Ortiz shares his side of his split with Mike Santana and discusses their feud.
The long-time tag team partners officially split up shortly after Mike Santana returned to AEW in August 2023. Santana then defeated Ortiz in the blowoff to their feud in October.
Speaking on The Shining Wizards Wrestling Podcast, Ortiz described how the split was not AEW’s call. He stated that Santana was adamant about not working with him. (H/t Andrew Thompson of POST Wrestling for the transcription)
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the company’s call to split us (Santana & Ortiz). Me and Santana just couldn’t get it together personally and he was just very adamant about not working with me anymore. So, the company kind of had no choice but to split us up, right? So they’re like, ‘Okay, you’re just not gonna not tag. It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s at least make this make sense why you split.’
“But even when we did it on TV, it just ended up, I feel like, being kind of rushed and you know what I mean? Let’s get to the point already due to stuff that was going on backstage and it was just making it hard to really put forward a program and then just our television in general, kind of has that feeling all over on all our shows. There’s almost that sense of rushing at times.”
Ortiz Says His Feud With Mike Santana Was Set To Stretch Across AEW TV
Ortiz continued by describing how some segments in AEW are somewhat rushed due to time constraints. He stated that there was supposed to be more development in his feud with Santana, but it did not pan out that way. Ortiz noted that it was set to stretch across AEW programming.
“Some stuff kind of sits and settles but, you could kind of see what they’re putting their effort into,” Ortiz said. “The stuff that really gets time to settle and really get to cook whereas some other segments, due to time constraints, you just kind of have to make those segments go faster and faster and there were supposed to be more development between me and him.
“It just, again, things out of my control, it just never panned out the way it was. It was set out to be a couple of weeks program throughout all our television. Like Collision, Dynamite and Rampage and then we just kind of went to Rampage and then we stood there. It just kind of played out how it played out unfortunately.
Mike Santana previously shared his side of the split with Ortiz. Check out his comments here.
