Ángel's decision to cross the threshold of the Arena Nacionalista wasn't a teenage whim or an act of rebellion without a cause; it was the methodical search for a new frontier. After graduating high school with honors and dominating the amateur circuit to the point of exhaustion, the silence of mornings without books weighed on him more than any weight training session. The academic void was an abyss that the gold medal from Cuba couldn't fill. Maestro Cárdenas, a living relic of the golden age of Mexican wrestling, received him at ten o'clock at night, when the Mexicali heat ceases to be solar radiation and becomes a dense, almost solid vapor that seeps into your lungs and forces you to breathe with effort.
Cárdenas, who in his glory days had traveled through Japan and the United States wearing a mask that now hung in his office, displayed a face that was a geographical map of scars and hardened cartilage; a silent testament to a thousand real battles where glory was paid for with blood. The old wrestler studied Ángel, taking in his 6-foot frame and the density of his muscle fibers.
"Listen carefully, kid. In Olympic wrestling, the mat is your ally; it's designed by engineers to absorb the impact, to protect you. Here, the ring is a wooden beast with an old canvas on top. It's a rigid structure that you must learn to use to your advantage, not resist," Cárdenas declared, striking the ropes with a gnarled hand. "But there's something more important: you can't be 'Ángel González' up here. That name is for diplomas, certificates, and making your mother proud. Here, you need an identity, a myth that will devour the others before the bell rings."
Ángel remained silent, processing the information with his usual analytical rigor. He remembered his rivals in Sonora and Cuba: names like "The Buffalo" or "The Shark." They were direct names that evoked an instinctive, savage force. He looked at his own hands, massive and capable of a grip that no one in the state dared attempt anymore for fear of injury, and he thought about his own nature: solitary, strategic, someone who observes from the shadows before attacking the weak point with surgical precision.
"I'll call myself Wolf," he said with an icy certainty that made Cárdenas raise an eyebrow.
Tony, his longtime friend, who had been watching the scene from the ropes with a carefree smile, let out a laugh that echoed off the ceiling beams and leaped into the center of the ring with surprising agility. Tony was a little taller, nearly 6'1", with broad shoulders and a physique that promised almost inexhaustible explosive power. Unlike Ángel, Tony didn't share his academic background or obsession with physics books, but he possessed exceptional genetics and a natural charisma that filled the arena even when it was empty. It's worth remembering that Ángel and Tony are friends, not cousins, a bond forged not by blood, but by mutual respect in the gym.
"Wolf? Very poetic, genius. I imagine you'll want to howl in the corner," Tony teased, giving Ángel a friendly shove that he took like a rock. "Look, if you're going to be the serious one, the tactical one, the one who analyzes the angles, then I'll be León. Someone has to be the king of the show, the one who makes people jump out of their seats screaming. You hunt in silence, I roar for the crowd."
And so, amidst jokes and sleepless nights, the pact between the two was born. But an identity in wrestling needed a physical form, a symbol that separated the man from the legend. Ángel, true to his technical and practical mindset, felt a natural aversion to traditional full masks. He felt that the leather and fabric limited his peripheral vision, that ability he had trained for years to detect the slightest change in an opponent's weight on the mat.
Looking for a solution that would unite his new identity with his need for effectiveness, he found a high-resistance neoprene face mask in a tactical and military gear store downtown. It was designed for motorcyclists crossing the desert at high speed and featured a hyperrealistic print of a wolf's jaw in steel gray. When he put it on, his light eyes, inherited from Carla's line, stood out with a fixed and predatory intensity. Tony, for his part, decided to embrace his name literally: he let his hair grow long and wild, designing gear that highlighted his physique of pure power.
The first practical lesson from Master Cárdenas was a brutal dose of reality that no physics textbook could soften. Ángel had to learn the most difficult thing for an Olympic wrestler: how to "hit" the mat. In the world of amateur wrestling, falling on your back is the ultimate defeat, the stigma you avoid with every fiber of your being; here, knowing how to fall on your back is the fundamental basis for let the show goes on and your career doesn't end in a wheelchair.
"Relax, Lobo! Don't stiffen up like a lamppost!" Cárdenas roared from outside the ring, banging his wooden cane against the wood. "If you stay rigid like you are on the medal podium, the wood is going to break your ribs. You have to learn to distribute the impact, to be part of the ring, not its enemy. Loosen up!"
Ángel repeated the "bump" on his back over and over again. His analytical mind tried to mentally calculate the contact surface to distribute the force of the impact according to the laws of pressure, but his instinct as an elite athlete violently resisted touching the ground. Each fall was an internal battle between his years of training and his new reality. Tony, on the other hand, fell with enviable ease, rolling and getting up with a mocking smile that drove Ángel crazy.
"Relax, know-it-all." "It's just old wood, it's not going to bite you," Tony said, laughing, as he jumped up with a spring in his step. "Enjoy the fall, it's what's going to make us famous."
At the end of the first week of intensive training, Ángel arrived home physically exhausted. Every muscle ached, even some small ligaments in his back that he hadn't known existed despite his years of weightlifting. Roberto was waiting for him in the kitchen, sitting with a glass of water, with the calm of someone who knows something has changed in the air. Carla was in her workshop, but the constant whir of the sewing machine stopped abruptly when she heard her son's heavy footsteps enter.
"I know you're going to the Nationalist at night, Ángel," Roberto said calmly, looking him straight in the eyes, searching for the boy and finding the man. "I'm not going to forbid it." You're fifteen, but you've proven to be more level-headed than many adults in this city, and you've excelled in all your studies.
Ángel remained silent, his shoulders tense, awaiting the safety lecture or the outright ban, but Roberto only let out a sigh heavy with resignation and respect.
"I'm only going to ask one thing of you: don't let the hype go to your head. If you're going to step into that ring, be the best, like you've always been, but remember that the blows there really hurt. There are no electronic scoring systems or federation referees to save you if someone decides they want to seriously injure you. And please... don't tell your mother I gave you permission, or she'll kill me for letting you go to that madhouse."
Ángel nodded, feeling a lump of gratitude in his throat. He understood then that the path to full maturity involved making his own decisions, even if they smelled of sweat, old wood, and worn canvas. That night, before going to sleep, he put on his headphones and listened to Linkin Park's "Papercut," letting the lyrics about internal pressures envelop him. He looked at his new neoprene mask on the nightstand. He was no longer just the kid reading about physics and biomechanics under the 50-degree sun of Mexicali; now, in the dim light of his room, Lobo was beginning to take its final shape, a hybrid warrior about to discover that the professional wrestling ring had its own unforgiving laws of gravity, and that the applause of the crowd was a kind of drug no textbook ever mentioned.