Mike Santana’s daughter, Ariana, was watching her dad fall apart after his father’s death in 2020, which led to him going to a dark place with drug and alcohol addictions.
The current TNA World champion suffered an ACL injury while working for AEW in late 2022 and around Christmas time received a phone call from his daughter’s mom that the now 8-year-old had written a letter to Santa Claus at her grandmother’s house asking for dad to stop abusing.
She told him he needed to get back to their home in The Bronx right away. He sat down in the bathroom and started reading. It was the “slap in the face” he needed. He was relieved that his “rock bottom” wasn’t worse, that it was all caught “right on time” for him to turn his life around.
“I think the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘I’m giving her the same life that I grew up living and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that,” Santana said in a Zoom interview.