2023 Ongoing MOTY List: Santana Breaks Up With Ortiz

 

20. Mike Santana vs. Ortiz AEW Rampage 10/27

ER: We don't get that many matches that are blowing off an actual real life breakup. This is probably the least you could do in a Good version of one of those rare matches, but we don't get many specifically-reasoned real world-kayfabe world blowoffs like this so the match existing is already kind of interesting enough to make it good. No matter what they did in this match, there would be some kind of psychological implications or the opportunity to project psychological implications onto them due to their situation. 

Santana and Ortiz were one of the best tag teams of the 2020s, Jersey indy guys who became a consistent highlight and major part of AEW. They were in the literal main event of the first episode of Dynamite, against the guys with an ownership stake in the company! Stadium Stampedes, the Parking Lot Fight, Anarchy in the Arena, Blood & Guts, all great fights that are among the best matches in AEW history, and these two were real highlights of them all. But, they got bogged down in AEW roster bloat, relegated to being not even the featured tag team in their stable, never sniffing the tag titles, a total miss for reasons I don't know. Still, it was a good steady gig. 

But Santana wanted more out of work and life - which is an impossible thing to not respect - and Ortiz wanted to keep the guaranteed gig, and they had a normal real life disagreement like men. If you are exclusively a tag team wrestler with one man for over a decade, you have ceased being a pro wrestling tag team and become an actual real life partnership. You are married, you are in a band that constantly tours together, you have never been in a car for more hours than you have with this person, you are a full on real partnership. And, if you start wanting different things than your long time partner wants, the only fair way to proceed is for both of you to be 100% honest with each other about your wants and needs. Santana wanted his fake first name back, Ortiz was happy with his last name and his place in life, and so two men came to the end of the trail. 

But at the end of the trail they got to officially implode their partnership and their AEW deals with a No DQ match on television. When it ended, it didn't really feel like the blow off of a 10 year + partnership, but they had some nice peaks where the emotion suddenly went from lurking to out in the open. It's a fun show-off singles match between two guys who rarely had singles matches, which is kind of an oddity in itself. Santana and Ortiz were in AEW for 5 years and literally 95% of their matches were tags with each other. They aren't singles match guys at this point. Now they're done. Santana has been out with a knee injury, Ortiz has been off television, and now they're back having their last AEW singles match. 

For a match with a real life disagreement and break up at its core, I don't think it lived up to the possibilities. It didn't deliver for me like their tag matches regularly delivered, and those didn't have any drama attached. This is a tag team having their first and only singles match, and too much of it felt like any two guys on this roster having a 10 minute singles match on Rampage. Now maybe Santana's 2024 singles matches have been really great, I haven't seen them, but I know for a fact they were really good at tag team wrestling. This is singles match wrestling with potentially emotional and violent stipulation, and too much of it felt like the exact same match Jack Perry would have had with Juice Robinson. So that sucks. 

BUT the moments that actually met the gravity of their team's collapse were when this actually went into something beyond. Beyond move trading, beyond strike trading, suddenly it felt like two guys who had been waiting to hit each other. Like they had been waiting a really, really long time to start teeing off on each other, and it turned a fairly typical TV No DQ match into something better. I'd be hard pressed to name too many "fight from your knees" exchanges or the best standing slap exchanges because they are things that usually make their matches worse. Here it was those played out stand-off moments that made this match worth writing about. Trash can lids and kendo sticks don't much thrill me anymore, but knuckle punches into foreheads will always thrill me; two brothers throwing fast slaps without holding back will always thrill me. Those punches and slaps were what I will remember about this. They were finally working the proper emotion for the important occasion. 

Plenty of things here looked good - Ortiz getting suplex off the apron onto a pile of chairs he pulled out, the way he theatrically went vertical for Santana's rolling cutter, the way Santana went hard on a short arm clothesline or his winning sitout powerbomb, even just the way Ortiz started lightly jogging to loosen up his body after getting a nearfall - but Santana stepping up with actual passion, demanding to be set free, was what brought emotion to a match that should have been overflowing with it. Santana did not want to be part of a team any longer, and when he was throwing slaps with both arms it looked like that was exactly what was being communicated. Ortiz didn't shake his hand after the match. This wasn't what he wanted. He was happy, he was content, and his face after the match was not one of a content man. 

2023 MOTY MASTER LIST