I added 1950s lucha libre lineups, mostly from the cities Torreon and Gomez Palacio to the luchadb database earlier this month. This covers every year from 1950 to 1969. They’re integrated in the different pages of this site, and they’re also just available here. This is a slow continuing project to mine the El Siglo de Torreon archive for lucha lineups and results.
This was a terrible idea! It took me two months to get to this post. I was expecting more like two weeks.
1970s: 323
1960s: 258
1950s: 909
Lucha libre was covered like a sport in 1950, at least in the pages of El Siglo de Torreon. It’s not just that there were so many more cards listed, but results were fairly common in some years. My searching is a lot better at finding posters than articles, which means I’ve probably missed more cards this decade than any other. There were definitely shows that didn’t have a poster but did have someone writing the results up. I only pulled articles that mention lucha in them, and there’s probably a few more to be found if someone went back and read every paper for ten years in detail. I would not recommend that use of time, but you might want to try if you think see I’m missing something.
year events 1950 93 1951 106 1952 108 1953 54 1954 65 1955 175 1956 121 1957 84 1958 51 1959 52
Arena Olimpico opened late in 1954. The paper listed lineups for that building and Plaza de Toros (and sometimes a third building) for 1955 and 1956, which explains the high total for those years. The volume of events probably never changes from that point, but the mentions of them in the newspaper drop until the 80s.
The only simple part of this was these were generally short card to enter. Tag matches are uncommon for the first half of the decade, and cards may have as little as ten people on them before then. It’s a lot of the same group of people, with very occasionally appearances by national stars. The more noteworthy names are those just starting out, with Karloff Lagarde and Rene Guajardo showing up in undercards more at the end of the decade. The Norte Heavyweight and Norte Lightweight champions are the most visible titles, though it’s the usual bit of belts disappearing for months at a time (or being defended elsewhere in the north.) I have enough Norte championship info that I could put together a sort of title history page, but it seems pointless without the Monterrey title matches.
The one title bit I did get out of it was Mishima Ota winning the Mexican Lightweight Championship. I had it on one date, changed, it, and then read more and changed it back. Ota win what I now understand is a non-title match on September 29, 1957, then wins the belt itself on October 6. There’s also a women’s title change, with Dama Enmascarda apparently winning the title in 1958, as she’s billed as champion following this title match. The women’s title is a bit of funny money, with Gonzalez seemingly taking her troop around Mexico and maybe running similar bits in different places. In this case, Dama Enmascarda sure seems to lose her mask in a hair/mask match with Gonzalez – Enmascarada is instead wrestling under her real name a month later – but she would masked elsewhere for years.
Articles I found
- stars in 1952 Laguna lucha libre
- doctors say children should not be allowed to watch lucha libre. A kid is hurt by wrestling moves.
- a riot at a show. and an incident after one,
- A referee is injured in a match.
- Gardenia Davis is accused of defrauding a woman (though it appears to a fraudulent Gardenis Davis?)
- Arena Olimpico Laguna gets threatened with a shutdown, and chairs are thrown in the ring following a main event., leading to the arena being shut down. It does come back at some point, probably not soon after, but no one reports on that.
I guess I need to start on the 40s next. I hope it doesn’t take two months.