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.