Post by Neal Durden on Sept 25, 2016 13:30:13 GMT
The busy streets of Brooklyn. Too many people go up and down these streets every day, too many to even bother to look at or count. Some of them go to work, others to do any hipster thing they think will make a good Instagram post. There are some who are simply sitting on the staircases to the buildings where they live. Then, there’s me.
As the Uber that’s driving me to my destination I take a minute to reflect on the journey. Everything that’s lead me to this point. To think about why I’m not as different to these people as I would think I am. Sure, I do something I love for a living, something that most of those people I’m staring at can’t even say. Sure, I may travel a lot and visit a lot of places. I’ve seen a lot and done a lot. But in truth, I’m nothing more than a man, with a destination. I need change as much as these people need it, even if they don’t know it.
Change, as they say, can be difficult. It’s not easy to understand that you need it and even harder to know that to achieve it, you need help most of the time. It’s certainly worse if you consider the fact that I’m such a strong headed bastard. For a long time I thought I had the bull grabbed by the horns, I thought I had the whole world in my hands and I could do no wrong. Then… it happened.
In truth, the “injury” Sine Mora gave me in HKW was nothing more than a cover up to something far worse. It hurt, it hurt a lot, but it wasn’t as serious as it played on the screen. Reality would damn me even more.
My association with Kraven lead the police forces to arrest me. I didn’t know what he had done, I didn’t know he once murdered a politician in Mexico, I didn’t know he was associated with one of the deadliest cartels in all of Mexico. But I helped him in the US as a fugitive. I gave him a place to stay, because he was the one who believed in me the most.
When promoters and wrestlers a like shut me down, when they closed doors on my face, he was the one picking me up and telling me to keep trying that one day I will be one of the most well known and respected wrestlers in the industry. He had a knack of knowing who had it, he felt I had it. I knew I had it. But the police didn’t know that part of the story, all they saw was a man helping a fugitive hide.
I ended up in prison, Mexico is one of the worse places to be locked up. Everyone looked at me with a mix of disgust and hunger. They were like wild hyenas, they knew someone who had never been locked up before came in. Luckily for me, Kraven was in the same prison. He knew I was there, he, again, helped me. It took him several months to get me out in a legal way. He took all the blame, he told people that I didn’t know anything, that I was just acting as a good person helping someone in need, that that was all I knew. He even went as far as to take a longer sentence if it helped me get out, as he felt I had yet a lot to give.
It took that and a little bit of bribery from the cartel he worked for, for me to get out. I owe him that. I owe him the fact that I can do what I love once more and that I’m back. Still, I lost many of what made me good before in those months. I lost the edge, I lost the knack of knowing when and how to finish an opponent.
Week after week I’ve been close to winning, but never close enough to taste victory. Change, needed to happen.
As the Uber came to a stop, I took my wallet out and handed the driver what I owed him. I grabbed my gym bag and walked out of the car. On the other side of the street, change awaited me… “VALERO FIGHT CLUB”…
This is it…
