Ortiz Reveals Santana Was Adamant About Not Working With Him Anymore

The Proud & Powerful were one of the most well regarded teams in All Elite Wrestling, with the duo of Santana and Ortiz lynchpins of the Inner Circle during the early years of the company.

The team officially dissolved on-screen in Summer 2023, although reports stretching back to early 2022 claimed that Santana and Ortiz were not on good terms behind the scenes. During a recent appearance on The Shining Wizards Wrestling Podcast, Ortiz has revealed more on how their split came about:

“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. 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 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 and yeah, it just kind of played out how it played out unfortunately,” said Ortiz.

Santana and Ortiz last teamed together as part of the Stadium Stampede match at All In Wembley in August 2023, with Santana winning their subsequent singles feud in October.

H/T: POST Wrestling