Santana & Ortiz are two of the top tag teams in AEW and are part of The Inner Circle. However, they might have signed with WWE.
Talk Is Jericho recently spoke to Santana and Ortiz where they talked about their journey from Impact Wrestling to All Elite Wrestling.
They knew AEW was an option after having a conversation with Cody Rhodes. An opportunity to go to WWE was given by Jeremy Borash. Impact Wrestling had no desire to pay them more money, but the two had more options.
Ortiz explained how they eventually made their way to AEW.
“Cody had contacted us, and it was just like, ‘hey, how long do you have left at IMPACT?’ Based off that, we already knew we had another option,” Ortiz recalled. “At the time, we were trying to negotiate with IMPACT. We were like, ‘hey, we need a little bit more money,’ and they were kind of going back and forth with us, which I understand. They’re running a business, so they’re not going to just outright give us exactly what we want. Just going back and forth with that and knowing that, we had other options, and also, WWE was an option at the time because [Jeremy] Borash now works there. That was our in, so we were just like, ‘okay, what are we going to do?’ It was a couple of weeks out from leaving IMPACT and we still didn’t know.”
“We were really sitting there and trying to make the decision, and they were like, ‘alright, just stay for one more year. Just do one more year and we’ll figure something out.’ We were going over it in our heads. ‘What are we going to do? We’re going to just stay here? People are going to turn on us, and if we stay here and they kind of feel like we’re going to leave, maybe they bury us or something sh*tty happens.’ It was like, ‘hey, we’re willing to do business the right way. We’ll lose on the way out. We’ll put over whoever you want to put over.’ We just felt like it ran its course, and we love the people there.”
“We loved working there. We just felt that we needed to grow; we felt like we were a big fish in a small pond. Not that we weren’t being challenged, but we wanted a challenge to try to work our way up.”
h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.
