Since it happened, I have sat back and watched the glowing reaction to the El Grande Americano mask match and barely been able to contain my anger towards it. I get it; it was a high quality match. But sometimes match quality is less important than what the match represents, and what that match represented was WWE deciding they could stick two non-luchadors in masks and build the promotion around them, while making the lucha talent secondary. But in case it wasn’t obvious that the luchador had become secondary in a lucha promotion, that Undertaker quote makes it obvious. Because in his mind, before WWE came to town, lucha libre was just a bunch of small guys doing flips with no psychology, no storytelling, and all that b******t American wrestling legends like to say about wrestling that doesn’t conform to their small minds.

Here’s what Undertaker, savior of lucha libre, may not know; lucha libre has been telling stories, and in my opinion telling them better than American wrestling has done, for a long time. As AAA’s new “face,” Undertaker should know this, given that AAA founder and booker, Antonio Pena was one of the greatest storytellers in history, the creator of Konnan vs. Cien Caras, the Gringos Locos vs. El Hijo del Santo/Octagon feud, the telenovela esq story involving the Apache Family and Billy Boy, and other memorable stories. And that’s just AAA; CMLL has Atlantis vs. Villano III from 2000, and Mistico vs. MJF from just last year, among others. IWRG did a mask match between Trauma I and Canis Lupus ten years ago, one of the best mask matches I’ve ever seen. And yet Undertaker is going to sit here, with Rey Mysterio grinning like a spineless coward, and tell me there’s no storytelling in lucha libre until WWE rode in on a white horse and changed things, in between the two taking shots at CMLL cause they insecure dorks?

Basically what Undertaker’s words tell me are the same thing Mysterio’s quote from Worlds Collide last year about how WWE put lucha libre on the map; these are men, and this is a company, that don’t understand what lucha libre is, something really sad in Mysterio’s case. If they did, you wouldn’t get comments like this, and Undertaker wouldn’t believe he had only just unlocked the secret sauce missing to lucha libre, even though it’s been there the whole time. All I see here is a bunch of clueless individuals who don’t know a thing about what they talk about. So if I were Undertaker, I’d stop basking in the credit and saying dumbf**k comments and maybe try to learn about the part of the business I’m now part of. Maybe then he’ll learn how out of touch he sounds.