Inner Circle member Ortiz revealed that the group’s epic Stadium Stampede entrance nearly cost him one of his fingers!
The main event of Double or Nothing 2021 was one for the ages, pitting the Inner Circle against the Pinnacle in a Stadium Stampede match that saw action throughout Daily’s Place in Jacksonville, FL. Prior to the show, a stipulation was added that if the Inner Circle lost the match, they would have to disband as a group.
Before the action even began, the Inner Circle made an incredible entrance that saw its members repel onto the field at Daily’s Place from the top of the stadium. Inner Circle members Santana and Ortiz recently discussed the details of this entrance with Digital Spy.
Santana began by describing the process of getting hooked up for the stunt and how terrifying it was to learn that he had to go first to go up to the top of the building.
“They took each of us one by one to stand up there and hook us in. It had to be the two biggest people at each end. So I remember the guy that was rigging us he goes, ‘Alright, so who’s going to be first to go up?’ [Jake] Hagar looks at me, he’s like, ‘Brother, that’s you, that’s all you.
“So I had no choice but to be the first one to go up. I remember going up there and I was standing up there by myself and then the rigger went back down and left me there by myself and my whole life was just flashing because I was like, ‘I’m really up here about to propel down maybe like 100 feet or more. This is my life right now, holy s**t.’”
His tag team partner Ortiz then revealed how the entrance nearly went horribly wrong for him and could easily have cost him one of his fingers, saying that even if that had been the case, he would have gone through with it because they only had one take to get it right.
“I wasn’t wearing gloves. So when I jumped, out of instinct I grabbed the rope in front of me. But you have this carabiner hooked up and it’s like this thick metal carabiner, so with the slack of me getting pulled up, it cut my finger.
“So I actually wrestled the rest of Stadium Stampede with a bandage around my finger and it cut pretty deep – it left a scar. But I was like, ‘Man if I would have grabbed it differently my finger would have just went flying off but I would have had no choice but to do the entrance because it was one take, that’s it. But yeah, luckily I didn’t lose my finger.”
After battling all around the stadium, Inner Circle was victorious in the match when Sammy Guevara gained a pinfall victory over Shawn Spears. At the time of its airing, Double or Nothing was AEW’s second most successful pay per view in the company’s history.