beneath the second match on a Guadalajara card.

CMLL has a women’s division that continues after the Arena México stream ends. A weekly promotion needs local cards to feel connected from one show to the next, especially when larger names pass through.

Hécate has become one of those wrestlers.

Hécate matters because she has become part of that connection. Her record shows how a woman can begin in Guadalajara’s opening matches and gradually earn better assignments from the promotion and something more valuable from the wrestlers above her. I really believe based on what I’ve seen from her, not to mention the tag team with Dark Silueta forming, that we will see her in Mexico City sooner rather than later.

Hécate’s name is still black on Cagematch. Tessa Blanchard still got pinned.

This is the second installment of Why She Matters, a recurring feature from The Luchadora Project about luchadoras working outside the spotlight, what makes them worth watching, and why their work matters.

Rarely does one watch a match with Sanely in it and walk away talking about Sanely.

I know because I watched what history will call her best match.

In fact, I’ve watched it three times.

The first time I watched the July 17 CMLL trios match, I remembered Persephone. I remembered Tessa Blanchard. I remembered thinking Thunder Rosa’s dancing was something I didn’t want someone to walk in on me watching. I remember Johnnie Robbie moved quickly and I questioned why she doesn’t have a full-time gig somewhere. Olympia looked good. There were dives and the sort of crowded closing stretch that felt like every other trios match featuring luchadoras.

When I saw that Dave Meltzer had given the match 4.25 stars, I thought maybe I had missed something.

Then I couldn’t remember who was even in the match.

Wait, Sanely was in that?

I watched it again casually and still couldn’t remember much she did. She had entered the ring. That much I could recall.

The third viewing was for this column. I kept my eyes on Sanely, including the long stretches when she stood on the apron while someone more exciting did something more exciting.

That was when I understood why CMLL keeps booking her.

Someone has to lose.

Someone has to lose without making the rest of the match look bad.

I think that’s why Sanely matters.

Daveflation

We should deal with the 4.25 stars first. I appreciate Dave shining a light on luchadoras, but in no world is this a 4.25-star match.

Meltzer gave the same rating to Randy Savage and the Ultimate Warrior’s retirement match at WrestleMania VII. He gave 4.25 to Shawn Michaels’ return against Triple H at SummerSlam 2002. Shawn Michaels and Chris Jericho also received 4.25 stars for their WrestleMania XIX match.

I’ve now watched Sanely’s trios match three times. It isn’t as good as any of those. I don’t think it is particularly close. Of course, had I been sitting ringside like Dave was this night, I might have thought differently.

The match is good. It is a busy, enjoyable CMLL trios match with recognizable stars and a strong final few minutes that stretch on for too long. I wouldn’t get near four stars.

Wrestling fans call this Daveflation. Meltzer’s scale has expanded over the years, first beyond five stars and then far enough beyond five that the original ceiling is somewhere down around the chair rail molding. A 4.25 in 2026 seems to purchase about 3.5 stars in 1993 money.

Meltzer can rate matches however he wants. It is his newsletter and, unless something has changed, he has not invited me onto the committee.

The inflated rating did accomplish something useful. It made me go back.

Once I stopped looking for a 4.25-star match and started watching Sanely, I found a better reason to write about her.

Four Wins

Counting wins in professional wrestling is a questionable way to make an argument. Doing it with CMLL’s luchadoras, who spend much of the year being shuffled through trios matches, might be even worse.

Naturally, I counted every one.

In 2024, Sanely wrestled 49 proper CMLL matches. Her record was 22-27.

In 2025, she worked 71. She went 24-47.

There’s 35 proper CMLL matches on her 2026 record through August 16. Sanely has won four.

Four wins. Thirty-one losses.

That is twenty less wins than she had last year. Her winning percentage has fallen from almost 45 percent in 2024 to 11 percent this year.

She hasn’t won a proper CMLL match since March 25, when she teamed with India Sioux to beat La Magnífica and Zeuxis. Sanely has lost 20 consecutive CMLL matches since.

A wrestling record can’t tell us whether somebody is good.

It can tell us what a promotion asks them to do.

CMLL used to ask something different from Sanely.

The Lady of the Black Glove

Sanely is the daughter of Mano Negra, the former NWA World Light Heavyweight Champion whose mask she adapted for her own career. The long black glove comes from him too, giving her the nickname La Dama del Guante Negro.

She grew up around wrestling and wanted to enter it herself. Mano Negra resisted. Sanely has said her father understood how difficult the business could be for women, so he insisted she finish her education first.

Her career has included injuries and long absences. She returned from more than a year away in 2024 and found herself in one of CMLL’s more unusual paths to a championship. Fans voted her into a Mexican National Women’s Championship match against Reyna Isis.

On September 27, 2024, Mano Negra stood in his daughter’s corner while Sanely won the championship at Arena México.

The reign lasted 161 days. India Sioux beat her on March 7, 2025.

Sanely still had meaningful wins after losing the belt. She joined India Sioux, La Jarochita and Lluvia to win the Copa Herederes cibernético in June. A tournament for second-generation wrestlers was an appropriate place for the daughter of Mano Negra.

Less than two years after becoming national champion, almost all the wins are gone.

Her schedule has not disappeared with them.

Eighteen Matches With Tessa

Sanely and Tessa Blanchard have been opponents in 18 proper CMLL matches this year.

Tessa, or Tessa’s team, has won all 18.

One was a cibernético. The other 17 were team matches. Tessa didn’t personally pin Sanely every time, and they haven’t had a singles match. They’ve simply stood on opposite sides of the ring 18 times.

Tessa’s side keeps winning.

Through August 16, Tessa had wrestled 51 proper CMLL matches this year. Sanely was across from her in 18 of them. That’s more than a third of Tessa’s CMLL schedule and more than half of Sanely’s.

That’s too much to dismiss as a coincidence hidden in the schedule. In 2026, helping Tessa win has become Sanely’s most regular assignment.

CMLL has made it increasingly clear that Tessa is a big deal. She works the important Friday shows and the regular cards throughout the week. She wins tournaments, pins champions in preliminary matches and receives world title opportunities. The volume of her Arena México appearances even led Cubs Fan to ask why she gets so many of them.

Persephone has beaten her twice in CMLL World Women’s Championship matches this year. The second came on July 31, two weeks after the Sanely trios match.

I still believe Tessa will eventually beat Persephone for the championship, most likely at Aniversario. I’ve been wrong about wrestling before, and I’ll be wrong again, but CMLL keeps giving me reasons to believe this one. I’ve already made the longer case.

To get Tessa to those title matches, CMLL keeps putting Sanely on the other side of the ring.

If you want to know who CMLL sees as a star, look at who keeps beating her.

The July 17 match was already their 15th meeting of the year. Sanely teamed with Olympia and Persephone. Tessa stood across from them with Thunder Rosa and Johnnie Robbie.

Tessa’s team won.

Sanely took the pin. The result was familiar. The 4.25 stars were the strange part.

Watching Sanely

Sanely spends the first three minutes of the match on the apron.

That explains part of why I forgot her. Six-woman tags do not encourage patient viewing. The eye follows whoever is running, diving or being thrown into something. A wrestler standing in the corner has to compete with five other wrestlers, a referee and the possibility that I will look down at my phone.

Sanely eventually tags in against Thunder Rosa.

She slows Thunder down, stands over her and raises the black glove. She wins a collision with a shoulder block, follows with a simple slam and settles into grounded control. The offense is basic. It gives Thunder’s quicker movement something to push against.

Thunder counters with a series of rolls and pinning combinations. Sanely follows her through them and takes the bumps cleanly. A couple transitions reveal the setup. Nobody gets lost.

Later, when the rudas take control, Sanely usually knows where the next piece of the match is happening. She joins the stomps, pulls an opponent into position and leaves enough room for her teammates.

I didn’t notice any of this during the first viewing. I noticed that the rudas were in control.

That is the job. Sanely helps create the part of the match everyone else remembers.

Her most memorable offense happens in the closing minute of the match.

The Dive Is Fine

Sanely runs toward the corner, hops onto the second rope and throws a crossbody onto the pile below, where Johnnie Robbie and Persephone are waiting.

Neither the height or distance are remarkable. Sanely isn’t particularly smooth getting onto the rope. The jump will not become part of a career retrospective of Sanely’s work.

Sanely reaches the people waiting for her. They catch her. Everyone lands close to where they intended, and the match continues.

The dive is serviceable.

That word sounds like an insult in wrestling. Fans want spectacular. We want moves that can be clipped, posted and described with at least two fire emojis by an account called SashaFan02018.

CMLL needs the dive to land.

One missed catch changes the match. A bad jump leaves someone injured or three wrestlers standing on the floor pretending they were supposed to watch Sanely fall beside them.

She gets there. They catch her.

The match goes on.

There’s a temptation in a profile like this to rescue Sanely from ordinary praise. We could call the dive beautiful, daring or evidence of some hidden athletic ceiling. The footage would say that’s a lie.

It is fine.

Much of Sanely’s work is fine. Fine becomes valuable when a match has six wrestlers, several dives and a closing sequence that depends on everyone being in the correct place.

Sanely does not create the best moments in the match. She avoids becoming the reason the match falls apart.

Someone Has to Lose

The dive explains part of Sanely’s value. The finish explains the rest.

After nearly fifteen minutes, Sanely returns to the ring with Thunder Rosa. She climbs to the top rope and hits Thunder with a missile dropkick. It is Sanely’s strongest individual move of the match and arrives when the result still needs a little doubt.

For a few seconds, Sanely looks capable of winning.

Thunder survives. She catches Sanely, lifts her and plants her with the Fire Thunder Driver.

Sanely takes the move flat and clean. She stays where Thunder needs her for the cover.

The referee counts three.

That is the full assignment.

Losing well requires work. The winner needs resistance before the finish. The last move has to look decisive. The person taking it has to land in the right place and remain there without making the pin look like a complicated furniture delivery.

No one is ever going to confuse Sanely with Manami Toyota or Jaguar Yokota. She isn’t building a case for inclusion among the greatest women to ever wrestle. I don’t imagine wrestling historians were waiting on this column to settle that question.

Sanely’s value is found further down the card, where most of professional wrestling actually happens.

CMLL runs several shows every week. Tessa Blanchard can’t wrestle Persephone every Friday. They’d run out of matches long before CMLL ran out of Fridays. The promotion needs familiar opponents who can give its stars useful victories without making the outcome feel completely free.

Sanely can do that because she isn’t some anonymous wrestler brought in to fill an empty corner. She’s Mano Negra’s daughter. She has spent nearly a decade in CMLL. The mask and long black glove give her an identity people recognize, and she held the Mexican National Women’s Championship less than two years ago.

Beating Sanely still means something.

Thunder Rosa’s victory looked decisive. The match ended exactly when it was supposed to. Sanely had done her part without demanding that anyone stop and admire it.

That has been much of her 2026.

Through August 16, Sanely had worked 35 proper CMLL matches and lost 31 of them. Eighteen placed her across the ring from Tessa Blanchard. CMLL knows what keeps happening when it books Sanely, and it keeps booking her anyway.

Those 31 losses tell us where she sits in the division. Being sent back out nearly every week tells us she still has a place in it.

Sanely matters because CMLL’s women’s division has to function between championship matches. It has to work on ordinary cards in Puebla, Guadalajara and Arena México. Someone has to keep the trios match moving, give the featured wrestler enough resistance and take the finish without dragging everyone else into the wreckage.

Sanely has become very good at being that someone.

I have always been good at the Irish goodbye.

Once the bill has been paid and an evening has gone on long enough for the best stories to begin their second trip around the table, I’ll exuse myself for the bathroom and quietly leave. By the time somebody asks where I went, I am usually in the car listening to music at a volume my wife wouldn’t appreciate.

Later I send a message saying I had a great time. This is partly gratitude and partly proof that I was not taken from the parking lot.

I have done a version of this on Sunday mornings too. As a pastor, I can tell when someone is developing a question during the sermon. The head tilts, a pen appears, and before long the bulletin is being underlined with more force than the paper was designed to withstand.

On those mornings, I have been known to move from the pulpit toward a side hallway with surprising speed for a man who hasn’t played organized sports this century. If asked, I am checking on something in the office, although nobody knows what that might be, including me. Its one of the practical benefits of having more than one pastor.

The church version is harder because everybody knows which car belongs to you.

Most of the time, disappearing is a minor social offense. My friends will see me again. The person with the marked-up bulletin knows where I work.

On Thanksgiving in 2000, my grandpa called and asked me to go hunting with him. I was fifteen years old, and there was a cute girl from a rival high school I wanted to chat with on ICQ instead. I thought I might see her at the mall on Black Friday.

This was, of course, back when teenagers went to the mall hoping to run into somebody and then acted surprised when they did. I did not know whether the girl would be there. I don’t remember making plans with her. My entire plan rested on the word might, but boys have built larger structures on weaker foundations.

“No, I’m not coming,” I told my grandpa.

“I don’t have any clean clothes,” was the excuse I gave to him, knowing full well it was a lie.

He died that evening.

I didn’t go to the mall the next morning. Instead, I went to my grandparents farm to be with my grandma who had lost the only man she’s ever loved.

I can’t tell you if I ever saw that girl at the mall. I can’t remember if we had anymore conversations on ICQ. You would think I might remember that, considering the importance I had assigned to the possibility. I do not. I remember what I said to my grandpa.

I thought I was turning down one hunting trip. There would be another Thanksgiving and another hunting season. The idea that there might not be another afternoon with my grandpa never entered into it.

For years I returned to that conversation and answered differently. I got in the truck, spent the day with him, and came home with one more story. Then I returned to the Thanksgiving that actually happened.

I do not know what my grandpa thought when I said no. Maybe he was disappointed. Maybe he shrugged. I have occasionally been tempted to give him a warm speech about how he understood and never held it against me, but that would be me writing his lines after he was no longer here to correct them.

What I know is that I stayed home. By the time I understood that the conversation needed a goodbye, there was nobody left to say it to.

Unfortunately, this did not turn me into a man who answers every call and accepts every invitation. I still watch the phone ring when I am tired. I still compose replies in my head and forget to send them. I remain capable of learning an important lesson on Sunday and losing track of it by Tuesday.

Years later, I was dog-sitting for my brother when I learned that Macho Man Randy Savage had died.

I had recently gone through a divorce, been fired from my job, and moved back to my childhood bedroom. Keeping one dog alive felt about the right level of responsibility for a man that down on his luck.

The job came with a bowl, a leash, and a clear way of knowing when I had fallen behind. The rest of my life was not offering that kind of customer service.

I was scrolling through Twitter when the TMZ message appeared.

Randy Savage was dead. I refreshed the page and read it again. Nothing in my brother’s living room changed. The dog did not lower the flag.

Macho Man had never seemed built for ordinary human limits. He wore enough fringe to furnish the entire country music industry in 1993, then climbed to the top rope and came down with an elbow that made gravity look like part of the show.

The way he died felt unbelievable.

He was never my favorite wrestler, but he had always been there, or at least it felt that way. He felt like he would always be there, too.

Wrestling encourages this confusion because the old matches remain available. You can call up 1988 after supper and find Savage every bit as young and furious as he was the first time. He drops the elbow again. The announcer shouts again. Meanwhile, I have reached the age where if I sleep at the wrong angle, my neck punishes me.

I did not grieve Savage the way I grieved my grandfather. One man knew my name. The other might have called me “brother,” but that was simply the system wrestling had developed for addressing strangers, which strangely enough is how I also address men in my church who I can’t recall their name.

Still, Savage had been in my house for years. He had shouted through the television while families ate, talked, left the room, and came back to find him still arguing with Mean Gene.

Some of the people I know through wrestling exist for me almost entirely on a screen. I know what they think about star ratings and which promotion they will defend well past the point of sound judgment. I may know what shift they work or that one of their children has been sick. I may not know their last name. Every so often, one of them goes quiet.

At first you assume work got busy. A few days pass, then a few weeks. You check the profile and discover that the last public statement was an argument about whether flips belong in wrestling, which is not the farewell most of us would select if somebody gave us time to prepare one.

They may have deleted the app or started a new account. Perhaps they grew tired of all of us and took up gardening, which is probably better for the blood pressure than discussing what Metlzer thinks. You hope they are somewhere doing fine.

There is nobody to call. The friendship grew through replies, group chats, and late-night messages. No one stopped in the middle of an argument about headlocks to exchange a spouse’s phone number in case one of the accounts suddenly went dark. That would have seemed strange at the time. It only seems practical afterward.

So you send a message: “Hey, just checking on you. Hope you’re okay.”

Sometimes an answer arrives. Work became busy or life became complicated, and they needed to step away for a while. I am always releived to learn that somebody has merely decided the internet is terrible. Other times the message stays where you left it.

There’s phone numbers in my contacts that once belonged to people I will never speak to again. Some of those people died. Others simply passed out of my life, but I’m never deleting them. It’s this sort of completionist thinking that led my to watch all of Candela’s matches in 2026, for better or worse. Besides, deleting a phone number of a friend who has passed on feels needlessly official, like driving downtown to file paperwork nobody requested.

The phone company has fewer reservations. Eventually a number is handed to somebody else. Somewhere, a person I will never meet may now carry a number my phone still associates with a familiar name and memories I’ll hopefully never forget.

Like Adam, the rock climbing bartender I only knew for a few years before he passed away, but showed up in my life like an illegal firework show. You knew it was dangerous. You knew it would burn out eventually, but while it was around, it lit up the night.

Or my friend Geof, who I never met in person, but had more influence on me than I’ll likely ever admit. I cheer for the Celtics in his memory every year, and always drink scotch in his honor.

My phone still offers me the little green call button. Every so often I scroll past one of those names and pause. I know a different voice would answer now, so I leave the contact where it is.

As you know, I’m a pastor, and I’m a Christian, and I believe things about death and what comes after it. We can talk about that sometime, if you wish, but being a pastor means people sometimes look at me after a death as if seminary prepared me with the exact words to give someone about death to help them understand it. That didn’t happen, although I haven’t gone for my doctorate yet. Still, I have hope for what comes after death. I also miss people and keep useless phone numbers.

I still leave parties quietly. Midwestern goodbyes are already long enough. You say goodbye in the living room, repeat it at the front door, continue talking on the porch, and then roll down the car window because somebody remembered one more thing. At some point a person has to leave or apply for residency.

Lately I have tried to send the message before anyone notices I am gone. On Sundays, I occasionally remain in the lobby long enough to receive the question written in the bulletin. I do not want to overstate my progress.

So what on earth does this have to do with wrestling?

Nothing really.

Except wrestling is full of people who seemed too loud, too bright, too alive to ever disappear. Then one day they do, and all that’s left behind are memories and old matches.

Maybe that’s enough.

Send the message. Take the hunting trip. Stay in the lobby for the question.

And when you leave, if you can help it, don’t forget to say goodbye.

My first wrestling message board had two members.

It met on Sunday mornings in a church classroom. Drew and I would take whatever portion of Sunday School could be safely diverted from spiritual formation and use it to discuss what had happened the night before on WCW Saturday Night.

Our other source was the Apter mags. They arrived late enough that a pay-per-view result was outdated by the time we read it, and every photograph seemed to have been taken half a second after the important thing happened. They were still wonderful. They gave us rankings, rumors, blood, and the impression that Bill Apter personally knew every wrestler in America.

Drew and I talked about wrestling (or “rasslin” to us Appalachian Americans) over store brand Nilla wafers and Country Time lemonade until his mom made him stop watching after he attempted to DDT his brother after soccer practice one day.

At the time, I considered this a terrible injustice. Looking back, maybe Drew was the smart one.

He got out early. He missed the Fingerpoke of Doom, the invasion, the anonymous general manager, Twitter, and at least four separate civil wars over whether a match was cinema. He made one questionable booking decision with his brother and his mother shut down the territory before the losses piled up. He left the business with no farewell tour, no podcast, and only one known injury angle.

Back then we watched wrestling first and talked about it later. Somewhere in the years since, those two things changed places.

Our family did not own a computer until I was already in junior high. It was beige, enormous, and sat on the bar in our kitchen. Our neighbor Everett gave it to us to help me with school work. Everett smelled like cigar smoke and always called me “Sport.” I’m pretty sure that man never learned my name.

Getting online back then required the phone line and a sequence of electronic shrieks that suggested the machine was either connecting to the world or reporting us to NORAD.

The internet was slow enough for wonder to load from the top of the screen to the bottom.

At first, it gave me facts. Wrestlers’ real names were a particular fascination. This was also how I discovered that Arn Anderson and Ole Anderson were not related. Arn was Martin Anthony Lunde. Ole was Alan Robert Rogowski. They were not brothers. They were not cousins. They were not even Andersons.

I had already accepted that wrestling matches were predetermined. I had not agreed to genealogical fraud.

Martin Lunde sounded like a man who prepared tax returns. Alan Rogowski sounded like the fellow who would make sure Martin had saved his receipts. These two men had somehow become Minnesota relatives, formed the spine of the Four Horsemen, and spent years looking as though they might come to your house and repossess the television while you were watching them on it. I found all of this deeply unsettling.

I checked 1Wrestling and ProWrestling.com whenever the phone line was free. I read news, rumors, results from shows I could not watch, and interviews with wrestlers I had only seen in magazine photographs. The internet did not make wrestling smaller or more cynical for me then. It made wrestling impossibly large. The television show ended. The browser kept going.

Eventually I found wrestling sims like TNM7 and Extreme Warfare before e-fedding took over all my attention. Those of you who’s back is a little achy right now remember those gloriously embarrassing segments of the internet.

My wrestler was “The Factor” Ben Evans. I came up with the name while eating at Bob Evans, which is true and perhaps explains why he sounded less like a dangerous wrestler than a district manager sent in to improve breakfast-shift morale.

The whole thing could have gone differently if we had eaten at Cracker Barrel that night. I might have spent my adolescence writing promos for “Old Country” Jed Barrel, whose finishing move was the Triangle Peg Game and whose entrance took place between two rocking chairs and a display of Gaither Vocal Band cassettes.

Ben Evans probably still exists on a server somewhere. He is frozen in primitive HTML, arms crossed in front of a graphic made with a trial version of Paint Shop Pro, waiting for the president of an imaginary wrestling company to post the card for Thursday Night Carnage. Every generation leaves ruins behind. Mine left guestbooks, broken image links, and several thousand words explaining why a fictional man named after a family restaurant deserved a fictional title shot.

From e-feds I moved into internet message boards. This may have been the internet’s best wrestling era. The rooms were smaller. You recognized the names. People had avatars, signatures, reputations, running jokes, and strongly held opinions about wrestlers whose matches had to be acquired on fourth-generation videotape.

Those boards expanded my wrestling world again. Other posters pointed me toward Japanese wrestling, lucha libre, independent promotions, and whole decades of history that cable television had never mentioned. An unfamiliar name in one thread could occupy the next two weeks of my life. I went looking for matches. I came back to talk about them.

We argued then, too. Nostalgia should not be allowed to work security. Some of the arguments were every bit as ridiculous as what happens now, only they unfolded over three days because everyone had to log off and let a parent use the phone. Still, the same people kept returning to the same rooms. An argument had a history, and a username eventually became a person.

Then the rooms became faster, larger, and impossible to leave.

Twitter gave every wrestling fan a live microphone. Podcasts gave every disagreement theme music. YouTube gave it a red arrow and a thumbnail of a man reacting as though he had been bitten by a raccoon while taking trash to the dumpster. Discord built a twenty-four-hour fellowship hall where nobody ever stacks the chairs and the meeting is never adjourned.

There are now more voices discussing professional wrestling than there were members of the nWo, and only a few fewer than there are members of the Anoa’i family waiting on a call from Stamford.

At any given moment, one corner of the internet is arguing that flips do not belong in wrestling, while another insists a headlock is a proper finishing move if applied by a sufficiently grim man from 1974 or a Japanese man in 2026. Both sides believe they are defending the business from each other. Neither side has considered going outside.

Some of those voices are smart, funny, and generous. Some belong to friends.

One of them belongs to me. I am neither smart, nor funny.

I have written columns, posted reactions, joined servers, left servers, returned to servers, and explained to strangers why their opinion about a pretend fight was factually and perhaps morally incorrect. I am not standing outside this problem with a clipboard. I brought snacks.

Nobody took wrestling away from me. I slowly converted my enjoyment of wrestling into the discussion of wrestling, one post at a time.

The show became raw material. I stopped watching simply to see what happened. I watched to determine what I thought about what happened, how strongly I thought about it, whether someone else had already thought it incorrectly, and what I might think about that. A match could not merely be good. It had to withstand the conversation waiting for it after the bell.

Eventually even that conversation could not wait.

Wrestling became a two-screen project. The match plays on the television. The glowing orb at my fingertips carries the parallel broadcast: instant reviews, promotion wars, ratings talk, bad-faith clips, good jokes, terrible jokes, and people reaching final judgment while the referee is still checking the boots.

My eyes move between the two. I miss the setup to a finish because someone posted something foolish. Then I complain that the finish did not work. Some nights I remember the argument better than the match. Some nights the argument is the only part I remember.

I have tried to reel myself in. I have muted words, thinned follow lists, left Discords, deleted apps, and put the phone in another room. I have retired from wrestling discourse roughly as many times as Terry Funk retired from wrestling, and with the same understanding that nobody should take the announcement literally.

The returns always begin innocently. I will check one result. I will see what people thought about one segment. I will correct one thing that is obviously wrong. Forty minutes later I am reading two strangers argue about whether a lack of star-ratings is somehow a sign of racism.

Then I wonder why wrestling no longer relaxes me.

There is an obvious irony in writing a column about this. Pro wrestling has too much commentary, so I have responded by preparing additional commentary. I am standing in the noise asking everyone to quiet down so they can hear my thoughts about the noise. I could have closed the laptop. Instead, I gave the problem a headline.

That is funny because it is ridiculous. It also hurts a little.

I am a man in his forties trying to decide whether I am tired of wrestling or merely tired from carrying its conversation around all day. Wrestling has been with me for most of my life. I can mark years by the version of it I was watching, the room where I watched it, and the people I could not wait to tell about it. WCW Saturday Night. Nitro. The first computer. The Factor. The message boards. The podcasts. The trips. The columns. Each one is wrestling, but each one is also a house I lived in for a while.

The possibility of losing that feels heavier than a television hobby ought to feel. I loved wrestling with the indiscriminate force available to a kid who had not yet been asked to divide himself among a wife, a daughter, a church, a house, and the weather radar. Wrestling got every available fiber because most of those fibers had not yet been assigned.

Maybe this is the life cycle of a man growing out of something he once loved with all of himself. The fibers get reassigned. My wife and daughter have claimed a large share. A church takes another. Several apparently belong to standing at the back window during a thunderstorm and announcing the movement of the red part of the radar to anyone within earshot.

That would be a normal story. It does not feel normal while it is happening.

The conversation around wrestling has grown too heated, too bitter, and sometimes too dumb for the amount of my life I have handed it. Most of the people in that conversation began where I did. They loved wrestling and wanted somebody to talk to. I cannot make them the villains without lying about myself.

I don’t have a solution. There will be no closing list of seven ways to reclaim the joy, mostly because I would turn the list into a post, monitor the replies, and ruin dinner. There may not be a solution. The thing I loved is still on television. I keep catching myself watching the screen in my hand.

I can still see that Sunday School room. Drew and I had no star ratings, quarter-hour numbers, screenshots, clips, or vocabulary for discourse. We had whatever happened on WCW the night before and a few minutes before an adult noticed we were not discussing the lesson.

Drew’s mom ended his wrestling career because he tried to DDT his brother. Maybe Drew really was the smart one. He got out before wrestling became a place a person could spend all day without watching any wrestling at all.

I wonder if there is this much discourse in the NCIS internet community, or if those people simply watch the mystery solved and simply go to bed.

Anyway, I’ll see you in the Discord later tonight.

This is the first installment of Why She Matters, a recurring feature from The Luchadora Project about luchadoras working outside the spotlight, what makes them worth watching, and why their work matters.

Last year, Candela was in my Wrestling Observer Newsletter Worst Match of the Year.

This year, she may get my vote for Most Improved.

I have been thinking about those two sentences since last Tuesday night. Wrestling fans prefer improvement stories with a clean first act, a training montage and no surviving footage of the original problem. Professional wrestling, unfortunately for everyone involved, keeps an extensive tape library.

The two votes belong together. Candela matters because she is raising the floor of CMLL’s Amazonas division, and there is enough bad tape behind her to show how far the floor has moved.

The Tape Is Unhelpful

The match that earned my vote was Candela’s loss to Tabata at CMLL Día de Muertos on October 28, 2025. It lasted nine minutes and felt twenty minutes too long. I remember checking the clock and thinking something was wrong.

They never found a rhythm. You could see them thinking between moves, then thinking about whether the other person had finished thinking. Everything that should have carried them into the next exchange brought them to another stop.

Last night, August 11, at Arena México, they found the same problem waiting for them.

There was a portion in the middle of the match where they began with wrist control and moved into a rope-running exchange. They crossed once and met again near the middle of the ring. Then the move stopped. For several seconds they remained upright and tangled, changing their grips and trying to locate whatever was supposed to happen next.

They finally separated and went back to the ropes.

The rest of the sequence had the same problem. One woman would set her feet and wait for the other to arrive. Tabata went over Candela’s back only after Candela bent and stayed there for her. A tumble put them both on the mat. They got up and tried another rotation, with Candela helping Tabata through it before Tabata landed and Candela rolled across her.

You could see what they had planned. This was supposed to be one of those quick lucha exchanges where two wrestlers trade counters, land together and pop back up before the crowd has time to sort out who did what. Instead, every setup remained on the screen. Wrestling is cooperative, of course. Good wrestling lets you forget that for a while. Here, you could see all the paperwork.

The trouble lasted longer than a botched move.

Candela and Tabata spent the whole passage waiting on each other. Neither could turn the mistake into a shove, a strike or a little bit of attitude that might have made the hesitation belong to the match. They simply restarted the choreography.

It looked hurried without ever becoming fast.

A match like that ought to end any Most Improved argument. Except one week earlier, Candela did not need a restart.

One Week Earlier

On August 4, she teamed with Kira against Maya World and Hyan during CMLL’s Semana Internacional. Hyan came in with the international reputation. Maya arrived as the young TBS champion. Kira has become one of the steadier Amazonas on the roster.

I went into the match expecting Candela to be the weak link. She may have been the best worker in it.

Dave Meltzer gave the match 2¼ stars, which does not sound good but is about two stars better than I imagined.

Candela opened with Hyan and looked comfortable matching her speed. Later, she hit the tornillo onto all three women on the floor, came back inside, hit her codebreaker and kept moving through the next exchange.

Her timing was cleaner, her positioning was better and she gave the match urgency when it needed it.

The finish became untidy, with missed moonsaults and a dropkick that did not find much of anything, but Candela had already done her part. For most of the match, she was the person keeping everybody connected. She worked like someone who understood what the match was supposed to feel like.

Watching the two matches a week apart, I think Candela’s best work begins once the match is already moving.

Candela studied contemporary dance before becoming a wrestler. Once a match has momentum, she understands where her body belongs. A busy tag gives her people entering, leaving, feeding and bumping. There is always another piece of motion for her to join.

Against Tabata, Candela had to create that motion herself. When the timing disappeared, she could not hide the pause or guide Tabata into something simpler. Tabata could not help her. They share a weakness, which may explain why they keep locating it so efficiently.

Candela already knows how to run, dive and rotate. Her next improvement will happen between the moves, when an opponent is late, a grip is wrong or the idea they discussed in the back does not survive first contact with the ring.

I have preached sermons like that.

The notes make sense on Thursday. They still make sense on Sunday morning. Then, somewhere in the middle of preaching them, you realize nothing is landing. You can feel it happen. The congregation is looking back with the patient expression church people develop after years of listening to preachers find their way home.

Afterward, somebody says, “I liked that story.” You know which story. It was twelve minutes into a forty-five-minute sermon, back when everybody still had hope.

There is no useful defense of the sermon. You thank them, go home and preach again the next week. I have not found a shortcut.

Candela has had plenty of chances to learn the same lesson. According to Cagematch, she wrestled 78 matches in 2025. Through August 12, she has worked 64 in 2026. She is one victory away from matching her win total from last year.

Win totals in professional wrestling require an asterisk large enough to be seen from space, but they tell us something about how a promotion sees a wrestler. The match total tells us more. Candela is working. She is getting the repetitions developing wrestlers are always told they need, usually by people who do not have to take the bumps.

The Middle of the Card

Candela is not Persephone. She is not Tessa Blanchard. That is fine.

Persephone is the crown jewel of the Amazonas division. She has the physical presence and obvious ceiling of someone CMLL can put in a major match and explain with a poster.

Tessa carries herself like a main-event wrestler because she has spent years being one. She can take over a match, establish its pace and pull an opponent back toward the plan when things begin to wander. Whatever else follows Tessa Blanchard into a building, uncertainty about whether she belongs near the top of a wrestling card is not among it.

Candela occupies the less glamorous part of the roster. She is the second or third match. She is somebody’s partner in a Tuesday tag. She works Puebla, Coliseo and Arena México, sometimes in the same week, and keeps collecting valuable experience.

Useful is faint praise among wrestling fans. It is a much better word in a booking office.

CMLL cannot make a division entirely out of Persephones and Tessas, any more than a football team can employ eleven quarterbacks and hope somebody remembers to block the blitz. Someone has to make the weekly cards work. Someone has to wrestle the visiting talent, steady the prospect and keep a tag moving when one of its pieces comes loose.

Fans prefer to talk about ceilings. We want to know who might headline Aniversario, win the Grand Prix or become the next crossover star. I’m not a contractor, but I know a vaulted ceiling is easier to admire when the floor is not collapsing.

The floor of a wrestling division is the second match on a Tuesday card. One great main event can make a night memorable. The floor determines how much of the night you have to endure before getting there.

Candela is helping that part of the Amazonas division.

The process remains uneven, and anyone wishing to argue the point may submit either Tabata match as Exhibit A. She now has matches where she adds pace, covers space and makes better wrestlers’ nights easier. A year ago, I mainly noticed her when something went wrong.

The Belt in the Middle

This is why something Cubsfan suggested caught my attention. He mentioned Candela as someone CMLL should consider for the Mexican National Women’s Championship, currently held by Thunder Rosa.

My first thought was that he had forgotten the Tabata match. My second was that he may have understood the point before I did.

Thunder Rosa won the championship from India Sioux on July 31. Rosa is a former AEW Women’s World Champion, an international name and now a dual-contracted AEW and CMLL wrestler. Moving the belt from Rosa to Candela would be a considerable drop in star power.

It could also give the championship a useful place on CMLL cards, even though we all know CMLL does not care much about championships and cares even less about the ones held by luchadoras.

Persephone already holds the world title and occupies the top of the division. The national championship can serve the group below her, the wrestlers who matter every week even when they are not closing Friday night. It can be defended in Puebla, Coliseo, Guadalajara and on the Tuesday shows where the middle of the division does most of its living.

Candela would be a risky champion. Then again, Thunder Rosa won the title in what is, at the moment, my Worst Match of the Year for 2026. The belt has survived worse arguments.

For Candela, it would be a gamble worth taking.

Singles matches still expose the gaps in her timing. A championship asks its holder to set the pace, make challengers feel important and get a match home when the original directions have become useless. Those are the responsibilities she has yet to master.

They are also the responsibilities she needs.

CMLL has already moved her near the conversation. In March, Candela and Metálica challenged Kira and Skadi for the Mexican National Women’s Tag Team Championship. They lost, but Candela did not look misplaced in a title match worked at a higher pace.

A singles title reign would give her regular matches with a reason for happening. Let her defend against Astoreth in Puebla, Keyra at Arena México, Zeuxis at Coliseo or someone from the Guadalajara roster trying to move up. Put Candela in charge of the lower half of the division and find out whether she can hold it.

Nobody would need to pretend the belt meant she had arrived. Give it to her as a test. For the first time, I can imagine Candela passing it.

I would still vote for the 2025 match against Tabata as the worst of that year. Improvement does not ask us to pretend the old work was better than it was.

It asks whether the wrestler has become better since. Candela has. Some nights the difference is hard to miss. Some nights Tabata is standing across the ring and the chemistry just doesn’t work.

I imagine the most improved worker award will go to someone like AEW’s Kevin Knight, who has shown he can hang in the main event. It may even go to someone in WWE that I don’t know about.

For me, the most improved isn’t always about who is hitting the ceiling, but who is raising the floor. Candela is doing her part to prove she’s doing that.

The ballot is not due for several more months. I may write Candela’s name again, this time on a different line. I may find someone else more worthy.

Until then, she has more matches to wrestle, and I’m okay with that.

Over at The Luchadora Project, I’m starting a recurring feature called Why She Matters. Each installment will focus on a luchadora working outside the brightest part of the spotlight: what she does well, where she still needs to grow, and why her presence makes the larger wrestling world more interesting.

The first installment is about Candela, who went from appearing in my Worst Match of the Year to becoming a possible Most Improved candidate. That is a strange journey, which usually means it is one worth writing about. You can read it at the link below.

Some mornings I sit down at my computer with the results from Arena México open in one window and a spreadsheet open in another, and I enter the latest information about the luchadoras of CMLL.

Date. Match. Partners. Opponents. Winner. Loser.

I check the spelling of names I have already checked dozens of times, look through results written in Spanish I understand poorly, and try to decide whether a match belongs in one category or another. Every now and then I discover that I missed something from Puebla or Guadalajara, which means going back to repair the record as if someone from the Mexican government might arrive later that afternoon to inspect it.

No one has asked me to do this.

I am reasonably certain CMLL does not care that I do it. CMLL itself may not keep these records with the concern I have developed for them, which would be funny if it were not also a little unsettling. Somewhere in Ohio, a middle-aged pastor is carefully maintaining a history of outcomes decided in advance by a wrestling promotion in Mexico City that does not know he exists.

My wife will occasionally walk past the office, see the spreadsheet on the screen, and keep walking. There are questions in a marriage that are better left unasked.

The records become articles, or pieces of articles. I write about Candela, Skadi, Tabata, Persephone, Olympia, and the other women of CMLL. I write about who is improving, who keeps getting booked with whom, who quietly put together a good month, and who loses more often than the crowd’s affection for her would suggest.

Then I publish the piece and wait.

A few people read it. Not many.

There is no great surge of interest in the win-loss record of Candela. Nobody is refreshing Working The Crowd or The Luchadora Project on a Wednesday afternoon because the outcome of Tabata’s latest trios match has left a hole in his understanding of the universe. The readership wanders in one person at a time, hangs its coat by the door, and sits toward the back.

This has started to make me wonder whether what I am doing is futile.

That is not a pleasant question once you reach the stage of life when time no longer feels unlimited. When you are young, an afternoon is just an afternoon. You can spend it watching wrestling, arguing about wrestling, reading about wrestling, and then watching several men on television argue about the wrestling you have already watched. The day is wide, supper will appear somehow, and tomorrow is too far away to be much concern.

That changes.

Marriage changes it. Ministry changes it. A family growing through adoption certainly changes it. The hours begin to have names attached to them. An hour at the computer belongs entirely to the computer and cannot also belong to your wife, your family, the people you pastor, the book you have been meaning to read, or the toilet downstairs that has been making a sound for three weeks.

So I look at the spreadsheet and ask the sort of question a man asks when he suspects the answer may inconvenience him.

Is this wise?

Not whether it is allowed.

There is no commandment against tracking the records of luchadoras, though the practice may be covered somewhere in the minor prophets. The question is whether putting real time and thought into something almost no one cares about is a faithful use of the life I have been given.

I can remember visiting churches with hymn boards mounted near the front of the sanctuary. Before the service, somebody would slide little white numbers into narrow wooden slots so everyone knew which hymns we would sing. Number 384. Number 162. Number 41.

The numbers mattered because they pointed to something. They helped a roomful of people arrive at the same song.

Sometimes the room was not full. Sometimes it was six widows, an organist, two families with restless children, and a pastor who had prepared as though several hundred people might come through the doors. Still, somebody put the numbers on the board. The organist played the introduction. Everybody stood.

I think about those hymn boards while I enter another CMLL result. There is something stubborn in the act of keeping track. You write down what happened because, at least while you are writing, you believe it should not disappear entirely. You put the number on the board even when the congregation is small.

Of course, a small congregation can also make a person doubt his calling.

I remember when wrestling never required this kind of examination. I grew up with Terry Funk bleeding under arena lights and Ric Flair trying to survive Vader at Starrcade. I stayed up for Wrestle Kingdom and mourned when WCW closed. Wrestling was part of the furniture of my life before I knew enough to wonder whether the furniture was tasteful.

I have been a wrestling fan longer than I have been most anything else, which is why I have had such a hard time admitting that I do not know if I still love professional wrestling or if I love the thought of professional wrestling.

The thought of wrestling remains wonderful. It contains everything I remember and very little of what exhausted me. The matches start when they ought to start. The stories make sense. Nobody spends twenty minutes explaining a corporate disagreement that will be forgotten before the next pay-per-view. The wrestling in my memory has been trimmed and repaired by time.

Actual wrestling still has to be watched from beginning to end.

I turn on a show and wait for the old feeling, but the feeling knows I am waiting and refuses to perform. I can recognize a very good match. I can explain why it worked. I can appreciate the pacing and the structure and the way the final minutes were built. Then the match ends, and I go upstairs to see whether I remembered to move the laundry.

There was a time when a great match rearranged the week around it. Now I sometimes forget it before bed.

I spend a fair amount of time talking about wrestling on Discord, and I enjoy it. Wrestling has always been more fun when there is somebody nearby to laugh at the bad parts and recognize the good ones. There are people there whose friendship matters to me beyond whatever happens in the ring.

Discord is not always a refuge, though. It is also where some of my worst tendencies come out.

I get pulled into arguments I already know will accomplish nothing. I become irritated about booking decisions made by strangers and defensive about opinions that will not matter by breakfast. Some nights I close the app annoyed with a person I have never met because he was wrong about one of these luchadoras I’m tracking on a show I was not enjoying in the first place.

There is something embarrassing about watching myself do this. I have a wife, a ministry, a family, and work that carries real consequences for actual people. Then I spend forty minutes litigating whether a wrestler was properly protected in defeat, as if the case might eventually reach the Supreme Court.

Discord keeps me connected to wrestling, but connection is not always the same thing as love. An argument can keep me involved as easily as enjoyment can. When I say I still like talking about wrestling, I have to admit that some of the pleasure comes from being right, being heard, and having one more place to plant a flag.

That belongs in this reckoning too. I am not only asking whether wrestling still brings me joy. I am asking what sort of person I become while following it.

And then there are the luchadoras.

I came to CMLL through the side door. I saw Candela before I saw Soberano Jr. I learned the Amazonas before I understood the larger shape of the promotion, and by the time friends told me the matches were uneven, I had already started caring.

Some of the wrestling was rough. The timing wandered. Ideas exceeded execution. There were moments when three people approached the ropes with three different understandings of what was supposed to happen next.

I loved it.

I did not love it because it was secretly perfect. I loved it because I did not understand it well enough to grade it.

After years of watching wrestling like a scout, I had become a beginner again. I was learning names, watching faces in the crowd, and following commentary in terrible Spanish. Curiosity carried me through whatever vocabulary could not.

The feeling did not last in quite the same way. I know the names now. I recognize the patterns. I have opinions about who should be pushed, which means I have apparently managed to turn wonder back into office work.

But I still care about the women.

I notice when Candela gets a win. I want to know whether Tabata is improving (Did you know she’s 5-1 since July?) I pay attention when someone who normally works near the bottom of the card is moved into a more important match. I keep watching for the small developments that do not make wrestling news and will not be discussed by many people outside the building.

Then I write them down.

Theologians have a name for the season when the old consolations disappear. St. John of the Cross called it the dark night. He was speaking about the life of faith, not professional wrestling, and I do not want to reduce one of the great works of Christian spirituality to a complaint about modern booking.

Still, the old saint understood something about love.

There are seasons when the practices that once brought delight become dry. Prayer continues, but the warmth is gone. Familiar words no longer open the familiar door. God seems quiet, and the soul has to face whether it loved God or merely loved the comfort it received from Him.

The dark night is not simply a bad week or a period of sadness. It is what happens when the reward is stripped away and the practice remains.

That is what the spreadsheet has begun to look like to me: the practice left standing after much of the reward has gone. Wrestling does not stir me as reliably as it once did. The articles do not draw enough readers to provide the little rush of seeing the numbers climb. CMLL is not sending a thank-you note. Even so, I enter the date, the match, the partners, the opponents, the winner, and the loser.

A win-loss record is a strange thing to preserve in professional wrestling. The results are predetermined, choices made by somebody in an office and liable to be forgotten or contradicted without warning. Tracking them can feel like taking minutes at a meeting where everyone else has already gone home. I am writing down what was decided for people who may not remember deciding it.

The record tells me things, though. It shows who has been trusted, who has been overlooked, who is rising, who is treading water, and who keeps appearing every week without receiving much notice. It gives shape to the women’s division and helps me see patterns that disappear when one Friday is allowed to dissolve into the next.

Whether anyone else needs those patterns is another question.

I would like to say that the work is worthwhile because one reader somewhere will treasure it. That is the kind of reassurance a writer reaches for near the end of an essay when he is trying to make the uncertainty behave. I have no evidence that a future historian of lucha libre is waiting for my spreadsheet. I do not know that a young fan will discover these articles years from now and feel less alone. Most things posted on the internet are not buried treasure. They are simply buried.

It may be futile.

That possibility deserves to remain in the room.

Some interests belong to one stage of life and not another. Some work ought to be laid down because the time it requires is needed elsewhere. A man can continue an old practice long after he has forgotten why he began, checking the boxes and filling in the blanks because an unfinished row bothers him more than it should.

The hymn board does not settle the matter. Those six widows probably knew the hymnal better than the person changing the numbers. They may not have needed the board at all. The pastor might have wondered whether preparing a full sermon for such a small room made sense, especially when the roof leaked and one of the children had already crawled beneath the third pew.

Still, on Sunday morning, the numbers were there.

I do not know whether I love wrestling as I once did. I know that I care about these women in CMLL. I know that I enjoy some of the people I talk with on Discord and dislike the person I occasionally become while arguing with them. I know that part of me still wants a record showing that, on an ordinary Monday night at Arena Puebla, Astoreth was there.

There is another show tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after.. At some point my wife will walk past the office and see me checking a result in terrible Spanish. She will probably keep walking.

Why do I do this? Why do I even care?

I honestly don’t know.

But thanks for reading.

Maya World turned 24 on July 26. She also ⁠beat Hikaru Shida for the TBS Championship, which meant wrestling fans spent the next morning doing one of the things they do best: admiring a lovely moment, disliking the match, then finding a number to make the disagreement official.

The moment was wonderful. The match was not.

It ran too long and lost its rhythm. Shida appeared to be struggling, and the match eventually asked Maya to solve problems she does not yet know how to solve. Dave Meltzer gave it 2.25 stars. ⁠Cagematch users had it at 5.46 at the time of this writing. Even most sympathetic reviews arrived at roughly the same place: great moment, poor match.

AEW may have moved too fast, and we will not know for a while.

For now, that conclusion leaves most of the story out because Maya World is not a finished wrestler. Nor should she be. She is 24 and ⁠debuted les than four years ago. Wrestling fans can be strangely offended by the discovery that a 24-year-old is still 24.

AEW has identified a young wrestler who can already make a building want something for her, put a championship on that connection and chosen to let her learn the rest where everyone can see it. The company is developing its champion in public.

I think AEW may be too early with Maya.

But I do not think AEW got it wrong.

I expect her to become one of its top women and someone the company can build major programs around. The awkward part is that we are going to see the distance between here and there on television.

Her AEW career has changed twice because she answered a call intended for somebody else. In November, Maya and Hyan stepped into a Collision match against TayJay on short notice. They lost, came back for more dates and were still winless in AEW when ⁠Tony Khan signed them after the Worlds End preshow on Dec. 27.

Six months later, Sareee could not compete in the Owen Hart Cup. Maya got another call to step into a spot not originally intended for her.

She entered the tournament, upset Skye Blue and then pinned Athena, her trainer and mentor, in the semifinal. Less than three weeks after entering as a replacement, she stood across the ring from Mercedes Moné in the final at Forbidden Door.

Her rise has looked less like a rocket and more like the career of someone who keeps a bag packed. AEW did not carefully map every stop. The route changed, and Maya kept being ready when it did.

Where you think Maya World came out-of-nowhere depends on where you’re looking. ⁠Cagematch lists 211 Maya World matches, although its record begins months after her stated debut and is not complete. She held independent championships, worked constantly and kept training while AEW viewers knew her, if they knew her at all, as someone who lost to Thunder Rosa or Megan Bayne.

She signed with AEW and became TBS champion less than seven months later. Seven months is barely enough time for one AEW story to survive three schedule changes. For Maya, it covered the distance from unsigned substitute to champion.

In May, ⁠Athena told Fightful that Maya had “already surpassed where I was” at the same age. She remembered Maya worrying that a Fort Worth crowd would not react to her, then walking through the curtain to an eruption. Athena considers her must-watch now and wonders what she might become in two, five or 10 years.

Athena helped train Maya. Khan signs her checks and chose to put a belt on her. Neither is a neutral witness. Their praise is still useful because both keep returning to the same qualities: Maya listens, prepares, delivers and connects with people. Wrestling calls that last quality the “it factor,” which is what we say when we can feel something but would prefer not to complete the paperwork.

Maya is easy to root for without spending every second insisting that you root for her. She moves with speed, but her compact power is what tends to surprise people. A run of fallaway slams against Moné became a crowd rally. Her selling keeps the emotional direction of a match clear even when the sequence connecting two moments does not.

Moné was not only the right opponent for this story. She was the wrestler who made Maya want to do this. Maya has said that ⁠watching Sasha Banks in 2015 made her want to wrestle. Their Owen final lasted nearly 25 minutes. The beginning was rough. There were gear problems, awkward exchanges and stretches when Moné’s experience was plainly holding the match together.

Then they found the crowd.

Maya sold from underneath, kept creating a little more hope and reached a finishing stretch in which an outcome almost nobody expected briefly felt possible. She lost, as nearly everyone assumed she would. The crowd had still traveled somewhere with her. As of Aug. 3, ⁠Cagematch users have the match at 9.08 from 651 valid votes.

Meltzer attended the show and did not publish a rating. ⁠He wrote that the match felt different live and that he wanted to watch the television version before assigning a number. As of Aug. 3, that number has not appeared. Moné eventually ⁠joked that Khan should send him the link. This became a small wrestling emergency because we are quite capable of staring into an empty Cagematch cell until it becomes a moral crisis.

The blank does not tell us Meltzer hated the match or refused to rate Maya. He gave ⁠her semifinal with Athena 4.25 stars, the Shida match 2.25 and her first defense against Persephone 3.5. He rated her before Forbidden Door and after it. One match remains blank. Anything about motive is speculation — and there’s been plenty of that. I’m not here to offer any more.

What I will say is this: Ratings are not lab results, but together these matches reveal a useful pattern. Maya can already participate in something great. She does not yet produce that level from opponent to opponent or rescue a match once it starts drifting. Athena and Moné helped structure matches around a younger opponent, but Maya still had to sell, keep pace, handle the pressure and make the crowd believe. She held up her end in both. Redemption showed how much work remains when an opponent cannot supply that structure. The problem is AEW has many more wrestlers similar to Shida than Mercedes.

Here’s what I’ve noticed.

Maya can pause too long in transitions. You can sometimes see her and her opponent discussing what comes next. Her offense moves among speed, compact power and high-flying without always feeling like one wrestler’s distinct idea. Her character is still mostly the earnest young underdog, which works beautifully when she is chasing Mercedes and becomes harder to sustain when she is the champion being chased.

Most importantly, we do not know whether she can control the pace when a match drifts or help an opponent through a difficult night. Shida appeared to be having one at Redemption. Maya could not find a way to repair the match around her. A champion will eventually be asked to do that.

Three nights later, she had a much better match with Persephone. ⁠Meltzer gave it 3.5 stars, and the Detroit crowd stayed with Maya. It was only one match, but it kept Redemption from becoming the only recent evidence.

The people who think AEW moved too fast have a case. A title is not an internship. It asks a wrestler to anchor matches, promos and programs. AEW could have left Maya in ROH, kept her beside Hyan and waited until her floor rose closer to her ceiling. It matters, though, that AEW gave her the TBS title. ⁠Willow Nightingale and Mercedes Moné gave the championship weight, and Moné sometimes made it feel like the most important women’s title in the company. It is a meaningful secondary title, capable of carrying a major program without declaring its holder the best woman in AEW.

That makes Lex Luger a useful historical comparison. He was ⁠less than two years into his career when he won the United States title in 1987. His physical gifts were obvious. The rest was still under construction. He was placed beside Ric Flair, Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard, worked with Nikita Koloff and Dusty Rhodes, and held a title important enough to establish him without requiring him to be finished.

Luger never became one of the world’s great technical wrestlers, but he became a top star and a world champion. He did not need to turn into Ric Flair for the United States title bet to work.

Luger shows the range of what this kind of title reign can produce. It gives a developing wrestler meaningful television time, better opponents and consequences while she learns, but it cannot decide the result.

Maya remains an encouraging wager because the evidence keeps changing. Her best nights are no longer hypothetical, and the weaknesses are easy enough to name: pacing, transitions, move selection and recovering when the plan stops working. Those problems will take time and good coaching. Meanwhile, people already care about her, which is the part wrestling schools have the hardest time teaching. She will do the remaining work with a belt on her shoulder and cameras running.

Learning in public would be complicated enough on its own. Maya is also a Black woman receiving a prominent opportunity in a fan culture that has not always extended Black women the same patience.

That does not make every criticism of her racist. The Shida match deserves criticism, and calling a clumsy transition clumsy is simply describing what happened. Taking Maya seriously requires honesty about what is not working. The problem begins when a bad transition becomes evidence that she never deserved the opportunity.

Wrestling already has a familiar vocabulary for young men given secondary championships: prospect, investment, upside. Luger had critics. Sammy certainly did. Their title wins are still legible as bets on the future. Some of Maya’s critics reached for a different word. Under ⁠one of AEW’s own posts after she won the championship, one comment read “DEI push.” ⁠An earlier clip drew “Quit pushing her due to DEI.” Two comments do not represent a fan base, and it would be dishonest to pretend they do. They establish something narrower: at least some people evaluating Maya have announced a standard that has nothing to do with her footwork.

Black women in wrestling have been describing unequal standards for years. ⁠Athena once talked about an independent scene where it seemed there was room for one Black woman per state, as if a promoter could fill a slot and consider the matter settled. In ⁠Lyric Swinton’s survey of women working in wrestling media, women described racist and sexist scrutiny, recurring demands to prove they belonged, and harsher reactions to opinions their male peers also expressed. It is not the same job Maya performs, but it is part of the same culture discussing her.

Maya has talked about what representation meant to her as a fan. ⁠In 2024, she described how much it meant to see two Black women face each other on an AEW pay-per-view and hoped they would be trusted with the main event. One had inspired her to wrestle. The other, Maya said, had fought for everything she received.

The roster is more diverse than it was when Athena started, but the old habits did not all leave with the old rosters. Young men are often granted time when they are called green. For a Black woman, the same word can become evidence against the push itself. One mistake starts a larger argument about whether she should have been given the opportunity at all.

I am a white man raising a Black daughter. I can tell when a wrestling transition looks clumsy from my couch in Ohio. I cannot tell Maya what it feels like to be a Black woman doing that work on national television. I will never see the world through her eyes or my daughter’s. Raising my daughter has not given me their experience by proxy. Loving her does not make me an authority on what she will encounter. It has made me listen more closely. Mostly, it has shown me how much I do not know.

My wife and I named our daughter after another Black woman who appears on AEW television. Wrestling will be on our television throughout her childhood, whether she requests that inheritance or not. We wanted her to see someone on the screen who looked like her, someone she could grow up watching and perhaps look up to.

That does not make Maya (or any other wrestler) responsible for my daughter’s self-image, and it does not oblige anyone to pretend her bad matches are good. It means I pay attention to who is allowed to appear, struggle, improve and remain visible. If every Black woman on television has to be flawless to stay there, nobody in the division would last long under that rule.

Black women deserve the ordinary span of a wrestling career. They should be allowed to be young, uneven, promising, overpushed, underpushed, rough on Sunday and better by Wednesday. Maya does not need a lower standard because my daughter might watch her. She deserves an honest standard, one that accounts for where she is in her career and does not turn every mistake into a referendum on whether she should be there.

Maya World is not finished, and the title did not change that when Shida stayed down for three. It means the work will happen in front of more people. AEW has given her better opponents, higher expectations and less room to hide. She will have great nights and probably another night like Redemption. ⁠She says she still trains every week, and she is going to need every one of those sessions.

Four years from now, we may decide AEW moved too fast. I do not think we will. I expect Maya World to be one of the women the company builds around. We may also look back at this title reign and wonder why so many of us were in such a hurry to decide what a 24-year-old had already become.

Wrestling is the only art form I know of where everybody involved has agreed ahead of time how it ends, and they still don’t always get it right.

Sit with that a minute.

The finish is written down. Everyone in the ring knows it. Two people who have done this for years, who have taken ten thousand bumps between them, who could hit a hiptoss in their sleep and probably have, will look at each other across eight feet of canvas and somehow arrive at a moment where one of them is standing there waiting for a clothesline that is not coming, and the other one is already on the mat selling a clothesline that never arrived, and eighteen thousand people are watching, and the referee is making a face like this was the plan all along.

That’s a botch.

And I want to say up front that I love them. Not the dangerous ones, nobody wants to see anybody get hurt. But the small human ones, where the machinery shows through for half a second. There’s an honesty in a botch you can’t get anywhere else in the business. Everything else in wrestling is cooperation. A botch is the one moment when nobody is cooperating with anybody, including gravity.

The greatest of all time, and I will not be taking questions, remains The Shockmaster. Big debut. Big reveal. Big man supposed to come crashing through a wall like the wrath of God. He came through the wall all right, then caught his boot on the two-by-four at the bottom of it, went down face first, and his glitter stormtrooper helmet came off and rolled away across the floor like a hubcap off a Buick.

My grandmother had a phrase for moments like that. She’d say a thing had “gone sideways in front of company.” That’s a botch. That’s exactly a botch.

Now, I bring all this up because late last year I sat down and watched Candela and Tabata have a wrestling match, and then I voted it worst match of the year, and I have not entirely stopped thinking about it since.

I don’t say that to be mean. I want to be careful here, because those are two women doing a hard job in front of a live crowd, and I have never taken a bump in my life. My knees pop when I stand up from a folding chair. But I have watched a lot of lucha libre and I have never seen two people spend that much time not quite finding each other. It was like watching somebody try to parallel park a pontoon boat. Every spot showed up about a half-beat after it was invited. There’s a sequence in the middle I rewound three separate times and I still could not tell you what it was meant to be. A monkey flip? A prayer? Both at once?

Anyway. I filed it away. I made my note in my little spreadsheet. I felt, if I’m honest, a certain amount of expertise about the luchadora business.

And then Friday night happened.

But before I talk about Friday night, let’s talk about predictions for a minute, because predictions are a wonderful racket. The people who make them almost never have to pay for them.

The Chicago Daily Tribune printed DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN in letters four inches tall and stacked it on newsstands, and the only real consequence was that Harry Truman got the best photograph of his life out of the deal. A man at Decca Records listened to four young fellas from Liverpool and passed, on the grounds that guitar groups were on the way out. Every February we haul a rodent out of a hole in Pennsylvania while a man in a top hat holds him aloft, and then we all agree to treat his opinion on the jet stream as a matter of public record. Nobody has ever gone back and audited the groundhog.

That groundhog has tenure.

The forecast is always more confident than the weather. Always has been.

I mention this because last week I sat down and wrote a few thousand words explaining, with numbers, why Tessa Blanchard was going to beat Persephone for the CMLL World Women’s Championship.

I had a case, too. Tessa was 32-9. Thirteen straight wins. She’d pinned Persephone on three separate Fridays in July, which in most lines of work would be considered a pattern. She’d beaten Lluvia clean. The champion had gone a whole month without a CMLL match and had been defending that belt in Jacksonville and Las Vegas and Rio Rancho like a woman with an excellent travel agent. I had a whole section arguing the belt had become a credential in somebody else’s story.

Friday night in Arena México, Persephone hit a crucifix bomb. Tessa kicked out — a real one, the kind where the building makes that noise. Then Persephone hit a ripcord lariat, climbed up top, came down with a moonsault, and pinned her clean in the middle of the ring.

Her fourth defense.

No shenanigans.

No run-in, no ref bump, no mystery figure in a hood. J

ust a champion beating a challenger in a very good wrestling match in front of people who paid money to be there.

And here’s the part that pains me to write, but I’m going to anyway.

I was wrong.

Not partly wrong.

Not wrong-for-the-right-reasons wrong.

Wrong like a man who studies the sky, tells the whole family to leave the umbrellas in the hall closet, and then stands in the church parking lot in a downpour while everybody watches him from inside the van.

So let me lay out the week I built my whole argument around. Wednesday: the champion goes north, comes up short, loses in Detroit. Friday: she comes home to Arena México and beats my pick clean as a whistle in front of her own people.

I wasn’t in the match, and still Persephone made me look silly. There’s a sermon in that somewhere and I’m not going to preach it.

Yet.

I am man enough to admit when I am wrong.

This time.

I want to be clear this isn’t a general policy.

It’s a limited-time offer.

Sundays only.

Not valid in all fifty states.

Ask my wife, who will tell you the last time I admitted I was wrong about directions we were somewhere in western Pennsylvania and it was 2019.

And listen, I dhad a moment Friday night.

A dark night of the soul, as we say in the trade.

Watching that moonsault come down, thinking about the better part of a year I’ve spent on this thing. Four hundred and some matches logged. And after all that counting, the one prediction anybody was going to remember, I got wrong.

A fella could just watch the matches. A fella could just enjoy things. I understand there are people out there watching lucha libre with a cold drink and no opinions whatsoever and I’m told they sleep like babies.

But here’s why I keep at it.

When I started The Luchadora Project earlier this year, I wrote that it was an attempt to pay attention on purpose. That’s still the whole of it. Not to be an authority — I’m not a reporter, I’ve got no access, I don’t know anybody. Just to point a light at a corner of wrestling where the light mostly doesn’t reach.

Because it doesn’t. Japanese women’s wrestling has a devoted following that documents everything. American women’s wrestling gets argued about daily by people with podcasts and strong feelings. The luchadoras of CMLL exist in a quieter room. Matches happen. Performances come and go. Somebody has the best night of her career on a Monday in Arena Pueblo in front of four hundred people, and by Thursday it’s gone, and nobody wrote it down.

I could tell you which luchadora worked the most matches this year, because I could go look it up. That’s not the point and never was. The point is that I think these women deserve a brighter spotlight than they’ve been given. Somebody was out there having the year of her life and the record of it lived nowhere but in the memory of whoever happened to be in the building that night.

So Persephone won on Friday. She’s had that belt since March, and she has now turned back Lacey Lane, Billie Starkz, and Tessa Blanchard twice to keep it. That’s a real reign. That deserves to be seen and considered and remembered, and it deserves it just as much from the fella who spent all week predicting it would end.

Especially from him, come to think of it. Wouldn’t be much of a record if I only kept the parts that made me look smart.

So here’s where I land.

I was wrong. It won’t be the last time. I’ve got a spreadsheet full of proof that I’m capable of being wrong in ways I haven’t even invented yet.

The spreadsheet knows what happened, but it has never once known what’s going to happen, and I keep having to learn that, and I expect I’ll keep on learning it.

Never trust a man who’s never had to run a correction.

Everybody botches. The wrestlers botch in front of eighteen thousand people. I botched in front of a website with a comment section. Only one of us had to take a bump for it, and it wasn’t me.

Tessa Blanchard has now lost twice to Persephone this year and I picked her both times, which means at this point I’m not an analyst, I’m a curse.

And if this feud is going to continue — and based on what happened Sunday night in Arena Mexico, I think it will — then I’ve got plenty of runway left to be wrong again.

I’ll be wrong again. Count on it.

But I’m going to keep shining a light on the luchadoras.

That part I’ve got right.

Okay, so, the tree.

We have to start with the tree, because the spreadsheet will tell you almost everything about Tessa Blanchard’s place in CMLL right now, but it cannot explain the tree.

December 2025. Arena México has been dressed for Christmas. Fake snow on the portico. Ornaments painted with the masks of the roster. A Douglas fir standing in the Cathedral, ninety-two years of lucha libre history hanging from its branches like tinsel.

The broadcast goes out on YouTube and Facebook. Wrestlers file through for interviews and keep getting asked about ensalada de manzana—apple salad—because in Mexico at Christmas there is always apple salad. It becomes the running joke of the stream: a procession of enormous, violent people getting sentimental about dessert.

Then the host announces her.

Ha llegado la gringa más mexicana.

The most Mexican gringa has arrived.

Tessa Blanchard steps into the frame beside Esfinge and says the thing that has become her public grammar in CMLL: that walking down these stairs and standing in this building feels like coming home.

Yo amo México y México me ama.

I love Mexico, and Mexico loves me.

Then the remote comes out. One button, red. Salvador Lutteroth, CMLL’s president, stands at the center of the roster. Masks, sweaters, title belts. The countdown begins.

Diez, nueve, ocho.

Tessa’s thumb goes down on the button.

The tree came alive. The crowd cheered. CMLL had itself a Christmas card.

It also had itself a metaphor.

One woman. One switch. Every light at once.

By then, CMLL’s investment in Tessa was already obvious. What has happened since has removed any remaining subtlety. She has been introduced, protected and promoted less like one of the Amazonas than as the woman around whom the Amazonas are being arranged.

On Friday, she challenges Persephone for the CMLL World Women’s Championship in Arena México.

The question is not whether Tessa can credibly win it.

She can.

The question is whether CMLL understands the difference between making Tessa Blanchard its champion and making Tessa Blanchard its women’s division.

Because those are two different decisions.

The Part the Spreadsheet Can See

The numbers are almost comically straightforward.

Through July 24, Tessa is 32–9 across 41 tracked CMLL matches in 2026. She is tied with Lluvia for the most wins among the Amazonas and owns the best winning percentage of any woman with at least 20 appearances. She has been on the winning side in 13 consecutive tracked matches.

This is not the résumé of a challenger who caught fire for three weeks so the promotion could manufacture a title match. It is the résumé of a champion waiting for someone to hand her the belt.

Persephone, by comparison, is 15–10 in 25 tracked CMLL matches. That record is not bad, particularly for a ruda working a schedule filled with tags. But it does tell us something about the hierarchy CMLL has been establishing. Tessa has not merely been winning more frequently than the champion. She has been present more often, protected more carefully and positioned more deliberately.

Still, the spreadsheet only gets us so far.

Lluvia has 32 wins too.

Same number. Forty-two matches to Tessa’s forty-one. By any measure the spreadsheet can produce, the two of them have had the same year.

CMLL did not ask Lluvia to light the Christmas tree.

That is the entire problem in one sentence, and it is worth sitting with before we go any further. If this were purely a question of production, the promotion would be choosing between two wrestlers with identical output. It isn’t choosing between them. It hasn’t been for months. One of them is a lifer, a homegrown star, one half of the reigning tag champions, married into the company’s history. The other one arrived from outside, left once already, and came back—and she is the one the company put in front of the tree, in the promotional images, at the center of the roster.

Numbers can make the case for a championship. They cannot explain why a company chooses one wrestler to symbolize an entire division.

For that, look at Persephone.

Persephone is not absent from CMLL. She works Arena México. She has been in the program with Tessa all summer. But the shape of her year is unmistakable, and one detail states it more plainly than any argument I could build around it: in May, she did not wrestle a single tracked CMLL match. Not a light month. A month.

The geography of her title reign says the rest.

Persephone won the belt from Mercedes Moné in Arena México on March 6. Her first defense came against Lacey Lane on an ROH taping in Jacksonville. Her second came against Tessa at CMLL’s Las Vegas event. Her third came against Billie Starkz on AEW Collision in New Mexico. Friday will be her first defense inside Arena México since she won the championship there nearly five months ago.

Meanwhile, her most visible singles progression has happened in AEW. Six days after beating Mercedes, she challenged Willow Nightingale for the TBS Championship. She entered the Owen Hart tournament. She beat Julia Hart in a TBS title qualifier. She wrestled in the six-way to crown a new champion. Even the Starkz defense was framed partly as a step toward Persephone becoming a double champion in AEW.

And it is still happening this week. Days before she defends the CMLL World Women’s Championship in Arena México—her first defense in that building in nearly five months—Persephone challenges Maya World for the AEW TBS Championship.

Read those two bookings in sequence, because CMLL essentially has to. In the same week, the reigning CMLL World Women’s Champion is chasing another company’s television title and finally defending her own at home. One of those matches advances her story. The other one resolves a program CMLL has spent the summer building.

That does not make her disloyal. It makes her a modern dual-company wrestler.

But it does clarify what the championship has become, and the answer has less to do with Persephone than with the belt itself.

In AEW, “CMLL World Women’s Champion” functions as a credential. It is the phrase that establishes Persephone as a plausible threat to AEW gold—the international bona fide that makes a TBS title challenge feel earned. The title is doing narrative work. It is simply doing that work in service of a story that resolves on somebody else’s television, for somebody else’s audience, toward somebody else’s championship.

This is the part that should worry CMLL, because it has happened before, and recently, and worse.

Zeuxis held this championship for 278 days—a long, homegrown, Arena México reign, the kind that builds a division. It ended at Grand Slam Mexico, a co-produced AEW show, when Mercedes Moné took the belt. Moné then held it for 261 days and three defenses, one of which happened on AEW Collision rather than a CMLL card. During those eight months, the CMLL World Women’s Championship traveled the world as one item in a belt-collector gimmick that peaked at thirteen simultaneous titles. It was not the prize. It was an accessory. A crown in The CEO’s collection.

CMLL’s answer to that was correct, and worth crediting: when Moné finally lost the belt, she lost it to a homegrown talent. Persephone had earned the shot, and she won it in the Cathedral, in the main event of the promotion’s biggest all-women’s show. The handoff was the right call.

It also did not solve the underlying problem, because the wrestler CMLL elevated had already signed a dual contract in January. The belt came home in March and started commuting again almost immediately.

So trace the last two years of this title and what you find is not disloyalty on anyone’s part. It is a championship whose meaning keeps getting determined somewhere other than the building it belongs to. First as a collector’s item. Now as a credential. In both cases, the story that gives the belt its significance in any given month is a story CMLL is not writing.

That distinction matters more than the win-loss record.

CMLL has a world champion. What it has not had, for a while now, is a world championship whose meaning it controls.

The Belt Has Always Had A Passport

Before anyone gets too precious about CMLL potentially putting its women’s world championship on a gringa, it is worth opening the title history.

The first CMLL World Women’s Champion was Bull Nakano.

Not the first foreign champion. The first champion, period.

The title has since been held by Akira Hokuto, Mariko Yoshida, Hiroka, Syuri, Panama’s Dalys la Caribeña, Chile’s Stephanie Vaquer, Willow Nightingale and Mercedes Moné. Its recent lineage has moved from Vaquer to Willow to Zeuxis to Mercedes to Persephone.

The “World” in the championship’s name has frequently been literal. Foreign champions are not an intrusion into this belt’s history. They are part of its grammar.

A Tessa victory, then, would not represent some radical Americanization of the Amazonas. Willow and Mercedes have already held the championship. Persephone herself is Mexican-American. CMLL’s women’s world title has often functioned as the promotion’s passport belt: the championship most comfortable crossing borders, appearing in other promotions and connecting Arena México to women’s wrestling elsewhere.

The historical problem has not been nationality.

It has been control.

In 1996, CMLL stripped Akira Hokuto after she appeared on WCW Monday Nitro. In 2024, Stephanie Vaquer was stripped when she left for WWE. Willow then won the vacant title in San Jose. Mercedes won it on an AEW show co-produced with CMLL. Persephone’s first three defenses have occurred in Jacksonville, Las Vegas and Rio Rancho.

The belt traveling is part of its identity. The belt repeatedly becoming entangled in another company’s plans is part of its history too.

CMLL has spent the last few years confronting a basic problem: the more internationally valuable an Amazona becomes, the harder it may be for CMLL to keep her story centered in CMLL.

Tessa offers a possible solution.

And this is where the argument becomes uncomfortable.

To my eye, Tessa is not especially likely to receive the call from WWE or AEW. Nothing in wrestling is permanent, and no one outside those companies can know what they will do. But they have had years, multiple free-agent windows and plenty of opportunities to sign her. Neither has.

Readers of this project know why. There is no need to retry the entire case from 2020 every time Tessa’s name appears. The history is known. So are the allegations, the denials and the reasons her name remains radioactive in certain parts of the industry.

At some point, though, the absence of a call becomes evidence.

That gives Tessa a peculiar kind of value to CMLL. She possesses the résumé, name recognition and in-ring ability of a wrestler who should be attractive to either American giant, but she carries baggage that makes both companies reluctant to touch her.

Her limited market elsewhere begins to function like exclusivity.

This is not theoretical. Tessa has already shown CMLL that she can leave. In December 2024, she departed for TNA while holding the CMLL World Women’s Tag Team Championship with Lluvia, forcing the promotion to vacate the belts.

CMLL’s answer to that, when she came back, was to book the betrayal directly. Her first match on returning—October 10, 2025, Arena México, eleven months after walking out—was a singles match against Lluvia. Not a soft landing against a stranger. The partner she left holding the bag, on night one, in front of the building that remembered.

That should tell you how deliberate this has been from the beginning. CMLL did not stumble into a Tessa Blanchard push. It walked her back through the exact door she had slammed, with the exact person she had slammed it on, and let the crowd decide in real time. The crowd cheered her. The company has been building on that answer ever since.

The more recent evidence points the same direction. When TNA asked her to choose between TNA and CMLL this summer, Tessa says she chose CMLL. She said her life was in Mexico. She called herself the Mexican gringa.

Both facts belong in the evaluation.

Tessa left CMLL holding a championship.

Tessa later chose CMLL over the company she left it for.

That does not make her unpoachable. It does make her a safer bet than a champion whose career is increasingly being integrated into AEW television.

CMLL may have found a market inefficiency: an elite wrestler whom the two richest companies in the United States appear unwilling to pursue.

Sports teams build contenders this way all the time. A player becomes available because every other organization is scared of the injury history, the personality, the contract or the headlines. One team decides the production is worth the risk. Sometimes that team looks smarter than everybody else.

Sometimes it becomes so invested in proving everybody else wrong that it stops noticing what the player is costing it.

That is the line CMLL is walking.

The Risk Begins After The Win

If Tessa wins Friday, I will not call the decision indefensible.

Her results justify it. Persephone’s increasingly AEW-centered trajectory helps justify it. A gringa wearing this particular belt is not a violation of CMLL tradition—the title history settles that.

The risk is everything CMLL might ask the victory to mean.

Tessa is not being presented as an American ruda who arrived to steal a Mexican championship. CMLL has wrapped her in the language of belonging. It has made her commitment to Mexico part of the product. It has placed her at the center of public events and promotional imagery. It has encouraged the idea that this is not simply a successful foreign wrestler, but someone who has finally found the country and company that understand her.

That is a larger endorsement than putting a belt around her waist.

It turns every match into another chapter in the rehabilitation of Tessa Blanchard. Every opponent risks becoming a supporting character in that story: the woman who challenged Tessa, the woman who validated Tessa, the woman Tessa elevated, the woman who eventually proved worthy of succeeding Tessa.

The division stops generating stories of its own. It becomes one long story about her.

That is what it means to make someone the division.

And we already know what that costs, because this project has spent a year documenting the other end of it. The reason CMLL needs a Tessa Blanchard is that it has never built a reliable structure for developing and keeping its own women. Vaquer left. La Catalina walked. Kira—twenty-five years old, second-generation, arguably the most talented young Amazona on the roster—has spent this year losing to Candela and working third from the top on Fridays while imports collect the featured slots.

A division that cannot develop its own answer will eventually buy one. That is not a moral failure. It is a structural one, and Friday is what it looks like when the bill comes due.

The danger exists even if Tessa does everything right.

She can be dependable. She can have excellent matches. She can honor her commitments. She can make CMLL’s gamble look brilliant. None of that changes the structural risk of allowing one wrestler to become the division’s identity, drawing card, international résumé and proof of concept all at once.

CMLL does not need to choose between using Tessa and protecting the division from dependence on her. It can put the championship on her and still build opponents who possess identities independent of her. It can use her name to create new stars without making proximity to Tessa the only measure of their importance. It can let her stand at the center without allowing everyone else to disappear into the background.

It can, in other words, put the belt on Tessa Blanchard and put Kira in a real program in the same month.

But that requires CMLL to understand why this relationship works.

Tessa did not become the most valuable Amazona merely because Mexico recognized something the United States failed to see. She also became especially valuable because the largest American companies have apparently decided the risk is not worth taking.

For CMLL, that creates opportunity.

It does not erase the risk.

Friday night, Tessa Blanchard may become CMLL World Women’s Champion. If she does, the booking will be easy to defend. The numbers are there. The history is there. The opponent’s trajectory is there.

The real test begins Saturday morning, when CMLL has to decide what exactly it crowned.

Last Christmas, the company placed one red button in Tessa’s hand and every light in the plaza answered.

That is a beautiful way to light a tree.

It is a dangerous way to wire a division.

You can watch Kira and know something immediately.

She’s a problem.

Not a problem like a difficult worker. A problem like “this person is going to be a star, and whoever fails to figure that out is going to spend the next decade explaining why they let it happen on their watch.” It’s the feeling I get every time I watch her. She has an aerial vocabulary built across fourteen years of competition. She has the ability to make a live crowd feel the setup before the move lands. You stop what you’re half-doing and actually watch.

Let me be precise about why I think she’s special, because calling her a “promising prospect” doesn’t cover it. Kira is twenty-five years old and has been doing this since she was a child — the daughter of Gran Jefe III, part of the Comarca Lagunera wrestling family La Tribu Lagunera, sister to wrestlers, raised in the business and trained inside it. Her ability isn’t a learned imitation of someone else’s style. It’s her native language, built over a decade of competition, and refined through hundreds of matches on every kind of show.

She is, based on my research, one of a small handful of luchadoras doing a 450 splash as a legitimate finish, and she’s doing it with the credibility that comes from a crowd that believes it means something. The Cagematch community notices it, too. Over a year ago, a user wrote, “One of the most promising talents in CMLL women roster right now. With tons of potential and one of the most interesting movesets in CMLL’s women division… it’s about time that she becomes really something else.”

It’s about time.

That was thirteen months ago. She is still waiting.

This is not really a story about one wrestler being underused, though it is that. It’s a story about what one wrestler’s usage reveals — about a division that has never been a priority, a development model that keeps producing the same outcome, and a deadline that has never existed before now.

A Division That Was Never the Priority

The honest version of CMLL’s relationship with its women’s division has to start here: it has never been the priority.

This is documented history, not a hot take. After Lady Apache’s departure in 2000, women’s wrestling in CMLL entered a period of effective dormancy that lasted roughly five years. When the division revived, it revived largely around Dark Angel — a Canadian wrestler whose work in Arena México generated enough authentic interest that the promotion had to respond to it. The pattern was established early: the division’s credibility would depend, again and again, on forces external to CMLL rather than on any development structure inside the building.

Women’s Month in October and Noche de las Amazonas in March are the products of that history — annual checkpoints that create the impression of commitment without requiring a sustained one. They’re not nothing; they produce real shows with real stakes. But they’re not a pipeline either.

What’s changed in 2026 is the cost of that structural gap. Because AAA is now a TKO promotion, and the talent pipeline TKO has built runs directly through CMLL’s women’s division. The model that papered over the development problem for decades now comes with a deadline it never had before. To understand that deadline, you have to trace what happened to the last four women who carried this division.

The Vaquer Problem

Stephanie Vaquer was CMLL’s women’s division for a sustained stretch. The Campeona Universal. The inaugural World Women’s Tag champion alongside Zeuxis. The reason the title felt like something worth holding during the years she held it. CMLL invested in her consistently, built real feuds around her, and the work paid off: she became the most credible women’s star the promotion had produced in years.

In 2025, NXT signed her.

She is now one of the most discussed women in WWE. CMLL absorbed the loss, changed nothing about how they build and protect their next women’s star, and waited for the next break to arrive.

It arrived in two pieces, almost simultaneously.

The Moné Problem

The first piece was Mercedes Moné.

CMLL needed a centerpiece in Vaquer’s absence and solved the problem the way they had solved it before: they borrowed one. Moné won the CMLL Women’s World Championship at Grand Slam Mexico — a co-produced AEW show — defeating Zeuxis, who had been carrying a 278-day homegrown reign. She then held the title for 261 days — eight months, three defenses. Those defenses were against La Catalina at Fantastica Mania Mexico, Persephone at the October 17 Viernes Espectacular during Women’s Month, and Olympia — that last one on AEW Collision, not at a CMLL show.

During those eight months, the belt traveled the world as one piece of Moné’s belt-collector gimmick alongside the AEW TBS Championship, the RevPro Undisputed British Women’s Championship, the EWA Women’s Championship, and titles from Poland, Austria, Denmark, Canada, and Malaysia — a collection that peaked at thirteen simultaneously and broke Último Dragón’s record for the most titles held at once. The CMLL Women’s Championship was one more crown in The CEO’s gimmick.

To CMLL’s credit: when Moné finally dropped the title, she dropped it to a homegrown talent. Persephone had pushed her in that October defense, earned the credibility, and got the shot at Noche de las Amazonas on March 6. CMLL used eight months of borrowed centerpiece to eventually elevate one of their own. The handoff landed.

Which brought its own complications.

The Persephone Problem

Persephone winning the Women’s World Championship from Moné at Noche de las Amazonas on March 6 was the right call, and CMLL deserves credit for it. She built herself into the most credible contender the division had. The match worked, the crowd was there for it, the finish landed. Of everything discussed in this piece, that decision is where CMLL got it right.

The complication is what happened next, and it’s worth tracing carefully.

Persephone signed a dual AEW/CMLL contract in January 2026. She was, by any measure, a success story — a twenty-four-year-old from El Paso who had built herself through CMLL into someone AEW wanted on contract. On December 5, 2025, three months before she won the title, she was in the main event of ROH Final Battle, challenging Athena for the ROH Women’s World Championship.

She lost.

On March 11, five days after winning the CMLL title, she challenged Willow Nightingale for the AEW TBS Championship on Dynamite — a real moment, the new CMLL champion on national television.

She lost on a backslide.

Then, on the April 22 Collision tapings in Portland, her team lost to Skye Blue and Thekla after Julia Hart blew black mist into Persephone’s eyes, with Blue getting the pin.⁷ Dave Meltzer reported in the Wrestling Observer that the mist finish was a storyline cover for a genuine injury Persephone had been dealing with — and that prior to the injury, AEW had been planning a Women’s World Title match between Persephone and Thekla at Double or Nothing.

The picture this paints is more complicated than “CMLL’s champion is thriving in AEW.” Persephone is positioned strongly and clearly valued by both promotions. She is also, on her AEW record this year, 0-for-every-major-singles-opportunity she’s been given. The CMLL Women’s World Championship spent 2026 as a prop in an AEW storyline that was going to pay off in an AEW Women’s World Title match — a match that didn’t happen because she got hurt. The belt has not anchored a CMLL narrative in months. The champion’s story belongs to another company, and it didn’t even resolve in her favor there.

Putting the title on Persephone was right. The structural problem isn’t the decision — it’s that the decision immediately fed into the same pattern as every decision before it. Another star made in Arena México, another story told somewhere else.

The Catalina Problem

La Catalina is the cautionary tale. Not as a story that ended badly for her — it didn’t, she’s thriving in AAA and the future is bright — but as a story that ended badly for CMLL. Because CMLL had everything it needed with Catalina, let it slip away through a combination of structural neglect and borrowed-talent overcrowding, and is now positioned to do the exact same thing to Kira. The playbook is identical. The clock is running faster.

Catalina came up in WWE, working NXT from 2019 to 2021 under the name Carolina against the likes of Bianca Belair, Candice LeRae, and Xia Li. The night after her November 2021 release, she posted on social media under her WWE name, Katrina Cortez:

Thirty days’ notice. Everything she’d built, sold.

In a 2022 interview with POST Wrestling, she described the real cost of that period — the pressure to meet WWE’s body standards, the physical toll she paid trying to conform, the online criticism that came anyway, most of it from fellow Chileans. “I felt the weight of being the first Chilean,” she said, “and I felt that I was doing it wrong, but now I see it and I know it was not like that.” She was pragmatic about the release itself — she’d seen the mass layoffs coming and assumed she was next. The worst part, she said, wasn’t the firing. It was that her father had flown from Chile to visit her, and was on a plane home the same day she got the call.

There’s an irony buried in that WWE tenure. The person who told her about Mexico, about AAA, about CMLL — who became something like a wrestling father figure to her at the Performance Center — was Santos Escobar. The system that ultimately discarded her was also, in a roundabout way, the system that pointed her toward where she’d end up.

After leaving, she told POST Wrestling:

She went home to Chile, rebuilt, and eventually landed at CMLL in 2023 — not through any pipeline the promotion built. As thecubsfan — who runs luchablog at thecubsfan.com, the most thorough English-language record of CMLL results in existence — noted after her departure, she arrived “because Sarah Stock and Taya Valkyrie pointed her toward CMLL.” CMLL caught a break and capitalized on it: the Campeona Universal, a years-long rivalry with Vaquer that gave the division its best sustained heat in years, a title match against Moné at Fantastica Mania 2025 in front of a full Arena México.

Then the AEW working relationship expanded, AEW women began filling out CMLL cards with more frequency, and Catalina’s positioning compressed. Title matches became mid-card tags. Mid-card tags became curtain. Her contract expired April 1. She didn’t renew. CMLL announced the split April 7.

On April 11 she arrived in AAA in a pink car and crashed Flammer’s Reina de Reinas celebration. Immediately positioned as the next title challenger.

This is a woman who left WWE because it wasn’t giving her opportunity, who said publicly she wanted to wrestle abroad again — and who, when the authentic lucha promotion stopped making room for her, walked back toward the WWE ecosystem because it was. She didn’t go back for the brand. She went back for the booking. The “authentic lucha” argument has a hard time competing with a pink car entrance and a title shot on week one. The wall is still the wall whether or not it’s properly plastered.

“Catalina was a young person who felt young in a promotion that likes feeling old and a women’s division that is even older,” thecubsfan wrote the morning after her departure. She was, he said, “wallpaper over a CMLL problem that still isn’t fixed.”

The wallpaper is in AAA now. The wall still needs fixing.

And in the same post, Cubsfan added the sentence that should be printed and pinned somewhere in CMLL’s booking office: “You can see her influence on Skadi and Kira, and part of that is why I think Kira is the next logical WWE target.”

CMLL has seen this play before. The question is if they care enough to stop it.

Who is Actually Being Featured

The mechanism that compressed Catalina is still running. You can read it off the 2026 cards.

CMLL’s women’s division is currently topped by Persephone, who holds the World Women’s Championship and a dual AEW contract. Below her: Thunder Rosa, who signed her own dual AEW/CMLL contract on April 3 and has appeared at Arena México-level shows eight times in the ten weeks since — Friday Espectaculars, the 83rd Anniversary of Arena Coliseo, Saturday Coliseos, Domingo Familiars. Alongside Rosa: Las Chicas Indomables (Lluvia and La Jarochita), the World Women’s Tag champions, who are in everything. Zeuxis, who won the Copa 70. Aniversario De La Arena México De Amazonas in April — an eight-woman tournament at the biggest show CMLL ran in the first half of the year — and then won the Torneo Internacional De Amazons in Guanajuato in June. India Sioux, the CMLL Japan Women’s Champion, who appears in every meaningful tournament. And Tessa Blanchard, who is — worth noting — not even under CMLL contract, a TNA talent who has been taking bookings since October 2025, and who as of this week received her TNA release amid the ongoing cross-promotional cold war. Blanchard got a spot in that Copa 70. Aniversario tournament. She got a title shot against Persephone over WrestleMania weekend.

That is the division’s top tier: two dual-contract AEW signings, the tag champions, the year’s most decorated tournament winner, the Japan champion, and an unsigned outside worker collecting tournament spots and title matches.

And then there is Kira, the woman CMLL chose to send to Japan first.

Before her Stardom debut, she told Fightful: “I have a lot of weight on my shoulders, a lot of positive energy. If I didn’t have nerves, it would mean that I no longer love wrestling. I love wrestling with all my heart, so nerves will always be there.”

She went to Japan carrying that. India Sioux, Kira & Tabata defeated God’s Eye in 10:36. She came home to the opening match of Noche de las Amazonas — below Mina Shirakawa, below Megan Bayne, below Starlight Kid and Mei Seira, all guests from the partnerships she had just been sent to legitimize. On March 14, she traveled to Atlanta for an MLW taping and challenged Shotzi for the MLW Women’s World Featherweight Championship. She took the clean loss, putting Shotzi over ahead of CMLL vs MLW at Arena México. When CMLL vs MLW ran on May 1, Shotzi defended that title against Garra Negra.¹ Kira was not on the card. On April 27 in Puebla, she and India Sioux beat Lady Frost and Shotzi clean in a tag match. She beat the visitors who got her Arena México slots, in a building where it didn’t count, and the booking the following week was unchanged.

She was not in the Copa 70. Aniversario Amazonas tournament — the night before it ran, she lost to Candela, Metálica, and Princesa Sugehit at the Martes Populares. She was not in the Torneo Internacional De Amazons. She was absent from the Copa Dinastias, which is a second-generation tournament, built around wrestling bloodlines — and the daughter of Gran Jefe III, part of La Tribu Lagunera, qualifies by definition. That’s not an oversight born of eligibility. She simply wasn’t entered.

Her Arena México Friday Espectacular record in 2026: four appearances, 2-2, third match every time. Thunder Rosa’s Arena México-level record in 2026 since signing in April: eight appearances in ten weeks.

Candela — who was one half of my WON vote for worst match of the year — has pinned Kira three times this calendar year. January 24. May 30. June 15.

The critique people use to justify all of this is the honest one: she’s still rough. Thecubsfan, after a recent match, noted that she “had a first fall sequence where she looked awesome and then badly blew the springboard to end the run” and that she’s “stuck at 90% of the way there.” That’s accurate. The last 10% is a real gap.

However, I believe Kira at 90% is better than most women in this division at 100%.

And that final 10% is a polish problem. Polish problems close in high-stakes matches against quality opponents with real consequences attached. They do not close in Puebla against Candela while a dual-contract AEW import collects eight straight Arena México appearances.

The Clock Is Ticking

Every pattern described in this piece — the talent built and then taken, the borrowed prestige, the contracted star looking elsewhere — has accelerated under the TKO relationship. AAA is not a distant competitor now. It is a funded, staffed, connected pipeline with a recent track record of identifying and signing exactly the kind of talent sitting on CMLL’s mid-card. It signed Vaquer’s rival. It signed Catalina.

Cubsfan’s observation — that Kira is the next logical target — is not a dramatic prediction. It is a reasonable inference from a visible pattern, made by someone who watches every show and has no investment in hyperbole.

The paths available from here are knowable. The Catalina path: TKO calls, Kira leaves, AAA positions her as a star on day one — which, given what just happened with Catalina, is exactly what they should do. The Persephone path: external attention forces a dual contract, her story splits between two promotions, and CMLL gets the credibility of her name while someone else builds the narrative — and as Persephone’s own 2026 shows, that doesn’t even guarantee the talent wins. The current path: the holding pattern continues, she collects more losses to Candela, and one of the first two paths eventually claims her anyway.

The other path that benefits CMLL requires CMLL to move first.

Kira wants to be here. She walked out of AAA in September 2023 — no negotiation, no counter-offer play — because CMLL was where she’d said she wanted to be since she was nineteen years old. She has a lineage in this business and chose this promotion inside it. She is still choosing it, against a booking sheet that gives her three losses to Candela and four Friday appearances in six months.

This does not require CMLL to rebuild its women’s division from scratch or confront ninety years of structural deprioritization in one season. It requires one thing: give her a program. A real program — a real opponent, a real feud, a story with a direction. Enter her in the Copa de Amazonas. Put her in the Friday match that counts, not the one that fills time. Let the Arena México crowd build the relationship with her before someone in TKO’s talent pipeline takes a meeting.

She is twenty-five years old. She has been doing this since she was a child. She won in Japan, took a title loss in Atlanta in service of someone else’s positioning, beat that someone else in a tag match in Puebla the following month, and showed up for work the next week without a word about any of it.

She is still here.

But she might not always be.

There is a certain kind of wrestling fan who knows everything.

You have met this person, or you have been this person, or you have at least sat next to this person at two in the morning on a Discord server where they explained, with great patience and zero irony, why a match from 1987 in a building that no longer exists was the most important thing that happened that year in any sport.

I am not that person.

I am adjacent to that person.

I have spent nights on websites with names I could not pronounce looking for matches that aired one time in a building in Japan. I have opened spreadsheets at midnight that made perfect sense at the time and less sense in the morning. I have given this strange and beautiful fake sport more of myself than I would ever admit out loud at a dinner party. At least dinner parties with decent folks.

So when the wrestling people started arguing about something called GWE — Greatest Wrestler Ever, a project where serious people rank their top 100 wrestlers of all time, which is either the most obsessive thing in sports or the most beautiful depending on how you look at it — I felt the particular shame of someone who thought they were paying attention.

I assumed it was some Japanese promotion I had never heard of.

I was already headed to Dailymotion before I finished reading the sentence.

It was not a Japanese promotion.

But it did lead me to Jim Londos.

And Jim Londos is the whole reason I am writing this.

Everything I know about him comes from Dave Meltzer and Wikipedia.

Which is not how you want to meet a person like this. But it will at least get you introduced.

He was born in a small town in Greece in 1894, the youngest of thirteen children, which feels like enough information on its own to explain a few things about a person. He came to America at fifteen with a cousin and not much of a plan beyond figuring it out as he went. He worked carnivals for a while. If you have ever been to one, you know the feel of it. Lights a little too bright. Music coming from somewhere you can’t quite place. The smell of something fried that you will probably regret later. Everybody moving toward something they are not entirely sure about.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he found wrestling.

And from the beginning he was told no. Too small. Too foreign. Not the right shape for the thing he wanted. The people who ran things looked at this kid from Argos, Greece and told him, politely or not, that he was not what they were looking for.

He did it anyway.

And then he became the biggest draw the sport has ever seen.

Not one of the biggest. The biggest.

There are people who have gone back and done the math. Real math. Adjusted for inflation and for what a ticket cost against what a working man made in a week. And what the math says is this: Jim Londos outdrew Hogan. Outdrew Austin. Outdrew Bruno Sammartino and The Rock and every name that gets said like scripture in serious wrestling conversations.

Not one of them.

All of them.

The whole argument — every name you have ever typed in all caps somewhere — settled by a man most of those places have never mentioned.

He wrestled in Athens in front of 100,000 people, with thousands more outside who couldn’t get in. Richard Nixon honored him. The King of Greece honored him. When he left a territory it didn’t dip for a while and recover. It folded up behind him like something that had been held together entirely by his presence and nothing else.

For thirty years he walked into buildings and made people forget their lives for a little while.

And these were not easy lives he was asking people to forget. This was the Depression. People didn’t have money. Not really. They had enough to get by, most of them, and not much beyond that. And still they found a way to spend a little of what little they had to watch this man from Argos, Greece, who was too small and too foreign and turned out to be exactly what they needed.

I keep coming back to that.

What do you have to be for a person who is worried about everything to decide, even for one night, that you are worth it?

He was that.

And then one night the crowd cheered his name for the last time.

I think about that more than anything else in this story.

Maybe he knew. Maybe he stood there in the lights just a second longer than usual and let the sound come all the way in. Not dramatically. Not like a movie. Just long enough to notice it.

Or maybe he didn’t know at all. Maybe it was just another night. Another building. Another town. Another drive back to wherever he was staying. And only later, in the quiet, when things got quieter than he expected, did it occur to him that something had ended and wasn’t coming back.

I don’t know which one it was.

I like to think he knew.

I like to think he stood there and took it in and then made his peace with leaving it there.

Because either way, the ending was the same.

He married a woman from Missouri who the papers called a “St. Louis Aviatrix,” which is honestly one of the best descriptions of a human being I have ever come across.

They had three daughters. Diana. Demetra. Christina.

They settled in Escondido, California, on ten acres of avocado grove, which feels either like the most peaceful ending to a life like his or exactly the right one.

I looked up what it takes to grow avocados, because I do not know how to grow anything and it felt like I owed him that much. It turns out they require patience. You cannot rush an avocado tree. You water it. You tend to it. You show up for it on the days when nothing visible is happening. And if you have done what you were supposed to do, eventually, in its own time, it gives you something back.

That is a different kind of crowd.

He spent his days there. Walking the rows. Paying attention to things that do not cheer for you. Watching the light move across a grove that did not care who he used to be. Building something that asked only that he show up and do the work and not be in a hurry about it.

After a life that was loud in a way most of us will never really understand, he chose something quiet.

Or maybe quiet chose him. Maybe that’s how it always goes.

He died on August 19, 1975, of a heart attack, and is buried in Escondido under a headstone that most wrestling fans have never gone looking for. The man who drew 100,000 people in Greece, forgotten so completely that I made it this far into a wrestling obsession without ever once hearing his name.

That is how little the noise protects you from being forgotten.

I have managed bands you have never heard of. I have preached sermons to rooms that were, let’s say, intimate. I have won journalism awards for stories that probably ended up lining birdcages in southern West Virginia, which is either a humbling thing or a perfect thing depending on the day you ask me.

I have spent a lot of my life tending things that didn’t come with much of a crowd.

And then my wife and I adopted our daughter.

Our house looks different now. There are bottles in places that used to hold other things. There are blankets that do not stay folded, and I have stopped trying to fold them. There is a rhythm to the days that I did not choose and cannot negotiate with, and I am slowly, genuinely learning that this is one of the better things that has ever happened to me.

When she first came home I loved her the way you love something you have chosen and waited for and built a life toward. Completely, without reservation, from the first moment. But it was still, in some way I could not have explained to you then, a love that was mostly going one direction.

And then one morning she looked up at me and smiled.

We were not doing anything worth noting. Just sitting there in the kind of early morning when the rest of the world has not started yet. The kind of moment that wouldn’t make it into any highlight reel.

But it wasn’t nothing.

It was recognition.

Something shifted behind her eyes and I understood, in the way you understand things that show up without warning, that I had been placed somewhere inside her world. That I was now a known thing to her. That she had looked out at everything and found me in it and filed me somewhere safe.

None of the bands I managed, the sermons I preached, or the stories I wrote prepared me for that moment.

It was the loudest thing I have ever felt.

And the room was completely quiet.

Jim Londos drew 100,000 people in Greece, then went home to his wife, his daughters, and an avocado grove.

I think he knew what he was doing.

It just took me a while to understand it.

There are a lot of ways to enjoy professional wrestling. Some people follow the biggest promotions and keep up with every major show. Others go deep into one style or one era and stay there. And then there are the moments when you stumble into something you didn’t expect to care about, and it quietly sticks with you.

Over time, I found myself watching more CMLL. Not casually, but consistently. And as I watched, I kept coming back to the women’s matches. At first it was just curiosity. Then it became appreciation. And eventually it turned into a question I couldn’t shake. Why does this feel so undercovered compared to everything else in wrestling?

It’s not that no one is paying attention. There are always people who care, people who track, people who know far more than I do. But when you zoom out and look at the broader wrestling conversation, it becomes clear that certain areas receive far more attention and documentation than others. Japanese women’s wrestling has a strong, dedicated following. American women’s wrestling is constantly discussed, debated, and promoted. But the luchadoras of CMLL often exist in a quieter space. Matches happen. Performances come and go. And very little of it is tracked in a consistent, intentional way.

That gap is what led to this project.

The Luchadora Project is, at its core, an attempt to pay attention on purpose. I want to follow the luchadoras of CMLL and beyond throughout 2026, to watch their matches, to evaluate them, and to create a running record of what is happening in that division. Not in a way that claims authority or expertise, but in a way that values consistency and care.

More specifically, my goal is to build a working archive. I’m creating a spreadsheet that tracks luchadora matches dating back to the beginning of the year across CMLL, , and other promotions where these wrestlers appear. Alongside that, I want to highlight standout matches, surface performances that might otherwise go unnoticed, and offer some ongoing commentary on what’s happening in the world of luchadoras as the year unfolds.

I’m not a reporter. I’m not connected to the promotion. I’m not pretending to have access that others don’t. What I do have is time, interest, and a genuine appreciation for the work these women are doing. And sometimes that’s enough to start something worthwhile.

This project is not about proving anything. It is not about arguing that one style is better than another or that one division deserves more praise than the rest. It is simply about giving attention where attention has been limited. It is about documenting matches that might otherwise fade into the background. It is about creating a space where these performances are seen, considered, and remembered.

There is also something deeper at play, at least for me. In a wrestling landscape that moves quickly and constantly chases what is new, there is value in slowing down and keeping track of what is actually happening over time. Not just the big moments, but the regular ones. Not just the headliners, but the matches that build the foundation of a division. When you track something consistently, patterns emerge. Growth becomes visible. Strengths and weaknesses become clearer. The whole picture starts to come into focus.

That is what I hope to accomplish here.

I want this to become a living record of the year for luchadoras. A place where matches are logged, evaluated, and reflected on. A place that, over time, tells a story not just about individual performances, but about the division as a whole.

If nothing else, I hope it helps a few more people see what I’ve started to see. That there is something here worth watching. Something worth following. Something worth remembering.

That feels like a good place to start.

I want to be very clear about this.

No cape. No foam sword. No waiting in line next to someone in a full Thanos suit while quietly reconsidering my life choices. I want to be very clear about this, because what I’m about to tell you might make you assume otherwise.

I have been cosplaying my entire life.

Just without the lanyard. Without the convention floor. Without even the self-awareness, for most of it, to understand that the person walking into every room was wearing a very carefully assembled costume that had increasingly little to do with whoever was underneath.

Different rooms got different costumes. Different crowds got different versions of me. And I have been doing this for so long that there were stretches — real stretches, not brief confusing Tuesdays — where I genuinely couldn’t tell you which one was the real guy.

Wrestling helped me figure that out. Specifically: Brad Armstrong.

But before we get to brad, you need to understand what we’re working with.

If my professional life were a wrestling career, the booker would have been fired by now.

I have been a shoe salesman. A medical billing specialist. An insurance fraud investigator. A ski resort sales team member — yes, in that order, yes, I understand how that reads.

A band manager. A sports writer.

A digital journalist. An editor (a bad one at that.)

A band manager again, because apparently I needed to confirm that the first time wasn’t a fluke. A publicist. And now, a pastor.

I am, essentially, Forrest Gump with a Substack.

Every single one of those felt, at the time, like the new gimmick that was finally going to stick. New entrance music in my head. Fresh tights. A recalibrated sense of what this particular crowd needed from me and whether I could give it to them fast enough to matter. And every time — every single time — the same guy showed up underneath the costume. The same anxious, approval-hungry, genuinely trying human being who just wanted the room to like him.

We will come back to that guy.

But first: Brad Armstrong.

Brad Armstrong was the oldest son of Bullet Bob Armstrong, a working-class hero who spent thirty years being the exact kind of man that wrestling crowds in Alabama trusted without thinking about it. Bob raised four sons with his wife Gail. All four became wrestlers: Brad, Scott, Steve, and the youngest, Brian — Road Dogg Jesse James, D-Generation X, the man who could silence or ignite any arena in America with four words — became legitimately famous.

Despite that, Brad was arguably the most purely talented of the four. Steve Austin once said that going to the ring with Armstrong was like being handed a gift: you never had to say a word, he already knew where you were going and he’d meet you there.

Jim Ross called him one of the most underrated performers in the history of the business.

As good as he was though, Brad Armstrong never became the guy.

And wrestling, not knowing what else to do with him, did what wrestling always does: it repackaged him. Repeatedly. With the relentless optimism of someone who genuinely believes the next gimmick is the one that changes everything.

You get Brad Armstrong — clean, crisp, fundamentally sound, the guy Austin described. Then Badstreet, masked and mysterious, aligned with the Fabulous Freebirds. Then The Candyman, who handed candy to children on his way to the ring, a character choice I choose to believe was wholesome and will not be examining further. Then Dos Hombres, where he and Ricky Steamboat wore matching red gear. Then B.A. Then Buzzkill, a Vince Russo invention that was essentially a parody of Road Dogg’s persona, except Road Dogg was Brad’s actual brother, which is the kind of detail that makes you set down your coffee and just stare at the wall for a moment. And even one time: Arachnaman.

Arachnaman was a spider-themed wrestler in a full blue and yellow mask who was not, in any legally actionable sense, Spider-Man. Marvel Comics disagreed at the cellular level and sent a cease and desist. WCW retired the character after approximately three months.

Three months as Arachnaman. He still had good matches.

That’s what gets me. Under every single gimmick — under the Badstreet mask, under the Candyman candy bags, under the Arachnaman suit that made Marvel’s legal team physically uncomfortable — it was still him. The same instincts. The same craftsman. The same real guy doing real work, no matter what they put on top of him. Austin could feel it. Ross could see it. The crowd could feel it, even on the nights they didn’t know his name.

He called it the Armstrong Curse — the family’s habit of getting close without breaking through — and he said it with enough dry humor that it eventually made it onto television. He passed away in 2012 at fifty. The people who really loved wrestling still say his name the way you mention a book that changed something in you without announcing it.

He was better than people realized. He gave you something real every single time.

I didn’t understand for a long time why that story got to me the way it does. I think I do now.

I grew up in West Virginia as a Boston sports fan, which is its own kind of gimmick that requires explanation every time I mention it.

Not New England. West Virginia. No geographic, cultural, or atmospheric justification for any of it. And yet: Red Sox. Patriots. Celtics. The full commitment, assembled in childhood through decisions that felt completely logical at the time and have confounded people ever since.

RBI Baseball on the NES, where I picked the Red Sox for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Madden 95, where I picked New England because my school’s colors matched the Patriots — and where I became firmly, unshakably convinced that Drew Bledsoe looked exactly like Woody from Toy Story. I maintain this position. Look at a picture. The height. The jawline. The vaguely concerned expression. I am right about this and I will not be taking questions.

Then a pack of basketball cards with Xavier McDaniel, who played for the Celtics and went by The X-Man, which is still a top-five nickname in any sport, I will die on this hill. And that was it. I was a Celtics fan. The heart wants what it wants, and in 1992 mine wanted a power forward with a menacing nickname and a fade haircut.

These were not good years to be a Boston fan. The Patriots had lost Super Bowl XX by thirty-six points when I was still in diapers. The Celtics were coasting on Bird-era fumes, losing in the first round, drafting players with names like Acie Earl and Darren Morningstar.

The Red Sox were the Red Sox: eternal April hope, reliably creative October heartbreak, year after year after year until 2004, but that’s a story for a different day.

I loved all of them completely anyway, from West Virginia, in a house where nobody else cared about any of this.

Then I moved to Ohio and became an Cleveland fan too, because that’s what Ohio does. It doesn’t recruit you. It waits. And eventually the Browns and the Cavs and the Guardians are just in you, the way weather gets in you, and you stop fighting it.

As I write this I have a Celtics blanket on one side of me and a Cavs blanket on the other and I feel completely at peace with this. I’m confident that sentence just made Joe Lanza’s head explode, and I want him to know I considered that and typed it anyway.

But here’s the part I’m only now starting to say out loud: for most of my life, all of it — the sports, the jobs, the rooms, the crowds — was running on the same engine. One engine. Underneath everything.

I desperately, relentlessly, sometimes almost comically want to be liked.

Not famous. I don’t need the pyro and the fifty-thousand-seat arena. Just liked. Approved of. Received well. I want to walk in and feel the temperature shift in my direction. And when it doesn’t — when the room stays where it was, when someone looks at me with mild indifference, when I can sense that I have not landed — some part of my brain that has apparently been running since childhood immediately starts assessing. What adjustment needs to happen. What the next version of the costume should look like. How to get the crowd back.

This is not a noble quality. It is also, I’ve learned, not that unusual. But knowing it’s common doesn’t make it less exhausting to carry.

The costume changes. The anxiety stays.

Let me tell you about the addictions, because they’re part of this.

I am addicted to my phone in the least glamorous way imaginable. Not gambling. Not anything you could make a documentary about. Just the small glowing rectangle, picked up and put down and picked up again, refreshing things that haven’t changed, checking in with nowhere specific to be.

I will be mid-conversation with someone I love and feel the pull. I will pick it up, put it down, pick it up again. It is a compulsion dressed as boredom, and I know exactly what it is, and I do it anyway.

I have a complicated relationship with food, which is my polite way of saying I have used eating as emotional regulation since before I had words for emotional regulation. Stress gets a sandwich. Anxiety gets whatever’s nearby. The feelings get managed, briefly, and then they come back, and so does the food.

And I struggle with self: with the specific background noise of not quite being enough, not quite measuring up, not quite being the version of myself that I think other people need me to be. This is the engine behind the costumes. This is what keeps the gimmick changes coming.

I am naming these things not because I’ve fixed them. I haven’t. I am naming them because the first step to wearing the costume a little looser is admitting you’ve had it on.

Here’s what else is underneath, as best I can see it:

A husband who is trying — genuinely trying, some days more successfully than others — to let his wife see the real version instead of the performing one. A white man raising a black daughter, which has quietly dismantled more of my assumptions and labels than anything else in my life. You stop worrying about how the crowd reads you when one person in the room matters more than everyone else combined.

A pastor who reads comic books and has stopped apologizing for it. Who is waiting with unseemly urgency for Marvel to continue Tiger Division. (Greg Pak. Marvel editorial. Whoever currently has the keys: let’s do it. I am checking for updates like a man refreshing weather radar before he mows, except the lawn never gets mowed because I keep checking my phone.)

A man who fell into lucha libre and then started learning Spanish because of lucha libre, which began as a side effect and became a genuine love. The language. The culture. The whole thing. I study on Duolingo. On the same phone I am addicted to. Using the device that is slowly eating my attention span to learn an entire language, which is either inspiring or the most Josh sentence I have ever written. Possibly both.

A man who is cautiously, nervously getting into joshi and who has to actively talk himself out of the low hum of imagined judgment that comes with being a forty-something pastor in Ohio watching this. There is a specific anxiety to it. A voice that asks: is this okay? Will someone think this is weird? Does this fit? And then I remember that Bull Nakano was one of the best performers in the history of this art form. That Manami Toyota changed what people understood wrestling could be. That the wrestling is excellent and the voice asking whether it’s okay is just the costume talking.

I’m learning to let myself enjoy things before I’ve gotten permission.

I know what you’re thinking.

What does any of this have to do with Brad Armstrong?

Underneath every gimmick, Brad Armstrong was still Brad Armstrong.

That’s the whole thing. That’s what Austin was pointing at. That’s what Ross meant. You could call him any name, put him in any mask, hand him a bag of candy or a spider suit that attracted the attention of Marvel’s legal department and the real guy was always in there. Doing the work. Giving you something genuine. Impossible to fully bury.

The Armstrong Curse wasn’t a curse. It was a man who knew who he was, even when nobody else seemed sure what to call him that month. He just kept working. Kept showing up. Kept being exactly himself underneath whatever they dressed him in.

I have had a lot of gimmicks.

But underneath all of it, it has always been the same guy. The same anxious, trying, nerdy, approval-hungry, genuinely devoted, comic-book-reading, lucha-loving, Joshi-curious, two-blanket-having, Duolingo-on-the-addiction-phone, desperately-waiting-on-Tiger-Division guy.

Still Josh.

The flaws are part of it. The anxiety is part of it. The phone and the food and the deep need to be liked and the forty years of costume changes: all of it is part of me. I’m not fixing these things so much as I’m learning to live at home with them. To know their names. To let them ride along without letting them drive.

The costume is still around. Probably always will be. But I’m wearing it looser these days. The real guy gets to be in the room more than he used to.

That’s the work. That’s enough.

Underneath the mask — it was always Brad.

Underneath all of this — it’s always been Josh.

I think he’s finally getting over.

Somewhere along the line, a lot of us decided we were supposed to grow out of the things we loved.

You hit your twenties, maybe your thirties, and suddenly the world expects you to put away the toys. Stop arguing about comic book canon. Stop staying up until midnight watching wrestling from Korakuen Hall. Stop getting excited when Apple announces a slightly better rectangle that costs roughly the price of a used riding mower.

You’re supposed to become serious.

Responsible.

The kind of person who says things like, “I don’t really watch wrestling anymore,” even though you absolutely watched three matches from All Japan at 1:30 in the morning last Tuesday.

And I’m here to say something that took me a long time to realize.

It’s okay to be a nerd.

Honestly.

When I was a kid, being a nerd meant you liked stuff too much.

You liked Star Wars too much.

You knew the names of the Ninja Turtles.

You could tell someone the every member of the Hart family before you could drive a car.

You cared about things that other people thought were silly.

Now, if we’re being honest, wrestling fans were always the nerds of the sports world.

Football fans talk about blitz packages.

Basketball fans talk about pick-and-roll spacing.

Wrestling fans will sit down and explain the booking philosophy of Giant Baba in the early 1990s while referencing three different Tokyo Dome crowds and something Dave Meltzer wrote in the Observer in 1994.

We’re not casual people.

We’re specialists.

Take lucha libre.

Most normal human beings can watch a lucha match and say, “Wow, those guys flip a lot.”

A lucha nerd will start explaining that what you just saw was a tornillo followed by a tope con giro, and that the reason it worked is because the rudo base timed the catch perfectly.

We will say this out loud.

In public.

Sometimes at family gatherings.

Joshi fans are even worse.

If you know, you know.

A normal person might watch a women’s wrestling match and say, “That was really good.”

A joshi nerd will explain that the match had strong AJW influence, the selling felt very Manami Toyota, and the finish reminded them of a match from a Tokyo Dome show in the mid-90s that only exists now as a third-generation VHS rip someone uploaded to the internet in 2007.

And somehow we’re proud of this.

As we should be.

Puroresu nerds might be the final boss.

These are the people who will watch a match where two men politely slap each other in the chest for fifteen minutes and say things like, “Look at the storytelling.”

And the wild thing is, they’re not wrong.

Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

You start noticing the rhythm.

The escalation.

The way the crowd slowly realizes something special is happening.

Suddenly you’re sitting there at midnight watching Misawa and Kobashi from 2003 like you’re studying ancient scripture.

The funny thing is, nerd culture used to be niche.

Now it’s basically the entire economy.

Marvel movies dominate the box office.

Comic conventions fill football stadiums.

People wait in line overnight to buy the newest iPhone like it’s a religious pilgrimage.

The difference is that some people pretend they’re not nerds.

But if you’ve ever argued online about which streaming service has the best interface, congratulations.

You’re one of us.

And honestly, there’s something kind of beautiful about it.

Because being a nerd just means you still know how to care.

You still get excited.

You still feel that little spark when something you love shows up on the screen.

You know the feeling.

The first time a wrestling theme hits and you realize this match is about to rule.

The moment a comic panel lands just right.

The second Apple shows a new product and you lean forward a little and say, “Okay… that’s actually pretty cool.”

That feeling doesn’t disappear when you grow up.

You just get better at pretending you don’t have it.

But here’s the truth.

Life is heavy sometimes.

Bills show up.

Jobs get stressful.

Children get sick.

The world gets loud and strange and complicated.

And in the middle of all that, there is something quietly wonderful about sitting down and watching a guy in a mask do a moonsault.

Or reading a comic book about cosmic gods.

Or getting irrationally excited about a new piece of technology that does basically the same thing as the last one but slightly faster.

These things remind us how to play again.

And grown ups don’t get enough of that.

I’ve come to think of nerd culture the way I think about a good diner.

You walk in, and everyone is welcome.

Doesn’t matter if you’re the person who has every issue of Fantastic Four bagged and boarded or the person who just wandered in because someone said this match between two Japanese wrestlers from 1993 was really good.

Pull up a chair.

There’s room.

And the truth is, wrestling has always understood this better than anything else.

Wrestling is ridiculous.

It’s theatrical.

It’s larger than life.

It’s a world where a guy can wear a dragon mask, or a cowboy hat, or come to the ring dressed like a demon, and somehow it all makes sense.

So if you’re the kind of person who knows the difference between a hurricanrana and a frankensteiner…

If you have strong opinions about All Japan versus New Japan in the 1990s…

If you still get excited when the lights go out and the music hits…

I’ve got good news.

You didn’t fail to grow up.

You just kept your imagination.

And in a world that spends most of its time trying to squeeze the joy out of things, that’s not something to apologize for.

That’s something to hold onto.

Because sometimes the most honest thing a grown adult can do is sit down, watch a wrestling match, and say with complete sincerity,

Man… that ruled.

I have a confession.

I’ve never seen The Godfather.

Not Part I. Not Part II. Not even the one people argue about like it’s a mid-card sequel that didn’t need to happen. I have somehow navigated 40 years of life without sitting down for what many consider the Ric Flair–Ricky Steamboat trilogy of American cinema.

And it gets worse.

I’ve never seen an episode of Game of Thrones. Not one dragon.

I’ve never watched The Sopranos.

I’ve never finished Breaking Bad.

I understand what this does to some of you. Somewhere, a film bro with a Letterboxd account just set down his pour-over coffee in disappointment. This is the equivalent of telling a wrestling purist you’ve never watched Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Kenta Kobashi (more on that later.)

It’s heresy. It’s cultural malpractice. It’s like admitting you don’t know where you were when Hogan turned heel.
But you know what I have seen?

Every Mighty Ducks movie. Multiple times. Including D3, which is basically the late era Jimmy Hart booked WCW Saturday Night of cinema—deeply flawed, oddly charming, and absolutely not something that mattered in the larger canon.

I’ve watched NCIS: Hawaii. On purpose. I remember the plotlines.

And at some point in the 1990s, I consumed episodes of Thunder Alley, a sitcom starring Haley Joel Osment and Ed Asner, because apparently I had both cable and absolutely zero parental supervision.

Fandom is funny like that.

We all think we’re going to be completionists. We think we’re going to “do it right.” Watch the classics. Study the canon. Stay current. Be informed. Have takes that are both historically grounded and culturally relevant.

And then real life shows up.

You cannot follow the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, keep up with every Disney+ spinoff, read the current Fantastic Four run, track what’s happening in the Ultimate Universe, and still be a functioning adult with a mortgage and a grocery bill.

Trust me. I’ve tried.

At some point you just want a new issue of Dr. Strange. Or Tiger Division.

(And yes, I’m going to say it again: Greg Pak, Marvel editorial, whoever has the keys to the kingdom — I am begging you. What’s next for Taegukgi? Is White Fox ever going to catch a break? Can Luna Snow just have one uncomplicated win? What is General Nguyen plotting? I check for updates like a Midwestern dad checking the weather radar before mowing. I’m not asking for much. Just closure. Or at least Issue #6.)

You end up clinging to the things that feel like yours.

And that’s where the blind spots form.

Wrestling is the same way.

There are matches I haven’t seen that would make certain corners of the internet revoke my fan card. I haven’t done a full All Japan deep dive. My 90s Joshi knowledge is more “I’ve seen the clips” than “I wrote a dissertation.” My puro consumption is curated and chaotic.

It’s not that I don’t want to watch everything.

It’s that there’s too much everything.

Isn’t it strange that I’ve only seen a little bit of the 1994 Super J-Cup, but I could give you a borderline oral history of the Jesse Ventura arm wrestling challenge from WCW Saturday Night in 1992?

I can tell you about the buildup, the faux-sport presentation, the announcers treating it like it was the Munich Olympics of forearm strength. I can tell you where it fits in that weird transitional WCW timeline between corporate seriousness and neon chaos, when everything felt one executive decision away from either brilliance or disaster.

But Misawa — the Emerald Ace, the architect of an entire wrestling style — I respect him more than I’ve truly experienced him.

So I tried to fix that.

I sat down and watched Misawa vs. Kobashi from NOAH in 2003. The one. The capital-C Classic. The match that shows up on every “If you want to understand wrestling” list.

And it was great.

You can feel the weight of it. The pacing. The escalation. The way every strike lands like it matters. The crowd reacting like they’re witnessing scripture.

I get it.

I truly do.

And yet.

It didn’t hit me in my chest the way I thought it would.

I admired it. I respected it. I appreciated the craftsmanship.

But it didn’t rearrange my emotional furniture.

Meanwhile, I can watch a random CMLL trios match at 1 a.m. and feel like I’ve just discovered religion. Or throw on a random Bret Hart TV match from 1993 and feel ten years old again. Or revisit some absurd WCW angle that makes no objective sense but makes perfect emotional sense to me. (I’m looking at you, DDP Mystery Benefactor.)

That’s the blind spot.

It’s not ignorance.

It’s gravity.

We orbit what pulls us.

Which brings me back to The Godfather.

I’m sure it’s brilliant. I’m sure it deserves the pedestal. I’m sure if I watched it, I’d reanact that Martin Scorsese meme, throw up my hands and say “CINEMA!”

But you want to know what one of my favorite movies ever is?

Gone Fishin’.

Starring Joe Pesci and Danny Glover. Just two guys trying to win a fishing contest and get tangled up in crime.

Is it a five-star work rate comedy? Nope.

Is it culturally revered? Absolutely not.

Does it show up on a film school syllabi? I pray not. But honestly? It’d be kind of incredible if it did.

Do I love it anyhow? Yes.

Because sometimes fandom isn’t about the objective best.

It’s about what hits you at the right time in your life.

What you watched on a random Saturday night when nothing else felt urgent.

What you bonded with your grandparents over when they bought you a pay-per-view for your 12th birthday.

What you argued about on a message board in between homework assignments.

What imprinted on you before you knew what work rate even meant.

Wrestling discourse can make you feel like you need to revere every sacred text. Like you need to have seen every five-star match. Like your joy has to be defensible in a debate.

It doesn’t.

Appreciate the great. Study the classics. Respect Misawa. Understand Kobashi. Know the lineage. But don’t feel pressured to pretend something moved you when it didn’t.

Your fandom — whether it’s wrestling, cinema, or comic books — isn’t a term paper.

It’s the match you watched on a grainy TV in a house you don’t have a key to anymore.

It’s the storyline you didn’t fully understand but felt in your chest anyway.

It’s the night you stayed up too late and paid for it the next morning — and didn’t regret it.

It’s the random pay-per-view you watched alone but somehow still remember like you weren’t.

It’s not about how loud it was. It’s about how long it lasted.

If that’s a Brad Armstrong match from 1993 instead of an All-Japan epic, that’s fine.

If you’re still waiting on Tiger Division like a rain delay in April, that’s fine too.

Because fandom isn’t ultimately about canon.

It’s about connection.

It’s about what you carry with you.

Whatever your Gone Fishin’ is.

Whatever your Ventura arm-wrestling challenge is.

Whatever your 1 a.m. lucha match is.

That’s your fandom.

And around here, that’s enough.

I grew up the way some kids grow up Catholic. Ritual. Incense. Pageantry. Except instead of incense it was pyro, and instead of saints it was guys like Terry Funk bleeding under arena lights. Pro wrestling was my everything.

I still say Flair vs. Vader at Starrcade is my favorite match ever, and I say it like someone defending the 2016 NBA Finals Game 7 as the single greatest sporting event in human history (we don’t acknowledge the World Series game 7.)

I’ve stayed up on January 4 for Wrestle Kingdom more times than I’ve stayed up for New Year’s Eve. Priorities. I’ve had multi-day arguments about match ratings that felt more intense than most family Thanksgivings (ironically, 2016 also plays a role there.) I mourned when WCW closed like I imagine people did when Elvis died.

In fact, I’ve been a wrestling fan longer than I’ve been most of anything.

But last year something weird happened.

I stopped watching.

And not because I was too busy.

I stopped caring.

WWE had long been off my radar, AEW had lost my interest, and New Japan was in its biggest slump since it became readily accessible to me.

So I stopped watching.

No manifesto. No dramatic “the business has changed” rant. I just drifted. Shows felt long. Promos felt longer. The discourse felt like Cleveland sports radio after a missed field goal. Everyone yelling. Everyone certain. Everyone exhausted.

I had turned watching wrestling into a front office job without the salary and benefits. I was scouting prospects. I was projecting pushes. I was debating long-term creative arcs like I had equity in the company. All of this while sitting on my couch in Ohio in a Spider-Man tshirt.

I thought I was done for good.

But then something incredible happened.

I started watching lucha libre.

Now, I wasn’t new to lucha. I grew up on WCW Monday Nitro. I watched Super Caló. I watched Lizmark Jr. and convinced myself he was one match away from superstardom. I watched Damien 666 and Ciclope and thought, “These guys feel like they would get me kicked out of youth group.”

In other words, I had seen lucha.

But this was different.

This wasn’t cruiserweights doing spots between NWO promos. This was lucha libre as its own ecosystem. Lucha with dust on it. Lucha with history baked into the walls. Lucha that felt like it belonged to the people in the building.

Lucha libre is wrestling with a patina. It’s lived in. It’s cultural. It feels inherited instead of manufactured.

And I couldn’t get enough of it.

Now here’s where I need to address something.

CMLL is the hot promotion right now. Mistico is selling out buildings like Noah Kahan headlining a Patagonia convention. Arena México is packed. The awards love them. The internet loves them. Everyone’s talking about how this is the year of CMLL.

But that’s not when I fell in love with it.

I fell in love with CMLL in October.

Getting obsessed with CMLL during October is like discovering The Beatles by listening to Ringo’s solo album first. It’s like starting The Godfather trilogy with Part III and thinking, “Huh. Interesting choice.” It’s like discovering Michael Jordan through Wizards highlights and wondering why everyone keeps talking about Chicago.

That was me.

And what hooked me wasn’t some epic main event. It wasn’t Capitan Suicida or Neon flying through the air like gravity owed him money.

This was October. The Women’s Grand Prix.

It wasn’t Soberano Jr or Templario that got me obsessed.

It was the Amazonas. It was wrestlers like Candela, Skadi, and Tabata. It was Persephone and Olympia.

And if I can be honest.

It wasn’t good.

The matches were messy. Timing was off. There were rope sequences where everyone looked like they were trying to remember which direction they were supposed to run. There were dives that landed half a beat late. There were moments where I genuinely wondered if this was the developmental show.

I had friends who were into lucha telling me, “I promise it gets better. Just stick with it for a few weeks.”

They said it like someone convincing you to power through the first three episodes of a slow-burn prestige drama. “Trust me. It hits.”

But here’s the thing.

I didn’t care if it got better.

I was already hooked.

Not on the wrestling.

On the experience.

I was watching something I didn’t fully understand in a language I didn’t know. The pacing felt different. The rhythm felt different. The crowd reacted in ways I wasn’t trained to anticipate. The stakes felt cultural, not just storyline-based.

And for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t analyzing.

I wasn’t grading.

I wasn’t projecting where this ranked in the Match of the Year conversation.

I was just watching something new.

I was letting myself not know.

That might sound small. It wasn’t.

Because somewhere along the way, I had stopped allowing myself to be a beginner.

I had stopped allowing myself to experience something without immediately categorizing it. I had turned everything into comparison. Into evaluation. Into context.

And here I was, watching imperfect matches in October, in a promotion I didn’t fully understand, and feeling that old sensation again.

Curiosity.

I wasn’t hooked because it was elite.

I was hooked because it was different.

Because it felt like walking into a room where a story had been unfolding long before I got there.

And I didn’t have to control it.

I just had to sit there and watch.

And then, in the middle of all this — in the middle of falling in love with wrestling again, my life shifted like rope-walk sequences that sometimes ended in polite chaos.

My wife and I found out we were adopting a daughter.

There isn’t a clean narrative transition for that. It doesn’t come with swelling music. It just lands in your living room and suddenly everything feels heavier and lighter at the same time.

For years I had approached wrestling like a scout. Evaluating. Ranking. Deciding who was worthy of investment. I wanted finished products. Tight pacing. Clean execution. I wanted Chicago Bulls Jordan, not Wizards Jordan.

And now I was stepping into fatherhood — into adoption — which is, by definition, stepping into something mid-story.

No grading scale.

No five-star system.

No “let’s see how this develops.”

Just presence.

A few weeks after we found out, my wife handed me a book she had bought.

It was a lucha libre book for babies.

Bright colors. Cartoon masks. Simplified Spanish phrases. A board book version of a world I had accidentally fallen into a few months earlier.

I remember holding it and laughing.

Of course.

Of course the thing I stumbled into during a random October would somehow circle back into this. Of course the masks and the arenas and the cultural weight of lucha libre would now live on a nursery shelf in our house in Ohio.

Isn’t that just the way wrestling works sometimes?

I had spent years arguing about star ratings.

Now I’m reading books about El Santo to a daughter who can’t even walk yet.

The reason I fell in love with CMLL in October wasn’t because it was technically superior. It wasn’t because it was the hottest promotion. It wasn’t because it won awards.

It was because I let myself experience it without control.

I let myself be new again.

I let myself watch imperfect matches and root anyway.

Adoption is that same posture.

You don’t walk into it evaluating. You walk into it committed. You don’t wait for polish. You show up for the process. You don’t analyze potential. You love a person.

Somewhere between Tabata’s mistimed dive and Persephone going for something ambitious, I stopped being a critic.

I became a fan again.

And maybe, quietly, it prepared me to be a father.

I saw Candela before Soberano Jr. and it made me a better wrestling fan.

Life’s weird like that.