Sanford "Santhrax" Kelly was in deep. The seed of his fighting game obsession had been planted thanks to long sessions of WWF: Wrestlemania with his brother and their friends from the local video store. Before long, you couldn't keep Sanford out of the arcade. He would show up before the doors even opened, and run in so fast they wouldn't even have time to turn on the lights.
He played a bit of everything: Pit Fighter, Time Killers, War Gods and King of Fighters on his Sega Genesis at home; Soul Calibur, Tekken, Capcom vs. SNK and more at the arcades. "Nobody really knew me," Sanford told Yipes on his podcast No Frillz about his early days as an arcade player. "I was a quiet guy. I used to body a lot of people, and then I would leave."
He eventually made his way to Chinatown Fair. Even at the center of New York's fighting game universe, Sanford was still putting the hurt on people. Both he and his friend Jeron "Hiro" Grayson started racking up huge win streaks in Capcom vs. SNK, taking down 30 or more competitors in a row.
This was where one of the greatest rivalries in fighting games began. One weekend, Justin Wong joined the line of competitors trying to take down these players running the CvS cabinets. Sanford only sort of knew who Justin Wong was, something about him being "the best in the east coast." Pretty obvious where this story is going, right? Justin humbles Sanford, and the rivalry is born.
Not so fast.
Justin fell to Sanford, just like everybody else in that line. Sanford, feeling pretty good about himself, says to a friend, "Hey, I thought this guy was the best in the east coast?" The friend responds, "No, he's the best in Marvel vs. Capcom 2."
Sanford was energized. Time to get into some Marvel. Later that day, Sanford challenged Justin, ready for a repeat of their CvS matchup. He lost so fast that Jeron, who had started a game on the CvS setup next to them at the same time, hadn't even used his third character yet. "I was like, what happened? I didn't even know you could do that in this game."
What began that day wasn't just a rivalry, but a friendship. Justin taught Sanford about the basics of fighting games and coached him in brackets. In 2001, at 19 years old, Sanford won the first tournament he ever entered. He was crowned champion of March Madness in Philadelphia, taking the Capcom vs. SNK bracket and winning $300. Sanford had to win the tournament through losers bracket and pulled it off. The experience convinced him that this whole fighting game competition thing was worth his time.
There was another significant motivator for Sanford: his mentor, Justin. "I started traveling to more tournaments, started being more competitive," Sanford told No Frillz. "This is how everything started with me and Justin. Justin was the only guy I couldn't beat. I could beat everybody else, but I couldn't beat Justin. I didn’t have the confidence in me to feel like I could beat Justin because he would keep beating me, but people told me I could beat him. I didn’t want to beat him because I thought I could, I wanted to beat him because people told me I could."
Sanford's tag, Santhrax, comes from the way he followed Justin around fighting game events like the plague. "I was anthrax, I was infecting people," Sanford told Family Game Adventure in a 2013 interview. "So I became Santhrax. I added the first initial in my name and put it in front of anthrax."
The quest to beat Justin turned Santhrax into one of the world's strongest Marvel vs. Capcom 2 players. His first big splash on the Evolution stage didn't actually come in a tournament match, though. It came in a grudge match at Evolution 2006, after Sanford had challenged Duc "DucVader" Do, the reigning Evolution champion in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. A staggering amount of cash -- over $6,000, well more than Justin Wong would win for taking the Evolution main MvC 2 bracket that year -- was on the line, but that wasn't all. Sanford was representing the east coast against Duc, who called the west coast home.
It was one of the most hype matches of the year, with huge crowd investment thanks to the money and regional pride at stake. Sanford was the underdog, somebody without even an Evo Top 8 under his belt, against the reigning champion. It started back-and-forth, with both players taking games. The first-to-7 set eventually made its way to 4-4, but Sanford closed out the final three games, winning for not just himself but his home region.
The next year, Sanford would make his first Evo Top 8, taking 7th in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. He remained a high level Marvel player even as his attention turned to other fighting games. The first to catch his attention was Tekken. On his No Frillz podcast, Yipes said that Sanford was one of the best players in the game at the time. After that was the 2008 release of Street Fighter IV, the first Street Fighter game to truly draw Sanford's competitive attention.
He had a great run in Street Fighter IV's first Evolution main bracket in 2009. Despite an early loss, Sanford tore up losers, only falling to Justin Wong for fourth place after starting Top 32 in losers side. Street Fighter IV was the game Sanford had grinded for this Evo. He had entered others, but Street Fighter was where his effort had gone, and where his expectations were highest.
So, naturally, Sanford won his first Evolution Championship in 2009. It was in the same game where he had taken down an Evo Champion and defended his coast's honor, Marvel vs. Capcom 2. To make things even sweeter, he finally took down the man he had been chasing for nearly a decade, Justin Wong. It was not the first time Sanford had beaten Justin -- he had won a set over Justin at a previous year's Breakpoint, a set where Justin had used Sanford's own team against him. But this time, he had done it on the biggest stage in fighting games.
It's probably the win that people remember him the most for. One of his primary motivations to travel across the country playing fighting games was to beat Justin Wong. Surely this has to be the biggest win of his career, right? To him, it merely ranks top 3. Sanford told Jon Rafman in a 2013 interview, "Everybody says, ‘When you won Evo2k9, that was the biggest highlight of your career!’ No, it wasn’t. Me beating Duc was the highlight of my career because it put me on the map to beat a legend. Duc was the first champion from MvC2, and for me to beat him was a big thing for me. I was a very popular player at the time, but I wasn't in the top three. I was like, ‘I have to take him down,' and when I did that, it felt like a big accomplishment. And it was probably the biggest money match in fighting game history."
Beyond his Evolution title, Sanford continued to post strong results in many fighting games. He remained strong in Marvel 2, finishing 2nd behind Justin Wong at Evo 2010, and nearly returned to the main stage in Marvel 3 after a 9th place finish in 2011. He won multiple major Street Fighter IV tournaments like Toryuken 2 in 2013 and Summer Jam 2016. He even made a few appearances in final brackets for Street Fighter x Tekken.
Sanford played a bit of Street Fighter V, and says he still plays Street Fighter 6 even though he doesn't compete in brackets. Despite that, his influence persists. Even if they don't know Sanford, pretty much every fighting game player has heard the wisdom he dispensed one night on the way to Chinatown Fair in 2009.
"Pick a top tier."
This wasn't just Sanford telling the world one of the deepest truths in fighting games. It was him grappling with it himself. Marn, a fellow Evo champion, was telling Sanford to stop picking Ken in Street Fighter IV, and to instead do what he does in Capcom vs. SNK 2 and pick the top-tier Sagat.
"I didn’t want to play Sagat," Sanford would later say on No Frillz. "I didn’t believe in cheap characters at this time, I just wanted to play what I liked. I lost to Marn… I got really mad. The way he beat me was basically saying, ‘See, this is what you’d be doing if you played this character.'"
It's a video that lasts in part because Sanford is so deeply quotable. "I want the money to work for me, I'm tired of working for the money," is one of the FGC's greatest lines of all time. But it's also a video that lasts because the conflict between the way you want to play and the way you have to play to win is one that every fighting game player has experienced. You'd have to search far and wide to find a fighting game player who hasn't come away from a tournament feeling the way Sanford did that night.
Despite the fact that Sanford has mostly left competition in the past, he returned to the sticks for a special event in 2025. As part of the first ever Evo Awards, there was a four-man Tournament of Champions held for Marvel vs. Capcom 2, featuring Sanford along with Duc Do, Yipes and Justin Wong. He wound up taking down both Duc and Justin and even reset the bracket against Yipes before falling at second place. It was a very nice cherry on top for Sanford, who called his time in Marvel 2 the highlight of his career.
Many of the FGC's most influential players and community leaders started with Marvel 2, or otherwise made their name through it. Not only did Sanford become a champion, but he was central to many of Marvel 2's biggest rivalries and storylines. You simply cannot tell the story of Marvel 2 without bringing up Sanford Kelly, and that is the definition of a legend.
See more of his story in Evo Legends Powered by Qiddiya Gaming on EvoFGC.
