Biography
Mike Santana spent more than a decade as one half of one of wrestling's most decorated tag teams before reinventing himself as a singles headliner, winning the TNA World Championship twice in 2025 and 2026. In July 2026 the New Yorker signed with WWE, and he now competes on NXT under a new name, Cruz Montana, chosen in tribute to his late father.
Sanchez debuted in 2007 and cut his teeth around New York and New Jersey. In 2012, as Mike Draztik, he formed EYFBO with Angel Ortiz, and the pair became a fixture of the independent tag scene, winning gold in AAW, CZW and House of Glory. Impact Wrestling signed them in 2017, renamed him Santana and placed the duo in Konnan's Latin American Xchange. LAX won the Impact World Tag Team titles within weeks of arriving and would hold them four times in all, with a record 662 combined days as champions, along with the GFW tag belts they unified with the Impact titles.
Santana and Ortiz left Impact in 2019 and turned up at AEW All Out that August, joining Chris Jericho in the main event of the very first Dynamite and becoming founding members of The Inner Circle. Their brawl with Best Friends in a 2020 Parking Lot Fight and their part in the 2022 Anarchy in the Arena match both earned five stars from Dave Meltzer. A torn ACL at Blood and Guts in June 2022 cost him months, and after returning as Mike Santana the team drifted apart, culminating in a singles win over Ortiz on Rampage in October 2023. He asked for his release and left AEW in March 2024.
Back in TNA from April 2024, Santana rebuilt himself as the company's top babyface. He saw off The System and Moose, made Josh Alexander say 'I quit' at Genesis 2025 and won an intensely personal feud with Mustafa Ali that produced TNA's 2025 Match of the Year at Rebellion. At Bound for Glory in October 2025 he finally beat Trick Williams for the TNA World Championship, his first major singles world title. Frankie Kazarian took it from him in November, but Santana won it back on the AMC debut of Thursday Night Impact in January 2026, held it for 164 days and dropped it to Nic Nemeth at Slammiversary in what proved to be his final TNA match.
He arrived in NXT on 21 July 2026, confronting champion Tony D'Angelo, and revealed the Cruz Montana name days later. A number one contender's match with Grayson Waller in August was wrecked by the debuting Zilla Fatu, and Montana has since been working his way back towards the NXT title picture as autumn 2026 begins.
