The Copa Antonio Peña (Spanish for "The Antonio Peña Cup") is an annual professional wrestling tournament held by Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide (AAA) once a year. The tournament is named in memory of Antonio Peña, the founder of AAA, who died on October 5, 2006. The tournament is part of the annual Antonio Peña Memorial show held annually around the anniversary of Peña's death. The tournament is a Gauntlet match featuring eight to thirteen AAA wrestlers ranging from mid-card to main eventers. The events are televised as a special feature on Televisa. The Cup is not defended like a championship and does not automatically give the winner a shot at the AAA Mega Championship. As is tradition with AAA major events the wrestlers compete inside a hexagonalwrestling ring and not the four sided ring the promotion uses for television events and house shows.
The Copa Antonio Peña is one of the featured events on the annual Antonio Peña Memorial Show (Homenaje a Antonio Peña in Spanish), which has been held since 2007 around the anniversary of Peña's death. In 2011, the first two Memorial Shows were retrospectively renamed Héroes Inmortales I and Héroes Inmortales II.[11]
In 1992 then-Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) booker and match maker Antonio Peña left the company alongside a number of wrestlers to form the Mexican professional wrestling, companyAsistencia Asesoría y Administración, later known simply as "AAA".[14][15] Over the next decade-and-a-half Peña and the team behind AAA built the promotion into one of the biggest wrestling companies in the world.[15] On October 5, 2006, Peña died from a heart attack.[14][15] After Peña's death his brother-in-law Jorge Roldan took control of the company with both his wife Marisela Peña, Antonio's sister, and Dorian Roldan (their son) also taking an active part in AAA. On October 7, 2007, AAA held a show in honor of Peña's memory, the first ever "Antonio Peña Memorial Show" (Homenaje an Antonio Peña in Spanish).[16] The following year AAA held the second ever "Antonio Peña Memorial Show", making it an annual tradition for the company to commemorate the passing of their founder. In 2008 the show was rebranded as Héroes Inmortales (Spanish for "Immortal Heroes"), retroactively rebranding the 2007 and 2008 event as Héroes Inmortales I and Héroes Inmortales II.[17]
AAA has held a Héroes Inmortales every year since then, with the 2020 event not occurring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Héroes Inmortales hosts the Copa Antonio Peña ("Antonio Peña Cup") tournament each year, a multi-man tournament with various wrestlers from AAA or other promotions competing for a trophy. The tournament format has usually been either a gauntlet match or a multi-man torneo cibernetico elimination match.[18][19]
The Héroes Inmortales XVI show featured professional wrestling matches with different wrestlers involved in pre-existing scripted feuds, plots and storylines. Wrestlers portray either heels (referred to as rudos in Mexico, those that portray the "bad guys") or faces (técnicos in Mexico, the "good guy" characters) as they follow a series of tension-building events, which culminate in a wrestling match or series of matches.[20]
^"Lo Mejor de la Lucha Libre Mexicana 2009". SuperLuchas (in Spanish). January 8, 2010. 348.
^"Número Especial - Lo mejr de la lucha ilbre mexicana durante el 2010". SuperLuchas (in Spanish). January 12, 2011. 399.
^Madigan, Dan (2007). "A family affair". Mondo Lucha Libre: the bizarre and honorable world of wild Mexican wrestling. HarperCollins Publishers. pp. 128–132. ISBN978-0-06-085583-3.
