In early 2011 WWE pulled off an impressive signing by acquiring international superstar Mistico. If you watch the clip above where he takes on Tiger Mask IV for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship you can see him in all his unmitigated high flying goodness. Is this the same guy signed to WWE? Maybe that imposter angle wasn’t an angle at all.
For better or worse the guy under the Sin Cara mask is in fact the same old Mistico. His in-ring performance in the WWE is actually very good though he obviously had to tone it down and adapt to the WWE style. Regardless of this effort Sin Cara hasn’t been pushed seriously for over a year now. That is what makes him having a crack at the WWE Intcontinental Championship tonight so exciting.
Sin Cara reminds me a tad of Ultimo Dragon. Like Sin Cara, Dragon was an exceptional talent that was signed to a major American wrestling promotion. The odd thing about Dragon was that unlike a lot of international stars WCW signed, the company actually seemed to give a darn about him. This was evident when they gave him a run with the WCW World Television Championship. It might not seem like much today that he won a title that Scott Hall eventually threw in the trash, but this was really an anomaly. Smaller, non-English speaking talent never won singles titles then. Scratch that. They would win them, but only if the title represented some specialty division that promoters could easily ignore. Even today these talents still largely compete in places such as TNA’s Xtra division where they get about as much promotion as the background characters in movies.
If Sin Cara is given the gold tonight he will be the first wrestler of his kind to win a title like the WWE Interconintnental Championship since Dragon with a few arguable exceptions. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that tonight Sin Cara will more resemble another WCW alumnus, Fit Finlay at WWE No Mercy 2006. Remember he was put in a four-way for a prestigious championship too. A few of us thought it was awesome while the overwhelming majority wondered why the heck WWE bothered putting him in a title match.
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