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.”
Pete Sanchez and Tito Santana
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.)
Pete Sanchez as a tag team champion in 1962, promoting a card on July 28, 1962, in Akron, Ohio.
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. Photo by Greg Oliver
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.
TOP PHOTO: Pete Sanchez in the ring in the WWWF. Photo by John Arezzi