AAA will run three TripleMania shows in 2022
- April 30th (Saturday) back in the Monterrey baseball stadium
- June 18th (Saturday) in Tijuana, in the Xolo’s soccer stadium
- October 15th (Saturday) back in Arena Ciudad de Mexico
As I was reminded on Twitter, the original idea behind “TripleMania” was to run three of these shows a year and this is a return to it on their 30th Anniversary. The Tijuana show looks to be the biggest capacity of the three; Estadio Caliente is listed at over 27,000 seats. The show has a decent chance of drawing US spillover fans due to how close it is to the border.
This is the first time TripleMania Mexico City has been scheduled outside of August since 2013. I’m curious if Arena Ciudad de Mexico has a date conflict or if AAA is busy somewhere else.
I did a really quick look at WWE and UFC PPV dates and don’t see any conflicts, but many schedules aren’t complete that far out.
The spine of the three TripleMania will be an eight-man, ruleta de la muerte tournament. All eight names were announced
- Ultimo Dragon
- Blue Demon Jr.
- Psycho Clown
- Pentagon Jr.
- LA Park
- Villano IV
- Canek
- Rayo de Jalisco Jr.
That’s four singles match in Monterrey, two singles match in Tijuana, and the last two in a mask match in Arena Ciudad de Mexico.
Villano IV is the likely loser. Let’s be clear here: there are other names on this list who should absolutely take a loss at TripleMania 30 if they are ever going to give up their mask because it’s unlikely they’ll ever get this big of a payday again. Either AAA will go in a different or what’s left of their ability to give in the ring will leave them. There will probably be a lot of fame and attention to go along with that mask loss, as Dr. Wagner Jr. found out. Still, Villano IV sticks as a guy who would never be in a TripleMania mask match without this tournament, and anyone who cares to think this out will assume he’s getting unmasked. AAA’s big advantage over most companies is they draw a section of fans who just want to show up and be entertained and aren’t going to be bothered by ‘knowing’ the outcome in advance.
Many of these people aren’t big on losing in normal trios matches, so even just getting finishes out of these (yet to be announced) singles matches is going to be some work. The matches themselves are not promising. Pentagon & Psycho can be counted on to be good, LA Park, Ultimo Dragon, and even Blue Demon should be good in the right circumstances. Canek & Rayo de Jalisco struggled to climb a single step as part of this presentation. It’s been so long since we’ve seen Villano IV on this stage that I don’t even know which category to slot him in.
The Rayo de Jalisco Jr. walk-in during TripleMania Regia suggests a Rayo/Park first-round match for this tournament, but that gives AAA a lot of benefit of the doubt in having a plan a while back. That segment built to NGD versus Rayo, which doesn’t appear to be going anywhere for the moment. I’d be tempted to have Psycho/Pentagon to have one conventionally good match in the first round, but they probably need to split them up to minimize very old versus very old. The final four could be Villano IV, Psycho Clown, LA Park, and one maybe Blue Demon, so they can get the less mobile names out right away. On the other hand, are outcomes like Canek beating Psycho Clown really beneficial for AAA in 2022, no matter how it’s done?
Ultimo Dragon is the big surprise name. Wrestling for AAA ends his promotion relationship with CMLL, which stretches back to 2001 for Toryumon Mexico’s first Arena Coliseo show. Dragon worked AAA briefly in 1996 and did return to CMLL after, so it’s not like the relationship is totally dead, but the era of random indie (and foreign) wrestlers working a big DragonMania show in Arena Mexico appears to have ended. Antonio Pena appears to have come up with the Ultimo Dragon character, so there’s longer history here. Ultimo Dragon works primarily with Dragon Gate in Japan, but my understanding (from listening to people who follow it closer) is he’s just there as a freelancer and doesn’t have anything to do with operations nowadays. Dragon has plenty of connections in Japan which could help AAA’s plans to run there. AAA had used CIMA and Stronghearts in 2020 before the pandemic with apparent plans to feature them regularly, CIMA and Dragon have professional issues, so AAA working with Dragon seems to close the door to CIMA’s guys coming back. It’s AAA, they may try to work with both anyway. This is interesting from an international alliance standpoint but doesn’t really affect this tournament, where Dragon is unlikely to lose to be around for more than one match. Just doing this for one match doesn’t really make sense – either CMLL/Dragon were done with each other already and Dragon had no relationship left to break, or there’s something else going on here.
The April 30th date in Monterrey is a logical place for the Kenny Omega versus Hijo del Vikingo match – it’s the first TripleMania, it’s the place where the match was scheduled to happen – but there was no tease of it or mention of Omega. Vikingo appeared at the press conference with the mega-championship, but was treated just as another face in the crowd along the lines of Mr. Iguana & Dave the Clown. Cibernetico, Sanson, and Foratero were given mic time to vaguely threaten people.
No other matches were announced and we don’t know who faces who in the first round of the tournament as of yet. AAA read off a list of places they plan to run: Tampico, San Luis Potosio, Tijuana, Mazatlan, Torreon, Puebla, Ciudad Madero, Leon, Aguasalientes, Saltillo, Monterrey, Cancun, Chihuahua in Mexico, as well as Dallas, Japan and Colombia. No dates for any of them. The first show will be Rey de Reyes on 02/19; they apparently aren’t going to squeeze in another taping to replace Merida, so AAA TV will be back to reruns for a couple of weeks.
The press conference peaked with the announcement of the mask tournament, with the first half-hour all about pushing the various sponsorship tie-ups:
- cross-promotion with NFL Mexico for their 2022 game
- AAA themed skills on Amazon Alexa
- cross-promotion with mobile game Freefire
- fans of mobile game wrestling ties up may note the company behind Freefire were the ones who did the Contra tie up with CMLL last year; they’ve switched
- promotion of the Charly/AAA LigaMX jerseys
- Charly announced they’ve also created team jackets and outfits for the AAA roster this year
- Tony Khan sent in a video congratulating AAA on 30 years
- this was the same sort of video Dorian’s done for AEW
- a new AAA merchandise store was shown off, and the online store promoted
- AAA announced their wrestlers would participate in the Vive Mexico musical festival, March in Mexico City
- AAA wrestlers will participate in musical “The Prom”
Very little of this stuck, it just existed to tell the press what a big deal AAA is right now. (Edit: I swear this is true, because I forgot the last two until after hitting post.) Marisela Pena opened the press conference talking about the history of her brother Antonio in lucha libre and the formation of AAA in the best of the show, which seemed to be the best part of the presentation. No other matches were announced.
FITE followed the Spanish press conference with an English interview with Hugo Savinovich, with the idea they were going to explain what just happened for people who didn’t understand English and explain how those people can watch the shows. It did not succeed. Hugo is a lot like Vampiro: a beloved character who can exude passion and excitement helpful to promote your product, but also not really good on details. This was a details situation. Hugo would answer one question for five minutes but also not really answer the question. He repeatedly had to ask people off-camera – it appeared to be Jose Manuel Guillen & Oscar Manuel – the answers to basic questions he was there to answer. Both of those people speak English and would’ve done a better job, but Hugo is an ex-WWE name so AAA & FITE put him in that role even though it wasn’t suited to in the least.
(In a larger context, I think there are large misconceptions of what Hugo is and what’s good at by English speaking fans and media who saw him at the WWF Spanish announcing desks and have developed their own ideas of who this man is without actually listening to him much in his own language.)
It’s not like all the AAA had all the info there anyway; the FITE host talked about broadcasting AAA monthly, then said it might be a more than once a month, then said he’d been given a schedule but wasn’t sure if it would be the right one. FITE is airing the Febuary 19th Rey de Reyes show, but that either wasn’t said or wasn’t said much. It wasn’t a disaster, especially on the scale of AAA English disasters, but you did walk away wondering what the point of it was.
We did learn things in the Hugo interview, though just not the things we were supposed to. Hugo said himself, Konnan, and two other people currently comprise the AAA creative team. Hugo said he and others are talking to wrestlers about doing fewer things and slowing it down a bit so the announcers have more time to tell stories. (I’m sure makes some sense for the storytelling but is also just about the exact opposite most people are looking from AAA. Also, what stories is AAA telling?) Hugo promised big surprises really soon as possibly the most-vague scoop of all time. Hugo was apparently told off-camera during the interview that FITE would have English commentary, and then declared himself as the guy who would manage all the international commentator teams and make sure they all did the best job possible. This came off like Hugo seizing power over something he didn’t know about – he was under the impression announcers had not been hired – though I think the intent was to promise English commentary would have Hugo’s stamp of approval.
In reality, AAA’s already hired people to announce in English – Joe Dombrowski and Larry Dallas would’ve started this week had the Merida taping gone on. They are an improvement simply by not being the last crew. I think everyone understands that this is a good gig to have – AAA can be a very fun show, and often a very memorable one – but it takes good support from inside the company to make it happen and English announcers tend to have to go outside to find it.
The English commentary will start with Rey de Reyes and they’ll be doing every TripleMania at least. Maybe other shows in between. The shows will be available internationally. My understanding is this is specifically a FITE deal – there are no plans for weekly TV in English – so the number of shows we get may depend on how much interest there is in these.
AAA might release more details in a press conference, but that’s all we got now. Announcing those eight names will get AAA the press attention they wanted, good luck to the rest of us on watching it.