La Novia del Santo (The Bride of El Santo)

And there was one time that El Santo had a girlfriend and it was a luchadora… or something like that. Today I have you one of the many curious stories that exist in lucha libre, its origin comes from a rather repressive act from a man to his wife, today I have for you the story of La Novia del Santo.

The career of La Novia del Santo in lucha libre is quite short, with only 7 months in Mexican wrestling mats. But! The path of the lady behind this character is really long, in fact this luchadora has more than 50 years in lucha libre, I’m talking about Irma González.

At some point of those fifty something years, she had to cover her face with a mask and adopted the name La Novia del Santo. The reason? Near the end of the 50s, Miss Irma was going to get married, but her boyfriend wasn’t a fan of seeing his girlfriend as a wrestler, so he did the reasonable thing back in those days, he asked her to retire from lucha libre until the wedding.

Apparently this man didn’t know his girlfriend well enough, because Miss González decided not to obey his fiance and remained in lucha libre until the wedding, well sort of. She wanted to keep wrestling so the best idea she came up with so her boyfriend could not find out that she was still wrestling, get a mask.

She thought of names like Rosa Blanca or Flor Negra, but didn’t like any of them. Looking at a sports magazine she came up with the perfect name, La Novia del Santo. Before doing anything else, she asked El Santo himself for his permission to use this name, he didn’t had trouble with the idea. The plan worked perfectly, her boyfriend never found out that she kept wrestling.

The wedding took place and after that Miss Irma dropped the character of La Novia… to go back and wrestle as herself. But the story of La Novia del Santo doesn’t end there. Apparently soon after Irma left the character, a exotic luchador picked up the name without Gonzalez´s or El Santo´s authorization and made some appearances with that character.

Yeah, that didn’t last long, El Santo wasn’t very pleased when he found out about the turn that this character got. In the first show that El Santo and his new “bride” met, the silver one threatened the exotic luchador, he was a smart man and left the character of La Novia del Santo.

And pretty much that’s the story behind this female character. Because of the years that this “tale” took place there aren’t any videos of Miss Irma wrestling as La Novia del Santo, but I leave you with two matches in which you can see the class and technique of Irma González. See you next week.

Francisco Arreola
@fcoarreola