If you tuned this week to All Elite Wrestling’s Dark, you might have noticed once again the presence of Serpentico. Serpentico has been wrestling in AEW for over two straight months. He’s been changing from gimmicks from Jon Cruz to Serpentico, getting into squash matches with Brian Cage and the Jurassic Express.
But, this week’s match was an excellent exhibition of Serpentico’s talent. The match was against Scorpio Sky. Both wrestlers are highflyers, so the mix and match were excellent. Although Sky won the match, Serpentico showed that he could hang with the best in the company. The end came when Sky hit the TKO on the masked wrestler.
So, who’s Serpentico? Jonathan Cruz has been working all over the independent scene of the southside of the Unites States. He’s originally from Puerto Rico but has lived most of his time in Florida. As we showed these past days on the news about the retirement of Mecha Wolf 450, Serpentico formed alongside the latter a popular Lucha Libre stable in the state of Florida. Lucha World Order included Wolf, Serpentico, WWE’s Lince Dorado, and Oraculo (more on him in another article). The trios of Puerto Rican luchadors had a high-risk style loved by the fans. Serpentico, alongside Oraculo, became popular pairs in Tijuana for The Crash wrestling. Moreover, he wrestled sporadically for NXT, Ring of Honor, Impact Wrestling, and Major League Wrestling.
Cruz was trained in the Team 3D academy. He has wrestled mainly for FEST Wrestling, Full Impact Pro, and PWX in North Carolina. He later joined La Anexión in Mucha Lucha Atlanta (MLA) alongside fellow Puerto Ricans, Mike Mendoza, Angel Fashion, Mecha Wolf 450, and El Cuervo de Puerto Rico. He appeared in 2019 on the Orlando Weekly Best of Orlando 2019, showing his breakout year. He sat down with the Orlando Weekly on May to talk about the state of wrestling in Florida, explaining:
You’ve wrestled for a huge number of groups and feds across the country; in your expert opinion how bad is this for independent wrestling?
In Florida, things had been really busy and very exciting of late with so many new groups operating. It’s really bad. Independent promotions are essentially small businesses that could potentially go out of business because of the money lost on building deposits, flight purchases, merchandise ordered and other number of things that go into putting on shows during the biggest wrestling weekend of the year. I don’t want any company to close – the more places there are to work, the more places that wrestlers have a chance to hone their craft. There are far more wrestlers than wrestling companies and spots on rosters are limited. The fewer companies there are, the fewer shows there will be and the less people get to work. Companies that weren’t running Wrestlemania week are also affected since they too had to cancel their events across the world due to the pandemic, and none have a real answer as to when they can run again. Independent wrestling, as of now, is at a standstill. There are a few shows running without fans (a la WWE and AEW) and streaming their events online, but the more the U.S. government cracks down on public gatherings, the less and less these events are going to be able to take place.
Since joining AEW Dark and wrestling in the main show, Cruz has reached the greater heights of mainstream wrestling. The 36-year-old has had ups and downs during his independent wrestling career, but these last two years have really shown that the Puerto Rican is ready for stardom. The Scorpio Sky match is just the beginning of Serpentico.
