10 Wrestlers Who Will Change The Business Over The Next 10 Years
3. Santana
If Tony Khan is smart, and he very much is, he will be keeping an eye on Santana - and not merely as a certain future AEW World Tag Team Champion.
That he will be.
Proud N' Powerful are a superb and charismatic tag team with an ability to command the TV screen and work scintillating state-of-the-art bangers.
In a profile piece so good that it hardly mattered that it was situationally flawed, Santana and Ortiz displayed enormous babyface potential ahead of their match against the Young Bucks on the Full Gear 2019 Countdown special. Inspiring and deeply authentic, Santana, patrolling dangerous streets with a collected swagger, resonated as a believable hard-man with an indomitable spirit.
Santana played a small but very impressive role in the wider Jon Moxley Vs. Chris Jericho storyline by cutting through the biblical theme and old-school narrative with a grand sense of pathos. Moxley by blinding him had subjected him to the same fate as life had laid upon his father.
That Santana revealed his babyface credentials as part of a two-week subplot diversion marks him as resourceful and creative storyteller - as does his idea to use beloved folk hero 'Trent's Mom' as the heat to drive a feud with Best Friends. It concluded in an instantly iconic segment of television, across its shattered windshields and flipped birds. It started with his pitch.
In Santana, AEW has a potential babyface star and booking prodigy.