The History Of The Luchador Mask In Wrestling, Explained

News of this mysterious figure circulated through the papers and suddenly the Manhattan Opera House was full to bursting – this Masked Marvel as he came to be known became the centre of a storm of speculation.

And all the while under the mask was humble Mort Henderson, a journeyman performer whose own star had faded. And Henderson would fade back into relative obscurity, but the Masked Marvel would endure.

Meanwhile, to the south, Mexico was embroiled in a bloody revolution that would span the 1910s, and two Italian businessmen Giovanni Reselevich and Antonio Fournier seized the opportunity to offer the beleaguered people a distraction.

They began to organise matches between fighters, bare knuckled and with no weapons, it became known as lucha libre or “free fighting”.I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid the sight of a masked man leaping through the air doing seemingly impossible stunts spoke directly to some lizard part of my brain.

The forked tongued whispers of wrestling, the well-told lie of good vs evil, would always capture my imagination, but there was something about a luchador that had an extra magnetism.

Maybe it was the insane aerobatics, because I’m sorry Mr Cornette, but flips is cool, but I think it fundamentally came down to the mystique of the mask.

The Mexican wrestling scene relied heavily on imports from the US for many years until Salvadore Lutteroth Gonzalez – the so-called ‘father of lucha libre’ formed the first Mexican-owned promotion, the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre or the EMLL in 1933.

Within a year they were selling out their homebase, the previously run-down Arena Modelo and gathering crowds of 5,000 paying fans.

In those early days though the EMLL also had to rely on American talent, and it was one of those bookings that changed everything.

Corbin James Massey had been working throughout Texas in the early 1930s as “Cyclone Mackey” and caught the eye of Lutteroth who brought him to the EMLL, Ciclon MacKey wrestled the very first show, but a year later he would don a mask to become La Maravilla Enmascarada.

The Masked Marvel. Where have I heard that before?

• rey mysterio
• history
• Explained
• Lucha Masks

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