Negro Casas

[JerryvonKramer]

Negro Casas vs. La Fiera (1/10/93)

 

We appear to lose sound at the start of this. Comes back.

 

This is a very enjoyable match that is sufficiently brutal and well worked to leave me really satisfied. Has none of the Lucha bugbears that I've criticised in the past. Strikes are all very crisp. The throws and bombs were cool. The juice job by Casas after the first fall looked *real*, as in hardway.

 

Fiera was impressive here. Seemed impassioned, and like he wanted to inflict pain. Casas looked tremendous. I thought his bumping and selling were both really good and I dug the hell out of his kicks and offense when he was on top.

 

Good stuff, not blowaway, or going to trouble my top 100 list, but super enjoyable. Intensity and violence.

 

****

 

Negro Casas vs. Mocho Cota (9/23/94)

 

These two are probably my favourite Lucha guys that I've seen, not saying a lot I know but this is moderately exciting. You can tell it is 1994, they are playing 2 Unlimited in the arena!

 

Cota has big hair here and comedic music. I'm disappointed he's not as cool and sinister as he was in the 1980s, but still has obvious charisma.

 

Stan Hansen style start to this as Cota ambushes Casas still wearing his denim jacket. Yeah it was definitely the early 90s! Ha ha. It's got a tiger on the back of it. Casas is bloodied before the match has even started.

 

Here are some things I like in my wrestling:

 

* great character work

* sustained heat sequences in which heels run through an entire arsenal of offense

* sustained focus on a body part, aka basic Andersons psychology

* great selling

 

This match has all of those things in spades and is easily one of the best Lucha matches I've seen. If you tend to not get or be alienated by Lucha, as I have been a lot. Watch this. This is a match from Mexico that fans of American or Japanese wrestling could enjoy. Cota could be Terry Funk. Casas could be Ricky Steamboat.

 

Cota beats on Casas for something fifteen straight minutes, possibly even longer. The stomps on his ankle are brutal, intense, great work. My buddy Pete simply must watch this if he hasn't, he'd love this limbwork. I loved Cota blowing out Casas's knee on the mat. Comeback is incredibly well built to, although finish seems a bit abrupt.

 

Will Mocho Cota ever be in a match I give less than four stars to? He's a lock for my list. Such a brilliant worker. And Casas continues to be fantastic. And this match will very very probably make my next top 100 matches. A bit like Rude vs. Steamboat, or Arn / Larry vs. Dustin / Steamer, this comes close to my perfect vision of a pro wrestling match. Only misses out on full five because the finish was a little anticlimactic. Brilliant match though. Loved it.

 

****3/4

[Grimmas]

Watch stuff of his from the last 5 years. Still freaking great and may be your favourite modern wrestler.

[Childs]

Where can I find Cota/Casas? That's a match I've wanted to watch for awhile.

 

Edit: Never mind, found it.

[WingedEagle]

Absolutely stoked to watch Casas/Cota over the weekend. Perhaps tomorrow night if I'm home in time.

[Matt D]

My SC review of Cota vs Casas:

 

 

 

In one way or another, I've been talking about wrestling since 1998, since I was 16 or so. During that time, I bought a few of the early WWE DVD offerings (Flair, Eddy, etc). Before that, I bought a few comp tapes (MX, Rockers, Mr. Perfect, which shows where my head was at in 02-03), and maybe one or two ROH shows. I love hearing stories of people tape trading back in the 90s and the early 00s, but I was always a little detached from that side of things. In the last few years I've bought a couple of other comps (A Dangerous Alliance one for instance), and I participated in a couple of the DVDVRs 80s projects (way too few, just AWA and Lucha, which got me into this mess in the first place). I'm not exactly a big spender. In fact, one of my rules of watching wrestling now is that I don't let it get in the way of my family life, and that includes financially.

I needed this match though. It's the first time in my life I ever really sought out one specific match and dropped at least a little cash for it. I needed it for a few reasons. For starters, Negro Casas and Mocho Cota are two of my three favorite luchadores (with Satanico). To see them in a hair match was exciting. Also, the Fiera vs Negro Casas match that popped up was really good, and there was also the sense of this being lost. I'm sure some of you reading this will have seen this in years past, but no one I talked to regularly had. I get the impression that this era of CMLL is underlooked because people were more into AAA at the time. Amusingly, I did get it, and then within a week of getting it someone posted it online (as he had the same idea/needs as I had in seeing it and got it around the same time I did. It was a zeitgeist thing). I'm not linking it here, but it is on Dailymotion, and people should look for the link, if they can't find it on DM, in the midst of the Greatest Wrestler Ever discussions for Cota on prowrestlingonly.com which I think would be interesting to anyone who reads this site anyway.

The match itself was two great performances. It should help the legacy of both men. It hit so many of the things I really love about wrestling in general. Ultimately, though, I think it missed on the thing I care the most about in lucha apuestas matches.

Put simply, it was all Cota. The match, for one reason or another, was only one fall. It had three acts though. The first act had Cota attack Negro Casas at the start, slam his head into the outside post a number of times, and open him up. From there, he worked over the head, stomping, containing, controlling. This ended with Casas fighting back from the apron and leaping to the top rope, backflipping into the ring. He hurt his leg on the landing, and the second fall was Cota opportunistically attacking the leg, pulling off the shoe, twisting, stomping, standing on, using it as a way to open Casas off for other offense or to cut him off whenever he tried to mount any sort of comeback. Ultimately, though, Casas got a few shots in, which led to the last act, where Cota tried to put Casas away, more and more desperate as Casas started to get a few more hope spots and a few shots in. Ultimately, Cota missed a big dive and Casas was able to capitalize with a back suplex. The struggle there, with Cota banging hard on Casas' hands to break the waistlock only for Casas to keep on the attack with a few forearms to set him up was really good and showed the sort of struggle that the entire match had, even in being so one-side.

The performances were great. Cota, whose hair was massive, was an incredible jerk. He would put his hand up in victory throughout the match, would stomp or stand on Casas' leg at any point, would kick and stomp him and just be unrelenting. He was a twisted, opportunistic goblin, a malignant spirit, a scoundrel. In the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he'd be the Ugly. His frustrated or desperate or downright cruel reactions to Casas trying to come back were great.

Casas put in one of the most sympathetic performances I've ever seen in lucha. He oscillated from desperate and defiant to pained to almost comatose with his body language and glazed eyes. He sold throughout the match and every shot he got in on Cota was earned. He had to climb a mountain for every moment of hope, but in climbing so hard and so high, he never had the strength to capitalize; Cota would take his leg right out again. Probably his biggest offensive move in the match, before the finish, was a desperate mule kick that he snuck in. Afterwards, he looked to the crowd and stuck out his tongue in valiant rebellion, a hint of the trickster god he'd morph into in his old age.

Those performances are why the match was ultimately unsatisfying to me. Cota was so nefarious and craven. Casas was so defiant and brave. They sold the meaning to everything in the match, from the legwork to Cota's Gory specials back into the turnbuckle, to his pokey punches in the corner, to Casas' doomed taptia towards the end. I wanted to see Casas unload on Cota. He toughed out the assault and scored a victory. Cota lost his hair and at least to me, was vanquished as someone on Casas' level. But I wanted to see Casas pound him. I wanted to see him get an immediate, violent revenge and it just wasn't there.

What was there instead, however, was very good, and you got the sense that the crowd was satisfied and that Casas was satisfied, even if we didn't get to see the actual hair cut. I just thought Cota deserved more violent comeuppance and I thought that Casas deserved the chance to give it to him. A match well worth watching though. I don't regret going out of my way for it.

[ohtani's jacket]

It's not really fathomable to me how someone could like that Cota match more than the Fiera match, but at least you found something you like.

[Tim Cooke]

 

 

this comes close to my perfect vision of a pro wrestling match

 

Really not trying to pick on you but trying to fit all wrestling into your perfect vision of what wrestling should be is an unproductive way to watch IMO.

 

I'm a huge southern tag team wrestling fan and it's probably my favorite style. When I watch an FMW death match or a Dragon Gate trios, I'm not trying to pigeon hole those matches and like/not like them based on my preference for southern tag team matches.

 

The 4/5/97 CMLL minis tag has a lot of arm work, especially for lucha. It's almost the lucha equiv of an Andersons match. Yet at the end of the day, it is still very clearly a lucha match and I would never try to sell it as anything but that.

[goc]

I feel like you guys are really late on the fact that I put up that Casas/Cota match about 5 months ago but then I'm not sure that I ever linked it here. I know I did at DVDVR.

[ohtani's jacket]

alexoblivion put it up for us before that.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

 

 

this comes close to my perfect vision of a pro wrestling match

Really not trying to pick on you but trying to fit all wrestling into your perfect vision of what wrestling should be is an unproductive way to watch IMO.

 

I don't try to fit all wrestling to my perfect vision of it, but if a match happens to coincide with it, it doesn't hurt it.

 

I do as a general rule think the narrative of an extended heat segment for a heel followed by a babyface comeback makes way more sense from a story and psychology stand point than a twenty minute shine sequence. And this does factor into how I rate things on occasion, like Bob Backlund matches.

 

I like heels to get heat if the babyface is going over.

[andrew79]

Negro Casas vs. Jushin Liger (NJPW, 5/3/10)

A disappointment given this was on PPV and for Casas’s CMLL World Middleweight Title.

It’s by the numbers stuff, though we do get two dives from Casas. And just when it starts to get exciting it’s over. Liger takes Casas’s title with a Thesz press after about ten minutes.

You could do worse, but you could do a lot, lot better.

***

[Matt D]

I'm too lazy to find the general lucha thread, so I'm tossing this here.

 

I know what I'm watching tonight:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDBb2s6nPiA

[Phil Schneider]

Its really good

[WingedEagle]

Negro Casas vs. Mocho Cota (9/23/94)

 

I really liked this, particular the early attack by Cota, the consistent hair by Cota and Casas selling the limb work throughout. He also had some comebacks nicely cut off that were building towards a really hot finish. Not to womp womp it too much, but my only issue here, as I believe Matt D noted, was that ultimately the comeback never switched gears and moved into the left lane. Casas's offense down the stretch into the finish lacked the escalation you want after all that selling and heat. Its as though we replaced the hot tag with a stretch of cautious offense designed to weaken an opponent rather than build to a kill. Too much good stuff to go any lower than 4 stars, but not enough payoff to go any higher.

[ohtani's jacket]

I'm too lazy to find the general lucha thread, so I'm tossing this here.

 

I know what I'm watching tonight:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDBb2s6nPiA

 

Review is up -- http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?/blog/8/entry-478-vintage-negro-casas-of-the-day-19/

[Matt D]

We were very much on the same page with this one. It's a really great Casas performance.

[JerryvonKramer]

Would be grateful if someone could provide a list of Casas's "Greatest Hits" for me to check out over the coming weeks. Many thanks.

[ohtani's jacket]

You've watched a lot of his well known singles matches already. I don't think there's much point in recommending trios matches. You could try the 1993 title match against Ultimo Dragon, the double hair vs. mask Scorpio/Bestia vs. Santo/Casas match from '99, and the Panther hair match from 2012, which is worked more like a title match than a hair match. I know you didn't like the '92 Santo match from the yearbook, but there's a 1991 handheld between them and a commercially released bout from '91. He's had a run of singles matches in recent years that others love more than me. If you want to go deeper than they're easily available.