Ask 411 Wrestling: Was the El Grande Americano Mask vs. Mask Match the First of Its Kind?

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Through Hel Stryer and brimstone . . . it’s Ask 411 Wrestling!

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

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Thomas has donned the hood:

I just got done watching the mask versus mask match between the El Grande Americanos and it got me wondering: Has there ever been a mask versus mask match like it where even though it was a mask versus mask match the identities of both individuals were already well known and it was purely for storyline purposes?

No, actually it’s not.

As you probably know, an often-used angle in the territorial era of professional wrestling was a wrestler being suspended from a promotion (in storyline terms) and coming back under a mask, with everybody knowing who the masked wrestler really was. Junkyard Dog did it as Stagger Lee, Jimmy Valiant did it as Charlie Brown from Outta Town, Andre the Giant did it as Giant Machine, Barry Windham and Brian Pillman both did it as the Yellow Dog, and Hulk Hogan even did it as Mr. America.

Perhaps the most famous take on this storyline was Dusty Rhodes as the Midnight Rider. In fact, Dusty did the Midnight Rider schtick in a few different territories over the years.

In 1983 in the Florida territory, Rhodes was feuding with Kevin Sullivan. He got suspended during the rivalry and, lo and behold, the Midnight Rider showed up shortly thereafter. Then Kevin Sullivan got suspended, and a remarkably similar masked wrestler named Lucifer was on cards days later. The Midnight Rider and Lucifer didn’t care for each other all that much, so they began feuding, and that feud culminated in a mask versus mask steel cage match on September 20, 1983 in Tampa. The stipulations also involved the loser leaving the territory for a year. In true pro wrestling fashion, Sullivan was back in three months.

Going into that match, everybody in the audience knew who the masked wrestlers were, but they still showed up to get the big payoff. In fact, the announcers even said during the match that fans strongly believed who the masked guys were, though it had not yet been “confirmed.”

You could also say that WWE’s Sin Cara versus Sin Cara match taped on October 16, 2011 in Mexico City for Smackdown was also a situation in which fans knew who the masked wrestlers really were.

Obviously, everybody knew that the original Sin Cara (a.k.a. Sin Cara Azul) was Mistico. That was openly acknowledged on WWE programming when they first signed the guy. The second Sin Cara (a.k.a. Sin Cara Negro) was Hunico. On the September 23, 2011 episode of Smackdown (taped September 20), Sin Cara Negro cut a promo indicating that Sin Cara Azul had previously stolen the ring name Mistico from him, which is why he chose to steal the Sin Cara name years later. This was not particularly well explained by WWE’s announcers, but it was a storyline acknowledgment of the real world fact that, years before the famous Mistico was Mistico, Hunico had used the same ring name himself while competing in lucha libre.

Again, this aspect of the story wasn’t heavily emphasized in English commentary, but you did have Sin Cara Azul, who everybody knew was the wrestler most popularly known as Mistico, facing Sin Cara Negro, who announced on WWE television that he was the first guy to call himself Mistico, a.k.a. Hunico.

We’re going back to Ignacio:

A few months ago, I asked for a who’s who of NWA World Heavyweight Champions. Would you do the same with the NWA Women’s Championship?

For those who may have missed it, I started answering this question in the last edition of the column but had to split the response up because it was running long.

Last week, we started out in 1950 with the creation of the championship and continued through 1998, when there was no clear-cut champion but wrestler Debbie Combs was sporadically defending the belt on the indies, though it was not entirely clear that she had the blessing of the NWA to do so.

The last recorded Debbie Combs title defense was on May 16, 1998, at which point the championship goes completely dormant for over two years.

The NWA decided to revive the Women’s World Title at its 52nd Anniversary Show on October 14, 2000 at the Nashville Fairgrounds (later the home of TNA) in front of 360 people. Strawberry Fields became the new champion, defeating Leilani Kai.

But who is Strawberry Fields?

This is an interesting one. Strawberry’s real name is Jackie Baucom, and she is the wife of David “Slim” Baucom, a Carolina-based businessman who made his fortune running a series of adult entertainment venues. Jackie was an exotic dancer when they met. According to a couple of interviews with Slim that my research turned up, he explained that, when Jackie stopped dancing, she wanted to continue entertaining in some way and decided to get into wrestling on the suggestion of a wrestler who used to come to the club where she worked. She started wrestling in 1997, and husband Slim actually followed her into the business, buying Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and becoming an official NWA territory. Baucom rose up in the organization until he was on the NWA’s board of directors, and he even landed contracts with the United States military to put on wrestling shows overseas as entertainment for the troops.

As Baucom became an NWA board member, his wife became Women’s Champion, two facts that given the lack of nepotism in wrestling history have to be completely unrelated. Unfortunately for Strawberry, her reign was short-lived, as she relinquished the championship the month after she won it due to a back injury. According to a note in the November 27, 2000 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, she was telling people that she was not retiring at the time and instead just taking time off to heal, but I see no record of her having a match after that, so…

The NWA Women’s Title is vacant again. It would be almost two more years before would have another champion.

That new champion is Madison, who wins the belt on August 23, 2002 in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada on an event promoted by Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling (ECCW). Madison originally hailed from Calgary, and she had less than one year of experience as a pro wrestler before her NWA Title win, after being trained by thirty-year indy veteran and periodic WWF enhancement talent Michelle Starr. Though she occasionally traveled to other promotions – including a couple of months for Les Thatcher’s HWA group in Ohio – really 90% of Madison’s career was in her home promotion of ECCW. That suited her just fine, though, because during the 2000s ECCW did become a hotbed of women’s wrestling, running a series of shows called SuperGirls that flew in top talent from throughout North America, including Nattie Neidhart, Becky Lynch, and Cheerleader Melissa. Though Madison was part of that scene, ultimately she hung up her boots in 2007.

Madison did drop the NWA Women’s Title a couple of months after she won it, falling to “The Lone Star Diva” Char Starr on October 26, 2002 in Corpus Christi, Texas on the NWA 54th Anniversary Show. Char’s wrestling career is actually similar to Madison’s, in that she became NWA Champion within a year of debuting, though the vast majority of her career took place in a fairly limited geographic area and she retired after just a few years. Specifically, Char wrestled almost exclusively in Texas and Oklahoma, and she only kept it up from 2001 to 2005. A New York Times article from 2001 about the wrestling school Char attended reveals that her real name was Char Revell and that she worked outside of wrestling as an herbalist. It appears she’s still in that line of work, currently helping to run the Sage Well Herb House & Wellness Cafe in suburban Austin, Texas.

Two months after winning the championship, Char Starr traveled to Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada for the only recorded match I could find her having outside of Oklahoma or Texas, dropping the NWA Women’s Title back to Madison on an ECCW show on December 6.

Our next NWA Women’s Champion is probably the most famous person to hold the belt since the Fabulous Moolah, and that’s somewhat appropriate because she was trained by Moolah. It’s former WWF Women’s Champion and Women’s Tag Team Champion Leilani Kai. Most reading this will know Kai, so I won’t go too deep on her background, but it’s worth noting that she had a 40-year career between 1975 and 2015, and she is still engaged with wrestling to this day.

Kai’s dropping the NWA Women’s Title has some question marks associated with it. If you look at most basic title histories, they will say she was stripped by NWA executive Bill Behrens on June 19, 2004 due to no showing NWA events. However, one source (Online World of Wrestling) indicates that the title being vacated was part of a storyline, which I am inclined to believe because despite supposedly “no showing” several events, Kai had defended her title on May 1 and June 5 for NWA Virginia, the promotion that was featuring the title at the time. The Women’s Pro Wrestling blog claims that Kai was stripped due to disagreements with the NWA over not properly featuring women’s wrestling, though there’s also the possibility of that being part of the angle.

In any event, the same day that the belt was taken from Kai, a new champion was crowned in the form of Kiley McLean, real name Kelly Adkins, who defeated a woman named Kameo in a match for the vacant title at an NWA Virginia show in Richmond. McLean was a Virginia-based indy wrestler who started her career in 1998 and adopted a gimmick heavily based on her Celtic heritage. She also started promoting her own shows in 2001 under the banner of the Global Wrestling Alliance, which mostly featured local talent but occasionally booked names like Bobby Eaton, Bill Eadie, and Buff Bagwell. McLean’s GWA eventually merged into NWA Virginia, which became her home promotion at that point. She continued to wrestle there until the end of 2005, when knee problems brought an end to her career. She did come out of retirement just once, though, for the most notable match of her career . . .

. . . when she played the role of “Rosie O’Donnell” on the January 8, 2007 episode of WWE Monday Night Raw for a match against “Donald Trump” (played by Ace “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” Steel) during the height of the celebrifeud between the two. If you’ve never heard of this one, let’s just say that it is widely considered one of the worst segments in the history of Raw, and think about the ground THAT covers.

Before her retirement and her turn as Rosie, McLean did drop the NWA Women’s Title to Lexie Fyfe on NWA Virginia’s April 23, 2005 show, making her reign about ten months. Fyfe was ten years a pro at that point, breaking into wrestling in 1995, actually being recruited by southern indy wrestler Brandi Wine when the two were working together at the same office job. Fyfe wrestled for several years around southern indies and even got herself a shout-out in Lita’s autobiography for being the one who got Lita connected with ECW, which was obviously the springboard to her WWF career. Fyfe also got herself some enhancement work with both the WWF and WCW during the Monday Night War era, though it never turned into a contract. Lexie was a key part of the SHIMMER: Women Athletes indy promotion in the mid-to-late 2000s, teaming with fellow former NWA Women’s Champion Malia Hosaka as “The Experience.” For many years, she has also been the owner of a company that films and sells “custom” women’s wrestling matches, bouts that are taped in an empty venue with no audience and no commentary with no real storyline so that people who are fans of that sort of thing can watch them and, um, well, I’ll let you figure out what they do when they watch them.

On the NWA’s 57th Anniversary Show on October 8, 2005 at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, Fye’s title reign came to an end when she lost to Christie Ricci in a three-way match also featuring Tasha Simone. Ricci obviously took her name from the actress Christina Ricci due to a passing resemblance between the two. She was trained by the aforementioned Leilani Kai and debuted in 2002, appearing on an early TNA pay per view in her first year. In fact, she was based mostly in Tennessee, though after a couple of years she became a regular in Lucha Libre Femenil (LLF), an all women’s indy group in Monterrey, Mexico that brought in a ton of American and Canadian stars of the era. She interacted with a lot of women who went on to the big leagues, and there were rumors of her getting a WWE developmental deal at one point, but it never came to fruition as when it came to in-ring talent she was a step behind the cream of the crop on the women’s indy scene in the 2000s. In a funny side note, the August 15, 2005 Wrestling Observer Newsletter reported that she had a day job as a paralegal and commercials for the law firm she worked for used clips of her wrestling to grab attention.

MsChif is our next NWA Women’s Champion, beating Ricci in Lebanon, Tennessee on January 27, 2007. Hailing from the Metro St. Louis area, MsChif came up with other wrestlers like Delirious, Matt Sydal, and Daizee Haze and became a darling of the 2000s indy scene, including time with IWA Mid-South, as one of the top stars in the early days of SHIMMER, and crossovers to Ring of Honor from her SHIMMER work. She likely could have gone even further in wrestling than she did, though the word during the height of her popularity was that she didn’t pursue a full-time wrestling career because she already had a satisfying day job as a microbiologist. In fact, PBS did a feature on her double life back in 2010.

(See if you can spot me in the audience of the match linked above! I’m there!)

The next NWA Women’s Champ is Amazing Kong, who defeats MsChif on May 5, 2007 in Streamwood, Illinois for NWA Midwest. I am guessing everybody reading this has a good handle on Kong’s background, so I won’t go too far into it. However, in a bit of trivia, this was a title-for-title match, as Kong was the AWA World Women’s Champion at the time. Granted, this wasn’t the legitimate AWA Women’s Title because we all later learned that the promoter who was booking it didn’t have the legal right to use the promotion’s intellectual property. Yet, with nobody knowing that at the time, it seemed pretty cool that Kong simultaneously held titles for both those historic organizations.

MsChif took the NWA Title back almost a year later on April 27, 2008 in Gape Girardeau, Missouri for a promotion called Central States Wrestling Missouri. Her second reign would last for over two years, with Tasha Simone becoming our next new champion in Lebanon, Tennessee for NWA Top Rope on July 24, 2010. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because she was the third woman in the ring with Christie Ricci and Lexie Fyfe when Ricci won the title in 2005. Simone – known early in her career as Tasha Simone-Love – is one of the more experienced wrestlers we’ve seen on this list, as she started plying her trade in 1992 after being trained by “Gentleman” Chris Adams and James Beard in the Dallas area. She started wrestling in the early 90s territory called “Big D,” which was an effort to coast on the fumes of World Class Championship Wrestling, and she also got a fair amount of exposure in the USWA in 1995 as an opponent for Jacqueline Moore. It appears that she hung up her boots in 2014, spending most of her career in indies located in Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia at various points.

Speaking of Oklahoma, that is where our next title change occurs, as La Reina de Corazones (which translates to “The Queen of Hearts”) upends Simone on October 2, 2010 in Altus, OK for NWA Oklahoma. La Reina is an alternate persona of Erica Torres, who started as an amateur wrestler in high school, where she was a California state champion her junior and senior years before moving on to wrestle in college and becoming a three-time All American. She transitioned to pro wrestler in 2009 and has been at it ever since, though per her social media it appears she’s been on a hiatus since February of last year as she paused to have a baby. In pro wrestling, she’s spent most of her career in Impact Zone Wrestling, a long-running indy group in the Sooner State. In more recent years, she’s branched out, competing in Booker T’s Reality of Wrestling and the most recent iteration of the Memphis Wrestling territory. With over 15 years of experience, it will be interesting to see where her career heads upon her return to the ring.

Less than a month after winning it, La Reina had to relinquish the Women’s Title due to injury, which created an opportunity for Tasha Simone to become a two-time champion, beating Miss Rachel in Lebanon, TN for the vacant belt on November 6, 2010. Just one day short of her second reign turning a year old, Simone is defeated by Tiffany Roxx, no relation to northeastern wrestler Nikki Roxx who eventually became Roxxi Leveaux in TNA. Tiffany, like many of the wrestlers in this portion of the NWA Title history, had a solid independent wrestling career for about fifteen years but largely remained in her home region of Tennessee and Georgia. She’s got some public facing social media which reveals that, these days, she’s living a “civilian” life though she remains supportive of independent wrestling in her area.

On Christmas Day of 2011, Tasha Simone wins the title back in Lebanon, making her the first person since the days of the Fabulous Moolah to become a three-time NWA Women’s Champion. However, it’s also her last reign with the belt, as Kacee Carlisle becomes champion on October 20, 2012, once again for NWA Top Rope in Lebanon, Tennessee. Carlisle retired at the beginning of 2024 after eighteen years as a pro wrestler, getting indy bookings in a variety of different states including Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, Delaware, New York, the Carolinas, and all points in between. She did once get a look from TNA at one of their rare house shows in 2013, though otherwise she didn’t have much to do with national promotions. Really, her time with the NWA Women’s Championship was probably her biggest career highlight.

During her time as NWA Women’s Champ, Carlisle was regularly brought to Texas, where she feuded with Barbi Hayden in 2013 and 2014. The two had a three-match series in NWA Houston and NWA Branded Outlaw Wrestling, and it culminated with them main eventing an NWA Houston show that was titled Hayden vs. Carlisle III, a heck of an accomplishment for two independent women wrestlers in the 2010s. That show took place on January 25, 2014, and it saw Hayden defeat Carlisle for the Women’s Championship.

But who is Barbi Hayden? A Texas native, Hayden was trained by Shoichi Funaki of Kaientai fame (who settled in Texas after his WWE career) and broke into wrestling in 2010. She predominantly wrestled on Texas independents for the early years of her career, though she also fell in with David McLane when he rebooted WOW in 2013 and, while wrestling there, she adopted the name Abilene Maverick, paying homage to her Texas heritage. In 2017, WWE brought in Hayden as an alternate for the Mae Young Classic, though her services weren’t needed for the actual tournament and she instead wrestled a dark match on the taping, teaming with Nicole Matthews in a losing effort to Deonna Purrazzo and Jessica James. In 2019, she announced that she was pulling out of all her independent wrestling dates, which briefly lead to speculation that she would be signing with one of the big leagues, though she eventually came out and said that she was leaving indy wrestling to become a performer at the Atomic Saloon Show at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. She hasn’t had a recorded indy match since then, though she did work for WOW again 2023 and 2024, including winning their primary championship.

Long before she became a Vegas entertainer, Hayden’s NWA Women’s Title reign ended on February 7, 2017 in Plant City, Florida at the hands of Santana Garrett. Garrett has spent time in NXT, TNA, and AEW, so I think she’s well-known enough that we can skip a detailed rundown here.

Amber Gallows defeated Santana Garrett for the NWA Women’s Title on December 18, 2015 in Sherman, Texas. Originally starting her wrestling career in the Carolinas in 1999 as Amber Holly and later rebranding as Amber O’Neal, she changed up her gimmicked last name again after legitimately marrying Doc Gallows in 2014. (They divorced in 2017.) This also made her the rare female Bullet Club member. O’Neal/Gallows wrestled for just about every independent worth its salt between 1999 and 2024, including being a key player in SHIMMER early on, where she played a heel character who wanted to be a “diva,” contrasting with the serious female wrestlers who made up the rest of the roster. Like many people on this list, she also fell in with the 2013 WOW reboot and held tag team gold there, continuing to work with the promotion on and off until 2024. That was also the year of her last recorded professional wrestling match.

The next several NWA Women’s champions are all very well-known, so we’ll skip them too. For the record, they are: Jazz (wins the belt on September 16, 2016 in Sherman, TX and vacates it on April 22, 2019), Allysin Kay (a.k.a. Sienna in TNA, beats Santana Garrett for the vacant belt on April 27, 2019 in Concord, North Carolina at the Crockett Cup), Thunder Rosa (beats Kay on January 24, 2020 at the NWA Hard Times pay per view), Serena Deeb (beats Rosa in Long Beach, California on October 21, 2020 at the same time the two are feuding in AEW), and Kamille (beats Deeb on June 6, 2021 at the NWA When Our Shadows Fall pay per view).

Defeating Kamille on August 27, 2023 at the NWA’s 75th Anniversary show in St. Louis, Missouri is Kenzie Paige. Prior to writing this column, I had heard Paige’s name but knew little about her. It turns out that she is 24 years old and already has 10 years of experience in wrestling, as she broke into the ring early with Kross Fire Wrestling, a Tennessee independent promoted by her father, Tommy Henry. Paige started wrestling for Billy Corgan’s version of the NWA in 2021 and also made several appearances for AEW during the pandemic era, mostly as an enhancement talent. Though she was on enhancement duty in AEW, she’s more recently grown into one of the most heavily pushed female acts in the NWA, and she also recently took over promoting Kross Fire from her pops. Her younger sister Kylie has also stepped into wrestling.

Natalia Markova is next. She’s a Russian native and actually started wrestling on independent shows in her home country back in 2007. (If you didn’t know Russia had an indy wrestling scene until just now, don’t worry – neither did I.) Her first matches outside of Russia were not in the U.S. but rather in Japan, as she appeared for DDT in 2011 and then for Wrestling New Classic, a short-lived indy promoted by Tajiri that used a lot of international talent, in 2013. By 2017, she had landed in the United States and has remained here for most of the rest of her career, starting off with groups like the all-women’s indy SHINE and the original version of Gabe Sapolsky’s EVOLVE. In 2021, she joined the Corgan NWA and has been wrestling there ever since, ultimately capturing the primary women’s championship on August 16, 2025 in a match taped for NWA Power.

And finally, your current, reigning NWA World Women’s Champion is Tiffany Nieves, who beat Markova on April 4, 2026 at this year’s Crockett Cup. A New York native of Puerto Rican heritage, Tiffany has been wrestling since 2021 and began in Florida indies, which allowed her early access to matches in SHINE and on AEW Dark. She really started to grow as a performer in 2022, though, when she relocated from Florida to Louisville, Kentucky to train at Ohio Valley Wrestling, these days operated by Al Snow. As a result of this, you can catch her in the background of at least one episode of the Netflix series Wrestlers, which focused on OVW. In 2023, she started wrestling for the Corgan NWA and has essentially split her time between OVW and the NWA ever since, in addition to sporadic matches for other indies.

That does it for this week. We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.