He saw “The Wrestler” and found it true to life. Drugs? “We’d get a pay advance every night, and it was such a grueling job a lot of guys turned to drugs. When we flew to a new place, the dealers were waiting for us  pain pills, steroids, pot, cocaine.” Loneliness? “I spent 12 years on the road, visiting and stopping over at my home when I could. Christmas, New Year’s, we wrestled. My wife raised our sons. I’d say 90 percent of wrestlers I knew were married a second time or more. Lots of partying.”

Mr. Santana knew wrestlers like Mickey Rourke’s character, but he did not turn out that way. He has been married 27 years and is close to his sons. One’s a Princeton grad doing human rights work; another is about to graduate from law school; the youngest is finishing at James Madison University. The family lives in a handsome home here on three wooded acres atop a hill. He teaches Spanish at Eisenhower Middle School and coaches boys’ basketball, while his wife runs their hair salon, Santana’s. He is, in short, the antithesis of “The Wrestler.” Through the craziness of the pro circuit, he hung on to a set of values  family, education, frugality, hard work  that enabled him to reach middle age whole. This story doesn’t have the edginess to be a major motion picture coming soon to a theater near you. Battered middle-aged men may provide filmgoers with a much-needed catharsis. But if you’ve seen Mr. Rourke in “The Wrestler,” or Anthony Quinn in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” or Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront” and wondered if they really coulda been somebody, the answer is: yes, Tito Santana.

Born Merced Solis in Mission, Tex., to Mexican-American migrant laborers, he started working at age 7, picking asparagus in Illinois, cherries in Wisconsin, cotton in Texas. Until ninth grade, he never attended school full time, but that year, his mother stood up to his father so her son could get an education. He finished high school, won a football scholarship to West Texas A&M and after graduating, played pro football in Canada for two years. A former teammate got him his first wrestling job.

He reached the top circuit in 1979, averaging $300,000 a year for a decade, although, he said, he never had a written contract. “You couldn’t take a day off. If you did  they could get rid of you.”

He said Vince McMahon Jr., chairman of what is now called World Wrestling Entertainment, controlled the scripts, deciding “who will win and who will make the millions.” As Tito Santana, he was cast as a good guy, always ranking between the middle and top. Asked why he was given such a good role, Mr. Santana said: “I was a very dependable person. In the 12 years, I missed just twice, once when I asked permission to be with my wife for the delivery of our second baby, and once I was snowed in. They knew I wouldn’t get busted for drugs. I wasn’t involved the way a lot of wrestlers were. I had a good attitude, I was agile, plus, I was Hispanic, and they needed ethnics.”