Here it is.
EAW.
A wrestling promo.
This is what you all have been waiting for, right?
Happy now? No?
This is what is understood by everyone watching, and by everyone who has stopped watching, in which a match is named, an elitist is weighed and found wanting, a grievance is aired at the correct volume for the correct duration, and the people at home, who came for this, who are owed this, are handed the thing they came for.
They get a voice.
They get a face doing the work of a soul.
They get their money back in feeling.
…
That’s the trade, though.
And here’s why. This is also where elitist gets publicized, tasks get itemized, visibility is manufactured out of nothing more substantial than breath and old injury, where the appetite to be seen is in the vocabulary of conviction… and where, across all the years of this, through every camera, in every building that has ever asked me what I think about a man… not one person has thought to ask how I feel. Not that anyone should. Let me say it correctly – nobody asks because the asking would cost somebody something, and nothing here is free. So… instead of the battle in front of me, instead of the retrospection I owe my interaction with your beloved EAW World Champion, instead of the clean public autopsy everyone has already settled in to watch me perform on a man whose name is doing half the work of my ratings for me… I am going to talk about the thing I crawled through to sit down in this chair.
At Bloodsport, I lost two teeth, was drowned, and strangled. Damn near lost an eye to a screwdriver, and an aluminum bat caught me across my head and opened up the back of my skull so badly that I was bleeding heavily and had to go through a CT scan and an MRI soon after the match, getting carried out on a stretcher. Had both of my eyelids punctured and torn open by a fish hook, so had to get in contact with an ophthalmologist for reconstructive surgery. My raw skin turned into open welts, split apart by a leather belt lashed across my back and my shoulder blades. Was deep in my tendon and trauma recovery, still had the tarsal plate up here messed up, and I could barely see — damn near fucking blinded even — because the whole thing was swollen shut. I was on a realistic path to a coma, and for a while there, I looked flat-out dead the entire time before finally got here to sit and speak about my condition. Stitches all over my head from the lacerations. Had to get dental surgery once it was over, and then came the whole run of physical therapy, concussion protocol, and every bit of medical recovery you can name. Even after I got out of the hospital, I was still dealing with the internal damage. My head felt like it got run over by a truck and was ready to come apart at any second. Your guess? It felt like absolute shit for a solid week. I could barely stand without teetering on the edge of going down. Couldn’t even move my face when I tried to speak or eat, looking like a non-responsive, miserable shell of a man and sitting in my house looking like Paul Sheldon after a car accident. I was hardly getting a wink of sleep, and when I finally lay down in my own bed? Yeah fuck my life, I couldn’t even settle the way I wanted to, and every little movement had my whole body feeling like it was being dragged through a living hell.
And you know the funny part? I'm still here, talking to the camera with prescriptive grammar, when by every reasonable measure, I had no business making it back at all.
So tell me, after all that… How do I feel?
Because I'll tell you right now — a fucking mess.
But then… I saw Hans Grayson.
I watched what the reigning EAW World Champion put himself through in a special place in hell they call the Cage of Death, and something about it made me feel ALIVE again.
If he can walk through that fire… then why can’t I?
So I made the call myself.
They wanted to send the whole floor after me. All hands, sirens, the emergency protocol reserved for men who have stopped being able to hold their own weight, a full descent of people whose job it would have been to carry me somewhere quiet and decide on my behalf what I could survive. I told them to stand down. “No, doc… let me glue my own bones back using ugly willpower”, as I said I would gather my own scattered pieces. I said I would set them back where they belonged, in whatever order I could manage, with whatever was left of my hands…. And you know what happened next? Surprise. Still challenging for the EAW World Championship, on the worst day of his life, and there is not a soul breathing who can fuck with him. Understand what this is not. This is not a paycheck being punched. This is not a man clocking in and out of habit while his life caves in around him on a Sunday night and keeps caving for every hour of the week that followed. That word doesn't apply here. Whatever obligation this is, it was never written down, never negotiated, never something I could put down when carrying it stopped being convenient. This is *I have to*. I came back because the game is already in my blood, already past the point of choosing, converted somewhere along the way into instinct, into the thing my body does before my mind gets a vote, and instinct doesn't ask what week I've had. I feel like absolute shit sitting here talking into this camera. I'm still doing it. This is the priority. I don't even care about the result of that battle anymore. Everyone in the building knew what it was. Damon Lazarus would not be holding a leadership position at all if Caroline hadn't leaned in and given Jake that Judas kiss.
But through all of it....
Through the agony, the torment, the sickness that sits behind the eyes and won't move, the sorrow of losing something you were promised you'd keep.
I'm still here.
Job isn't finished, and whatever anyone wants to say about me, I'm tougher than they are. I'm a lot tougher than people want to give me credit for. I've been down. I've been beaten to pieces since my last match back on Season 19, put through the kind of stretch that removes men from this business permanently and quietly, and yet here I am, breathing, lacing my boots, walking into that ring to wrestle, which is the one true mark of this profession and the one thing most people could never actually be.
Every sacrifice… every year shaved off the back end of my own career, spent early, spent knowingly.
I'M. STILL. HERE.
And they still want to tell me none of it matters.
FUCK THEM.
THEY CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES. ALL OF THEM.
They want to apathetically minimize my sacrifice to make me doubt my own reality — FUCK ALL OF THAT. This shit is about living with radical indifference. As a matter of fact, they don't know the first thing about what I've been through. Not the shape of it, not the duration, not the arithmetic of what it costs a man to keep presenting himself upright in a building full of people who have decided in advance what he is. They read the result and worked backward from it, and somewhere in that backward reading, my sacrifice got reclassified as entitlement, as though the wreckage were something I'd been handed rather than something I'd paid for. Guess what? If proximity to death were a credential, I'd have cashed it in years ago and been done with the whole arrangement. That isn't how any of this works. I'm not getting nearer to anything holy. There's no ledger up there crediting the account. This is real life--- a hard knock one. The pain is real. So here's the honest position, I am sitting inside a miserable stretch of my own life, and every single thing I've done still refuses to land, still comes back short by some margin nobody will explain to me.
Nobody can keep me down.
You fucking bet.
I keep believing, keep coming back… NOBODY BUT ME.
I lost, fell… STILL STANDING.
Through all of it, through the failures, through the shortcomings I could list faster than any of them could, there is no one alive who can stop me from moving, no one who can put a lid on stubbornness this old. That is the whole difference. That is what makes me stronger than every man here who thinks winning made him better than me. They climb the ranks, and I keep slipping, but the truth doesn't live in any of that. MY LIFE IS CONSISTENT, and no matter how many times people try to put me down, I'm going to keep coming back just as consistent, until I reach the end of my road and stand as the only man with the right to tell the world where it ends.
EAW.
A wrestling promo.
This is what you all have been waiting for, right?
Happy now? No?
This is what is understood by everyone watching, and by everyone who has stopped watching, in which a match is named, an elitist is weighed and found wanting, a grievance is aired at the correct volume for the correct duration, and the people at home, who came for this, who are owed this, are handed the thing they came for.
They get a voice.
They get a face doing the work of a soul.
They get their money back in feeling.
…
That’s the trade, though.
And here’s why. This is also where elitist gets publicized, tasks get itemized, visibility is manufactured out of nothing more substantial than breath and old injury, where the appetite to be seen is in the vocabulary of conviction… and where, across all the years of this, through every camera, in every building that has ever asked me what I think about a man… not one person has thought to ask how I feel. Not that anyone should. Let me say it correctly – nobody asks because the asking would cost somebody something, and nothing here is free. So… instead of the battle in front of me, instead of the retrospection I owe my interaction with your beloved EAW World Champion, instead of the clean public autopsy everyone has already settled in to watch me perform on a man whose name is doing half the work of my ratings for me… I am going to talk about the thing I crawled through to sit down in this chair.
At Bloodsport, I lost two teeth, was drowned, and strangled. Damn near lost an eye to a screwdriver, and an aluminum bat caught me across my head and opened up the back of my skull so badly that I was bleeding heavily and had to go through a CT scan and an MRI soon after the match, getting carried out on a stretcher. Had both of my eyelids punctured and torn open by a fish hook, so had to get in contact with an ophthalmologist for reconstructive surgery. My raw skin turned into open welts, split apart by a leather belt lashed across my back and my shoulder blades. Was deep in my tendon and trauma recovery, still had the tarsal plate up here messed up, and I could barely see — damn near fucking blinded even — because the whole thing was swollen shut. I was on a realistic path to a coma, and for a while there, I looked flat-out dead the entire time before finally got here to sit and speak about my condition. Stitches all over my head from the lacerations. Had to get dental surgery once it was over, and then came the whole run of physical therapy, concussion protocol, and every bit of medical recovery you can name. Even after I got out of the hospital, I was still dealing with the internal damage. My head felt like it got run over by a truck and was ready to come apart at any second. Your guess? It felt like absolute shit for a solid week. I could barely stand without teetering on the edge of going down. Couldn’t even move my face when I tried to speak or eat, looking like a non-responsive, miserable shell of a man and sitting in my house looking like Paul Sheldon after a car accident. I was hardly getting a wink of sleep, and when I finally lay down in my own bed? Yeah fuck my life, I couldn’t even settle the way I wanted to, and every little movement had my whole body feeling like it was being dragged through a living hell.
And you know the funny part? I'm still here, talking to the camera with prescriptive grammar, when by every reasonable measure, I had no business making it back at all.
So tell me, after all that… How do I feel?
Because I'll tell you right now — a fucking mess.
But then… I saw Hans Grayson.
I watched what the reigning EAW World Champion put himself through in a special place in hell they call the Cage of Death, and something about it made me feel ALIVE again.
If he can walk through that fire… then why can’t I?
So I made the call myself.
They wanted to send the whole floor after me. All hands, sirens, the emergency protocol reserved for men who have stopped being able to hold their own weight, a full descent of people whose job it would have been to carry me somewhere quiet and decide on my behalf what I could survive. I told them to stand down. “No, doc… let me glue my own bones back using ugly willpower”, as I said I would gather my own scattered pieces. I said I would set them back where they belonged, in whatever order I could manage, with whatever was left of my hands…. And you know what happened next? Surprise. Still challenging for the EAW World Championship, on the worst day of his life, and there is not a soul breathing who can fuck with him. Understand what this is not. This is not a paycheck being punched. This is not a man clocking in and out of habit while his life caves in around him on a Sunday night and keeps caving for every hour of the week that followed. That word doesn't apply here. Whatever obligation this is, it was never written down, never negotiated, never something I could put down when carrying it stopped being convenient. This is *I have to*. I came back because the game is already in my blood, already past the point of choosing, converted somewhere along the way into instinct, into the thing my body does before my mind gets a vote, and instinct doesn't ask what week I've had. I feel like absolute shit sitting here talking into this camera. I'm still doing it. This is the priority. I don't even care about the result of that battle anymore. Everyone in the building knew what it was. Damon Lazarus would not be holding a leadership position at all if Caroline hadn't leaned in and given Jake that Judas kiss.
But through all of it....
Through the agony, the torment, the sickness that sits behind the eyes and won't move, the sorrow of losing something you were promised you'd keep.
I'm still here.
Job isn't finished, and whatever anyone wants to say about me, I'm tougher than they are. I'm a lot tougher than people want to give me credit for. I've been down. I've been beaten to pieces since my last match back on Season 19, put through the kind of stretch that removes men from this business permanently and quietly, and yet here I am, breathing, lacing my boots, walking into that ring to wrestle, which is the one true mark of this profession and the one thing most people could never actually be.
Every sacrifice… every year shaved off the back end of my own career, spent early, spent knowingly.
I'M. STILL. HERE.
And they still want to tell me none of it matters.
FUCK THEM.
THEY CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES. ALL OF THEM.
They want to apathetically minimize my sacrifice to make me doubt my own reality — FUCK ALL OF THAT. This shit is about living with radical indifference. As a matter of fact, they don't know the first thing about what I've been through. Not the shape of it, not the duration, not the arithmetic of what it costs a man to keep presenting himself upright in a building full of people who have decided in advance what he is. They read the result and worked backward from it, and somewhere in that backward reading, my sacrifice got reclassified as entitlement, as though the wreckage were something I'd been handed rather than something I'd paid for. Guess what? If proximity to death were a credential, I'd have cashed it in years ago and been done with the whole arrangement. That isn't how any of this works. I'm not getting nearer to anything holy. There's no ledger up there crediting the account. This is real life--- a hard knock one. The pain is real. So here's the honest position, I am sitting inside a miserable stretch of my own life, and every single thing I've done still refuses to land, still comes back short by some margin nobody will explain to me.
Nobody can keep me down.
You fucking bet.
I keep believing, keep coming back… NOBODY BUT ME.
I lost, fell… STILL STANDING.
Through all of it, through the failures, through the shortcomings I could list faster than any of them could, there is no one alive who can stop me from moving, no one who can put a lid on stubbornness this old. That is the whole difference. That is what makes me stronger than every man here who thinks winning made him better than me. They climb the ranks, and I keep slipping, but the truth doesn't live in any of that. MY LIFE IS CONSISTENT, and no matter how many times people try to put me down, I'm going to keep coming back just as consistent, until I reach the end of my road and stand as the only man with the right to tell the world where it ends.
The most intimidating thing about me was never the cold in my voice. People fixate on it because it's the part they can hear, the part that reproduces cleanly on a broadcast, the surface they can point at and call a gimmick, and while they're busy doing that, they miss the actual mechanism entirely, that a man can be put down, thoroughly, in the way that ends other careers, and get his feet back underneath him, and beat someone senseless, and make the whole procedure look like nothing at all. Fucking effortless, isn’t it? That's as dangerous as this business gets. Hans says he's the champion who brings out the best in people. The one who wrings some excitement out of this thrilling trade of ours, keeps the crowd in their seats, keeps their eyes fixed on the product. Then, he made a fine fucking choice picking me, because Hans Grayson does not make accidents, and he knew precisely what he was reaching for when he accepted my challenge. Years of this. Rivals across every circumstance the calendar could invent for us, under stipulations neither of us would sign today… so let me tell him what he actually bought. I am not only going to bring out the best in myself. I'm going to reach past excitement, past whatever modest thrill he thinks he's been selling, and put Vaught-Hemingway Stadium into one collective gasp, on their feet, both feet, watching me take a world title nobody on this earth expects me to win.
Nobody but me… ME.
I'm the one in control of what my hands do.
He KNEW I was the man who could push him over the edge. If it wasn't going to be anyone else in that three musketeers act over on Voltage, then it was always, from the beginning… going to be ME. And he wanted all that smoke for himself… so I'll give him something he can't dodge.
We keep those cards close, because there's business in front of me this week, and business in front of me gets handled first. We take care of what's here. We build momentum, and we hand the world champion a nice little preview of what's walking toward him.
….
You again….?
How….
And I mean HOW…. do you go from retiring Adam Lucas, from ending a career in front of a live crowd and everything that ought to have meant…. to horseplaying with… Drake Armstrong?
Ladies and gentlemen, Kai Rabeaux.
The Babykiller, John Babylon, Mr. Plastic Pixie. How are you doing? Before we get to any of it, count me to ten on your hands…. Ah. Right. Last time, I never got back to you. You seemed so excited while you were slandering me that it felt impolite to interrupt a man enjoying himself, and somewhere in the middle of listening… it landed on me… you're worse than I am. How a man appoints himself “judge” and gets sentenced in the same breath is the one thing about you I've never worked out. Everyone else looks at you and sees a global catastrophic risk, a walking indictment, a crime with a name attached, a reigning hardcore champion… but I don't see it.
Genuinely, I sat and waited for the follow-through, expecting something…..
….
….
….
….
….
….
Nothing impressive arrived.
You regressed into busywork. State terror under the “Hegemonic” banner… a finger gone… Dr. Bethany Blue handing out just desserts to you who'd earned them, and the discovery, arriving late, that karma keeps a ledger. What a ride it's been for the Overlord of the Generation, right? But hey... big deal. I nearly died at Bloodsport too. Nearly again like last year, in front of the same cameras, for the same people who have since forgotten the date, and I'm still here, still challenging for the EAW World Championship, in a slot nobody else in that locker room wanted to occupy. But I know you've been busy, champ. I'm not blaming you for being busy defending that title against Miku Sakai, though it was entirely unnecessary that dissertation you delivered to her- and I suspect you knew it while you were still convincing her with it. But enough with backseat driving your journey so far, because I'm not here to gloat at you all day like the way you did the last time you had me one-on-one and came up short. I have to make an example out of you for him, and I intend to assure him I meant every word I said to his face. Speaking of which, you should be more like him. I mean that, and I understand exactly how it sounds coming from a man who has business with him in a fortnight. Whatever is going on between Hans and me right now, whatever we're building toward in Oxford… *at least* I find something in it that moves me. I’m watching a man take hold of the thing he dreamed about and then work, week after week, to deserve having taken it.... which is the opposite of you in every direction that counts, too much malice in the engine and too far ahead of anything constructive that was ever placed in your hands, running on spite that arrived before the plan did.
But then… you're just a child throwing a tantrum, so what would you know? I already know what you'll say about my status. All the insults, the intellectualization, the grandiloquence, the whole elaborate vocabulary you build to keep his insecurity at arm's length from himself, blah blah blah… look… I've seen it all. I've heard it all, so I don’t need to go through it all over again. I saw through you the last time. You already gave away primacy effect on the one night you had a real chance to show me you were what you said you were. First impressions govern everything I gather afterward, and once again, nothing since has revised mine. Which is why I can look straight past the bombastic words and soliloquy, past the gimmick, past the accomplishments, past the willful damage… and see a lost boy who is a poster child for unfulfilled potential.
Good day, Kai.
