Review: AAA Triplemania XXXII Mexico City

For my sins, reviews of AAA’s flagship show have been a recurring feature of this blog. I talked last time about how this came to be, and how the first of this year’s triple-whammy of shows, Triplemania Monterrey, was so abysmal that there was frankly nothing even worth writing about, but how I had been daft enough to order all three shows as a package deal, meaning I more or less had to watch them. And, to appease The Algorithm, to write about them.

June’s Tijuana leg of the three-city, three-show Triplemania experience was a far more enjoyable show, but frustrating for different reasons; here was AAA in its purest form, as a company that disregards its own continuity, gets in its own way, books against logic, and either holds its viewers in contempt or assumes they are only still watching out of spite. I found the third and final Triplemania of the year, emanating from Mexico City, a more enjoyable watch - perhaps because I had the sense to save it for a quiet Sunday morning rather than staying up past 3am to watch it - though, on reflection, it was the perfect storm of the issues presented by both previous shows.

As if to mock my decision to order all three shows even further, the first typically AAA technical fuck-up was a monumental one - a free pre-show aired on Triller, and they simply never switched over to a paywalled feed. The entire show streamed for free, and seemingly nobody cared enough to notice. I am currently pursuing a refund.

The second technical snafu was one that’s occurred at Triplemania several times over the last two years - for the early part of the show, the English commentary was buried low in the audio mix, and was therefore almost inaudible. To make matters worse, the Spanish commentary had not been muted, resulting in a cacophony of voices of every conceivable volume, particularly during ring introductions, as nobody seems to have ever instructed AAA’s commentary team not to speak over the ring announcer.

Speaking of the pre-show, what limited hype and advertising was available for this show made it clear that there would be no wrestling taking place before the main show. So it was only during the second match when the announcers made reference to the Reina de Reinas (AAA’s Women’s Title) match having already taken place there - Flammer, who had not defended the title in over a year - defeated Faby Apache. I haven’t watched this match, but it involved outside interference from Karen Jarrett, at least playing into the recurring theme of Faby having attacked Jeff Jarrett on the previous two Triplemania shows.

I don’t need to watch this match. I have seen it play out a thousand times. Faby Apache does not sell, and spends more of her match feuding with heel referee El Hijo del Tirantes than with her opponent. This is the bane of AAA’s women’s division. When Faby Apache briefly parted ways with the company, Lady Shani was simply slotted into her spot to work the exact same routine. For two years, women’s matches in AAA were little more than a backdrop for a male referee to feud with his own dad.

Stepping On Rakes

On to the main show, the feed began abruptly mid-entrance for El Elegido. Thanks to the aforementioned audio snafu, it was near impossible to understand what was going on, and it was only through prior experience that I knew this was Copa Triplemania, AAA’s meaningless Rumble/Gauntlet/Excuse to get everyone on the card.

This year’s Copa was more of the same. The undercard feelgood talents, the likes of Nino Hamburguesa, Pimpinela Escarlata, Microman and the massively underrated Mr. Iguana mixed it up with old faces fitting this year’s ‘90s nostalgia theme - among them, Charlie Manson, Mascarita Sagrada, and one of my old favourites, Heavy Metal. The appearance of former AAA talent and WWE midcarder from the dark old days of the mid-00s Kenzo Suzuki had been leaked early, while Marco Corleone - known better to non-Lucha fans as Mark Jindrak - was a genuine surprise, and while neither wrestler was setting the world alight with their work, both seemed to honestly enjoy being there, and added a positive energy to the match that was otherwise lacking.

The 3’3” Microman - with the English commentators confused as to whether he was even in the match at all - was eliminated by fellow mini Guapito, who it took the announcers some time to identify, and who seemed to have entered the match off-camera, immediately before mini legend Mascarita Sagrada entered the fray, robbing us of a potential Microman/Mascarita interaction. Sagrada was then attacked by a further two masked minis, largely off-camera, and unrecognised by the commentary team - it’s only through checking in with Luchablog’s coverage of the show that I learned that they were apparently Los Micros Gemelos, jumping ship from CMLL.

With all due respect to mini wrestlers, the direction of travel from AAA has not been good. In years gone by, the likes of NGD and Negro Casas moving from CMLL to AAA was big news. In the last eighteen months, AAA have lost wrestlers to CMLL, to AEW, to WWE, and to just wanting to take their chances on the open market, and have lost all momentum while the ordinarily stubbornly isolationist CMLL have become an international hot property thanks to well-received collaborations with AEW, NJPW and RevPro. We are in interesting times indeed. That the talent AAA have managed to lure in for Triplemania this year have been aging veterans, and the only wrestlers signed away from their chief rivals are Minis, for a division that barely exists in AAA, is a poor look for a company that needs all the help they can get.

Octagon Jr. won the Copa. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It never does. He deserves better. This is a promotion with one foot permanently stuck in the past, and the other one stepping on rakes.

Jeff Jarrett & Large Adult Sons

AAA is a company that cannot get out of its own way. In Tijuana, a match between former tag team partners was muddied by inserting another wrestler in aid of an interpromotional gimmick that nobody cared about. Here, a feud built up over three shows was sidelined in service of “heat”. Shane Silver recently wrote about the concept of “heat” being outdated, that it was a byword for a bag of tricks that old carnie wrestling promoters deployed to keep punters coming back time after time.

It’s an interesting read, and I agree to a point - we are past the days when the way to keep audiences coming back time and again to watch your show is the delayed gratification of having the good guy lose time and time again, making fans hold on for that magic moment when finally your hero won. Today, the heat that is born of the hero being cheated out of a deserved win is near impossible to recreate, because anybody watching wrestling in 2024 doesn’t blame the bad guys for cheating their hero out of a championship, they blame the man behind the curtain; it’s not the villain’s fault the hero failed, it’s the booker’s fault. Once we accept it’s all a show, heat becomes a redundant concept.

Maybe I’ve been too long in the bubble, but I can’t bring myself to fully let go of the concept of heat. Though, when I have on occasion been called upon to contribute to seminars on wrestling psychology and ring structure, I tend to substitute the idea of “tension” where previous generations might have used the H-word. A good match is built by masterfully building tension, not “heat”. A heel enraging the audience by insulting them might get them “heat”, but it rarely builds tension, because the heart of a match’s tension is in the sense that the match could end at any moment - it only takes three seconds. Every time a wrestler turns away from the task of defeating their opponent to insult the crowd, they might get heat, but it’s a hollow heat, and it does nothing to build tension. I would go one further - any time that two wrestlers are not within a limb’s reach of one another, tension begins to dissipate, and with it, so does the audience’s investment, because in that moment the match cannot end. Sometimes, reducing tension is part of the balancing act of a match’s story - an old adage is that the only difference between a heel and a face is that the heel moves backwards while the face moves forward, and the heel backing away from the face to earn themselves a breather can be an effective way of reducing tension while not losing focus - but a good wrestler knows exactly how much air they can afford to let out of that particular balloon without letting the whole thing go limp.

All things then, in moderation, and everything in balance. Don’t lose sight that the point of building tension is to release it all at the opportune moment, the point of getting heat on a heel is to build an equivalent amount of sympathy for a babyface, or to create catharsis when the heel gets their comeuppance. When neither outcome arises, it’s not heat, it’s spite, it’s contempt.

Since Triplemania Monterrey, Dr. Wagner Jr and his family have been feuding with Negro Casas and Psycho Clown - I made an effort to document their sprawling and interlocking family tree after Tijuana. This feud began with an absurd “mystery partners” match in Monterrey, where Wagner’s partners may as well have been drawn from a hat, and Negro Casas’ partners were NGD, who ultimately turned on Casas at the end of the match, something that you’d think he would have predicted given that the exact same thing had happened to him on television a matter of days earlier. I speculated then that, with no obvious direction for an eventual apuesta match for Mexico City, we might see Negro Casas and Dr. Wagner Jr put their hair on line against one another.

In Tijuana, the feud continued, with Wagner recruiting his large adult sons El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr and Galeno del Mal, while Negro Casas teamed with son-in-law Psycho Clown and Psycho’s nephew Brazo de Oro Jr for a family affair of a trios match. That adds the additional wrinkle to the story that it was Psycho Clown who claimed the mask of Dr Wagner Jr back at Triplemania XXV - so far, so much heat, and not without merit.

The Wagner clan, the heels in that environment, took advantage of the relative inexperience of Brazo de Oro Jr, and of their more coherent teamwork as a more established trio, and won the match, making it 2-0 to the Rudos. That puts us in prime position to dissipate that tension, and cash in all that heat for a babyface blow-off in the big feud ending match at the biggest of the three shows, right?

Wrong. At a non-Triplemania show back in June, less than a week before Triplemania Tijuana, there was at least a pay-off to Negro Casas’ brief beef with NGD, as father an son-in-law Negro Casas and Psycho Clown defeated them to win AAA’s World Tag Team Titles. So in Mexico City, they had to defend those titles - a match against Dr Wagner Jr and Galeno del Mal would make sense, still playing into the family feud, while the tag team setting could provide ample cover for the limitations of the older men in the match. But this is AAA, and they cannot get out of their own way.

Rather than allow a feud that, after the weird initial hiccups of the Monterrey match could be ironed out (how do you iron out a hiccup?), had actually built pretty organically and logically, to be paid off at the biggest show of the year, AAA threw a spanner in the works by making this a Three-Way Tag Team Match, with the addition of the team of Satnam Singh and Raj Dhesi, the former Jinder Mahal.

Dhesi and Singh had never teamed together before, and Dhesi had never competed in AAA before. Satnam Singh has been an absolute monster in his previous AAA appearances; one of the few highlights of Triplemania Monterrey was the visual of tiny luchadores diving into him and bouncing right off, while his Tijuana main event was a disaster of a match but ended in an emphatic seal of approval when he pinned Vampiro with one foot. The problem is, Satnam Singh in those matches has been part of “Team USA”, the loose conglomeration of Singh, Jeff Jarrett, QT Marshall, Parker Boudreaux and Sam Adonis. While Jarrett and wife Karen were in Satnam’s corner for this match - with the ridiculous image of Karen Jarrett waving an American flag in support for the Indian Singh and Canadian-Punjabi Dhesi - Adonis, Marshall and Boudreaux were nowhere in sight, Satnam Singh had just been shunted into a different partnership because the opportunity presented itself.

Jeff Jarrett is a heat magnet in AAA. I don’t hate it. He is synonymous with an era of AAA that was broadly unpopular, but which I have a soft spot for, and for a period of Jarrett’s life when his addictions and personal issues were at their worst, and when he wasn’t a particularly welcome presence. I, however, have always loved seeing Double J show up in a Lucha ring - he’s prepared to do everything in his power to garner heat and get a match over, to the point of often outworking the wrestlers he’s managing, and there are few spots that delight me more than Jarrett teasing a lucha dive only to come off the ropes straight into the Fargo Strut.

But here, his presence is in service of heat and heat alone. The family feud was forgotten early, with Negro Casas and Dr Wagner Jr even offering a handshake, so the whole match turned into Luchadores vs. Raj Dhesi & Satnam Singh or, more accurately, into Luchadores vs. Jeff Jarrett, where the heel tandem were nothing more than an extension of Jarrett. Jarrett has spent his appearances in AAA as an unfocused thorn-in-the-side, calling out anyone and everyone, but with no specific programme. Here, he was crowbarred into a story that had nothing to do with him, because AAA privileged the cheapest of cheap heat over a story that made sense, and a finish that could have given the audience some closure, some catharsis, some satisfaction.

Raj Dhesi, a former WWE Champion, got the pin on Negro Casas only after Jeff Jarrett snuck in for a guitar shot, in a match that also featured outside interference from Karen Jarrett and Faby Apache.

Jeff Jarrett getting beaten up by luchadores is a reasonable pay-off to him criticising Mexican wrestlers in general, but that’s the pay-off on a one-off angle, not something that’s built up over three shows across several months, and not something to scrap a reasonably well-built feud for. Who knows when, or even if, the newly crowned champions will bother showing up in AAA again. Any return to a Casas/Wagner programme after this would feel like a needless step backwards. Any comeuppance for Jeff Jarrett would have been better served coming from someone he has consistently antagonised this year, or over the preceding years - say, Latin Lover and Vampiro, two men who have been teasing a match with Jarrett for the last two years. Jeff Jarrett’s last actual match in AAA was in 2019.

There is no logic. There is no catharsis. There is no pay-off. There is no satisfaction. There is only heat. There is only Jeff Jarrett.

No Thank You

AAA booker Konnan repeatedly complains of the difficulty of booking a promotion when American promotions can just swoop in and sign up your champions by offering them more money than you can afford to pay, or make them unavailable on key dates. Back in Monterrey, Konnan put the AAA Mega Championship on Nic Nemeth, who subsequently missed Triplemania Tijuana. Indeed, this show was only Nemeth’s second ever AAA appearance, and his only previous defence of the Mega Title was for a different promotion in Puerto Rico. He put the Tag Team Titles on a team of outsiders. When he “needed” to get the AAA Tag Team Titles off FTR in order to keep them closer to home, he booked FTR to lose to Dragon Lee and Dralistico, despite knowing full well that Dragon Lee had already signed with NXT - Lee announced his signing immediately after the match, rendering the titles instantly vacant.

I mention that here, because the next match was for AAA’s Cruiserweight Championship. It wasn’t initially announced as that. This was supposed to be a match between Matt Riddle and Laredo Kid, with Cruiserweight Champion Komander added at a later date to make this a title match. Matt Riddle is obviously not a Cruiserweight. Komander won this title back in September. He has not defended it a single time in a AAA ring.

All three men wielded wooden chairs on their way to the ring, only to sit down on them during ring introductions, and then never incorporate them in the match. The American announce team claimed that they were part of an IKEA sponsorship. I still don’t know if this is true, or if they were just doing a bit. This was AAA waving Chekhov’s Gun in the air in act one, and then skipping right over act three altogether.

This match had flashes of greatness, and flashes of frustration and disappointment. I would sum it up as “stop getting Matt Riddle in my Laredo Kid vs. Komander”.

Even if Matt Riddle didn’t have a dubious track record, and an unfortunate “Personal Issues” sub-section on his Wikipedia entry, he was a miserable addition to this match, a wrestler whose stock has fallen to the point that he’s detrimental to the shows he’s on - this isn’t an ex-WWE star proving their worth elsewhere, it’s elsewhere picking up the scraps that WWE leave behind.

If Matt Riddle was ever a good wrestler, it’s difficult to remember when. It certainly wasn’t Saturday night in Mexico City. There, he threaded the needle between the 1980s WWF wrestler trotted out on an independent show to go through the motions and say their catchphrase, and the indie wrestling spot monkey who hits move after move with no semblance of rhyme or reason. A running knee here, a Powerbomb there, a Tombstone Piledriver for good measure. In a match where Komander and Laredo Kid were as dynamic and inventive as they always are, Matt Riddle was a video game wrestler. He had his moveset, he hit them when the right buttons were pressed, he taunted, and then entered into his idle animation until it was time to hit a move again.

Laredo Kid and Komander were the in-ring highlights of this show. They had a good, sometimes great, match. The problem is, Matt Riddle was having a different match with both of them at the same time. Komander hit a death-defying dive like only he can. Matt Riddle kicked off his sandals. Laredo Kid took a bump that was simultaneously simple, logical, unique, and terrifying, like nothing I have ever seen. Matt Riddle said “Bro”. Komander and Laredo Kid wrestled, Matt Riddle hit his spots.

Laredo Kid is a sensational wrestler, which AAA know enough to generally place in him what would pass for the “workrate” match. Komander is the kind of luchadore who generates highlight reels, can be endlessly GIFed on social media, is sorely needed in the absence of the injured El Hijo del Vikingo, and has become a far more well-rounded talent while working in AEW. They are the kind of wrestlers that should be the backbone of AAA.

Matt Riddle won.

Chris Packham Got On The ‘Roids

Next, it was time for Vampiro’s retirement match. But there’s some caveats. He’s not really retiring - even if we buy that this is his final run (which it should be, but probably won’t), this isn’t his last match. It’s his last match at Triplemania. It’s his last match in Mexico City. Put a pin in that, and let’s check back in next year.

Vampiro is a perfect lunatic. He is a wrestler and a rock star, the star of his own movie and multiple documentaries, he married a supermodel, was bodyguard to Milli Vanilli, sold out arenas, was a heartthrob that brought teenage girls to Lucha Libe in hitherto unheard of numbers, he has a string of TV credits to his name, he founded the Mexico City branch of the Guardian Angels. His life story is already a patchwork quilt of lies a ten year old would tell to impress the new kid in the playground, yet he is also a bullshit artist par excellence, giving Hulk Hogan a run for his money. There isn’t an injury or disease he hasn’t suffered from. He has been kidnapped by Mexican cartels more time than you’ve had hot dinners. He has been followed by no fewer than three evil spirits for the last ten years as the result of a black magic ritual gone wrong.

The pre-match video package detailed Vampiro’s career - though, limited as it was to his time with AAA, we were robbed of footage of young sexy Vampiro being mobbed by teenage girls who, thanks to the oppressive right wing stranglehold on Mexican culture in the late 1980s, had never seen heavy metal music before - Ian Hodgkinson may as well have come from Mars as from Thunder Bay, Ontario. Similarly, no footage of his Lucha Underground bloodbath with Pentagon Jr, and if there is any relationship between WWE and AAA, it wasn’t enough for them to be permitted any footage from WCW, so no Human Torch match, no KISS Demon, no Insane Clown Posse, and no Oklahoma. More’s the pity. Instead, it was a lovely tour of Vampiro’s regrettable haircuts - the white boy dreads, the emo fringe, the “Chris Packham got on the ‘roids”.

A hearse was driven into the arena, and a coffin carried out, and placed on-stage via a forklift. The coffin opened to reveal Vampiro, hopefully from a trapdoor in the stage, rather than a middle-aged and broken down man being knocked about inside a box reeling all over the place on a forklift.

And now on to the elephant in the room. They never really announced or explained what this match was. They never announced Vampiro’s opponent, and honestly I’m still not sure who it was.

Vampiro was jumped on his way to the ring by Jeff Jarrett and Sam Adonis - I had hoped that this match would involve Jarrett and a partner against Vampiro and Latin Lover, to pay off storylines built up over years, and to ensure somebody capable in the match to do the heavy lifting. Jarrett was able to hold down some semblance of structure in Ric Flair’s Last Match, and from that point on should have been every aging grappler’s go-to choice to drag them to something halfway watchable. But it turns out Jarrett wasn’t the opponent, and the concept of the match was to be revealed shortly.

A bell tolled, and a funeral procession revealed a portrait of Chessman, an old Vampiro rival, who ran in and joined in the assault, bringing back memories of their match at Triplemania Monterrey last year, which I still sometimes wake up in a cold sweat thinking about. Chessman was fought off by Pagano and Mechawolf, while Vampiro stumbled through the audience, sometimes fighting back, but usually just looking knackered and wandering about.

It became clear that this would be the format of the match. In better hands, it could have been great. In AAA’s hands, it was at least better than asking Vampiro to work a match. Each time a bell tolled, a portrait would be unveiled, and an old Vampiro rival would emerge, soon to be countered by a babyface ally. Given more time and scope, the concept could have worked. Even here, I enjoyed it despite myself.

By the end, Pirata Morgan, the almost immobile Cien Caras and his sons, Konnan, Octagon Jr., and El Mesias had all entered the fray, and, in a clip that I expect you have already seen, one coffin was opened to reveal La Parka, complete with Thriller playing, and stopping abruptly once the coffin lid was shut. I know that La Parka is a spooky skeleton and all, but the implied appearance of a wrestler who tragically passed away in 2020 inside a coffin as part of this match certainly raised an eyebrow.

It was around this point that I began to wonder exactly what constitutes a Vampiro win in this match. Did he have to put seventeen other blokes inside a coffin?

If Cagematch is to be believed, Vamp’s actual opponent in this match was El Mesias, and it was he who eventually ended up in a coffin. It’s not a Vampiro AAA match without audible production fuck-ups, and here’s a beauty, as El Mesias stood prone in front of Vampiro, who repeatedly motioned and screamed for a chair to hit him with. No chair was produced, and eventually Vampiro just gave Mesias a kick, and shut him in a coffin. The match ended, everyone else involved having seemingly disappeared in the interim.

It was, Cagematch tells me, 25 seconds short of 10 minutes long. It felt longer, and honestly should have been longer to at least have allowed each of the cameo appearances to actually do something. I think this match had more than twice as many wrestlers in it as it had wrestling moves.

Enjoy retirement Vampiro, I’ll see you for the next one.

Shambles

On to the Mega Championship match now and, as previously mentioned, Nic Nemeth won the title back in Monterrey and hasn’t been seen since. That match was largely built around a rehash of their World Title feud in WWE from a decade and change ago, but a change of direction here meant that this was now being framed as a battle of nations - Alberto El Patron the proud Mexican hero, fighting for heritage, his family legacy, and to bring the title back for Mexico, Nic Nemeth the smug American interloper.

To hammer that home, Nic Nemeth arrived with a surprise manager in a backstage segment, revealed to anyone still unsure as John Bradshaw Layfield, which I have to admit I never saw coming. He stood alongside Nemeth for the American national anthem, looking like Ronald Reagan’s Spitting Image puppet had a growth spurt, and then sat at ringside, not factoring into the match at all.

The match was miserable. Alberto El Patron is 47 years old, and has been washed up for a decade. He has been a low, low down point of every AAA match I’ve seen him in. He hasn’t been relevant in years, and if he ever does make headlines, it’s never for the right reasons. Matt Riddle’s Wikipedia “Personal Life” section takes a look at Alberto’s and gasps, “fucking hell, look at the state of that!”.

Nic Nemeth, meanwhile, has been a damp squib outside of WWE. Years too late to cash in on the goodwill of being an “indie darling” held down by the system movez guy despite being a complete product of the WWE system, starting in their developmental system in 2004, and staying there for longer than all of Hulk Hogan’s WWE runs put together. His departure from the company was an opportunity to reinvent himself, to prove that he always had more to offer than what WWE permitted him to show. Instead, he’s Dolph Ziggler by any other name, hitting his WWE finish in a Bloodsport “shoot fight”, still relying on reputation and on old WWE tropes without even the limited self-awareness of a Matt Cardona to know when to play them for laughs.

For AAA’s part, they at least tried to create some story here - Nic Nemeth won the Mega Championship following a low blow to Alberto El Patron back in Monterrey and, after a match that featured all the usual bad weapon shots, table bumps, and heel referee shenanigans of a AAA title match, plus the Shawn Michaels School Of Amateur Dramatics over-emoting of modern WWE, Alberto invoked the tedious wrestling logic of “turnabout is fair play” and beat Nemeth the same way, by throwing a beer in his face, and hitting him with a low blow for the win.

The match wasn’t so much the story, though, the aftermath was.

Latin Lover walked to the ring to present Alberto with a new title belt, but expressed his disappointment in Alberto for resorting to a low blow to win - when he became an authority figure, Latin Lover said that the audience was sick of title matches ended with screwy finishes, and he was here to fix that. He had nothing to say about two previous title matches on the same night ending with outside interference and assorted fuckery, but I’ll extend AAA some credit in assuming that he just values the World Title that little bit more.

The national hero babyface Alberto immediately turned heel - a role he’s far better suited for - and mocked Latin Lover, goading him into a fight and taking him out at the injured knee. Konnan entered with a barbed wire baseball bat, which he handed off to Latin Lover, playing off a storyline in which he has been trying to convince Latin Lover to stand alongside him, with the baseball bat as a symbolic olive branch. In the most predictable of swerves ever, Konnan attacked Lover instead, resulting in a nasty bladejob.

All year, AAA have flashed a mysterious eyeball symbol on-screen without explanation. I have been saying all along that the reveal of the mystery would be a heel stable led by Konnan, because it always fucking is. A mystery man in a mask with the same eyeball emblem on it entered the ring, joined with Konnan and El Patron, and unmasked to reveal AAA president Dorian Roldan. JBL entered the ring, nobody believed for a second that he would stand up to the heels, and he ultimately shook their hands and left. There have been allusions to Layfield being a “financial backer” to the new stable, or to AAA in general, but the group left without him, posing on the stage without him, which to me suggests he was kept out of any photo opportunities and future highlight packages as he’s unlikely to be part of the group moving forward. They just made use of him while he was there in the same kind of desperate grasp for attention that presumably inspired Konnan to wear a Judgement Day T-shirt for this angle.

The story is a load of bollocks, and it doesn’t make any sense. Konnan has been as confused and annoyed by the Eyeball symbol as anyone, and it being a “swerve” doesn’t do enough to explain all that away. Latin Lover and Konnan have been at odds ever since Lover joined the company, and despite both being essentially babyfaces before now, “warring authority figures” was the baseline for their relationship - teasing reconciliation only to revert to the status quo gets us nowhere. Dorian Roldan’s involvement is absurd - he’s not a strong performer, and his motivation doesn’t make sense. Why resort to mysterious imagery, and backstage sneak attacks of your own roster, just to get back at Latin Lover, a man you hired? If you weren’t happy with the job he was doing, why not just fire him? How did having some anonymous goons attack Octagon Jr. or whoever else was at the sharp end of all this help in any way?

It’s the pinnacle of late ‘90s, Russo-influenced, crash TV, doesn’t-matter-if-it-makes-sense-it’s-only-wrestling abject bullshit, by a creative mind that has been completely run dry for years. We have been here before. Konnan has no ideas that aren’t him leading a heel stable, or authority figures fighting for control of the company.

Something that a lot of people in wrestling either don’t want to admit, or remain blind to, is that WWE set the tone in everything we do. Even to companies who can’t stand WWE, who set themselves up as the “alternative”, who want nothing to do with them, they always end up following their lead, one way or another. It might be in the visual language of production, it might be in the turns of phrase - I remember ITV’s WOS Wrestling jarringly using the McMahon-ism “sports entertainment” - but often it’s in the in-ring content. At the height of the WWF’s much-maligned Invasion angle in 2001, there were invasions and inter-promotional feuds everywhere, and while Vince McMahon was all over WWE television, promotions all over the world were turning their promoters heel and making them the on-screen bad guy.

AAA was no different. In 2010, Dorian Roldan turned heel in a family feud, siding with Konnan and his heel stable, La Legion Extranjera, against his father Joaquin in a battle for control of AAA. So far, so McMahon. But this was fourteen years ago, and here we are again, with Dorian Roldan siding with Konnan to take on a babyface authority figure for control of the company, yet without any of the semblance of reality that came of a genuine family relationship, and a plausible power struggle for control in the vacuum left by the death of Antonio Pena.

Perhaps, as cubsfan/Luchablog has suggested in his thoughts on the show, this is all a cynical effort to turn real-life resentment towards Konnan and Dorian Roldan, and the general direction of the company, into that old word “heat”. I doubt they’ve even put that much thought into it. Either way, as WWE have shown time and time again, having the heels run the show and take the blame for poor TV only works if there’s direct correlation between the heels losing and TV getting better - if the heels keep on winning and the show stays awful, nobody wins, and if the heels lose and the show stays the same, we’re back at square one.

There are ways to make that story work, but they require having an array of babyfaces lined up to fight for AAA, and to win. The retired Latin Lover is not enough. The only babyface wins on this show are Vampiro, who were meant to believe is retiring, and Octagon Jr., in a meaningless show opening clusterfuck. The young potential heroes - the Laredo Kids and Komanders of the world - the perennial face of the company in Psycho Clown, and veterans positioned to stand up for the honour of the company, like Dr Wagner Jr., spent this show as sacrificial lambs at the altar of mainstream (read: American) acceptance that will never come. Others, like the Lucha Brothers and The Beast Mortos, have walked away entirely, and won’t be the last to do so. Konnan could have spent this show, or indeed this year, building up a stalwart group of babyface stars integral to the company, all ready to be slotted into this story from the offing. They haven’t done that, instead opting to give wins to Matt Riddle and to the Artist Formerly Known As Jinder Mahal, and to get heat on a non-wrestling Jeff Jarrett and referee El Hijo del Tirantes at the expense of an entire roster.

Perhaps this is all set up to create a run of heels for a returning El Hijo del Vikingo to knock down en route to beating Alberto el Patron to win back the title he never lost. But I doubt it. Vikingo, due to return soon, and the embodiment of the last time anyone extended AAA any goodwill at all, appeared in a post-show interview to congratulate El Patron - why not at least allow them a staredown on the show itself, or hint that he, or anyone, might have something to say about this state of affairs? Perhaps because, even as a long-reigning Mega Champion, AAA never saw Vikingo as anything more than a walking source of GIFs, thrust from opening match obscurity into the main event only because Kenny Omega wanted to wrestle him, never given a single meaningful feud or storyline to get his teeth into. He should be the face of the company, but it’s more likely we’ll see him jobbed out to Alberto El Patron to cement Alberto as Konnan’s chosen heel champion, in the endless pursuit of heat above all else.

Domo De La Muerte

It’s difficult to give much of a shit about the main event after that, even when said main event is a domed, weapon-filled steel cage with nine wrestlers in it, and the last one out loses their hair or mask.

The competitors were Cibernetico, Dark Cuervo and Dark Ozz of La Secta, Psicosis, Abismo Negro Jr. and El Fiscal of Los Vipers, and Murder Clown, Panic Clown and Dave The Clown of Psycho Circus, making Dave The Clown an unlikely two-time Triplemania main eventer this year. Spare a thought for poor El Fiscal, though, who despite main eventing Triplemania doesn’t even have a Cagematch profile.

This match was nonsense. Wrestlers fought aimlessly, with some escaping less than five minutes after the match started. Los Vipers quickly fought among themselves - English commentary bullshitted together an explanation that Fiscal and Abismo Negro Jr were preventing each other from escaping because, while the names may be misleading, Fiscal is the actual son of Abismo Negro, and they were arguing about who would be allowed to keep the mask and continue his legacy. Almost certainly not what was happening, but I admire the effort.

Early on in this high stakes pay-per-view main event, the referee - who wore a GoPro camera strapped to his head, for a camera angle that production never once cut to - took a shaving foam filled pie to the face from the trio of clowns, leaving him covered in foam for the entire match, while most of the other wrestlers ended up with the clowns’ confetti all over them.

The match felt hopelessly cobbled together, and the stakes comparatively low. The previous two years’ Triplemania saw mask/hair matches built up across three shows, between huge names, while previous years saw apuestas from the likes of Psycho Clown, Dr Wagner Jr., L.A. Park, Pentagon Jr., and Blue Demon Jr. The prospect of Panic Clown losing his mask, or Dark Ozz getting a haircut, didn’t really measure up.

The sole highlight came of the answer to the match’s central mystery - how the 300lb Murder Clown could possibly climb up through the aperture in the roof of the cage. Instead, Panic Clown got hold of some comically large controls to lower a winch from the ceiling, disguised with balloons, to hoist the big man up and out of the cage. A creative and visually hilarious spot in a show sorely lacking in them, if completely absurd.

The match ultimately came down to Cibernetico and Psicosis, with Abismo Negro Jr remaining on the cage roof after his escape. With Psicosis hanging upside down from the roof, Abismo aided Cibernetico in knocking him loose, sending Psicosis crashing through a table; an impressive bump for a wrestler pushing sixty. I assume that this signals the end of the reformed La Secta Cibernetica, largely an exercise in indulging this year’s ‘90s nostalgia, and the return of Cibernetico to Los Vipers. But, honestly. who fucking cares?

Psicosis unmasked after 27 years under that name, revealing his real name as Juan Gonzalez Cruz, thanking AAA for permitting him to use the name, and allowing company figurehead president Marisela Pena to do the honours. In a moment that always gets a pop from me, the unmasking revealed that his long hair was attached to the mask.

I don’t know what’s next for Juan Gonzalez Cruz. This felt like a retirement, if not for him, then for the Psicosis character. The timing was interesting - earlier on in the show, the original Psicosis was inducted into AAA’s Hall of Fame, complete with a video from Rey Misterio Jr putting him over as one of the most important luchadores of all time. Since his return to AAA, Psicosis has only worked under his alternative name, Nicho el Millionario, and this was his first appearance not only as Psicosis, but under the iconic mask since his return, even if it was only to stand on stage and wave. That this happened on the same show as the unmasking of the second Psicosis felt like auspicious timing, but it may have been nothing.

Odds & Sods

There is no use speculating about what happens next in AAA creative. I’ve never guessed it correctly even when everything clearly points in one direction, and half the time even when a match is explicitly announced, it doesn’t end up happening anyway.

This is a company that, if not in its death throes, is at least in dire need of a kick up the arse. It saddens me that AAA’s reputation among wrestling fans online is as a joke - the company that fucks up, that makes all the wrong decisions, books assorted wrong’uns, can’t fix its own production problems, announces wrestlers that won’t be appearing, and spots that go wrong. But they have nobody to blame for themselves, they simply cannot get out of their own way.

AAA has always been shambolic, always chaotic, but they’re no longer able to channel that chaos into anything worthwhile, anything that makes the bullshit more palatable. You can overlook the bad booking, incomprehensible decisions, and terrible audio when you get incredible wrestling at the end of it, but today’s AAA is heavy on the stick of Konnan and Alberto El Patron, and light on the carrot of El Hijo del Vikingo and Laredo Kid. Reliable stars like the Lucha Brothers are gone, as are fundamental lynchpins like Taurus, and agents of chaos like Rush and L.A. Park, and AAA have nobody but themselves to blame. Of the talent that remain, they’re reduced to background players behind a cast of characters who peaked when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Wrestlers are given big wins, then the next time you see them they’re back to opening match obscurity, or the fifth wheel in a tag team match more focused on Jeff Jarrett at ringside than on anyone actually competing. You can be main eventing Triplemania one month, and nowhere to be seen the next.

As someone who honed his Lucha fandom on grainy VHS transfers of AAA from the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the focus on old names from that era should be laser-focused to appeal to me, but the kick of getting to see Heavy Metal or Pirata Morgan again wears thin when they never fucking do anything, and when none of this is in service of anything greater. When you feel like a prize dickhead for paying to watch a show that everybody else got for free, and for caring enough to get invested in AAA’s talent and storylines, when AAA themselves clearly never did.

AAA in 2024 is a company that can’t decide whether its talent or its fanbase more, and its squandering both. Wrestlers leave to greener pastures, and Konnan points the finger of blame at anything but the mirror. But why would a wrestler want to work for a promotion that would sooner put their own management class front and centre than the talent risking permanent injury - or worse, as the ghost of La Parka is there to remind us - when they can make twice as much money to work Collision every few weeks? Why would a fan bring themselves to care about who wins a title when the company clearly doesn’t? Why get invested in a homegrown wrestler when they’re just going to be cast aside and jobbed out to the next WWE cast-off happy to work south of the border once or twice a year?

It’s not that AAA is bad - though right now, they really are - it’s that they’re rubbing your faces in it. Every forward direction from this show is telling you that everything wrong with what they’re doing is going to keep on happening.

If you want a picture of AAA’s future, imagine Konnan’s boot stamping on Latin Lover’s face - forever. And a Jeff Jarrett guitar shot.