Casas/Dandy v Cota/King!

Negro Casas & El Dandy v Mocho Cota & Silver King (CMLL, 3/18/94)

1994 CMLL is a strange beast. There are things like the Dandy/Llanes feud and...for the longest time that's pretty much all anybody had talked about in any great detail. Basically nothing else. Even then it's been about ten years since I watched the title match and I barely remember a thing about it now. Then a while back the Casas/Cota hair match got some pimping. Cota was a revelation on the Lucha 80s set and since then I've checked out some of his post-prison run. By the mid-90s the ship had probably long sailed on him having something like the Rocca title match, but he was still a ton of fun and the apuestas with Casas is one of those matches I've been looking forward to for a while. I guess this was where the feud started. I don't know what Cota did to get under Casas' skin but before the bell even rang Casas had him dragged to the floor. It promised a hate-filled brawl that they never really delivered on, at least not during the primera. They never quite went for each other's throat, instead settling down a bit and trying to work a semi-clean match. The exchanges were still rough though, and more than once tempers flared and someone would come in to take a swing. Cota was such a weird looking guy at this point in his career. He had the incredible afro, the signature hand gesture with missing finger on the front of his singlet, chicken legs and dinner lady arms, he looked like a malnourished Conway Twitty who'd stab you for a sandwich. In addition to his beef with Casas he didn't particularly care for Dandy, or his own partner, or pretty much anybody in the general vicinity. When he took an accidental dropkick from Silver King he'd had all he could take. You knew something was about to go down when he came back out scowling a minute later, and sure enough he brought with him a knuckle duster. Match ends in a DQ when Casas takes it from him and gives him a shot to the head (after Cota had given Dandy a whack in the ribs and laid out Silver King with a right hook), but the post-match with Casas trying to maul him was probably the best part of the whole thing. If Casas wasn't yet the untouchable king of Arena Mexico he'd become you couldn't tell from the way the people were behind him. When Casas was out for blood, the people were out for blood, and the referees could get fucked as well. Dandy grabbing both of them by the ear and dragging them away so Casas could continue the beating unimpeded was an awesome little touch, particularly when you consider the history of those two. That they stood raising each other's hand in the middle of the ring while Cota looked on bloody and bitter was a pretty good indication of how much piss he'd boiled.