El Hijo del Santo and Negro Casas Get Into a SCRAP, Y'all

A real high peak for the great sport of professional wrestling.

Divorced from the pageantry of its entrances, the prestige of serving as an Anniversario main event, and the years long history between Santito and Negro Casas, none of which matters to me as a gringo whose relationship to lucha libre is more fascination than obsession, this apuestas is a mean piece of business, a match that escalates the sense of hostility between the two without blood and with a minimum of mask pulling. It begins as a pure, gritty competition between two of the greatest wrestlers of all time and devolves beautifully into a brawl neither man is willing to give an inch in, momentum swinging back and forth not based on skill or fortunate reversals, but out of spite after taking one too many punches in the corner. 

Even if Santito wasn’t technically the rudo here, it’d be hard for me not to root against him. He’s been a fixture of my casual affair with lucha dating back 15 years now, and the story of how he broke into the business — he fell in love with wrestling as a child, so his father, Pepe Casas, taught him how to cry at ringside to heighten the crowd’s emotional responses to his matches; his first match was a rib where he was told he’d have to take his absent father’s place in a match to save his job, only to find Pepe backstage after the match — is relentlessly charming, especially in contrast to El Hijo del Santo’s being, you know, the fucking son of El Santo. Their respective roads to the top of CMLL had their own challenges, but there’s an aristocratic air to Santito that’s reflected in the way he prosecutes his agenda here, as well as on the tale of the tape, where despite two more years of ring time, Casas is well behind Santito in terms of his apuestas record, and has by now already fallen victim to Santito with his hair on the line once.

Early on, it feels like Casas has the edge on his longtime rival, rattling his cage a bit with a swift kick to the thigh, which is Casas’ target throughout the match. Santito responds with an armdrag, stating his intentions for Casas’ demise early on as well, but early on it’s Santito’s reaction to the first exchange that you notice, the way his leg hangs a little loosely, how he feints out of a big, showy collar and elbow attempt from Casas. He’s not exactly stooging, but he does approach these early moments gingerly, reflecting how the pair have taken on the other’s role for this angle. While he’s backing down from Casas, he appears in picture-in-picture to say that Casas talks too much and isn’t ready for what he brings to the fight. It’s a great bit, especially considering how Casas is riding Santito’s back and slapping him in the face by the end of it. 

Things really being picking up when Casas snaps Santito’s leg across the bottom rope before locking in a half crab. He’s too close to the ropes and knows it, but he refuses to let go, instead kicking at Santito’s arms. Santito responds by pulling him down to the mat, and the fight is on in ernest, Santito pulling at Casas’ hair, Casas gripping Santito by the eyeholes of his mask. The referee, who spends his match largely powerless, convinces the two to ease up on each other, only for Casas to sneak in three quick elbows, which succeeds in enraging Santito, who straight punches him out in the corner before pressing the attack with a series of stomps. Those stomps, in turn, get Casas back into it, and he knocks Santito to the apron before dropkicking him to the floor. His attacks on Santito’s knee get more cruel, particularly when he plants the point of his elbow into his knee.How does Santito respond? Knee lifts, baby.

CMLL

In a way, the structure of the brawl skews more towards the way fight sequences in movies work when the opponents are equally matched. For whatever reason, the one that came to mind was the alley brawl between Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live, where each escalation on the part of Piper or David is met with more elaborately brutal violence, with no real sense that the other party is on the verge of capitulating, disbelief turning to indigent rage. It’s just before the peak of this exchange, having put Casas on his back twice with a knee lift to the shoulder blade, that Santito sees Casas roll over with his arm in the air, prompting him to dive into a hastily-applied crossarmbreaker, both hinting at his desperation to end things before they go any further, and pointing towards the actual finish of the match. 

That they find even more room to escalate hostilities from there is astonishing, frankly. So much of the match hinges on both men refusing to break in the ropes, and there’s a moment where Casas has Santito hanging over the ring apron, taking free shots, that looks custom built for the cover of Box y Lucha or Super Luchas, but then Santito breaks free and starts ramming Casas’ head into the ring apron. “SANTITO FUCKING THIS JAWN UP ON THE APRON” is what I have in my notes. “CASAS FIRING BACK. WRESTLING IS REAL.” Everything from there is in caps.

Something I wonder about as a latecomer to shows like Star Trek is what the summer break after a big cliffhanger must have felt like for the obsessed. The camera racks in on William Riker ordering the Enterprise to fire on the Borg Cube, the music gets dramatic, then you’re hit with a “To Be Continued” and months of silence. Santito and Casas had me wondering about the anxiety of a commercial break, which is how you know a wrestling match has you in its grip. They’re reset in the ring on the other end, where Santito quickly flattens Casas with a gamechanging face smash. They remain nippy, with Santito laying in the knees by the ropes, which Casas responds to with some punches and a ram into the corner. What irrevocably changes the tide of this match is Santito following up a missed Casas dropkick in the corner with a top rope dive to the outside. To that point, he and Casas had largely been on an even keel, but in the closing stretch it’s Santito landing the bigger shots, and Casas’ lot is to remain defiant to the last.

It’s excellent work, especially when Santito’s match-long frustration spills into his pulling Casas’ hair in a submission, to say nothing of his last minute call to go back to the cross-armbreaker at the end of the match. The whole time, Negro Casas suffers the indignity of Santito’s ire, pointless little slaps, a stray kick or stomp here and there. His late match Hail Mary is a return to Santito’s legs, but by the 25-minute mark he’s strayed too far from it, and his attempt at a Power Lock ends with him twisting into the ropes, in futility. It’s only a matter of time until Santito claims his scalp a second time. 

A small bit that nagged at me on a first viewing was how easily the crowd shifted its allegences from one wrestler to the other, but on subsequent viewings it felt like the right response given the muddied waters of both Santito and Casas’ alignment, how new both of them were to being the rudo and technico, respectively, and how the root of the issue was personal jealousy, which will resolve itself into a long, successful partnership before long. It’s part of an ongoing story, one that sounds like a refined and artistically successful mounting and dismounting of Hulk Hogan’s earlier heel turn in 1996, but it’s also, on its own, a high peak for an entire artform. A feckless dork might call the whole saga “cinema,” but it’s pro wrestling, baby.

Rating: *****