In forty-two years of wagering it, El Santo never lost his mask in a ring. He did take it off himself, on national television, in front of most of Mexico. Ten days later ten thousand people buried him in it anyway, and the reason has nothing to do with keeping a secret.

Rodolfo Guzman Huerta wrestled as El Santo from July 1942 until September 1982, and in Mexican wrestling the mask is not a costume, it is property. It is wagered in a match called an apuesta, the loser removes it in the ring and says his own name into a microphone, and he never wrestles masked again. Santo took the mask of Black Shadow that way at Arena Coliseo on November 7th, 1952, in front of twelve thousand people, and he took the mask of Bobby Lee at the Palacio de los Deportes in 1978, at the age of sixty. Nobody ever completed that transaction against him.

This lucha libre documentary follows what the mask actually was. The photo comic by Jose G. Cruz that printed his hooded face a million and a half times a week for thirty years. The lawsuit in the nineteen seventies that ended with a bodybuilder wearing the hood in the magazine, and with an unmasked photograph of Guzman Huerta handed to the press more than a decade before the moment everyone remembers. Guillermo Ochoa in 1982, Ricardo Rocha in 1983, Jacobo Zabludovsky and Contrapunto in January 1984, and the three seconds that turned into a still photograph.

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