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NewsAEWExcalibur on the Origins of His Mask, Previous Gimmick

Excalibur on the Origins of His Mask, Previous Gimmick

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All Elite Wrestling (AEW) broadcaster Excalibur was recently interviewed by Chris Van Vliet to talk about several professional wrestling topics.

Here are the highlights:

Excalibur on the origin of his mask:

Well, it may shock people to learn that I used to wrestle professionally. I started in Southern California, where there is a big lucha libre tradition, you know, just being north of Mexico. Lucha libre being the Mexican style of professional wrestling. And masks are prevalent not only in lucha libre, but all facets of Mexican culture. It’s part of their cultural mythology basically, and so I took a shine to lucha for two reasons. One, I was a big comic book fan, so there was the superhero-esque aspect of it.

And two, I just liked the athleticism of lucha and that style of wrestling more than what was happening in like the mid-90s in WWF or WCW at the time. And so that led me down a road where I discovered the Japanese version of lucha, where all these wrestlers would come over from Japan, they were usually junior heavyweight style wrestlers. And they would come over from Japan, train in Mexico, and then go back to Japan, and they started their own promotion called Universal Pro Wrestling. Grand Hamada was the one who started it.

And that promotion had the very early incarnations of The Great Sasuke, Super Delfin, Taka Michinoku, Gedo, Jado, Ultimo Dragon, all these guys who would go on to become some of the greatest junior heavyweights. So when i saw that, I was like, ‘Oh my god. That’s even better than lucha because that’s taking some of the harder-hitting aspects of the Japanese style marrying it with this athleticism,’ and that really is like my sweet spot for professional wrestling. A lot of guys will talk about, ‘I remember when Austin and Rock did X, Y, and Z,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh no. I remember when they had the most amazing six-man match at Michinoku Pro.

And that really is my sweet spot because I think people could tell from my commentary that I am a wrestling nerd. Like I internalize all this stuff. And so I’ve always been a nerd like that because I would go out and tape trade in the early days of the internet. RecSport Pro Wrestling, it was like these tape trading circles, And so I was always seeking out stuff.

When I got my driver’s license, I found out there was a Japanese book store about 30 miles away from the house I grew up in. And so every Thursday, I would drive to the Japanese bookstore, I would get that week’s tape from New Japan Pro Wrestling, bring it home, I would dub it on my two VCRs. I was into it.

Excalibur on his other mask from his backyard wrestling days:

In my backyard days, I had a different gimmick — I was El Scorpio Diablo. It was a different mask, but then when I started training, I’m not sure why I wanted to switch, actually, I think I know I wanted to switch because I was in Southern California when I told the native Spanish speakers that I wanted to go as El Scorpio Diablo, they were like, ‘You’re kidding, right?’ *Laughs* So, switched up to Excalibur and switched up the look as this. So this style of mask has always been what I’ve had since 1999.

Also Read: Excalibur Discusses his Initial Uncertainty About AEW, Being Convinced by Tony Khan

H/T 411Mania for the transcriptions

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