Rick The Model Martel vs. Tito Santana (Apr 1989 – Nov 1990)

Background

Rick Martel and Tito Santana became a team by accident of timing. On the August 15, 1987 episode of *WWF Superstars*, The Islanders jumped Martel after he'd beaten Barry Horowitz; Santana, working commentary in the Spanish-language booth that day, ran out to help him fight them off.[1] Santana promised they'd strike back "with force," and Martel turned the phrase into the team's name on the spot.[1][4]

Strike Force moved fast from there. They beat The Hart Foundation for the WWF Tag Team Championship on the October 27, 1987 *Superstars*, with Jim Neidhart submitting to a Boston crab from Martel; the Hart Foundation spent months afterward on television insisting Neidhart had never actually tapped.[1] The reign lasted five months, ending at WrestleMania IV on March 27, 1988, when Demolition's Ax cracked Martel with Mr. Fuji's cane behind the referee's back to take the titles.[1]

What happened next wasn't advertised as anything but an injury angle. At a June 1, 1988 *Prime Time Wrestling* taping in Oakland, Demolition attacked Martel with a steel chair and finished him with their Demolition Decapitation at ringside; the WWF announced he'd suffered a back injury and a concussion and wrote him off television.[2] The real reason Martel disappeared for roughly six months had nothing to do with wrestling. His wife had fallen severely ill, and the WWF granted him a leave of absence to care for her.[2] Santana kept working as a singles competitor through the layoff.[2]

Martel came back at the Royal Rumble on January 15, 1989, reuniting with Santana as Strike Force and also going deep into the Rumble match itself before being eliminated in the final four.[2][16] The reunited team was booked opposite The Brain Busters, Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard, fresh off a run as the NWA's Four Horsemen tag champions and newly arrived in the WWF with Bobby Heenan managing, for a spot on the WrestleMania V card.[9] Nobody outside the promotion had any reason to expect it would be Strike Force's last match.

Build-up

WrestleMania V took place April 2, 1989 at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City in front of 18,946 fans.[9] Strike Force and the Brain Busters worked roughly nine minutes, with Anderson and Blanchard's superior teamwork getting the better of a Strike Force that hadn't wrestled together in months.[8] Late in the match, Santana went for his flying forearm on Blanchard; Blanchard ducked, and the forearm caught Martel square instead, sending him tumbling out to the floor.[8]

What happened next was the whole angle. Santana, isolated and taking punishment, crawled to the corner and reached for a tag. Martel, still holding his head, looked at his partner, turned, and walked to the dressing room, leaving Santana alone in the ring.[1][8] The Brain Busters finished him with a spike piledriver, Blanchard leaping from the top rope to add extra impact, for the pin.[8] Jesse Ventura's heel commentary read the moment more accurately in real time than Gorilla Monsoon's disbelief, framing Martel's walkout as a betrayal that had been building rather than a fluke.[8]

Martel didn't wait long to explain himself. In a post-match interview, he turned on Santana directly: "I'm sick and tired. Sick and tired of him. I was doing great as a singles wrestler, but Mr. Tito wants to ride my coattails some more."[1][6]

Santana returned to WWF television on the May 13 *Superstars*, beating Barry Horowitz in his first match since the breakup and signaling he was moving forward as a singles star rather than chasing his old partner for answers.[17]

Through the second half of 1989, Martel built the character that would define the rest of his run. He picked up Slick as a manager and began working as "The Model," a preening narcissist who introduced a fictional cologne called Arrogance, carried in an oversized atomizer, around the time of that year's Survivor Series.[2] The Santana rivalry ran alongside the transformation rather than driving it: the two wrestled to a double disqualification on a *Saturday Night's Main Event* taped September 21, 1989 and aired October 14, a common-enough television result that kept the feud simmering without settling anything.[13][14]

That same night, October 14, the WWF ran an untelevised King of the Ring tournament at the Providence Civic Center. Santana advanced past Bad News Brown, The Warlord, and Akeem; Martel beat Bill Woods, Bushwhacker Luke, and won a disqualification decision over Jimmy Snuka to reach the final.[10] The two met for the crown in front of 4,500 fans, and Santana pinned Martel to become the 1989 King of the Ring, the first real payback for WrestleMania V.[10][11]

Survivor Series on November 23, 1989 folded the rivalry into an 8-man elimination tag: Martel's Enforcers (Martel, Big Boss Man, Bad News Brown, and Honky Tonk Man) against Santana's Dream Team (Santana, Dusty Rhodes, Brutus Beefcake, and The Red Rooster).[12] Martel rolled Santana up for the match's first elimination, evening the ledger from the King of the Ring loss, though Santana's team ultimately won with Rhodes and Beefcake surviving.[12] The two continued crossing paths through 1990 on the house-show circuit and WWF's syndicated shows as Martel's Model act climbed the card, with a final scheduled singles meeting taped that October for *The Main Event IV*.[7]

The Matches

*The Main Event IV* was taped October 30, 1990 at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and aired on NBC on November 23.[15] It carried no stipulation and no build beyond a year and a half of history: after King of the Ring and Survivor Series had split the ledger, this was simply the next scheduled Martel-Santana singles match, slotted well below the card's real drama, and it turned out to be the last one that mattered to the story.

The Santana-Martel match opened a broadcast headlined by Ultimate Warrior defending the WWF Championship against Ted DiBiase, a title match that ended in a disqualification when Virgil interfered at the ten-minute mark.[24] The broadcast itself became a footnote in the WWF's business history for the wrong reasons: it drew a 6.7 rating and roughly 10.6 million viewers, at the time the worst rating any WWF special had posted on NBC, a slide widely blamed on fan backlash to the Sgt. Slaughter "Iraqi sympathizer" storyline running that same fall.[24] None of that was visible in the Santana-Martel match itself, which played out as straight, undercard-level television.

Martel came out aggressive, attacking before the bell and throwing Santana to the floor early.[18] Santana answered by working Martel's arm after sending him into the ring post, and the two traded the kind of back-and-forth that had defined their house-show matches all year: backbreakers from both men, a Santana middle-rope clothesline for a near-fall, and a Martel small package that nearly stole the win outright.[18]

Martel broke the pattern by locking on the Boston crab out of nowhere. Santana had no counter, and the referee called for the bell at roughly 6:55 with Santana tapping out clean.[18][15] There was no run-in, no distraction finish, and no angle attached to the loss; Scott Keith's contemporaneous review called it "standard TV fare," a competent but unremarkable close to a rivalry that had never gotten a marquee pay-per-view showcase of its own.[18]

Aftermath

Martel's Model gimmick had already outgrown the Santana program by the time *The Main Event IV* aired. He'd blinded Jake Roberts with a blast of Arrogance cologne on the October 6, 1990 *Brother Love Show*, weeks before the Santana match even aired, and that angle carried him into 1991's Blindfold Match at WrestleMania VII.[19] Before that, Martel folded into a new faction, the Visionaries, alongside The Warlord and Power and Glory (Hercules and Paul Roma), managed by Slick; the group swept Roberts' Vipers 4-0 at the November 22, 1990 Survivor Series, the first clean sweep in that event's history.[25] Martel carried the group's momentum into a then-record 53-minute Royal Rumble performance in January 1991 before The British Bulldog eliminated him.[25]

Santana's post-feud path was quieter, and it followed a career-long pattern of near misses. He was reportedly in the WWF's plans for a world title run in the early 1990s as part of a push into Spanish-language markets, but the company shelved the Latin American expansion and gave the title spot to Bret Hart instead; Santana later said he believed he and Ted DiBiase were drawing as well as Hart at the time.[26] Instead, he moved into a program with The Barbarian through 1991, took bookings in Japan, and returned to WWF television that September with a new gimmick, a bullfighter character called "El Matador."[20] Santana had reservations about the reinvention even at the time; he later said the WWF "missed an opportunity" to make the matador concept work the way it could have.[20] He wrestled under the El Matador name into 1993, drifting away from the top of the card for good and never again reaching the heights Strike Force had promised, before his 2004 WWE Hall of Fame induction closed the book on his in-ring legacy.[26]

The two never had a rematch after November 1990. Their rivalry, built entirely on WWF television and house shows rather than a pay-per-view main event, closed the same way it had mostly played out: on a random Tuesday-night taping, without fanfare.

Behind the Scenes

Santana wanted to be the one who turned heel. By his own account, when Strike Force broke up he went directly to Vince McMahon and asked, "Can I be the heel?" McMahon turned him down flat: "No, I still got some things I want to do with you."[17] Santana believed he had the tools for it, comparing the heel character he'd have built to Mr. Perfect or "Mr. Wonderful" Paul Orndorff, and said he'd studied heel work his whole career by riding with heels like Demolition on the road.[17]

Bruce Prichard has offered the business explanation for McMahon's decision. On *Something to Wrestle*, Prichard said flatly that "it's hard to hate Tito Santana," describing him as "a very, very warm, natural, just real person" with nothing put on about him, the opposite of what a credible heel turn requires.[21] The gimmick went to Martel instead, and McMahon and J.J. Dillon are credited with naming the resulting character "The Model."

Martel's own account of pitching the turn lines up with that read. He's said he approached McMahon himself, believing he'd exhausted what he could do as a babyface, and that McMahon "nearly laughed him out of the room" before reconsidering.[22] Once approved, Martel embraced the heel work, later saying it offered "much more creativity and freedom" than anything he'd done as a fan favorite.[22]

None of it reflected any real animosity between the two men. In a shoot interview, Martel said of working alongside Santana, "inside the ring, outside the ring, I could feel comfortable having him beside me."[22] Santana returned the sentiment publicly, calling Martel "a hard-working man" and describing real chemistry between them.[4] The team's name itself nearly went a different direction: Santana has said the WWF's original idea was to call the pairing "Border Patrol," and he talked the promotion out of it given how sensitive border-related incidents were at the time, leading to "Strike Force" instead.[5]

The injury angle that split them up in 1988 also wasn't what it looked like on television. Demolition's chair shot and finisher were real WWF ring violence sold as the cause of Martel's absence, but the actual reason, his wife's severe illness, never made it into any storyline explanation; the promotion simply let the kayfabe injury run as long as the leave of absence lasted.[2]

The team that ended Strike Force didn't outlast it by much. WrestleMania V was the Brain Busters' only WrestleMania appearance, and the pairing was gone within the year: Tully Blanchard failed a drug test on November 1, 1989 and the WWF had no interest in bringing him back, while Bobby Heenan publicly fired the team on a *Saturday Night's Main Event* backstage interview not long after, and Arn Anderson left the promotion almost immediately to return to the NWA that December.[27] The match that made Martel a heel and ended a tag team was, within months, also one of the final chapters for the team that won it.

Legacy

WWE's own retrospectives have kept the Strike Force breakup in circulation, listing Martel walking out on Santana among the promotion's most shocking tag team betrayals and crediting it as the launch of Martel's singles run as The Model.[23] A closer look at the WrestleMania V match itself has been kinder to it than its reputation as a forgotten undercard bout suggests: one retrospective review called it "a largely forgettable match buried in a fourteen-match card" but praised how much story the Brain Busters and Strike Force packed into nine minutes, singling out the post-match interview as "a thing of unscripted beauty."[8]

The feud never got a marquee pay-per-view singles match of its own, playing out instead across a King of the Ring house-show final, a multi-man Survivor Series elimination, and a TV-special blowoff on *The Main Event IV*, a scheduling pattern more typical of a program the WWF believed in enough to sustain for eighteen months but never viewed as a top-of-the-card program. Santana's King of the Ring win stands as the more prestigious individual result, but Martel's clean Boston crab victory in the final meeting left him with the last word on screen. That final match aired on the lowest-rated NBC special of the WWF's run to that point, a number driven by the Sgt. Slaughter angle rather than anything Martel and Santana did, but it left their long rivalry's actual send-off buried on one of the company's worst commercial nights of the era.[24]

The Strike Force breakup endures mainly as connective tissue: it's the reason "The Model" existed at all, which fed directly into Martel's high-profile program with Jake Roberts that ran from late 1990 into 1991 and closed with the WrestleMania VII Blindfold Match, and into the Visionaries faction that gave Martel his only taste of a dominant heel stable. Santana, for his part, never got the heel run he lobbied for, spending the rest of his career as the babyface Vince McMahon had decided he'd always be, a decision that also, by Santana's own reckoning, cost him a shot at the company's biggest prize.

See Also

Sources & Further Listening

1. Strike Force (professional wrestling) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Force_(professional_wrestling)
2. Rick Martel — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Martel
3. Tito Santana — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito_Santana
4. "Tito Santana and Rick Martel: Rise and Demise of Strike Force" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/tito-santana-rick-martel-strike-force/
5. "Strike Force Shattered: The Rivalry Between Tito Santana and Rick Martel" — ProWrestlingPost.com. https://prowrestlingpost.com/tito-santana-and-rick-martel/
6. "10 Things WWE Fans Need To Know About The Golden Era Tag Team Strike Force" — TheSportster. https://www.thesportster.com/facts-trivia-things-wwe-golden-era-tag-team-strike-force/
7. "Riding Space Mountain: Strike Force: Rick Martel & Tito Santana (WWF, 1987-90)" — Riding Space Mountain. http://ridingspacemountain.blogspot.com/2013/06/strike-force-rick-martel-tito-santana.html
8. "Match of the Year: Strike Force vs. The Brain Busters 4/2/89 – WrestleMania V" — matchoftheyear.net. https://www.matchoftheyear.net/2019/02/strike-force-vs-brain-busters-4289.html
9. WrestleMania V — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WrestleMania_V
10. King of the Ring (1989) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_the_Ring_(1989)
11. "WWF King Of The Ring Tournament - 1989" — The History of WWE. https://thehistoryofwwe.com/wwf-king-of-the-ring-tournament-1989/
12. Survivor Series (1989) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_Series_(1989)
13. Saturday Night Main Event, Oct. 14, 1989 — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/shows/snme/history/1985to1992/oct141989
14. "WWF Saturday Night's Main Event - October 14th, 1989" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2017/03/27/wwf-saturday-nights-main-event-october-14th-1989/
15. "The Main Event 4, Fort Wayne, IN, October 30, 1990" (SmarK Retro Rant) — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/rant/the-smark-rant-for-wwf-the-main-event-iv/
16. Royal Rumble (1989) — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rumble_(1989)
17. "Tito Santana Was Furious He Couldn't Turn Heel After Strike Force Broke Up" — Wrestling News. https://wrestlingnews.co/wwe-news/tito-santana-furious-couldnt-turn-heel-after-strike-force-broke/
18. "The SmarK Retro Rant for The Main Event #4 – November 1990" — Inside Pulse. https://insidepulse.com/2006/03/22/47363/
19. "Rick 'The Model' Martel sprays 'Arrogance' in the eyes on Jake 'The Snake' Roberts: Superstars, October 6, 1990" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/videos/rick-the-model-martel-sprays-arrogance-in-the-eyes-on-jake-the-snake-roberts-superstars-october-6-1990
20. "Tito Santana Says WWE Missed An Opportunity With 'El Matador'" — Wrestling Inc. https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2014/10/tito-santana-says-wwe-missed-an-opportunity-with-el-matador-582736/
21. "Bruce Prichard On Vince McMahon Not Letting Tito Santana Turn Heel, Says He Was Too Nice To Be a Heel" — 411MANIA. https://411mania.com/wrestling/bruce-prichard-vince-mcmahon-not-letting-tito-santana-turn-heel/
22. RF Video Shoot Interview with Rick Martel (recap) — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2022/05/07/rf-video-shoot-interview-with-rick-martel/
23. "10 Shocking Tag Team Breakups" — WWE.com. https://www.wwe.com/classics/classic-lists/10-shocking-tag-team-breakups
24. "What the World Was Watching: WWF The Main Event IV - November 23, 1990" — Scott's Blog of Doom. https://www.blogofdoom.com/2022/03/02/what-the-world-was-watching-wwf-the-main-event-iv-november-23-1990/
25. "Rick Martel leads The Visionaries to WWE's first clean sweep in Survivor Series history" — Cageside Seats. https://www.cagesideseats.com/wwe/2024/11/28/24306995/rick-martel-visionaries-first-clean-sweep-1990-wwe-survivor-series
26. "Tito Santana and the Title That Eluded Him" — Pro Wrestling Stories. https://prowrestlingstories.com/pro-wrestling-stories/tito-santana/
27. Brain Busters — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_Busters

Further Listening

• Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard — Episode 211: Tito Santana, covering the heel-turn pitch and why McMahon said no
• RF Video Shoot Interview with Rick Martel — Martel's account of pitching his own heel turn and his real relationship with Santana
• Tito Santana: Don't Call Me Chico (Tito Santana autobiography, with Kenny Casanova) — Santana's own telling of the Strike Force breakup and the heel turn he wanted