Felt Like Santo on a Sunday: Hijo del Santo vs. Mano Negra

El Hijo del Santo vs. Mano Negra CMLL 2/23/96

ER: I've been on a Santo kick lately (for some reason, I dunno, he's alright) and I saw that YouTube upload god Roy Lucier had thrown up this episode of 1996 tournament lucha. Now tournament lucha is obviously eyeball poison and has been for some time, but it was still a series of decent length fun singles matches in 1996, with an actual chance of producing gems (unlike the more modern 3 minute match structure). This specific Copa Jr. tourney was filled with fun sounding singles matches, but Santo vs. Mano Negra immediately jumped out at me, and my oh my was it a unique little gem. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes a match is going one way, something unexpected happens, and both guys decide to work with it. You see this happen when one of the ring ropes snaps, but this was something different. 

They go through some competitive matwork, Santo works Negra like a rocking chair (look at Santo hook his feet and apply pressure to the front of Negra's shoulders), but nothing out of the ordinary. Santo goes for a wristlock and recoils. Santo's hand is bleeding, and Negra appears to have some kind of chain bracelet wrapped in his wrist tape. Santo is cut around the webbing between his thumb and index finger (the finger crotch), and I was hoping it was from a blade Negra had concealed in his wrist tape, but an unexpected papercut-type cut on a sensitive patch of skin sucks no matter how it got there. 

Once the ref is done re-taping Negra's wrist, the match turns, because Negra goes right after Santo's hand. Santo is selling like a man with a persistently annoying cut, shaking out his hand while clenching his teeth, selling like me when I sliced my middle finger open cutting up a stale loaf of French bread for croutons. Negra bites at it, runs Santo's finger crotch over the ropes, rakes the cut across the rope, just dickishly going after that hand in ways that would never finish a match but sure do piss Santo off. Santo hits a beautiful dive, and a great in ring tope that headbutts the ref across the ring when Negra moves (the ref taking a big flipping bump that bounces him all the way back into the opposite corner). Negra capitalizes for a killer BS finish, punting Santo right in the balls...but then locking in an abdominal stretch so Santo can't just lie there grabbing his freshly punted balls. I also love the thought that Santo cutting his hand open was somehow actually planned, because wrestlers are crazy and Santo is a great enough wrestler that he could make something like that look quite accidental. I don't want to know, all I know is that I love it.