Pete Sanchez was an undercard giant
He was not on the list.
While you will find results from across North America with
Pete Sanchez or Gino Caruso in bouts, there aren’t necessarily a lot of wins.
As an enhancement talent, his job was primarily to make others look good.
With Sanchez’s death on July 27, at the age of 81, it’s a
reminder that he did his job with modesty and didn’t seek the spotlight, hence
the very few interviews and times he went on the record through the years.
In a rare parting of the curtain, he spoke to a newspaper in
Portland, Maine, in September 1976, part of a story by Dan Warren titled
“Getting Mauled For A Living Can Be Lucrative But Lonely”.
“Hey, I’m doing OK,” Sanchez said in the story, noting he
was 28 years of age, and never went past high school. “Wrestling’s been good to
me.”
“I’ve been wrestling four nights a week for the past four
years straight,” Sanchez added. “Usually a match’ll last about 15 minutes. So I
guess I wrestle about an hour a week. The money’s pretty decent.” In the story,
he claimed he made $48,000 (USD) a year.
The 5-foot-11, 245-pound Sanchez tried to set the record
straight.
“That’s where people are wrong about wrestling,” he said.
“If they think all you have to do is throw on boots and a pair of tights and
jump in the ring, they’re wrong. You got to be in shape to stay alive in this
business. …
“Oh sure, you’ve got to be a showboat some of the time. But
this is no place for actors. These people who come to the matches are paying
good money to get in so we’ve got to give them a good show. But it’s not fake
or anything.”
The interview protects kayfabe, and notes that Sanchez was a
good guy and owned part of a seafood restaurant in New York. If it was indeed
true — which couldn’t be confirmed — that helps to explain Sanchez’s long-time
connection to the New York City-based World Wide Wrestling Federation. A lot of
contemporaries, like Baron Mikel Scicluna and Dominic Denucci, had “shoot” jobs
in the Big Apple and wrestled because they loved it and had already for years.
In his autobiography Tangled Ropes, Superstar Billy Graham
wrote about Sanchez:
As cliché as it sounds, some of my good friends were
jobbers. I caught rides all the time with Pete Sanchez and “The Unpredictable”
Johnny Rodz, two tough Puerto Rican guys who jobbed for everybody. We’d drive
to spot shows in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, with the two of them passing a
joint around and periodically offering me hits.
Nah, I’ll pass.” I wasn’t a dope smoker, but I sure got a
contact high.
When we’d arrive at the building, fans would often be
surprised to see Rodz and Sanchez step out of the car, while I trailed behind
them. It all seemed natural to me. I never believed in separation of power. Who
drew meant nothing to me.
John Arezzi, in his memoir Mat Memories: My Wild Life in Pro
Wrestling, Country Music, and with the Mets, noted that the “underneath guys”
like Sanchez and Rodz were far more approachable and friendly pre- and
post-matches, whether it was at the restaurant and bar at The Holland Hotel, or
at at the Savoy. “After the shows, we’d all congregate at a bar called the
Savoy, which was across the street from the Edison Hotel on 46th Street,
between 7th and 8th Avenue, hidden away,” wrote Arezzi. “Right after the Garden
show was over, that’s where everyone would go to drink. Although I was just 18
in 1975 it was legal to drink at that age in New York. I looked forward to
hanging at the Savoy after each show, as you felt like a real insider to be
there in a tiny bar that held less than 100 people.”
Born on April 4, 1943, in New York City, Sanchez certainly
moved around a lot during his career, which started around 1958, and ending
just before the big WWF national expansion. (Note there was a second Pete
Sanchez in the WWF, circa 1986-1999, and that was Pete Cotto, who died in 2021;
even the WWE Encyclopedia mistakenly combines the two.)
Early on, Sanchez was a US tag team championship teammate of
Carlos Milano in Ohio circa 1962. There was a stint in Charlotte for Jim
Crockett Promotions in mid-1976, a title tag run in Arizona with Gary Young in
1980, and on and on.
When Sanchez went to Stampede Wrestling, he was known as
Gino Caruso, and, in 1970, one newspaper noted he was a “slick stylist from New
York,” and, in 1973, he was called “the acrobat from Hoboken, NJ.”
In Calgary, he won Stampede’s International tag team titles
twice in the spring of 1973, holding the belts for a few weeks each time, first
with Bill Cody and then with Carlos Belafonte (better known as Carlos Colon).
Sanchez would work for Colon, the promoter, in Puerto Rico, off and on through
the years as well, including a run with the North American tag titles with
Colon in 1974.
Abdullah the Butcher vs Gino Caruso (Pete Sanchez) in the
main event in Regina, Saskatchewan, on February 1, 1973.
There was also a wild feud with Abdullah the Butcher in
early 1973 in Stampede.
As a tag team wrestler, Sanchez got a significant push
alongside Manuel Soto as The Flying Tigers around 1975 in the WWWF.
When Ric Flair made his Madison Square Garden debut on March
1, 1976, it was a victory against the trusted “Pistol” Pete Sanchez.
Bruce Swazye, Sonny King and Pete Sanchez at the 2010
Cauliflower Alley Club reunion.
There was a reason that promoters kept using Sanchez,
whether he was under his real name or as Gino Caruso.
“I’m telling you, what a babyface this guy was,” Davey
O’Hannon said of Sanchez. “He was great. He knew how to call a match. He knew
the psychology of a match. And when he got going, he had a fire.”
In one of those frequent “reporter goes to the matches” stories
that seemed to run in the 1960s and 1970s, The Reporter Dispatch in White
Plains, NY, sent Gretchen Keiser to the bouts in early 1977. She saw Sanchez in
action and wrote:
A din of whistles, cheers and boos erupted as Pete Sanchez,
241-lbs., from Cleveland, Ohio, and the Executioner 1, from “parts unknown”
entered the ring.
“Go Pete Go,” they chanted as the blue-blooded executioner
in a matching off-the-shoulder leotard and tights twisted Sanchez to the floor,
his face contorted in a grimace.
“Rip it off,” the kids shouted, running to ringside with
cameras as Sanchez inched the skin-tight hood up over the Executioner’s chin
before the masked man chomped on the cloth with his bared teeth, foiling the
latest attempt to reveal his face.”
In the 2011 interview, O’Hannon also noted that Sanchez was
“a lot easier to get along with now than he was years ago, not that he was a
mean guy or a nasty guy. He just had a different type of personality,
especially for a babyface.”
It was around that time that Sanchez had dipped his toes
back into the business, attending his first Cauliflower Alley Club reunion in
2010 and the Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame induction in 2011, in Amsterdam, NY.
As the one who broke the news, Bill Apter, called Sanchez
“one of the most pleasant guys I had ever met in the wrestling business.”
Sanchez had been in failing health for some time and died
from cancer on July 27, 2024. He is survived by his three children Peter
Sanchez, Therese Sanchez and Roseann Sanchez, five grandchildren, and two great
grandchildren. His sister Josephine (Joanie) Diaz, his niece Nadine and her
husband Robert DiLeo, their children and grandchildren.
There will be a visitation on Tuesday, July, 30, 2024
from 4-8pm at Demoro Funeral Home, 517 Route 33, Millstone Township, NJ 08535.
A Funeral Service will take place during the visitation. Cremation will be
private.
