Anthony “Tony Santos” Sannizzaro (1922-1984) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 23, 1922. Raised in the Boston area, he got his start in professional wrestling as an amateur middleweight and lightweight wrestler for Paul “Papa” Forbes Bowser (1886-1960), a prominent New England promoter and a founder of the American Wrestling Association. By the 1940s, Santos also transitioned into management and refereeing for Bowser, before enlisting in the United States Army in 1944. Returning home after the war, Santos resumed working with Bowser primarily as a manager, promoter, matchmaker and referee. He often represented Bowser’s operation in smaller cities throughout the region.

By about 1953, Santos established his own wrestling promotion and began a long partnership with Jack Pfefer (1894-1974), a legendary New York-based wrestling promoter and booker. Initially, Santos focused on smaller New England towns and cities and on booking wrestlers for tours in Canada. Working together, Santos and Pfefer expanded their New England promotions and often directly challenged Bowser’s more established holdings. One of their strongholds was the Valley Arena Gardens in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

1960 was a pivotal transition year for New England wrestling. Valley Arena Gardens closed permanently due to fire damage in March, and Paul Bowser died in July. In the ensuing scramble, Pfefer and Santos established a new promotion, Big Time Wrestling (BTW), and, by August, they had secured exclusive rights for wrestling matches at the Boston Garden, one of the city’s top venues. Big Time Wrestling also promoted matches at the Boston Arena (now the Matthews Arena) and soon emerged as the city’s dominant wrestling promotion. BTW also continued promoting in smaller towns throughout the region, usually following the New England summer carnival and resort circuit. Santos and Pfefer often featured women wrestlers and little person wrestlers on their cards, in addition to other gimmicks like Black Ozzie, a 300-pound wrestling black bear.

In about 1960, Santos established Santos’ Professional Wrestling School in Boston to train and teach aspiring wrestlers. Brochures for the School claimed: “This is the only professional wrestling school of this type in the world. Never before has a gymnasium set up this type of a school.” Over the years, Big Time Wrestling successfully recruited new wrestling talent from the students at Santos’ School.

Throughout the 1960s, though, Santos and Pfefer faced competition for the lucrative Boston and New England markets—particularly from the New York-based World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) owned by Vince McMahon, Sr. (1914-1984). Several times during the decade, WWWF and allies like Abe Ford made inroads into Big Time Wrestling’s territory. By the mid-1960s, a heated rivalry developed between Frank Scarpa, the BTW champion, and Bruno Sammartino, the WWWF champion. McMahon’s frequent televised wrestling matches helped the younger Sammartino attract a following in New England and boost WWWF’s popularity. Santos and Pfefer were well known in the 1960s for promoting matches with “sound alike” wrestlers like Bruno Sanmartino (with an “n”) to take advantage of the name recognition of established wrestling stars.

Big Time Wrestling and the World Wide Wrestling Federation battled over the Boston market in the late 1960s, but Frank Scarpa’s death severely weakened Santos’s promotion. In January 1969, Scarpa suffered a heart attack during a match and died soon after. Reeling from the loss of its star wrestler, Big Time Wrestling soon went on hiatus and WWWF consolidated its hold on the market.

Santos officially retired from wrestling in 1974. He passed Big Time Wrestling to his sons Tony Santos, Jr., and Gene Santos (1941-1994). The Santos brothers led a brief revival of Big Time Wrestling in the mid-1970s before shutting down the promotion for good in 1975 at which point Gene Santos moved to Florida and Tony Santos Jr. signed with WWWF. Throughout his career, Tony Santos had also promoted country and western music concerts in New England. After retiring from wrestling, he focused on his music booking agency, Shower of Stars. Tony Santos died in October 1984 at the age of 62. In 2011, both Tony Santos, Sr., and Tony Santos, Jr., were inducted into the New England Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame.