looking at the top stars of Guadalajara, from 1950 to 1986

Alfonso Dantes is always treated as one of Guadalajara’s great legends of lucha libre, and it’s not hard to see why when looking at the times he’s wrestled in the building. He’s got the most years with the most main events, and he’s got the most matches over all, thru the period I checked.

I put together a list of the three most frequent main eventers each year. I’ve split it up by building, for the few years where there was competition. It’ll kinda give you an idea of how the top stars changed over time.

Alfonso Dantes has the most main events in five years. No one else has more than 3 (Ringo Mendoza & Solitario if you count his busiest self promoted year.) He’s one of three biggest main eventers from 1967 to 1981, and is still around in a lesser role thru the end of the period and likely beyond.

The names all do change from year to year; it’s rare for someone to be in the most main events two straight years, and the top 3 never stays stable. I think this is because Guadalajara is used as a place to for up and coming talent, maybe a little bit before they were used in the same roles in Mexico City. Once they got hot, they were spending their Sundays (and maybe some Tuesdays) working arenas around Mexico City.

The 10 match list has a lot of familiar names.

495 Alfonso Dantes
375 Ringo Mendoza
274 Rayo de Jalisco Sr.
265 El Santo
240 René Guajardo
234 El Faraón
231 Ray Mendoza
229 el Halcón/Danny Ortiz
225 Rolando Vera
219 Blue Demon

Again, Dantes has 100 more matches than the next nearest person, and 200 more than anyone besides Ringo. Maybe this would look a lot different if we had the full lineups for these shows – maybe Dantes just made the top matches quicker – but Dantes is a pretty dominant presence. I’ve got a stronger idea of how important el Halcon and El Faraon were for a time, and I think we’d see guys like Atlantis, Rayo de Jalisco Jr. and the Dinamitas on this lift if I had lineups into the 90s.

There’s plenty of big names not included. Angel Blanco, el Solitario and Perro Aguayo are all among the top 20. The relationship between EMLL and UWA was friendly enough that UWA wrestlers did work in Arena Coliseo Guadalajara from time to time, but only infrequently. Solitario’s attempt to run his own promotion – basically only weeks when the bullring wasn’t running bullfights – didn’t seem to be on any regularly scheduled. It’s possible they were running smaller local venue which didn’t show up in the paper, but UWA also seemed to put together a regular loop of towns that were generally closer to Mexico City, and so may have not focused much on Guadalajara.

Another thing that stuck out to me about the top guys in Guadalajara is the era of Santo, Demon and Rayo de Jalisco is a lot shorter than I thought. Santo’s retirement isn’t until 1983, and Demon and Rayo are still around until the start of the 90s, but they’re not wrestling here all that often. Santo’s working heavily for the opposition group when Arena Coliseo Guadalajara opens and is pretty much down as a big star there in the mid 60s. Demon’s barely around long before that. I’d guessed Rayo was a top star for a long period of time, but he’s not really after 1970. It’s the Mendozas, Sangre Chicana, early Perro Aguayo and Alfonso Dantes carrying things thru the 70s. The Perro Aguayo/Ringo Mendoza feud itself seems to carry long stretches of time the way nothing else does.

One last thing: check out Satoru Sayama cracking the list in 1979. Sayama’s booked like a top guys of a promotion, in a promotion that rarely has build around foreigners. (Benny Galant in the 1963 is the previous one.) Sayama was so good that EMLL got over it’s usual preoccupations to actually use him as a shooting star.