AEW stars Santana and Ortiz recently spoke with Digital Spy to hype up this week’s Dynamite on TBS, where the duo tag with Chris Jericho to battle Daniel Garcia and 2Point0.
During the interview Santana and Ortiz reflected on their epic entrance for the Stadium Stampede match at Double or Nothing 2021, with Ortiz revealing that he nearly lost a finger zip-lining down. Highlights are below.
Santana ays the Stadium Stampede entrance against the Pinnacle was one of the craziest things he’s ever done in wrestling:
“That was probably one of the craziest things I’ve ever done in wrestling. Whenever we go to Jacksonville and we pull up to the stadium at Daily’s Place I always take a moment to look up at that screen and just go, ‘Yeah, we really did that, like idiots.”
Santana says he was terrified being the first person up there all by himself:
“They took each of us one by one to stand up there and hook us in. It had to be the two biggest people at each end. So I remember the guy that was rigging us he goes, ‘Alright, so who’s going to be first to go up?’ [Jake] Hagar looks at me, he’s like, ‘Brother, that’s you, that’s all you. So I had no choice but to be the first one to go up. I remember going up there and I was standing up there by myself and then the rigger went back down and left me there by myself and my whole life was just flashing because I was like, ‘I’m really up here about to propel down maybe like 100 feet or more. This is my life right now, holy shit.”
Ortiz adds that he nearly lost a finger doing the entrance:
“I wasn’t wearing gloves. So when I jumped, out of instinct I grabbed the rope in front of me. But you have this carabiner hooked up and it’s like this thick metal carabiner, so with the slack of me getting pulled up, it cut my finger. So I actually wrestled the rest of Stadium Stampede with a bandage around my finger and it cut pretty deep – it left a scar. But I was like, ‘Man if I would have grabbed it differently my finger would have just went flying off but I would have had no choice but to do the entrance because it was one take, that’s it. But yeah, luckily I didn’t lose my finger.”