Post by Technical Perfection on Jun 29, 2021 15:18:44 GMT -5
Chris Card’s office, downtown Toronto. The surprisingly hot Canadian summer has lead to the weather breaking and as water pounds against the window an ominous rumble of thunder booms in the near distance. Chris Card is dressed in his sharpest business suit, not unusual for him, and he leans back in his leather armchair and casually flicks ash from the end of his cigar into an ashtray on his oak desk. Seated opposite Chris are two besuited men, one skinny, lanky, bespectacled, the other a little corpulent. The fatter gentleman mops his brow, sweating from the oppressive humidity. Card smiles his usual cracked gravestone smile and offers up a shot of his whisky to the two other gentlemen. The larger of the two gladly accepts and takes a glass, the skinnier one refuses politely.
Chris Card: Gentlemen. Have you brought me the reports I asked for?
Both men hand over some paperwork and Card shuffles through them and takes a rapid glance, looking for any main points and figures that immediately jump out to him. Card pulls a face of moderate disgust upon perusing quickly the documents that his larger subordinate has produced. He takes a sip of whisky and nods to his associate to drink too.
Chris Card: Now this is pretty grim reading.
The Financier: I didn’t think you’d enjoy what my team found. I mean my colleague in legal here got his hands on the full accounts and well, they’re a bit of a horror show.
The Lawyer: It wasn’t difficult to acquire the financial records. A usual part of every legal transaction is to get all the facts and figures together.
The Financier: I’d offer ya a toast, Chris. But this ain’t the time.
Chris Card: So it looks on the surface that the AWF has been circling the drain for a damn long time.
The Financier: I guess that’s what you get when you let Terry Bradshaw control your accounts through a major financial… event.
Chris Card: You mean COVID?
The Financier: Yeah, if ya wanna be blunt about it. Well run places have been struggling and AWF, well it ain’t being run well.
Chris Card: So the grand plan. Using my personal leverage to seize the company around the throat, use Horton as a patsy to get things running through my good self?
The Lawyer: It’s not off the table. Not from my perspective. If you wanted to, you could take the reigns.
Chris Card: I’m sensing a but.
The Lawyer: But you’d be legally on the hook for its financial situation.
The Financier: And lemme tell ya, Chris. You don’t want to be.
Chris Card: Shit. Any outs. Any way we can get Horton on the hook for the disaster and walk out with the control I want?
The Lawyer peered over his glasses and shook his head.
The Lawyer: No. Trust me, I’ve hunted through the by laws. I know how Horton takes control. I know he wants to wind it up and he can probably liquidate the debts, leverage them against his governmental contacts. But you?
The Financier: Ya can’t have the baby without changing some stinky diapers.
Chris Card: A charming metaphor. I appreciate your straight talking. I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed. Could we, theoretically, take the hit?
The Financier: You’d have to leverage profitable assets to make it a possibility. This wouldn’t be a hit ya couldn’t take. But unless it’s a passion project for ya, this federation is damaged goods boss.
Chris Card: Did you have a chance to look through the other thing?
The Lawyer: Two offers, Mr Card. One pays more, the other might be more your style.
The Financier: One’s better ice cream, the other has a better fudge sundae sauce on, so to speak.
Chris Card: So it seems I have two choices. I can try to right a sinking ship and soldier on at great personal risk. Or my services are wanted, needed elsewhere and I end up in profit.
The Lawyer: How much do the letters AWF mean to you, Mr Card?
Card pauses, takes a long, slow sip of his whisky and has a short thought. Lightning cracks outside, splitting the night sky with electricity. Card glances down and stares at his Hall of Fame ring for a second, then turns to his staffers.
Chris Card: Mail me the contracts to my home address.
Chris Card: This is my ring.
The lights go up in an empty arena. Chris Card stands, pride and statesmanlike in the centre of a familiar pale blue canvas. There is no suit, no cigar, no whisky, none of the trappings you would associate with a piece of Chris Card promotional material. Just a wrestler in his wrestling gear, a microphone and an echoey hall to address. His personal camera crew have been dismissed, instead Card chooses to just have a staff member work the arena hard cam, one continuos shot throughout the whole scene. The light spills down onto Card from above and from all sides, every spotlight focused directly on him, every rotating light fixed in position.
Chris Card: This isn’t going to be about people or personalities or gimmicks. I’m not going to get cute for you. This is not about venerating the past, mine or others. There will be more than enough wistful reminiscences of times past from other people involved in the show. These three letters upon which I stand, these letters that some people hold so dear? They mean as much to me as the detritus I collect on the soles of my boot as I go out for my daily constitutional. This ring could be any ring in the world, any federation you could dare to name. But while I’m standing in the middle of it? This is my ring.
Aping the warm up he goes through immediately before the match, Chris Card rushes the ropes on the far side of the ring, testing the amount of spring in them by leaning hard against them before springing back off and snapping himself to a halt in exactly the same spot he set off from.
Chris Card: This is my canvas. People will tell you that merely addressing the audience from an empty wrestling ring is old hat. It’s done. It’s played out. But then people have levelled the same accusation at my entire wrestling career and they’ve been consistently confounded on that point. I am here to remind you that anything, anything that happens between these ropes when I am involved can be elevated to an art form. I paint landscapes with my words and I paint epic masterpieces with my actions. That which looks to the outsider as basic, even simplistic, in the hands of a true master can be aesthetically pleasing on a level that a true student of the wrestling arts can appreciate on the deepest of levels. I have never been one for making the magnificent look routine but I always strive to make the routine look magnificent. Every hold, every throw, every move are the smallest of brush strokes in the creation of a work so much greater than the sum of its parts. This is my canvas. This is my ring.
Card cradles the microphone to his lips like the most skilled orators of yore, enunciating every word with clarity. There s a careful meter to his speech pattern, near Shakespearean soliloquy in his particular use of stress. Always eager to separate himself from the crowd, Card speaks not in the furious tone of violence that so many in the professional wrestling industry use as a crutch but with a level of steely precision and determination that simultaneously masks and gives away the emotion flowing through his icy veins.
Chris Card: This is my theatre. This whole sport is, at times, theatre. There are heroes to cheer and villains to boo. There are comic acts to laugh at and tragic acts to sympathise with. The audience themselves form a great Greek chorus, commenting on their approval or otherwise of what happens within the bounds of the ropes through joyous chants of support and hateful barracking of those they disagree with. Am I a villain? In a classical sense, yes. But I am driven by my own motivations, often those which clash with the common moral sense. Yet I have never stooped to the level where I perform acts which are unnecessary. Evil for evil’s sake makes for a pretty thin motivator. I do what needs to be done. And I am not shy about that fact. Those who understand that, were they in my position, they would do the same thing too may be welcome to stay those jeers or they may howl louder, uncomfortable with the reflection of their own complex lives I cast. For every person in the arena I say that you are allowed to make your own choices. I guarantee you all one thing. You will not be silent at my performance. This is my theatre. This is my ring.
Now Card straightens his shoulders. His stance firms a little, his shoulders seems somehow to broaden. The stance of a senior businessman addressing his fellow board members, a spokesperson for some pressure group speaking before a committee, a politician at a rally of supporters. There is even a little of the demagogue about Card’s mannerisms, strident, strong, powerful in both word and posture.
Chris Card: This is my forum. Not the forums of chattering fools hidden deep within their cloak of concealed identity. No, I refer to the forums of antiquity. Of Greece and Rome where philosophers and the intelligentsia stood in front of crowds of people who gathered to hang on their every word, ears pricked so as to not let any nugget of wisdom pass them by. And so I let my audiences hang on my every word, as uncomfortable as they may be at times. My voice carries weight. Those who wish to deny me out of hand will dispute this but my response is simple. When Chris Card talks people listen. When Chris Card wrestles, people watch. I captivate through word and deed. If you want to know how much clout I wield, go ask a young wrestler. If you wish to become a better technical wrestler, if you really want to improve your game you watch Chris Card. My surgical destruction of my opponents is simple yet brutally effective. When I have railed at opponents to cut the fat from their move sets, to improve by simplification, those who have listened have become better as wrestlers. I do not aim to be a pedagogue. I teach better indirectly. But those who listen to me can be better people. And those who study me can learn. This is my forum. This is my ring.
Leaning backwards a little there is a little puff out of Chris Card’s chest before he continues. A careful deep breath or two, not out of tiredness but more as an exercise preparing him to project the next part of his rant. The words keep piling on, a little more determined, a little more effort behind them as Card continues as if building up steam towards a glorious conclusion. The speech continues.
Chris Card: This is my church. I lay my soul bare for every one of you every time I get into the ring. While people devote their lives to serving a higher power, a higher purpose I have devoted my life to serving wrestling. You may call me self centred for my actions but at the end of it all I have made it my life’s mission to put on a quality product for you, the fans. If you don’t like the way I go about it, that’s fine. Because as that pioneer of professional wrestling “Gorgeous” George Wagner said to a young Cassius Clay, "He told me people would come to see me get beat. Others would come to see me win. I'd get 'em coming and going." It has been said that this great industry is a morality play. Maybe, rather than looking for obscure references in a dusty old book, you can show your kids what I do. Maybe you point to me and say, “That Chris Card, don’t be like him.” Maybe you tell them the opposite. I don’t judge. I stand in front of you, my congregation, and demonstrate what I have built my entire life around. I take the Wrestling. This is my church. This is my ring.
Now the crescendo happens. There is a very un-Chris Card nature to his winding up of the speech. Words directly from some unknown beating heart, coursed through with the powerful nature of the event, melting the thick layer of ice that Card usually keeps his feelings locked up inside. With every one of the short, punchy statements Card makes, comes a brief pause and a summoning up of energy to make the next one delivered with ever more passion, ever more conviction. This is a hitherto unseen side of Chris Card, or at least one that the general public usually gets absolutely no access to.
Chris Card: This is my life. My passion. My victories. My defeats. My triumphs. My failures. My dreams made reality. My art. My stage. My podium. My masterpiece. My performance. My testimony. My past. My present. My future. My world. My existence.
And now a little heavier breathing, almost seething, displaying a level of intensity that the almost flawlessly calm Chris Card never, NEVER lets show. The last five words are delivered in a tone that is simultaneously hushed and powerful, threatening, convincing and definitive.
Chris Card: This is my ring…
A short pause.
Chris Card: Cross.
Chris Card drops the microphone he has been grasping like a drowning sailor to a life preserver, swept along, as Card was, on a tide of his own emotions. It lands at his feet and timed perfectly with the thud of the mic hitting the canvas the frame hard cuts to black.
Chris Card: Gentlemen. Have you brought me the reports I asked for?
Both men hand over some paperwork and Card shuffles through them and takes a rapid glance, looking for any main points and figures that immediately jump out to him. Card pulls a face of moderate disgust upon perusing quickly the documents that his larger subordinate has produced. He takes a sip of whisky and nods to his associate to drink too.
Chris Card: Now this is pretty grim reading.
The Financier: I didn’t think you’d enjoy what my team found. I mean my colleague in legal here got his hands on the full accounts and well, they’re a bit of a horror show.
The Lawyer: It wasn’t difficult to acquire the financial records. A usual part of every legal transaction is to get all the facts and figures together.
The Financier: I’d offer ya a toast, Chris. But this ain’t the time.
Chris Card: So it looks on the surface that the AWF has been circling the drain for a damn long time.
The Financier: I guess that’s what you get when you let Terry Bradshaw control your accounts through a major financial… event.
Chris Card: You mean COVID?
The Financier: Yeah, if ya wanna be blunt about it. Well run places have been struggling and AWF, well it ain’t being run well.
Chris Card: So the grand plan. Using my personal leverage to seize the company around the throat, use Horton as a patsy to get things running through my good self?
The Lawyer: It’s not off the table. Not from my perspective. If you wanted to, you could take the reigns.
Chris Card: I’m sensing a but.
The Lawyer: But you’d be legally on the hook for its financial situation.
The Financier: And lemme tell ya, Chris. You don’t want to be.
Chris Card: Shit. Any outs. Any way we can get Horton on the hook for the disaster and walk out with the control I want?
The Lawyer peered over his glasses and shook his head.
The Lawyer: No. Trust me, I’ve hunted through the by laws. I know how Horton takes control. I know he wants to wind it up and he can probably liquidate the debts, leverage them against his governmental contacts. But you?
The Financier: Ya can’t have the baby without changing some stinky diapers.
Chris Card: A charming metaphor. I appreciate your straight talking. I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed. Could we, theoretically, take the hit?
The Financier: You’d have to leverage profitable assets to make it a possibility. This wouldn’t be a hit ya couldn’t take. But unless it’s a passion project for ya, this federation is damaged goods boss.
Chris Card: Did you have a chance to look through the other thing?
The Lawyer: Two offers, Mr Card. One pays more, the other might be more your style.
The Financier: One’s better ice cream, the other has a better fudge sundae sauce on, so to speak.
Chris Card: So it seems I have two choices. I can try to right a sinking ship and soldier on at great personal risk. Or my services are wanted, needed elsewhere and I end up in profit.
The Lawyer: How much do the letters AWF mean to you, Mr Card?
Card pauses, takes a long, slow sip of his whisky and has a short thought. Lightning cracks outside, splitting the night sky with electricity. Card glances down and stares at his Hall of Fame ring for a second, then turns to his staffers.
Chris Card: Mail me the contracts to my home address.
Chris Card: This is my ring.
The lights go up in an empty arena. Chris Card stands, pride and statesmanlike in the centre of a familiar pale blue canvas. There is no suit, no cigar, no whisky, none of the trappings you would associate with a piece of Chris Card promotional material. Just a wrestler in his wrestling gear, a microphone and an echoey hall to address. His personal camera crew have been dismissed, instead Card chooses to just have a staff member work the arena hard cam, one continuos shot throughout the whole scene. The light spills down onto Card from above and from all sides, every spotlight focused directly on him, every rotating light fixed in position.
Chris Card: This isn’t going to be about people or personalities or gimmicks. I’m not going to get cute for you. This is not about venerating the past, mine or others. There will be more than enough wistful reminiscences of times past from other people involved in the show. These three letters upon which I stand, these letters that some people hold so dear? They mean as much to me as the detritus I collect on the soles of my boot as I go out for my daily constitutional. This ring could be any ring in the world, any federation you could dare to name. But while I’m standing in the middle of it? This is my ring.
Aping the warm up he goes through immediately before the match, Chris Card rushes the ropes on the far side of the ring, testing the amount of spring in them by leaning hard against them before springing back off and snapping himself to a halt in exactly the same spot he set off from.
Chris Card: This is my canvas. People will tell you that merely addressing the audience from an empty wrestling ring is old hat. It’s done. It’s played out. But then people have levelled the same accusation at my entire wrestling career and they’ve been consistently confounded on that point. I am here to remind you that anything, anything that happens between these ropes when I am involved can be elevated to an art form. I paint landscapes with my words and I paint epic masterpieces with my actions. That which looks to the outsider as basic, even simplistic, in the hands of a true master can be aesthetically pleasing on a level that a true student of the wrestling arts can appreciate on the deepest of levels. I have never been one for making the magnificent look routine but I always strive to make the routine look magnificent. Every hold, every throw, every move are the smallest of brush strokes in the creation of a work so much greater than the sum of its parts. This is my canvas. This is my ring.
Card cradles the microphone to his lips like the most skilled orators of yore, enunciating every word with clarity. There s a careful meter to his speech pattern, near Shakespearean soliloquy in his particular use of stress. Always eager to separate himself from the crowd, Card speaks not in the furious tone of violence that so many in the professional wrestling industry use as a crutch but with a level of steely precision and determination that simultaneously masks and gives away the emotion flowing through his icy veins.
Chris Card: This is my theatre. This whole sport is, at times, theatre. There are heroes to cheer and villains to boo. There are comic acts to laugh at and tragic acts to sympathise with. The audience themselves form a great Greek chorus, commenting on their approval or otherwise of what happens within the bounds of the ropes through joyous chants of support and hateful barracking of those they disagree with. Am I a villain? In a classical sense, yes. But I am driven by my own motivations, often those which clash with the common moral sense. Yet I have never stooped to the level where I perform acts which are unnecessary. Evil for evil’s sake makes for a pretty thin motivator. I do what needs to be done. And I am not shy about that fact. Those who understand that, were they in my position, they would do the same thing too may be welcome to stay those jeers or they may howl louder, uncomfortable with the reflection of their own complex lives I cast. For every person in the arena I say that you are allowed to make your own choices. I guarantee you all one thing. You will not be silent at my performance. This is my theatre. This is my ring.
Now Card straightens his shoulders. His stance firms a little, his shoulders seems somehow to broaden. The stance of a senior businessman addressing his fellow board members, a spokesperson for some pressure group speaking before a committee, a politician at a rally of supporters. There is even a little of the demagogue about Card’s mannerisms, strident, strong, powerful in both word and posture.
Chris Card: This is my forum. Not the forums of chattering fools hidden deep within their cloak of concealed identity. No, I refer to the forums of antiquity. Of Greece and Rome where philosophers and the intelligentsia stood in front of crowds of people who gathered to hang on their every word, ears pricked so as to not let any nugget of wisdom pass them by. And so I let my audiences hang on my every word, as uncomfortable as they may be at times. My voice carries weight. Those who wish to deny me out of hand will dispute this but my response is simple. When Chris Card talks people listen. When Chris Card wrestles, people watch. I captivate through word and deed. If you want to know how much clout I wield, go ask a young wrestler. If you wish to become a better technical wrestler, if you really want to improve your game you watch Chris Card. My surgical destruction of my opponents is simple yet brutally effective. When I have railed at opponents to cut the fat from their move sets, to improve by simplification, those who have listened have become better as wrestlers. I do not aim to be a pedagogue. I teach better indirectly. But those who listen to me can be better people. And those who study me can learn. This is my forum. This is my ring.
Leaning backwards a little there is a little puff out of Chris Card’s chest before he continues. A careful deep breath or two, not out of tiredness but more as an exercise preparing him to project the next part of his rant. The words keep piling on, a little more determined, a little more effort behind them as Card continues as if building up steam towards a glorious conclusion. The speech continues.
Chris Card: This is my church. I lay my soul bare for every one of you every time I get into the ring. While people devote their lives to serving a higher power, a higher purpose I have devoted my life to serving wrestling. You may call me self centred for my actions but at the end of it all I have made it my life’s mission to put on a quality product for you, the fans. If you don’t like the way I go about it, that’s fine. Because as that pioneer of professional wrestling “Gorgeous” George Wagner said to a young Cassius Clay, "He told me people would come to see me get beat. Others would come to see me win. I'd get 'em coming and going." It has been said that this great industry is a morality play. Maybe, rather than looking for obscure references in a dusty old book, you can show your kids what I do. Maybe you point to me and say, “That Chris Card, don’t be like him.” Maybe you tell them the opposite. I don’t judge. I stand in front of you, my congregation, and demonstrate what I have built my entire life around. I take the Wrestling. This is my church. This is my ring.
Now the crescendo happens. There is a very un-Chris Card nature to his winding up of the speech. Words directly from some unknown beating heart, coursed through with the powerful nature of the event, melting the thick layer of ice that Card usually keeps his feelings locked up inside. With every one of the short, punchy statements Card makes, comes a brief pause and a summoning up of energy to make the next one delivered with ever more passion, ever more conviction. This is a hitherto unseen side of Chris Card, or at least one that the general public usually gets absolutely no access to.
Chris Card: This is my life. My passion. My victories. My defeats. My triumphs. My failures. My dreams made reality. My art. My stage. My podium. My masterpiece. My performance. My testimony. My past. My present. My future. My world. My existence.
And now a little heavier breathing, almost seething, displaying a level of intensity that the almost flawlessly calm Chris Card never, NEVER lets show. The last five words are delivered in a tone that is simultaneously hushed and powerful, threatening, convincing and definitive.
Chris Card: This is my ring…
A short pause.
Chris Card: Cross.
Chris Card drops the microphone he has been grasping like a drowning sailor to a life preserver, swept along, as Card was, on a tide of his own emotions. It lands at his feet and timed perfectly with the thud of the mic hitting the canvas the frame hard cuts to black.
