Ortiz discusses the split between him and his longtime tag partner, Santana.
The AEW star addressed this real life beef during an interview on The Shining Wizards podcast. The duo did have a brief on-screen feud that culminated in a matchup on Rampage, but Ortiz admits that the entire thing felt rushed due to everything else that was going on in the promotion. He adds that AEW were the ones who pushed for a match to happen since them just going their separate ways would not have made sense.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the company’s call to split us. Me and Santana just couldn’t get it together personally. He just was very adamant about not working with me anymore, for whatever reason. So the company kind of had no choice but to split us up, right? So they’re like, okay, they’re not just not tag. It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s at least make this make sense, why you split. But even when we did on TV, it just ended up I feel like being kind of rushed, like 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. Some stuff kind of sits and settles, but you could kind of see what they’re putting their effort into, the stuff that really gets time to settle and really get to cook, whereas some other segments, due to time constraints, you just have to make those segments go faster and faster. There was supposed to be more development between me and him. 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, throughout all our television, Collision, Dynamite, and Rampage, and then we just kind of went to Rampage and then we stood there. Yeah, it kind of played out how it played out, unfortunately.
Fellow AEW star Sammy Guevara recently stated in an interview that one thing he wishes was that Santana and Ortiz got to win the AEW tag team titles before they split up. You can read about that here.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)