AEW’s Proud N’ Powerful, Santana and Ortiz, sat down with Stephanie Chase to talk about their run with the Inner Circle stable and potentially moving forward from the stable. The Inner Circle has been teasing dissension for a few weeks now and Santana revealed he wouldn’t mind if the group went their separate ways for now.
“We had done so much and we were, we had proven to be very successful at being the group and the group,” Santana said. “I just felt like it was time for all of us, you know, to go our separate ways and start establishing our own selves and whatever we’ll continue doing and stuff like that. And then maybe eventually down the line we could bring it back together for a major moment and, you know, rock & roll again.
“I always feel like the group is cool, we’ve proven that the group can be successful, but now let’s prove that each of us can be successful on our own. Almost like the Wu-Tang Clan, you know? They were such a great band together, you know, so successful together. When they broke up and went their own separate ways, they all became successful, so I think that was more my mentality.”
That said, Santana feels the Inner Circle has done great work, most notably in their feud with Dan Lambert’s American Top Team stable and The Men of the Year (Ethan Page and Scorpio Sky). Santana believes it’s a huge testament to the Inner Circle that the feud, which included several MMA fighters, came off as well as it did.
“I think it was a huge testament to all five of us in the Inner Circle that we were able to pull out this cool-ass match with guys that had no professional wrestling background,” Santana said. “And the fact that we also, in doing what we were doing and making them look good, and then vise versa, we kind of like made them respect people wrestling a lot more. Because they begin to realize how much work goes into what we do. And yeah it was a very accomplishing moment where all of us looked at each other and were like ‘yeah man we made it through.’ And we got something out of it so it was pretty cool.”
