Extinction Promo

You see, this is what I’m talking about.

Let’s look at what we have here. No offense to the title “match” with Cagero and Riggs, but this is the marquis match of Extinction. The two main stables are squaring off. Three former world champions are participating. The culmination of all the storyline work we’ve done on Riot! since the last ppv pays off in this big, ultimate, final confrontation with…well ok, with nothing really on the line. In any case, the point is, this is the big match, the piece de resistance, the ultimate finale between the two titanic forces that have fought over this company for weeks.

And it’s completely fucking lame.

Johnny and I are the only watchable wrestlers in this match. There, I said it. I’ll be expecting a fine from the IWC discipline office any moment now, but the truth is the truth. This is the most ridiculous joke of an athletic competition I’ve ever heard of. This would be like sending the New Orleans Saints to play football against a high school team. It’s laughable. Do you understand me, Brat Pack? YOU are laughable. The talent mismatch is such that I would feel comfortable fighting you without Hurse even without the looming threat of Cruze’s returning “legend” (and, let’s face it, given Cruze’s ability to gauge “talent” it may end up being basically a handicap match anyways.)

I’m not trying to hurt the company here, believe it or not. I’m just incredulous, frankly, that this made it out of the booking office without someone, ANYONE, saying “hold on, wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea.” I mean, let’s recap. You’ve got probably the best legitimate wrestler on the opposition team in Christian Savior. What do we know about this man? What have we learned in recent weeks? Well, we’ve learned that his abilities in this company essentially stop being valid the minute he steps through the ropes. He is a talented politician. He brought together the disenfranchised better than the Obama campaign, I can’t deny, and unlike the current president he’s actually delivered on one of his campaign promises. Johnny Kingdom is currently no longer world champion. Christian Savior played a large part in seeing this happen. Based on these lines of reasoning alone, we would say that his efforts as leader of the 5SS have been successful. However, this is not a Fox News Special Report, this is an AWOL promo, so we’re going to look a bit closer. True, Kingdom is no longer champion. However, Savior isn’t champion, either. In fact, he isn’t champion of anything right now, and that is due in large part to yours truly pinning and eliminating him from the Overbooked Extravaganza. Yes, I’m aware we’ve covered this ground before, Christian, but it bears repeating and given your in ring performance, I can barely conclude that you even showed up at the arena last week, let alone bothered to watch my last promo. You aren’t Cartel Champion. You aren’t World Champion. You aren’t Tag Champion. You are, in point of fact, currently champion of nothing. You “hand picked” Savior to win the World Title, as you put it, but it appears that Cagero’s not on board, so you in fact have simply transferred the belt from one man who despises you to another one. Admittedly, this is not a terribly difficult feat to accomplish given that most of the roster would gladly throw you off of a cliff given the opportunity, but the point remains. Your regime is long on talk and very, very short on delivering on its promises. I, on the other hand, am doing just fine at delivering in both areas. I beat you last week, and along the way I managed to survive having basically your entire stable thrown at me and still got the job done. To put it bluntly, that match was not evenly waged by both of us. It was domination. It was a clear mismatch, and I’m the number two man on my team. Kingdom’s history with you shows an even longer stretch of domination, to the point now where he’s frankly just sick of you. Not irritated or furious, just tired of talking about you. You’re not that good. Your superstar of the year award merely serves as evidence that the masses are asses. It means about as much as when athletes like Manny Ramirez or Tracy McGrady win in on-line votes for spots in the All-Star game of their respective sports despite not actually even playing in the particular season they’re being rewarded for. You have name recognition. That is all. You’re all smoke and mirrors with no substance. No amount of embarrassingly ordinary efforts at composing “parody” promos (which, believe me, is a topic we’ll be revisiting later this week) can change this fact.

And then there’s Porno Lad. Somehow I managed to ruffle his feathers just by showing up here and having the audacity to point out that his name was ridiculous, and it’s just gone downhill from there. Well, I’m sorry son, but your name IS ridiculous. How does that strike fear into an opponent? How does that drive up buy-rates? It doesn’t, PL, it in fact probably has the opposite effect. The irony of your group’s situation is that they want to be taken seriously and given what they consider to be their fair spot in the company, when in turn the best threat they can level against us is “You better look out, Empire, or we’ll sick Porno Lad on you.”

Is that a joke?

Who came up with the idea to make you the muscle of your stable? I really want to know. Was it Savior? It sounds like one of his ideas, I’ll admit, and requires about as much intellectual fortitude as his vaunted Alice in Wonderland promo, but to be honest I would have expected it to be more a result of your continual overestimation of your abilities. One of these days, PL, someone is going to come along and demonstrate just how incredibly ordinary your truly are. There is very little that is special about you or the effort you put out week to week. The only thing remarkable about you is the fact that you don’t see this as the truth yet. Your one true talent, as far as I can see, is simply the fact that you are able to remain so continually, blissfully ignorant to the fact that you are just flat-out not good. Your promos aren’t entertaining, they’re dribble. Your in-ring performances are not remarkable, they are completely average. The successes you’ve seen thus far are simply a result of your being paired up with equally mediocre competition week after week. Well, that stops now. You’ve put yourself in an untenable position by setting yourself opposite to us. Now, you don’t have the option of matching up against the Too Magnificents and the Rick Rohls of the world week after week, you have to face legitimate competition, and now you’re going to be revealed for the run-of-the-mill, bottom-of-the-barrel competitor that you truly are. Take the tazer out of your hands in my match against Too Magnificent and you will have accomplished exactly nothing since joining the 5SS a few weeks ago. Do not expect this tendency to change. And as for your being the muscle, the enforcer of your stable, well, watch and learn kid. I’m the model for who you want to be. If you ever want people to fear you, you’re going to need to figure out some way to distinguish yourself because, I gotta tell you, right now I’m more afraid of Miho Miyazaki than I am of you.

Of course, that’s more a mixture of horror and dreadful fascination than actual fear, but I digress.

As for Katie Steward…who the fuck are you again? I’m assuming you’re a part of the SCW component of the Brat Pack, which means that I can basically write you off as a factor in this match, so I suppose that’s a relief. SCW is like double A ball compared the IWC, no matter what I think of the company’s state these days, so if you can’t even cut it to compete here then I’m officially relieved of any obligation to take you seriously as a threat. However, I can’t help but wonder what the people in your group are thinking by making this move. There’s about a million of you Five Star Society plebes available on the IWC payroll, and you guys have to look outside the company for your fourth member? Wow, just, wow. I think that pretty much speaks for itself.

Which brings me to you, Robin. Your presence in this match is, I have to say, the most embarrassingly terrible thing I’ve seen in my time in this business. I want you to really understand what I’m saying here. I’m taking off the Kay-Fabe hat here and just speaking to you as a fellow human being. I was once drug out of a hospital bed, supposedly in a coma, and forced to wrestle a match, and THIS is the most embarrassing and irresponsible thing I’ve ever seen. I’m not being abrasive here, Robin, and I’m not insulting your abilities in the ring. Frankly, I’ve done that enough times. The bottom line here, Robin, is you are pregnant. Assuming that this isn’t just some sort of stupid ruse (and, frankly, I hope it is for everyone’s sake) you are making possibly the MOST irresponsible decision imaginable by putting yourself in the ring at Extinction. As a mother, as a HUMAN BEING, how can you POSSIBLY think that this is a good idea? It is beyond conception that anyone in the IWC competition office is even allowing you to show up in the arena, given some of the lunatics in this place and their preference for kidnapping and otherwise harming peoples’ families. So Robin, please, I’m begging you, as one person to another, all kidding aside, do not come out to the match at Extinction. Find a replacement, find anybody, and send them out in your place. I don’t want to be responsible for the safety of your child in the ring and, to be honest, your team’s performance should be the only abortion the fans are forced to watch next Sunday.

None of this makes any sense for you, Five Star Society. This is a lose-lose. Even If you manage to come up with enough ridiculous shenanigans to squeak out a win, the rest of the match will be so one-sided that even a victory will be more like a defeat for your group in terms of the court of public opinion which, we both know, is the real prize we’re competing for here. And, to be honest, any of the sort of bullshit you’ll have to use to get the win will likely just make us even more pissed off at you and even more determined to see you fail than we were going in. You can’t scare us. You can’t intimidate us. We’re not going anywhere until we see your group fall apart. So what do you really hope to accomplish at Extinction?

Your advantage thus far against us has been your superior numbers and the element of surprise. This match takes both of those away from you because it forces you to concentrate your strength in one place where we can see you coming and where you don’t have any sort of meaningful assistance available to you from outside the match. You see, unlike most of the folks you’ve run into thus far, we in the Empire know how the game you’re running right now works. Most of us have been there and run the same game some time in the past. You have no cards available to you come Extinction. There are no tricks left. The best you can hope for is to have a weapon hidden somewhere near the ring, and that’s a gamble because it’s possible we could get hold of it and use it against you. You can’t use a run-in, since the presence of Katie Steward means you’ve given up entirely on the rest of your stable to contribute in any sort of meaningful way to this match. So all you have left is a match-up by match-up test of talent in the ring, and whether you’ll admit it or not, you’re going to lose in that comparison every time. We are just better than you. There’s no other way to put it. On a one-to-one basis I would take any member of my side against any member of your side any day. Hurse with a broken neck is a better wrestler than Porno Lad. Even Jackson Adams could probably squeak a win out against most of you. So how can you delude yourself into thinking you have any kind of chance?

This is why I apologize to the fans. This match is a stinker, no doubt about it. If it were a football game, it would be so one-sided that Vegas wouldn’t even put a line on it. I’ve spent all week trying to come up with anything creative or entertaining to try and do for a promo to salvage it, and all I could come up with was sitting down and composing a twenty-three hundred word dissertation on your group’s complete failure to even make this competitive. Thus, I’ve come to a conclusion. If I can’t even be bothered to get interested in this match, a ppv match that I’m competing in, then how the hell can I expect the fans to care about this? Consequently, I’m extending a one-time offer to the people who buy Extinction on ppv. If you are as unsatisfied with the product on display as I think you likely will be, mail me your cable bill and I’ll refund your money. That, and my humble apologies on behalf of the booking office for putting together such a farcical contest are all I can really offer as compensation for your wasted time.