Tito Santana: Tales from the Ring

By Tito Santana, With Tom Caiazzo

Sports Publishing LLC

SportsPublishingLLC.com

$19/95

Reviewed by Joe Babinsack

There’s something about Tito Santana that just never comes across.

He’s a big guy, with strong football credentials. He’s a talented wrestler, who may have never headlined all that much, but he had a run with the Intercontinental belt, and he won the King of the Ring when it meant something, and he was in the first nine Wrestlemanias (a feat he shares with Hulk Hogan and few, if any, others. Ok Howard Finkel and Vince McMahon Jr, but you know what I mean.) And Tito’s one of the few baby faces who seemingly spent his entire career in that role.

But through it all, and through his book, there’s still a lot missing.

Tito Santana is a bit of a mystery, a little underappreciated and yet a little bit too unknown considering that he had some higher profile runs and was in the WWF during the Hogan boom. My main complaint about the book is that while I’ve read the book, I really don’t know if I know Merced Solis as well as I’d like to have known him.

Two trains of thought run through this book. First, Tito seems to be wrestling with his career, and most especially, the role of the aforementioned McMahon in shaping his destiny throughout the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s. The train of thought runs two perspectives, often conflicting, and often shifting within the short and easy-to-read chapters.

On one hand, Vince is shown as being all business, but capable of doing great things with people’s careers. Tito seems to go out of his way to attribute success of this guy, or the other guy, of Bret Hart and of other names, solely to the decisions of Mr. McMahon.

But then, Tito complains here and there about how he’s treated, how he was saddled with El Matador (which was or was not McMahon’s idea, there’s an interesting bit there concerning Vince’s mindset.) When Tito ends up ending his career, you can read between the lines that Vince pushed him out, mostly because he didn’t have anything for Tito to do, and had been dumping him down to the bottom of the card.

Thus we have a conflict that is maddening: Tito singing Vince McMahon’s praises, and placing far too much emphasis on establishing the WWE history that has rewritten far too many stories, but on the other hand, there’s an underlying complaint about the same man.

Which is it? Does Tito want it both ways?

And perhaps, is that the problem with the book?

The other train of thought, which I also found troubling, was the approach to wrestling reality. Whenever I see a talented guy like Tito talk about “fake” and “scripted” -- and there’s one sentence that pretty much makes me shake my head -- I shudder. Look, I don’t really mind if someone wants to write a book in character, or even play kayfabe too much, but you’ve got to go one way or the other.

I thought Tito and Tom Caiazzo did a pretty good job through the first 2/3 of the book, sidestepping things at times, but very much explaining the training needs, the learning curve and the way the business operates in terms of moving from territory to territory. Plus he does delve into the unwholesomeness of promoters, how they lie and the pervasiveness of racism and bigotry.

But this is one of those things where you can’t have it both ways.

If you come clean about it being a work (fake is a four letter word!) then you need to pivot on that revelation and get into the bigger picture. There is a later story about how Tito did some fast footed creative work, but again, considering the shortness of the book, there were a lot of opportunities for explaining behind the scenes stuff and some of the decisions being made.

I guess I am being a little unfair, since there was a good story about when Tito hurt his knee wrestling Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff, and he suggested to Vince that he use the injury in a storyline….but then the storyline gets pinned to Greg Valentine, and then the storyline weaves into some worked sense of reality, as Valentine puts on the figure four and Santana writes about how the knee popped “audibly”

But I loved the story about how he told Shawn Michaels he would “kick his butt” if Michaels didn’t vacate the airplane seat they both were booked into.

That’s funny. Ironic, though, as Michaels did do the Hall of Fame induction speech in 2004.

The story of Tito Santana starts out vastly interesting and with great potential. He speaks in his introduction about being a migrant farmer, and picking vegetables from Texas to Illinois.

The book is easy to read and full of some interesting (but short) stories about other wrestlers. A lot of the book seems to want to explain the history and the story of the WWF in the 1980’s. Far too much of that story has been written already for this one to be of use, and there are just so many factual oversights that it makes me shake my head.

Everything, once again, goes back to the WWE mindset of rewriting history, and that rewritten history just does not jibe with reality at times. But the biggest concern, aside from the length of the book, is that Tito spends far too much time talking about other wrestlers than he does himself.

It’s like he’s screaming, here’s some cool and interesting stories.

But, to be honest, there are quite a few cool and interesting stories. I would have loved to read more about some of Santana’s friends, like Andre and how he took a liking to the man who would be called El Matador, but what’s in there is a few more tales of Andre’s life as a wrestler, without the obligatory “he could drink 18 bottles of wine” story.

I would have liked to read more about the friendships with Sgt. Slaughter and Paul Orndorff and Rick Martel and Dino Bravo. But the stories are quickly paced and there are a lot of them. I just wish Tito would have focused more on his big run from early to mind 1980 until he decided to retire in 1993. He does do some pages on each Wrestlemania he was part of, but that’s a far cry from depth and details a reader wants.

Tito Santana goes the way of Larry Zbyszko, and gives us a quick read and a short book. There’s nothing wrong with the writing or the content, it’s just a question of why can’t we have a 300 page book and not a close to 200 page one. Sure, it leaves you wanting more, but that’s not the purpose of writing a book in the first place, and if it is, then there’s a level of cynicism that bedevils even me.

Joe Babinsack can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Thanks to Georgianne Makropoulos for securing the review copy of the book. I’ve got some interesting stuff along the way, including many more indy promotion DVDs and a few self-published books.