13 Ups & 2 Downs From AEW Dynamite (Feb 12)

6. Everything Goes Dark

The list of active professional wrestlers who feel more believably gritty than Santana starts and ends with Eddie Kingston. That's high praise, and while the duo's similarities make this an easy comparison, the Proud and Powerful man stands on his own as an awesome, underrated talker dripping with real-world legitimacy, as he showed again in last night's pre-taped Jim Ross interview.

Getting his eye stabbed was enough justification for Santana to want to turn Jon Moxley's work dark, but he took it deeper, harking back to a time when he was broke, unemployed, directionless, and living in a hellhole Bronx apartment. The walls were closing in; he was buried alive. Santana called his dad at 3:30am, saying that his every waking day was dark. His dad's response? "That's my everyday."

Santana's father, we learned, was fully blind by 25. That's why this angle hit Santana so hard. That's why he claims Jon Moxley built his own coffin by p*ssing away his Inner Circle opportunity. That's why he promised that Mox was about to find out how it felt to live in the dark.

To hell with everything else. This guy is real. You feel what he says every single time, so here's hoping he gets more promo opportunities in the future.