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Greece - April 30, 2023

In the hours leading up to my Festivus World Championship defense in Greece courtesy of 5BW, I was largely minding my own business when I saw a response to my #sophisticatedsunday tweet. I didn’t think much of it until I saw it was Elijah Copeland going on his ‘MY TITLE’ spiel again.

I sighed and rolled my eyes at this. I felt sorry for the guy considering the way he ended up losing the Madness IDL Championship, but the longer he kept being a douchebag about it, the less sympathetic I was. In fact, this was an instance where I can say I felt a little angry while I was experiencing a moment of de ja vu…

“I feel like I’ve seen this before…” I said to myself.

“Seen what?” I heard the voice of my younger sister Adrianna behind me as she approached me.

“You might want to take a gander at this…”

I showed her Elijah’s tweet and Adrianna scoffed. For what little tolerance I had for Elijah at this point, Adrianna was LESS inclined to feel sorry for him.

“Fuck that guy…” she said without mincing words.

“WOW, you just cut right to it, didn’t you?”

“Honestly? I’m not saying he deserved what happened to him because he didn’t, but it’s like he’s taking it out on YOU when you did nothing wrong and that’s what bothers me. He seemed like a decent guy, but the cruel irony is that the motherfucker is just Diet Holden Ross with that huge ego of his.”

I widened my eyes in surprise. I never thought I would hear ANYONE compare Elijah to Holden Ross in ANY capacity. But, my sister has never had the patience for people that I have had over the years.

“I think your comparison is off base…” I said. “Sure, his attitude is stupid but he’s not going around assaulting people like Holden did.”

“You’re going to let him treat you like that though?” she asked me.

“Of course not…” I was quick to say. “I’m not going to let him walk around the Madness locker room like he’s the cock of the walk. The guy is clearly still bitter by the fact that I’m the champion now and not him. That’s really the gist of it, Adrianna.”

Well if Holden Ross is too far, he’s definitely Paul all over again…”

I grew confused for a moment.

“Paul?”

“You know… MR. ENTITLEMENT from PRW back in like 2009? First PRW World Champion…”

“OH…” I responded, suddenly remembering. “HIM… yeah, now I know where my de ja vu feeling is coming from…”

With this, it was time to reflect on a much simpler time…

Late May 2009

“Paul” was an egomaniacal douchebag. He was the first ever PRW World Champion and thought that everything had to be his way. Aside from Mike, his dimwitted sycophant, Paul was widely disliked in the PRW locker room. Mike, by the way, was PRW’s first Intercontinental Champion. He was just as bad, if not worse than Paul. I remember a night in the locker room prior to a show where I was walking n with the tag team championship I was holding at the time and those two idiots were waiting for me.

“So when are you going to put the tag belts on the line against us?” Paul asked while Mike laughed.

“You can’t be happy with what you already have, huh?”

“No, because Paul and I are supposed to run this joint. We’re the stars here. We’ve heard about you and your story Myra, and that’s cute and everything. But, we don’t care about your story. We don’t care that your mother was a wrestler and that you broke free from your father’s grasp to live your dreams.

“Nah, wrestling isn’t about that sappy stuff…” Paul added, further pissing me off. “Besides, where’s your partner? I thought you’d be carrying her into the locker room the way you carry her during your matches.”

Both douchebags had a laugh at my expense and my 24 year old self obviously wasn’t mature enough to just let this slide off of my back.

“Funny how you talk about carrying because the only reason why you two are even featured so much is because the owner of the company is carrying you on his FUCKING JOCKSTRAP!”

Paul and Mike were suddenly left stunned.

“Yeah, you heard me. The owner signs you two, and a bunch of your buddies from some dead Indy outfit and basically has you wrestling against subpar wrestlers from that dead company all the damn time. If I was one of the initial signings on this roster like you both were, you two wouldn’t even be so ‘dominant’. You two aren’t even good! You’re a couple of flashes in the pan that know nothing about what being a true champion means.”

I bolted out the door having had enough of their nonsense….

Back to the present day…

“Those guys were just… UGH…” Adrianna reminded me.

“Funny thing is Mike quit the company a week later. One douchebag down, one to go. I remember when I was originally supposed to fight for HIS vacant championship but then…”

“Paul got injured…” Adrianna reminded me. “Hey, doesn’t that sound so fucking familiar? Egomaniac of a champion gets hurt and has to forfeit the title? Isn’t that… oh I don’t know… Elijah?”

“I see the similarities…” I admitted. “But, back to the memory. Paul having to vacate the title due to injury was a shocker enough, but when I found out that I would be challenging for the PRW World Championship instead, I was completely shocked. Of course, I remember that match and when I won my second world championship. There’s no need to go into that…”

“Right… but it was after the match…”

June 29, 2009

I held my newly won PRW World Championship, the second of eventually six world championships in fact, close to me. It was, up to that point, the most joyful feeling of my career. I had been through the ringer from day one as far as my wrestling training goes. I had endured the frustrations of being in the Indies longer than I wanted to be and my mainstream career getting off to a rough start in a company that was clearly rooting to see me fail. But none of that mattered to me anymore. I had tears of joy in my eyes. For the first time, I felt like I TRULY made my late mother proud. The show wasn’t even over for 15 minutes when Adrianna walked in MASSIVELY angry as she looked at her cell phone.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” she blurted out, catching me by surprise.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, suddenly feeling worried.

“...I think you want to watch this…”

She gave me herr phone and I saw that literally moments after the show I was wrestling on had gone off the air, Paul had released a YouTube video from his hospital bed reacting to my world championship win. Immediately, I was annoyed but I watched the video nevertheless… and at that point in my career, it was the most angering, yet deflating feeling that I ever had as a professional wrestler.

“THAT IS MINE…” Paul said in the video in regards to the world championship that I had just won. “I DIDN’T LOSE IT!”

Now is this sounding familiar to you?

“They handed the fucking thing to her…” Paul said… never mind the fact that I STiLL had to go through a Hell in a Cell match against a future PRW Hall of Fame member in order to become the World Champion at all.”

My eyes narrowed with anger and had that phone been mine and not Adrianna’s, I would’ve tossed it right across the room.

“THAT WAS MY MOMENT…” he said. The sense of entitlement that he had in that video, hell in his entire PRW career in general grated my nerves for the entire time that he was there. I heard a warning from his bitch of a wife (who he said those horrible things to) saying to ‘enjoy it while I can’

The video ended and there was much anger surrounding the room.

“HOW DARE THAT SON OF A BITCH… THAT PIECE OF SHIT… try to rob you of your moment. How FUCKING DELIBERATE… he releases that GARBAGE mere minutes after you win the title? Holy shit, I’m so glad I’m not a wrestler myself because I have no fucking idea how I would be able to deal with the massive egos that pervade your line of work!”

Adrianna calmed down a peg when she realized that I was taking the video that I saw pretty hard. I was definitely deflated watching and hearing him try to say it was ‘his title’, ‘his moment’ and basically demean and bury the hard work I put into my career and the Hell in a Cell match I had to endure. While I’ve long matured from this in my own right, at the time, it felt like a devastating gut punch.

“Are you going to be okay, Myra?” Adrianna asked me.

“I don’t know…” I said with a sigh. “How can someone be such an ASSHOLE to pull a stunt like that? He’s not even THAT good! He wouldn’t have even won the title in the first place had the level of competition here been this high when the company started and he won the title. I’m just… I’m done for tonight…”

I sighed as I stood up and began to leave.

“What about the celebration we planned in the event that you won?” Adrianna asked me.

“Cancel it…” I said as I shut the door behind me.

Present Day

“Cut me some slack on not remembering that…” I told my sister. “I’d obviously long moved past it and it has been 14 years…”

“It helps when Paul’s career went off a cliff and it never recovered. Serves him right! He hasn’t wrestled in more than 13 years! KARMA!”

“You’re not wishing that upon Elijah, are you?”

“No…” Adrianna said with a scoff. “...but having remembered that, don’t you see the similarities between Paul and Elijah?”

“The fact that they’re biblical names?” I said in an attempt to lighten the mood. Adrianna rolled her eyes and she clearly didn’t take the joke well.

“Don’t be silly, Myra…”

“Okay, YES… I see the similarities: both of them held a championship, both lost it due to injury and not because of what happened in the ring, and after I won it, they are both acting like it’s ‘their’ title because they ‘never lost it’. You know, what’s funny is that my first PRW World Championship reign… after I held it for a really long time and raised PRW to a higher level than Paul ever had the ability to take it to, I was supposed to defend the title in an elimination chamber match but never did because someone else assaulted me and broke my ankle. I lost that title without ever losing it in the ring so I can RELATE to Elijjah’s pain…

“Except, when you recovered and came back, you weren’t running around the locker room calling it ‘your title’ and acting like you were entitled to it like Paul did and like what Elijah is doing. You got your revenge on the moron that broke your ankle THEN you went on to regain the PRW title. You handled it like a champion. Paul didn’t. Elijah isn’t. In fact, when he came out to congratulate you on the night you won the title, I bet he was doing it for his own ego and to try and steal your thunder and not because he actually cares about you.”

“Look, I’m not going to comment on that part because we don’t know that for sure. But, the big difference here is that I’m actually going to face Elijah. I never got to face Paul because the idiot was always injured. Of course, it goes without saying that I’m going to beat him too. I’m not out to silence his ‘sense of entitlement’ or to adjust what is clearly and increasingly becoming a woe is me, snobbish, selfish asshole attitude, it’s about the championship and making sure I keep it with me. If beating him is what shuts him up, then so be it. That’s what we’ll do. There’s so much I want to say about him right now, knowing that I’m getting flashbacks to a similar situation but… I suppose the right thing to do is to express how I feel and tell it like it is when the camera comes on a few weeks from now…”

“Don’t hold back, Myra…” Adrianna reminded me. “You’ve got to, and you will, humble that son of a bitch!”

I had a bit of a laugh at this point and when I glanced back at my phone, and his tweet, I wasn’t so bothered by it anymore. I’m definitely a woman on a mission not just to prove that I AM the standard bearer of Madness, but also the champion that’s going to carry the show to its greatest heights yet.

And when I shut Elijah Copeland up and end his whiny, ‘me me me’ talk regarding the Madness IDL title?

That’s precisely what I’ll do.