Lucky Me
(FADEIN...
On my chessboard.
The white knight has moved.
Trying to formulate a strategy for my return match with Mayfly, and it isn't going well.
At least there's another avenue.
Three... two...)
"I'm practicing, Mayfly."
"Before our next knock - down, drag - out chess encounter, we've got a knock - down, drag - out ring encounter to look forward to, and I think that they'll help each other out."
Strategy is a key component of both.
"But we're no stranger to strategy, are we?"
"Think back to our first meeting, Mayfly. Do you remember it?"
"I do. I'll never forget it."
"April twentieth, two thousand and either. Wrestlestock 2, in the JTP Invitational everyone was running scared when Ol' Joe came down with his bathtub full of hepatitis and questionable plunger."
"What happened?"
"I remember. Do you?"
"You punted him into the ropes and I disarmed him, and the match was able to continue."
"Nice to meet you."
From that point, we moved on in very different directions.
"I'm excited about this match, Mayfly. Do you know why?"
"We're the last of a dying breed. For our particular situations, we may be the only ones of our breed."
Let me elaborate.
"Everyone knows wrestling is cyclical. The tide comes in with amazing talent, matches, and promotions, the tide pulls out and things settle down, and it continues like that until the end of time. I'd say the last five years or so were more or less a slow restart of another change of tide. The legends of yesterday retire, the legends of tomorrow start their journey, and the whole cycle restarts."
You and I, Mayfly, have a unique perspective.
"Neither of us have ever been expected to do much in this business. Me, because I'm under two bills trying my best to hang with the heavyweights, something almost without precedent in this business. Me, because of the way I wrestle, speak, and conduct myself in this business; that has the rest of the industry at large scratching their heads because they just don't get it."
"You, because you're a woman in a man's world."
I don't agree with the assessment, but the general consensus holds.
"It's like our chess match, Mayfly - we can't power through anything in this sport so our only hope for survival is and will always be strategy. Fortunately, we've each learned from the best."
That's where the major split exists.
"The legendary wrestler in my background, however, is retired and completely out of the spotlight. Nobody looks at me and sees him looming over my shoulder, wanting to know what he's going to say next. For you, the legendary wrestlers in your background are booked in a title match, probably in the Main Event at the next Aggression."
"Nobody notices Mary-Lynn Mayweather when Jack Harmen and Tony Davis are on her team."
I noticed.
"Strategy, Mayfly. That's what separates us from the pack; we are indeed the last of these particular Mohicans. Others use it as a tool, we use it as a survival technique."
"You're obviously a genius, Mayfly - graduated Law School at eighteen, working on legal briefs and playing chess against a computer and winning at both. According to Miss Ivy you're the only lawyer she trusts; that's worth the price of admission."
"Let's see how that genius works when you're standing across the ring from someone who sees professional wrestling in the same vein as you see chess."
"I don't predict victories. I never say 'I'm going to win,' or anything even remotely comparable. I'm not so egotistical that I would guarantee anything except to wrestle as hard as I can every time I go out to the ring."
"Until now."
"Mary-Lynn Mayweather... we are going to steal the show."
FADE