Lucha Libre, or Mexico's style of pro wrestling, hold masks sacred -- wrestlers with masks must always keep them on, and losing a mask in a match means abiding by the stipulation and never wearing it again. The tradition is said to spring from Mexico's Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), a Halloween-like holiday where people wear intricate -- and sometimes scary -- masks in order to honor departed loved ones. Of all the legendary masked luchadors who have honed their craft in tier home country or abroad, none have a mask quite as Dia de los Muertos-inspired as La Parka (known today as L.A. Park). The fearsome skeleton of professional wrestling may be best known outside Mexico for his dancing, chair-swinging antics in WCW, but he's a star in his home country, and with a look like that, it's little wonder why. Looking like a true creature from beyond, La Parka's getup is the stuff of nightmares for impressionable young viewers (and pretty damned creepy for older ones). This often-imitated look is purely bad-ass.
Scott Fried is a Slammy Award-winning* writer living and working in New York City. He has been following/writing about professional wrestling for many years and is a graduate of Lance Storm's Storm Wrestling Academy. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/scottfried.
*Best Crowd of the Year, 2013
