10 Times Wrestling History Repeated Itself
5. The Evil Masked Doppelganger
In 1982, All Japan Pro Wrestling brought in Mark Rollerball Rocco from the UK to play the evil counterpart to Satoru Sayama's Tiger Mask character. The story went that Black Tiger was a Yakuza hitman sent to get revenge on Tiger Mask for turning his back upon them and becoming noble. Many people would play the parts of Tiger Mask and Black Tiger over the years to huge box office success, with the latter always being played by gaijin, or foreigners.
In 2011, WWE's attempts to get the original Sin Cara (Luis Urive, formerly Mexicos biggest lucha libre star Místico) over would lead them to bring in a doppelganger: Sin Cara Negro, played by Jorge Arias. The two feuded to much less success than the more famous Tiger Mask/Black Tiger pairing in Japan, partly because Urive was flopping big time as a high flying babyface: his infamous botching of many moves would lead to the majority of his fame being set as an online viral meme and object of ridicule amongst serious pro wrestling fans.
When Urive was finally sacked in 2013, Arias (who'd been kept on in a smaller role as Hunico), assumed the mask once again: this time taking over from Urive for real and playing the babyface Sin Cara, a role he continues in to this day.
Incidentally, the connection between Urive and Arias actually goes back further, to Mexico in the early 2000s. Arias was wrestling under the name Mistico when Urive debuted under the name: but Urive had the might of lucha libre promotion CMLL behind him, who obtained the legal rights to the name, forcing Arias to change his persona.
They'd use this real life history as a storyline point in their 2011 feud as rival Sin Caras, but the history was quickly dropped once it became apparent that no one really cared one way or the other. Still, Arias seems to have had the last laugh