Mil Máscaras Made New York Change Its Rules

In 1997 the biggest wrestling company in America needed Mil Mascaras to lose just once, in front of more than 60,000 people at the Royal Rumble in San Antonio. Twenty-five years earlier, New York had changed its own rules so he could wear his mask into Madison Square Garden. Neither time did he pay the price everyone else paid. This is the story of Mil Mascaras, born Aaron Rodriguez Arellano in San Luis Potosi, the man of a thousand masks and one of the big three of lucha libre cinema with El Santo and Blue Demon in Las Momias de Guanajuato. We follow the lucha de apuestas wins that took the masks of Baron Escarlata and El Halcon, the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, the night he beat an unmasked Don Jardine, The Spoiler, at MSG under Vincent J. McMahon, the IWA world title he never handed back, and his shot at Superstar Billy Graham. In Japan he fought The Destroyer and Jumbo Tsuruta in All Japan Pro Wrestling, walked out to Sky High by Jigsaw and, by Tiger Mask's own account, made Jushin Liger possible. In the dressing room the story was different, and Chris Jericho, Mick Foley and Bruce Prichard all told it. Then came the WWF and AAA partnership, Pierroth, Cibernetico and the 1997 Royal Rumble, and finally the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2012, where his nephew Alberto Del Rio, son of his brother Dos Caras, inducted him. A Mexican wrestling documentary about a luchador who crossed between Mexico, America and Japan for fifty years and never agreed to lose.