The Magnificent Seven: 7 Stars Lucha Underground Has Used Better Than WWE

Late this past spring, I heeded the popular opinion and began to immerse myself in the world of Lucha Underground. While I won’t argue that the product is perfect, I found plenty to admire about the show, not least of all including the deeply competitive roster for which just about every talent had a discernible personality or program going at any given time, and there was a largely level playing field because so many of these talents had had distinctive opportunities to shine.

Some of the promotion’s top stars like Pentagon Dark/Jr., The Monster Matanza Cueto, and (thus far) Prince Puma are fresh to the American television audience, having not appeared on WWE TV, or had more than cup of coffee with TNA. But then I also noticed a cadre of stars who had been a part of WWE, but were, frankly, more impressive, entertaining, or engaging in Lucha Underground.

So, I decided to rank the talents put to better use by LU than WWE. For the purposes of this countdown, I did not include talents who had only worked for WWE in a backstage capacity, only had a tryout match (televised or not) or only appeared in WWE developmental, even if that developmental deal did include appearances on nationally broadcasted Tough Enough, or on WWE Network programming like NXT. To put a finer point on it the list of LU talents who were not eligible included: Cage, Ivelisse, Son of Havoc, Catrina, Mariposa, and The Mack), though of some of these performers undoubtedly would have made the cut had I shifted the lens and let them in.

Criteria for this countdown centered on level of success as a performer in LU relative to success as a performer in WWE. Note, I’m gauging success based not entirely on kayfabe achievements like winning titles or big matches, but more so on how engaging the character has been on LU broadcasts relative to WWE. So, for example, though Alberto El Patron and Rey Mysterio each won world titles and were objectively more famous with WWE, I would argue both were put to more compelling use in LU. As always, my personal opinion weighs heavily.

#7. PJ Black

In WWE, Justin Gabriel got something of a push the summer of 2011 as second-in-command to Wade Barrett in the Nexus stable that headlined the show heading into SummerSlam and, was, to a lesser degree, spotlighted for months to follow. Gabriel was one of the final few eliminations in the Team WWE-Nexus elimination tag match and required offense from John Cena himself to be eliminated. Later, he put up a strong fight against Cena one-on-one, and Cena needed to use his super-finisher Attitude Adjustment off the second rope to keep Gabriel down. The trouble is, after this initial flourish, Gabriel became a mere cog in the Nexus and then Corre stables—a bit player who got to shine occasionally (most notably pinning Edge in a non-title match in early 2011) and win tag gold, but otherwise working as a forgettable mechanic, putting on strong enough performances in his own right, but never getting a chance to shine.

I won’t claim that PJ Black has become a megastar in Lucha Underground. He notably lost his debut match to The Mack. Just the same, upon arriving in LU, he immediately had a character as “The Darewolf,” and before long settled into a pompous but athletically gifted trio alongside Johnny Mundo and Jack Evans.

It remains to be seen if Black will flourish further under the LU banner, but with a smaller roster, better-defined character, and more opportunity to let his personality show, he has already demonstrated a greater capacity for success than he had shown under the WWE banner after his first few months in the main roster spotlight.

#6. Big Ryck

In WWE, I’d argue that Ezekiel Jackson never truly found an identity. He was a heater for The Brian Kendrick on Smackdown, and later William Regal in ECW, and looked poised to make a name for himself when he wound up the last champion of the WWE ECW experiment. The speculation at the time was all about WWE wanting the big man to look good before he headed back to one of the two main brands.

While you can attribute some of it to ill-timed injuries, and some of it Jackson’s attitude or limitations as a worker, he never really found his footing in the years to follow, most notably showing up as the muscle for The Corre stable, before turning face for a brief run as Intercontinental Champion. He ultimately dropped the strap unceremoniously to Cody Rhodes and receded to the background.

In Lucha Underground, Big Ryck was a strange fit for the roster—a mountain of a man, but still working within the limitations he’d demonstrated in WWE, rather than rising to the level of athleticism demonstrated by the other resident big men like Cage and Mil Muertes. The character was immediately defined, however, as a mercenary who followed the money, a sensible fit for the Dario Cueto-run Temple. All of a sudden there was a context for him lacking the aesthetically pleasing skills of a luchador, in favor of the brute force a guy hired to beat people up on command.

The character evolved one step further during season one when his running buddies, The Crew, turned on him and put out one of his eyes with a cigar. Wearing an eye patch, he went from an impressive physical specimen to the look of a deranged monster with the added constant reminder that he had every right to be righteously pissed off. In the short term, he became a new force for the powers of good
In the Temple before giving way to his original character’s nature and reverting to a gun for hire, aligned with newly arrived moneybags DelAvar Daivari.

While the character only lasted one season, LU shrewdly cast Big Ryck as muscle for hire and, for the brief period he worked face, far more concerned with revenge than meaningfully doing the right thing. As such, he realized the fuller potential of the performer at hand.

#5. Rey Mysterio Jr.

As I mentioned earlier, on paper it’s difficult to knock Mysterio’s WWE run. He won three world titles (kickstarting one reign at a WrestleMania), won a Royal Rumble, and generally worked near the top of the card for the better part of a decade. Despite all of these accomplishments, though, Mysterio was always a bit of an awkward fit in the broader WWE landscape. He started out working in the cruiserweight and tag divisions, where he thrived as an in-ring performer, but had a woefully obvious glass ceiling hovering over his head, as WWE was not prepared to take a five-foot-six superstar that seriously. When he did get his shot at the top of the card, his first world title reign saw him drop non-title matches clean to The Great Khali and Mark Henry, and just barely survive a challenge from Kane, before finally dropping the strap to King Booker, whom WWE clearly had better defined plans for. His second reign quickly gave way to Kane relieving him of the title to pursue his program with The Undertaker at the top of the card, and Mysterio’s third reign didn’t survive a single episode of Raw, amidst the Summer of Punk turmoil, when he dropped the WWE Championship to John Cena at the end of the same episode on which he’d won it. From there, Mysterio remained an upper card contender, over with the crowd almost in spite of WWE’s uneven booking.

In LU, Rey Mysterio has been treated as a legend. He was introduced as a mentor to rookie Dragon Azteca Jr. before jumping into the fray as a noteworthy contender in Aztec Warfare, quickly becoming a Trios Champion, and finally defeating Prince Puma in match successfully sold as a dream match, and the main event of Ultima Lucha Dos. He started season three with the subtle suggestion that Dario Cueto was helping his brother dodge Mysterio as a contender to the LU title, and going on cleanly defeat Pentagon Dark—another top star who looks poised to ascend to the top—in the main event.

In LU, Mysterio is a bona fide legend whose identity as a luchador is neither a novelty nor a caveat, but rather an essential part of why he is respected. Moreover, with only one our per weekly episode, he’s not over-exposed or over-taxed—treated as a special attraction with no need to over-exert himself into another injury like he had time and again in the later stages of his work in WWE.

#4. Matt Striker

After uneven attempts at working as a heel wrestler and then manager, in WWE, Matt Striker was exactly the sort of commentator that Vince McMahon and the establishment resent for being too technical and showing too much personality, and thus exactly the sort of commentator smart fans love for simultaneously calling pro wrestling like a sport, while telling coherent stories. In WWE, he was relegated mostly to ECW and NXT. In LU, he’s had the chance to shine.

In Striker’s case, not unlike Mysterio’s, relative success in LU may be equal parts a matter of how a performer is used and how a performer fits a promotion. In LU, Striker fits like a glove, getting to straddle the line between Joey Styles-esque on-the-fly play-by-play for lighting quick progressions of moves and Jim Ross-style storytelling and sound bites. Striker consistently sounds like a fan when he runs play-by-play, invested in the characters at hand and facilitating us viewers at home marking out when something truly extraordinary happens in the ring.

LU is a boutique, hardcore fans’ promotion. I don’t know that it would appeal to a casual viewer for all of the intricacies of storylines that demand you not miss an episode, and accelerated pacing of spots in the ring. Striker is the ideal voice of this brand in a way I don’t suspect he’d ever be allowed to be in WWE.

#3. Chavo Guerrero Jr.

This is probably an overstatement, but I struggle to think of any single performer whom WWE more mis- or under-utilized than Chavo Guerrero Jr.

I’ll concede that Chavo was not as strong of an all-around performer as his uncle and contemporary, Eddie. But then, how many guys all-time could really claim to be?

While Eddie was a historically great worker, athlete, and personality, Chavo was excellent—maybe even great in each of these capacities. It’s just that you’d have a hard time knowing it based on his decade in WWE. Prior to that time, in WCW, he had the opportunity to work to his strengths among the promotion’s excellent cruiserweight division, besides getting more opportunities to show his personality working a crazy gimmick, riding a hobby horse around the ring.

In WWE, Chavo was largely second fiddle to Eddie—his tag partner and literal partner in crime as Los Guerreros, in which Chavo got show a bit of personality, but was always outshone by his uncle, which ultimately gave way to a short, lukewarm feud between the two. WWE appeared to have the intention of pushing Chavo under the absurdist Kerwin White gimmick, before Eddie’s untimely passing, at which point, Chavo embraced his roots and even got a mini-push with a win over JBL in an Eddie tribute match on Smackdown before receding to the lower middle card. He’d have a brief resurgence after a heel turn, but was clearly treated as a second-class citizen under Edge as the lone main eventer of La Familia. Chavo would end up peaking in WWE as the ECW champion for a couple months in early 2008, after which point he spent an interminably long time jobbing out to Hornswoggle in a truly awful feud that may have squandered the final years of Chavo’s prime.

So what would Lucha Underground make of this aged talent, whose potentially legendary status WWE had all but tarnished into oblivion? He worked LU’s very first televised match opposite Blue Demon, and it didn’t bode well—a slow-paced, straight-forward, anti-climactic affair. However, little by little, LU went on to transition Chavo into a player—first with his violent heel turn, then with the eerie promise that “Mexico” was coming for him, then with his fluctuating alliance with Dario Cueto and The Crew. Then, after an absence, there was Chavo’s very best work under the LU banner—screwing over Cage and conniving his way into a Gift of the Gods Championship match and win only to get the righteous beat down he deserved in a very good match with Cage to drop the title to him, and to give The Machine momentum and a story before he challenged The Monster Matanza Cueto for the LU title.

In LU, Chavo is not a joke, but rather a calculating and cowardly heel in the tradition of his family—a recognizable wild card who can duck in and out of the proceedings to add intrigue at unexpected times.

#2. Alberto El Patron

I waffled on my choice to put El Patron this high in the countdown. After all, he only worked for LU for half of one season, and if we aimed to compare apples to apples, Del Rio’s very first six months with WWE were largely quite good, too.

Here’s the thing—as a WWE performer, after his initial luster wore off, Alberto Del Rio was a snore. He was largely vanilla as a top heel, and repeated losses to legit top guys like John Cena shored up that we weren’t really supposed to take him seriously. When he first turned face, there was a flicker of excitement, only for him to quickly become vanilla as all heck in that role, too. Yes, in his first fourteen months with the company, Del Rio had debuted beating Rey Mysterio clean, won a Royal Rumble, won Money in the Bank, and won the WWE Championship—the kind of run that, on paper looks legendary. But the man’s booking was up and down enough during this period alone that it was hard for fans to fully accept him as a world-class threat, and only grew more topsy-turvy from that point forward.

Not having seen Del Rio before he debuted with WWE, I didn’t have a proper frame of reference, and thought that I just didn’t like the performer. Imagine my surprise then, when he showed up on LU. Yes, he had the instant credibility of a former WWE star, and the Mexican heritage to fit right into the landscape of LU. But on top of that, he carried both a superstar it-factor and a severity we’d never gotten to see in WWE. While I didn’t think his series with Texano set the world on fire, his program opposite Johnny Mudo threatened to. Mundo turned heel and threw El Patron through a glass window to cost him his shot at the LU title. El Patron returned an angry, angry man who returned to cost Mundo his All-Night Long Match with Prince Puma and feud violently en route to a very good showdown at Ultima Lucha.

The shift that puts El Patron into the number two spot for me went down over this past calendar year. For it was just a little under a year ago that Alberto Del Rio made a surprise return to WWE programming, as a surprise challenger to John Cena’s US Championship. The comeback was strange. On paper, beating Cena clean and decisively should have strapped a rocket to Del Rio’s back side. The trouble is that the match was short, disjointed, and frankly not very good—not to mention that it was largely overshadowed by the confusion of Zeb Colter managing Del Rio in their ill-defined MexAmerica partnership. Del Rio promptly set to floundering, largely directionless already when he made the semifinals of a world title tournament and got pinned clean by Roman Reigns, before becoming just another guy alongside comparably directionless Rusev, Sheamus, and King Barrett in the utterly forgettable League of Nations stable. In sum, Del Rio’s biggest headlines and most memorable activity of this second WWE run had nothing to do with how WWE booked or how he performed, but rather the shock of him returning unannounced, followed by him leaving the company again just as abruptly on the heels of a Wellness Policy suspension.

In LU, as in AAA and CMLL, El Patron was a bona fide, irresistible superstar, while in WWE he never quite clicked, and never felt like much more than an upper mid-card mechanic who slipped in and out of the world title scene as WWE needed him. He’s a prime example of a talent WWE never really figured out how to use, who delivered on some of his clear potential under the LU banner.

#1. Johnny Mundo

John Hennigan/Blaze/Spade/Nitro/Morrison had a long, varied, and strange run with WWE. After winning Tough Enough, he advanced from developmental to play Eric Bischoff’s sidekick before truly finding his footing in the MNM tag team—a too oft-forgotten very good team from a largely bleak period in WWE tag wrestling. He’d go on to become a mid-card fixture and even flirt with the main event backing celebrity Kevin Federline against John Cena, and then moving on to become the top dog on ECW. In the aftermath of his ECW title run, he formed an unlikely, but supremely entertaining tag team with the Miz that wound up elevating both men to the upper mid-card. Morrison wound up a face again pushed against the glass ceiling, challenging The Miz and later Cena for the world title, earning a niche as top high-spot guy for a couple years.

In a common thread for folks on this countdown, Mundo rolled into LU a big fish in a much smaller pond, and it didn’t feel absurd at all to hear Matt Striker sell the one-time WWE career-mid-carder as one of the best wrestlers in the world. Working on a smaller roster, objectively ripped, jacked Mundo looked like a force to be reckoned with as a pissed off face gunning for Dario Cueto and The Crew. Then the character really took off as a heel, coming across as wildly arrogant, cheating in obvious and dickish fashion, and engaging in tremendous programs with Prince Puma, Alberto El Patron, and Cage before settling into the trios division alongside PJ Black and Jack Evans as a cadre of magnificent assholes.

In WWE, Mundo’s bodytype and athleticism saw him get relegated to the Kofi Kingston/Neville spot in the mid-card and tag ranks. In LU he has consistently been treated like a top guy, and despite not capturing any singles gold to date, he remains not only wildly entertaining, but one of the most credible stars on the roster.

Which talents would you add to the list? Let us know what you think in the comments (and before you comment with someone like Cage or Ivelisse, go back and read the intro).

Read more from Mike Chin at his website and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.