10 Subjects Dark Side Of The Ring Should Cover Next
5. The Savage Beating Of Juventud Guerrera
In 2009, Juventud Guerrera made his return to AAA in what was a unanimously unpopular decision.
Juventud was the quintessential sh*t-disturber infamous for his insistence on building every match around his own high spots. He was a narcissist who naturally failed to get over amongst wresting's brotherhood. To compound this reputation, he had disclosed X-Pac's suicide attempt the prior year on U.S. radio, disturbing also the sh*t in his grim and out of bounds private life.
Juventud's punishments were brutal and ironic; a pack of wrestlers shoot beat him to a pulp in a multi-man cage match as, in the meantime, X-Pac took a sh*t in his bag. Juventud was apoplectic, understandably, and stormed backstage. He went off on Konnan - whom he deemed his nemesis in a room of enemies - and blamed him. He was in fact blameless, but that's not the correct word for any of this. Jack Evans proceeded to jelly Juvi's face in the resulting fracas, the repercussions of which led to a media furore, threats of deportation, and - but of course - a pitch for a worked shoot angle.
It was a piece with no heroes, a fascinating look at the moral code of wrestling's brotherhood - and, more pressingly, whether that moral code is anywhere near sufficient in the absence of industry-wide regulation.