No, you know what? Fuck that. That’s been done to death. None of that ‘a long, long time ago’ nonsense either. This is the story of a real man, a real champion, not some Don Maclean bullshit about whiskey and rye.
So let’s just get to the good part already, right?
For the most part, I think any wrestling fan around the world, on the internet, and certainly seated every eighteen inches in XWF arenas across the globe know exactly who I am, but it seems like, for some reason, the current Universal Champion either doesn’t know or has chosen to forget just who the hell he’s dealing with here.
So let’s do it again, just for the old man’s benefit, shall we? Cut him some slack, sometimes he takes his pills twice by mistake and has a bad day.
Doc, just so you have no more doubts whatsoever about just what is waiting for you this coming weekend at Bad Medicine, here you go.
My name is “Loverboy†Vinnie Lane. You can see me nearly every single week on XWF television, either winning matches and defending titles or otherwise making my presence felt, Monday after Monday after Monday.
You don’t have to go too far to find someone who can tell you exactly why I walk around with my head held high, dude, or why I tell everyone that I’m the best that’s ever been. It might sound cocky, and it might seem premature, especially when you’re the guy with the strap around his waist… at least until Saturday, anyway.
But see, here’s why. Like I said, you can ask almost anybody. Ask the recent Universal Champions, for instance. Samuels, Gator, Morbid Angel, Theo Pryce, Sebastian Duke, Azrael… ask them. I’ve been in the ring with them all, and, with the exception of Samuels, have beaten them all.
Now, not a lot of people can say they’ve gone through that many legends, can they? Even fewer can say that they’ve never been pinned by any of those legends either. Check for yourself, if you want. Other than Gator, none of them have put me down for the count.
Where are they now, anyway? You’d think such a high profile rogue’s gallery would want to stick around and rule the kingdom they claimed to have the throne to, right? The alleged ‘Three Kings,’ where did they go? Some might say they saw the hand writing on the wall when they took the Trios Titles from me, because not a single one of them had any interest in taking a one on one shot after that.
Gator? Azrael? Gone. Disgraced. Stripped of anything worthwhile. Why?
Duke’s still here, of course, but it’s pretty clear why he chose the Warfare brand to demonstrate his dominance, isn’t it?
And what about the others? The uncrowned champions of the XWF, the measuring sticks and kingmakers of this business? Men like Peter Gilmour, Mastermind, Cain, Justin Sane, Austin Fernando, Frodo Smackins or Pest?
Defeated.
Every one of them tried to hold me to the terms of their measuring sticks, the limitations they had set and tried to reach themselves, and every one of them fell short.
Why?
Because you can’t measure me, dude. I AM the measuring stick. You can’t appraise a once in a lifetime diamond in the rough like me when the best you’ve ever seen is one carat. I’m solid gold, man, I’m the real deal, the prince of peroxide just waiting to knock the king from his throne.
Now, you stick around the XWF long enough and you’re bound to hear it from one loser or another… they all seem to pack together and go for the one cheap shot they can think of. Oh, Loverboy lost to Gilmour…
You know what I say?
Big deal.
Everyone who thought that a throwaway loss to Gilly somehow meant I was weak enough to be taken down by a mind brittle enough to cling to such a notion found out the hard way that it meant absolutely nothing. Me losing to Gilmour didn’t equal me losing to Mastermind, or Frodo, or Harrison, or Cain, or Muddy Waters… none of them could take me out. Every one of them thought there was blood in the water because Gilmour got lucky once.
They weren’t ready to swim with a shark though, dude. They weren’t ready for the feeding frenzy that comes with going toe to toe with someone as hungry as me.
I’m a tower of power, dude, too sweet to be sour… too hot to handle and too cold to hold, you know what I mean? I’ve gone from rags to riches, man, I kept working for the fortune and fame… and you know, I guess that’s what we need to cue you in on, huh?
After all, you’re the Doctor, right? You already know who I am… you need to know who I was.
Dude, I may not have always been the big-ballin’, shot-callin’ megastar that I am today, but the seeds were sown the day I was born. See man, while plenty of others would have been content to just be good at one thing they loved, I was determined to be GREAT at everything I loved. Chicks, rock n’ roll, wrestling… all of it.
I thumbed it to the station when I was just seventeen man, hoping a Greyhound would help me find my way. I went down most of I-95 with nothing but a bookbag with a change of clothes and the CD’s I couldn’t live without. I had one pair of shoes, dude, and when I rolled into Tampa on a rainy night, the first thing I looked for wasn’t a place to lay my head and rest, it was where I could go to get into the ring. I wrestled my first match in those same shoes, man, and my first payday went to buying a pair of boots.
That was thirteen years ago, man. Thirteen years I’ve bled for the wrestling business. Every time my hand got held high, which happened more and more often as time went on, I didn’t rest on my laurels and say I’d made it. I kept looking up. I kept climbing the mountain. And now? Now I’m right at the summit. I can see the peak, dude, I’m right there where the sun meets the sky… and you think you’re going to stop me?
You?
Here’s what the world needs to know, Doc. Now that we rehashed my origin story like some new Spiderman reboot.
Who are you?
Yeah, look, I know you’re Doc D’Ville. I know you’re the champ. I know you rarely lose, you’ve only been pinned by one guy one time… but that’s nothing.
Who ARE you?
Are you like me? Did you live like an urchin under the streets until you found a lucky break? Or were you born with a silver spoon deep-throated down your soft palate like a flag of manifest destiny?
Did you ever have a struggle in your long, long life, Doc? Or did it all come easy to you? Because, dude, it’s great to have been born better than most… I can even sympathize there… but when you’re so used to having it easy, you’ll find you aren’t at all prepared for the one time it’s not.
It’s the little things that slip you up, dude. The stuff you take for granted. When you take a turn you’ve taken a thousand times before and your tire is a little balder than you thought, you end up hitting a brick wall at 70 miles per hour.
Dude, nice to meet you… I’m your brick wall.
See Doc… as much as you want to paint a picture of me being too confident and flying too high lately, I think you’ve got it the other way around. Oh, trust me, I’m confident. I go into every match assuming I’m going to win. Why wouldn’t I? Who would go into any contest expecting to lose?
I’m flying high, like you said, dude, and I always have been… and after Bad Medicine, I’ll be flying high again. Is it because I’m unbeatable? Hell no, dude. I’m a human being. I’m a competitor. I’ve lost before, I’ve lost to YOU before. But that doesn’t mean I can’t win…and I win a hell of a lot more than I lose, dude.
It’s you that doesn’t really know what that’s like. You got one smear on your record, and you already got your heat back from that loss ten times over. Sure, you lost to Gator, barely, but you beat him when much, much more was on the line. You got it back.
That’s where we are, you and me.
You beat me when it didn’t matter, but you came away knowing something, didn’t you? You learned that if I cared a little more, tried a little harder, was a little more careful… you knew I could come back to haunt you.
Why else would you spend all this time plotting a way to take me out?
You knew. You knew it was coming. As soon as our match ended all those months ago, you knew as well as I did that it would be me that ended up coming to put an end to your inevitable reign of terror.
You even decided to test my mettle one more time, coming after the Federweight for no other reason than to see if you could still keep me down.
And you couldn’t.
You tried and tried and tried… way harder than you needed to. Who would have cared if the Universal Champion pinned the Federweight? What would it have given you? Nothing.
But you knew you might not be able to, and you had to find out.
And you couldn’t.
You rolled me up, I kicked out. You pressed me, I kicked out. You hooked my legs, I kicked out.
Yeah, you made a name for yourself kicking out as the X-Treme Champion, something that gave you the ability to take a title you didn’t earn properly, but you aren’t used to it happening to you, are you?
You were surprised. You didn’t know how to react. When you put people down… they stay down.
So you tried to put me down.
And you couldn’t.
Doc, you and me, like you so astutely pointed out, we wrote the first chapter in what we both knew was going to be a long book back in September. Admit it. There was never another match you’ve been in that made you doubt yourself the way you did against me, even in victory. I could see it in your eyes on Madfare when we were signing our contract. It’s the reason you sent your dogs out to wear me down. It’s the reason you feel the need to take me out before Bad Medicine.
You, Doctor D’Ville, the man who strikes fear into every man walking the earth he comes into contact with, are AFRAID of me.
I’ll let that sink in, because in the moment between you hearing those words and the time you try to brush it off like so much hot air, in that moment, you’ll know it to be true.
You’re getting worried. You’re starting to see ghosts. You’re hearing footsteps, man. It’s getting to you.
I’m getting to you.
That’s right, XWF… your Universal Champion, the unbeatable, unstoppable, machine of endless ability and power… fears one man. If you were paying attention back in September, dude, you’d have seen it then, too. It was a blink of an eye, but it was there. A moment. Just a moment.
And a moment is all it takes.
A moment was the only difference between you coming out victorious last September and I not. A moment that will be legendary, because it is the moment that you lost this match at Bad Medicine. THE moment that you lost your championship. Not Saturday. Last September. You already lost. You already know it, too, so like Macbeth you try to defeat your fate. Like Oedipus, like Caesar. Kings. Kings who fell long before they drew their final breaths. Kings who were dead the moment they were born.
So talk. Run your mouth to your little puppet. Send him after me and try to reassure yourself that I’m just another, just like all the rest. Minimize me so that you can sleep at night. Tell yourself whatever lies you need to believe in order to be able to drag yourself down to that ring Saturday night, because once you do, dude, once you get into that cage against your own destiny – there will be no more lies you can tell yourself.
Don’t you get it, dude? Don’t you understand?
My destiny is and always has been to take this from you. It’s why we’ve only come into one another’s presence so sparingly to begin with. I mean… let’s face it... neither of us have been terribly hard to find, right? And yet each of us have had dozens of interactions with every other member of the XWF roster, other than one another. It’s like we’re polar opposites, negative and positive magnetism. When we get together, the world shifts on its axis.
And this time, dude? This time… you know it isn’t shifting your way.
And you know what, man? You might be right. I might go the way of Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. I might burn up on re-entry. I could easily end up so hot and so high that I simply burst and explode into a supernova… a blaze of glory.
But isn’t it like they say, Doc? Better to burn out than to fade away? I might be gone in a flash, I might be on top forever… we won’t know until it happens, but what we DO know is that it WILL happen.
So you just do me a favor, Doc, and you keep that mock sympathy to yourself. I don’t need it. I’m comfortable with my fate. I’ve known what it was since I was old enough to walk, and I can FEEL IT.
I’m taking the last step. The final checkmark on the destiny of “Loverboy†Vinnie Lane.
I WILL beat you at Bad Medicine.
I WILL be the Universal Champion.
Like a shooting star burning white hot across the sky… it’s already done. It’s already gone.
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