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Steve_Justice · (09-24-2019)

Some people would expect a new champion to be caught up in celebration and media hype. When you’re a champion, everyone wants to be your friend. Everyone wants to bask in the glow of the champ. When you’re on top, it’s like reaching the peak of a rollercoaster. You feel, however fleeting, like you’re on top of the world; that you’re invincible. And you tell yourself that the ride is never going to end.

A lot of people reach the pinnacle of success and choose to rest on their laurels. Content with reaching championship status, many men and women fail to defend what they have earned, crumbling under the pressure. Once that happens, the glow; the juice; the magic that you had is gone. You find out that those friends aren’t your friends and the fans, who operate on the basis of you’re only as good as your last match, move on to the next big thing.

Steve Justice sat folded in the lotus position on the floor of his apartment in his pajamas, the XWF tag team championship lay folded on his cheap Ikea coffee table. Steve’s eyes stared at the bare, white wall in front of him as he tried to control his breathing and empty his mind of everything.

His mind travelled back in time to his humble beginnings as he compared it to where he sat now. He grew up in the poor part of a small, blue-collar city. He and his brother had been the victims of a father who held a whiskey bottle better than he could ever hold a job. He was ostracized by his peers and told that he would never amount to anything at home. But through the blackness, a light broke through: the sound and fury of Punk Rock molded him. Made him hard to hurt and harder to kill. It gave him a survivor’s instincts that helped him to this day. Finally, his time in hell came to an end. After one beating too many, he grabbed his belongings and hit the streets running. He lived by his wits for years squatting abandoned buildings; panhandling for change and living from hand to mouth.

Finally, fate intervened one day when he was panhandling the street as usual. He stopped the mugging of a tourist who happened to be a wrestling trainer and promoter from the UK. From that point on, he lived and toiled inside of a small, sweatbox gymnasium. He wasn’t charged money for his training but it cost all the same in blood and sweat and pain. The only way to learn the art of Catch Wrestling is by first learning the hard way what not to do. With time came bruises and an aching body but also a new sense of self-worth as he came to realize he had a knack for this wrestling business.

Despite the hand he had been dealt, he had overcome the odds to build a career for himself in one of the most perilous businesses ever. He had experienced triumph, betrayal, the agony of defeat and the ecstasy of being recognized as one of the best in the business. But despite all of this, he never felt like resting on his laurels. He always felt the thirst for more competition to push himself further beyond his own limits. He worked tirelessly to sharpen his skills and add new wrinkles to his game every time he set foot inside the ring. He tried to cultivate a zen approach to the wrestling business. For him, each title or accolade he earned was just a piece of a much bigger picture. Of course he celebrated victory and didn’t like the taste of defeat but he tended to take a longer view. Each match was just another chapter in the book that was his career. In the end, once his body refused to function or the fire of competition had finally burnt out inside of him, his name would echo in eternity as one of the greatest of all time. A warrior who always gave it everything he had in the ring and put on an exciting match every time out. He didn’t hide behind technicalities or blame this or that for his losses. He simply sucked it up and tried to come back better than he had been before. He lived by the sword and died by the sword and ,even in defeat, he was known for going out on his shield in a blaze of glory.

Steve couldn’t help but compare himself to his future opponent, Sarah Lacklan. They were like oil and water; Apple and Microsoft; Chris Page and entertainment. Sarah was the scion of a wealthy family. She lived in a gilded mansion and enjoyed the best of everything. She was allowed to pursue dance, cheer, lifting, poetry and whatever else tickled her fancy and it was all paid for with mummy and daddy’s credit card. Despite all this, she had cultivated a fan following through her ubiquitous social media presence that stretched all over the world. Notwithstanding her popularity with teenage girls, her shiny facade didn’t fool Steve Justice. Her and her family were the evil empire. They were a cancer upon the face of the world. Theirs was the way of nepotism and inherited wealth that guarantees a smooth path through life.

Steve frowned and tried to resettle himself but he felt bile rising up in the back of his throat. The whole Lacklan family was the elite that kept the common working people crushed underneath their boots. In Steve’s mind, it wasn’t a tragedy that somebody’s mansion was burned to the ground. The real crime was that the whole neighbourhood hadn’t been burned from the face of the earth. Sarah Lacklan had lived her whole life behind a red velvet VIP rope. While it was true that she had become a successful member of the XWF roster and had become the Anarchy champion, it was all built upon the sweat and toil of the common people. Her achievements were paid in full by her parent’s blood money.

While Steve had toiled and paid with blood, sweat and tears to get where he had, Sarah had the benefit of wealthy connections and the best of everything that handed her the skills she had acquired. While she grew up on the inside track of the wrestling business, Steve had to carve his own path and advance himself through trial and error. Steve knew that Sarah was famous for her striking prowess and ability to gameplan masterfully. He also knew that what Sarah lacked was the ability to push through adversity.

While Sarah was fine when things were going her way, the minute she met some serious resistance was when things fell apart for her. Steve would do what he always did with people like this. He would drag this match into the deep waters. This wasn’t just a regular match, it was an anything goes TLC match. Steve planned to use everything at his disposal to make sure that Sarah was in for a long night. It was one thing to get hit with a kick or a slam it was an entirely different thing to be smashed with a chair or dumped off of a ladder through a table. It took something special to overcome adversity like that. When your body wanted to quit, you had to have a fire inside of you, a passion for the wrestling business that Steve didn’t think Sarah possessed. Sarah was a dilettante that went from MMA fighting to clothing design to being a social media blogger. Wrestling was just one more jewel in the Lacklan crown. When the heat got too high, she would fold just like all of Steve’s previous opponents. Nobody in the XWF had been able to make Steve quit or pin his shoulders to the mat yet and he didn’t plan on a five foot albino and her b-movie girlfriend being the ones to finally break that streak.

Steve took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. He slowly rose to his feet and stretched out the ligaments in his legs. He went to the coffee table and picked up the XWF tag title and looked at it. He knew in his heart that he was a fighter. And he knew that Hanari Carnes was also a proud fighter who would do whatever it took to defend the tag team championship. From what it sounded like, Kenzi Grey was a capable opponent but she was untested in the land of Xtreme. Her first match in the XWF would be a trial by fire. Not only was she in a huge arena full of people but the tag titles and tournament championship were on the line. Add to that the chaos of a tornado tag with tables, ladders and chairs and it would probably just prove to be too much for her to prepare for. Besides the high stakes, Kenzi seemed far more preoccupied with protecting her wife from whoever this Masked Man was anyway so how much her head was in the game was a big question mark.

Steve, on the other hand, thrived in a chaotic environment. He had been Xtreme Champion briefly and had taken to the sort of fight that title had brought with it. He had been hit with all kinds of furniture in his career and taken his fair share of sick bumps. He was willing to take more punishment than the 5’2 Mafia were willing to. While Sarah liked to make light of their team name, she was going to come to rue the day that she crossed the Arm Collectors. When she found herself on the mat in an armlock with the sound of her joints and ligaments popping loud enough to be heard over the cheering crowd. When she was left with no other choice, she would find out the two great truths of the universe: everybody taps and Justice will always prevail.

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