Somewhere in an office in London, Uk:
Bob Mitchell: It's Wembley, it's like a home game for you given recent history, and it's a big *bleep* step up from that indoor climbing place they booked last time.
Blade Alexander: Right? What's with that? What's makes someone say “You know what would be a great place to have a wrestling event? Some indoor climbing park!”
BM: So they can pack in all them warm milk sipping millenials to stand there and side eye us for a night while you're doing the graps' in the middle of their precious little indoor park where they take their little selfies so they can feel like rugged outdoors men without having to step outside. It's ridiculous, like that's a great idea... Let's try to fill the place so everyone can pack it in on the floor and it looks sold out even though it's really about sixty-five people huddled around some awkward pillars that people just kept on climbing anyway.
The pinstriped suited manager shakes his greying head from behind the comfort of his mock oak desk in his office at the start of a hall that very few people have used recently. If it weren't a typical grey, drizzly day in London you could catch sight of the Thames between two buildings, but since London weather is London weather here we are inside, where the window to this office gives a great view of the empty grey wall across the hall.
BM: But that disappointment is in the past. We're moving on and we're full-time with SCW. For the first time in seven years they're coming back to London Brawling 2, and it's in the SSE. A proper arena, not some one off we're hip and different but we wont even really work it into the show kind of indy company. This is a big sold out deal and everyone else on the roster is BIG TIME kidding themselves if they think any of them had anything to do with selling that place out. A hundred, two at best, but THAT place in THIS city, that's all you. Weren't you on the last London Brawling?
BA: I think so, but don't quote me on that.
BM: Well you're on this one, any with good reason. They plastered your face notably on the posters all over the city and in ads they've been touting Blade Alexander's return to SCW. Anything to put an *bleep* every eighteen inches. Why else would you get such a high profile match so quickly? I mean yeah there's the obvious talent, and the fact that this match needs a serious shot in the arm, but why else put you in a position to be the number one contender for a title on your first singles match back in the company, and on a Supercard no less.
Blade is more flipping through his phone that engaged in Bob's pep talk or whatever this is supposed to be, but he is listening to the hand that now guides his career.
BA: Obviously the emphasize the people that sell the tickets. As far as my match goes, what selling point would there be otherwise? Josh Aquin versus Jack Asher, not exactly screaming Supercard match-up, even if there is the number one contender to the Roulette Championship on the line. At best that's a Climax Control match. Without my involvement there's just not much else there otherwise.
Take a look at Joshua Aquin, that guy has been here since I left, he claims that the SCW ring is his ring, but if that was true then why did I have to Google his name just to figure out who he is. When you told me who I was facing the name rang a bell but I just couldn't put a name to it. He's as generic as they come. The guy has a face that says he has no personality. He's got tattoos that look like he blindly picked them out of a book at whichever parlour he wandered into first. The guy has been here for YEARS and still no one remembers him. He thinks he'll make his mark and wind up the Roulette champion, but he's had over six years and still no one can remember him. He's never done anything of note. It's not his ring, he'd probably be let go if anyone in payroll could remember who he was. If it hasn't happened by now, it's not going to happen. It's not a good sign for your career if you have to advertise where you're going to be ahead of time so there's actually an off chance that maybe you'll get recognized when he's out drinking away the fact that his career is more stale than his in ring work.
BM: You know, I'd actually consider showing up if he'd offer to pay for drinks for people who recognized him, but he'd have to promise that I didn't have to talk to him.
BA: How would you even recognize him?
BM: I figure I'd print out his picture before hand and write his name on the back.
This actually draws a laugh from Blade who finally looks up from his phone.
BM: Who do you keep texting anyhow?
BA: The wife who else.
BM: *BLEEP* I should try to talk her into getting in the ring. SCW has it's bombshells, I get her in the ring and we'll ALL be rich as kings in no time.
BA: I'm pretty sure they don't pay you if you actually maim the competition.
BM: I think that might be part of the whole thing with the Roulette title. Maiming contests. Might be an actual thing.
BA: You should probably get on that then. Knowing the rules might help when it comes time to take that title off whoever is going to walk out with it. I'm getting a bit tired of being kept away from gold in SCW. From being promised a short at the tag titles, which I was never interested in and never happened anyway to having to do the work myself and get my own title shots when I was easily the hottest thing in the company and getting pushed aside for Front Office Spike to try to take credit for all the work I did, I'm getting a bit sick of the run-around that SCW has given me since day one. Literally day one, the day this company first opened it's doors.
BM: That's where I come in. You're a busy guy. You have a lot of things on the go. Travel, making dates, pleasing the man-eating (and woman-eating) missus, raising the cutest little boy. It's a full schedule. You have no time to run down double talking hipsters who continuously talk out of both sides of their mouths knowing full well you're too busy to follow up and make them make good on those promises. Me, I've got *bleep* all to do these days but yell in the faces of some teary-eyed millenials and teach them the hard facts that this isn't all a big game of Big Brother, you can't just talk *bleep* and not have to eat it after and if you make a promise your damned sure better follow up on it.
Bob takes a moment to arrange some of the papers on his desk. He's great as a manager but kinda weak on the filing system.
BM: And what about this entitled jag-off?
He holds up a promotional photo of the upcoming London Brawling 2 match and it's third participant, Jack Asher.
BA: Yeah the entitled rich boy who doesn't think he's entitled. Him at least I can give some credit, he might be delusional but he does have some skill. He's got something of a wrestling background and he's decent, but it's skill that you pay for, not skill you earn. There's a big difference between having loads of money and learning from the absolute best to the pain of hard earned lessons.
The kind of training and the life Asher leads can introduce him to the right people and get his foot in the door, but there's a world of difference between people like Jack and people like me. I've seen where he's been. My dad did this for years. He was a multiple time champion and I had the privilege of sitting under the learning tree of some of the best in this business before a time when I even had any idea what that truly meant. My dad was a living legend in his day and surrounded himself with others like himself that loved to share stories. When I was young I just thought they were old men telling tales to a young kid, but they were the hard earned lessons of a life time spent on the road. They were tales of love and loss and I thought when I started out that I had heard it all and knew everything.
Then one by one I paid the price. I felt the loss of each of those old men who died too young thanks to this business. I felt the set backs of injury, the personal betrayal, and the death of close friends. The biggest lesson I learned from my father was one that couldn't be bought at any price. He taught me how to be a survivor. I stood by and watched him carry on after the death of my mother. I saw the pain etched on his face when he carried the best friend he ever had to his final resting place. I saw him carry the weight of catastrophic knee injury, the scars on his back from death matches in the 90's, but never once did I see him break.
You have your fancy coaches who can teach you all the ins and outs of bridging suplexes and every form of arm bar known to man and submission holds that haven't been seen in a century, but none of that ever really prepares you. It can take care of you in the ring, but it wont prepare you for the first time some crooked promoter rings the bell early in your match because he needs to protect the main event of his upcoming pay per view. It doesn't prepare you for losing your job because the best, fairest boss you've ever had couldn't open up to anyone about the pain of his wife leaving him and they find his brains all over his desk.
It's easy to be a team leader and be a paragon of sportsmanship and dedication when you have a leg up on everyone else and you face no adversity, but now he's in the real world where he's not being protected, not facing people who are more poorly trained or have less experience. He's in an uphill battle where he's going to have to prove he can face the odds and overcome. I'm sure we'll hear from him in the next week or so a whole bunch of rhetoric about being so great and how this wont be all that hard and how he's so much better, but all it will be is talk. All he has is talk, it's all he's ever needed and all he could ever really do until the time comes when he has not just to earn something, but he has to learn how to TAKE something from someone better than him.
Personally it's going to give me a great deal of satisfaction being in this match. Not just having a match on an SCW Supercard again. Not just competing in a city I've called home for the last three years, but to be in there with a guy who's been a serious SCW lifer, who's been here ages clawing and scratching and always looking up, always fighting from behind only to see time and time again someone else better, someone else more memorable, more likeable, more charismatic pass him by on their road to success. To see someone like that and look across the ring and seeing a guy like Jack Asher, the latest guy with all the potential in the world and to actually be in the middle to give Asher a taste of what could be. A lifetime of obscure mid-card wrestling, painfully working through years and years of getting nowhere, showing him face to face what it's like to see his future as a guy who's biggest hope is that someone will shout his name and know him in some dive pub after the night's matches are over. I'm going to make Asher look that terrible future, the future that many, many people just like him in this business have to look forward to and then see if he has the passion and the drive to keep going. Joshua Aquin has. To his credit, it's probably his only redeeming quality, but it's a big one. Six years of having his heels dug in, trying to drive forward in the muck that is SCW and getting nowhere. But look at all the names that have come and gone, some of us have come back again and some come and gone a second time, and here he is, still trying to get anywhere. No quit, no giving up. You could stay he's just in it for a steady paycheck, but it's a bit deeper than that. He could just get in the ring, take his bumps, grab his check and head to the bar, but you check that website that I have to keep going back to just to remember what his mediocre face looks like and there they are, steady posts from a guy still hanging on to the hope that one day he'll get good enough to get recognized without having to have a shirt with his own name on it.
Can Jack Asher say the same? Does he have the same deep well of hope? They say the earlier you face adversity in life the better it prepares you for the real world. Jack Asher has never faced any of that. I'm pretty sure once he gets a taste of Josh Aquin's life he'll be gone before anyone really knows he was here, some office job in a family company somewhere that keeps him nice and isolated from having to do any real work or facing any type of adversity where he can take yearly month long holidays on a yacht he didn't earn and post tropical vacation pics from expensive, exotic places the people who do the real work for whatever company gets stuck with him will never make the money in their lives to go on. Meanwhile I'll be here in SCW holding the Roulette Championship, Josh Aquin will be here still plugging personal appearances no one asked him to make either one or both of us facing off the next spoiled rich kid who thinks it would be a laugh and an easy life to be in SCW. So long Jack, thanks for coming.
I didn't come back to SCW to fit in, or put in the grind, or listen to empty promises. I'm not even here to feed my family, nothing as crass as that. I'm here to take what's mine and the Roulette Championship is the first step to that.
His phone rings, and that's where we end, with Blade Alexander taking a call and Bob Mitchell looking confused and befuddled by the papers on his desk.
