Training Partner
"Cena!"
Alarmed, I broke into a run. Cena was trudging along at the very back of the rejects, and he turned to look at me with the face of a man half dead.
"Ah, man. I was starting to think I'd head home without so much as a goodbye, you being gone and all......"
"Wait—you got cut?"
"Yeah. After you left, they watched me take some bumps, then told me my skills were flat-out unusable and to come back next year."
"Ugh."
A groan escaped me.
It never occurred to me it would turn out like this.
Of course, by the original history, Cena failing this year's tryout was exactly how things were meant to go. He would recognize his shortcomings, train hard, and pass the following year. And from there he would climb and climb, until one day he became the legend who carried the WWF on his back.
But unlike Cena, my own history as a wrestler had been rewritten. I hadn't spent days crippled by diarrhea from Adam's Cuban sandwich. Which meant the original future—where I passed alongside Cena the next year and we entered GCW as classmates—could no longer happen.
Well, this is a problem......
I'd thought it was a total jackpot, Cena testing the same year as me. Who could have guessed he'd wash out of an exam this easy?
My plan had been to help him train every way I could so we could make it in together.
With things as they stood, that plan was dead in the water.
"So what's the plan now?"
"Guess I head back to my old neighborhood. Let me catch your name one last time before I ship out. Might catch you on TV someday."
"It's Junho Kim. My friends just call me Jun."
"Okay. Joon."
"...Jun."
"June. You take care of yourself now."
"Hold on. Wait just a second."
I stopped Cena, who was still wrestling with the pronunciation.
"How did you get here?"
"Huh?"
"Answer the question. Cena."
"Uh... I took the bus."
"Anything waiting for you back home?"
"Well, first I'll have to start hunting for trainer work again."
"Then stick around a little longer."
"...Why?"
Cena cocked his head, puzzled. Ah, to hell with it, I thought, and pressed on.
"Be my TP."
"TP?"
"Yeah. If you're coming back next year to try again anyway, wouldn't it be smarter to see the whole process up close first?"
Cena chewed on that for a moment—then broke into a wide grin.
"Not a bad deal!"
TP—short for "Training Partner." In pro wrestling, nothing mattered more than "harmony," the rhythm you shared with the man across the ring, so every wrestler worth his salt kept at least one TP around. GCW even made room for it: hopefuls were allowed to bring one TP apiece to the tryout.
"Then let's make it work, Cena."
"Same right back at you, Joon."
...
Fine. I'd just let him keep calling me Joon.
Fortunately, a word with the staff was all it took to get Cena registered as my training partner. My real motives were plain as day, but Baku had taken a shine to me, so he waved it through with a hearty roar.
"Slipping a buddy in as your TP the very moment he washes out, eh? A time-honored trick, kid."
"He's got his rough edges, but the talent's the real deal, sir. I'd like to give him the chance to build some experience."
"Rough edges?"
Baku snorted in amusement. But on the papers bearing Cena's name as TP, he signed without a moment's hesitation.
Forty-seven hopefuls had survived the first round—which meant roughly fifty had been weeded out. And that tally included the handful of dumbasses who'd smarted off to Baku before the test even began and gotten themselves beaten black and blue for it.
The survivors were then shown to the dormitories on GCW's grounds. Cena, as my TP, was assigned to my room.
A four-story prefabricated building. To put it kindly, the interior couldn't be called comfortable—but it was spacious, at least.
As the wall-mounted fan rattled and wheezed itself toward death, it struck me all over again: I really had come back to the past.
There was a CRT television. A square box of a thing.
"Cena, we've still got some time before dinner, right?"
"Yeah, we can take it easy for a bit."
He'd flopped onto the bed against the opposite wall; reassured by his answer, I dropped heavily onto my own mattress. Sitting on the edge of it, I clicked the remote, and a richly saturated 4:3 screen flickered to life. From memory, I dialed to the channel I wanted.
Burning Kong—the WWF's weekly broadcast, its flagship show—had just gone on the air.
This was the hour it used to come on, back in Georgia.
The opening video rolled: a sun lingering just before it slipped past the horizon, then the logo—a gorilla pounding its chest with a thunderous roar. The camera swept across the sold-out stands.
Hard on its heels came the shatter of breaking glass, and the crowd went berserk.
To the blare of his entrance music, a man strutted out toward the ring, oozing swagger with every step.
Goosebumps raced across my entire body as I stared at the TV screen.
Rockcold Stevie Steen.
He really is something else.
There was no mistaking that ovation—it belonged to an Icon, a man who had built an entire era with himself in the starring role. The Shawn Cena of the future, the Captain Logan of the past—every one of them had forged an age that belonged to them and been crowned for it. That was what made them "Icons": greats who moved on a different plane from every other wrestler beneath them.
The year 2002 was the twilight of the Attitude Era—the age Rockcold himself had built. A chronic neck injury would drive him into retirement next year.
His body was anything but sound. He was holding together on painkillers, pills, and sheer grit—nothing more. Rockcold truly was a staggering human being. I'd only seen him in person once, away from the cameras, but he was every inch the "Icon" who had made an era.
Up in the ring, Rockcold took the microphone in hand. Every motion, every gesture, was steeped in savvy and experience.
The crowd thundered his name—Rockcold! Rockcold!
He raised a hand to them, then finally spoke.
"Last week! That sumbitch The Pock and Bart Maxen jumped yours truly! Those gutless sons of bitches ain't got the stones to face me man to man!"
The crowd buried The Pock and Bart Maxen under a chorus of boos. Cursing out the two men currently playing the heel roles, Rockcold walked the viewers at home through "the story so far."
Still magnificent, even watching it now.
Flawless charisma, start to finish.
Burning Kong, the WWF's weekly program, had run live every single week for over a decade, from 1992 to this very day. Put simply, it was a television drama dressed in the trappings of sport. The wrestlers split broadly into faces and heels and feuded their way through storyline after storyline. Love triangles and betrayals, violence running rampant through it all—that was the signature of this Attitude Era, and audiences devoured it with fervor.
And Rockcold above all had earned the fans' white-hot devotion by beating down Bart Maxen—the man who, in reality, held the chairman's seat of the WWF. Call it a drama all you liked, but a script where a mere wrestler, just another company employee, got one over on the chairman of a corporate giant lit a fire under the blue-collar viewers who made up the heart of the audience.
Then again, Bart Maxen played the loathsome boss so perfectly that it's no wonder Rockcold took off the way he did.
People watched and lived it all vicariously. I had been one of them, once upon a time.
But now I found myself watching Rockcold through different eyes.
He was a wrestler perfect in every respect. And yet the very first thing that seized my eye, before anything else, was the body.
Two muscle-bound men testing their strength against each other in nothing but their underwear.
That was the image ordinary people had of pro wrestlers. Which is to say: wrestlers built their bodies to be seen. Bulking up. Packing on slabs of muscle. But the bulkers rarely lasted long—their knees simply couldn't take the load.
I'd been born with passable raw materials. Six foot two. A hundred and seventy-two pounds. But I was still a blank canvas. A fine body among ordinary people—yet as a pro wrestler, it never once looked strong.
It was the same story my entire career.
So the first order of business, starting now, was to rebuild this body into something spectacular. At least two hundred and twenty pounds of carved muscle.
Even in its main office, GCW ran on fans instead of air conditioning. Industrial-sized monsters, granted—but on a stifling, muggy tropical night like this one, they didn't amount to much. The assorted bodies clustered around the desks were all running on fumes. It was end-of-day wrap-up, the books being closed on another day's work, and everyone looked wrung out.
The man in charge was Harley Racy, sixty-five this year. A wrestler who had owned the 1970s, he'd spent his retirement here at GCW, molding the next generation and enjoying his twilight years. He scratched at his thinning gray hair with a pencil as he paged through the attendance report.
"The shows are turning into a goddamn mess."
Attendance: five hundred and forty-seven.
Even granting that this was merely a developmental territory, the number was ugly.
"We were drawing a thousand as late as last year. How the hell did it come to this?"
"The higher-ups keep stripping the cupboard, that's how."
So spoke Rolling Jay, the "booker" in charge of the match cards. His legal name was Jacob something-or-other... but nobody alive remembered it. Harley Racy had a real name too. But this was the wrestling business—being known by your "ring name" rather than the one on your birth certificate was simply how things worked.
"You mean Johnny?"
"You remember the high school kids mobbing the place just to catch a glimpse of him? Because of that boy, winged sneakers were a full-on craze in Georgia for a while."
"Bwahaha! Can't argue with that."
Harley let out a booming laugh.
Johnny Ace. Called up to the WWF's "main show" just recently, Johnny had until then been the franchise star of GCW.
"Quick little son of a gun. An Ace by name and by nature. That boy's Shooting Star Press belongs in a textbook."
"But what can you do? Johnny's gone. We're what's left. They gutted the roster to build a whole stable around him. It's a war zone in here."
"How many did they take?"
"Joseph. Michael. Kimberly too."
"Four people, taken up top to debut as a stable?"
A "stable," in pro wrestling, was a kind of "team"—several wrestlers banding together in concert. Usually three or four strong. To milk the gang dynamic for all it was worth, they traveled in packs and jumped people in bunches, which meant they were almost always heels.
At that, Harley Racy—once a legendary wrestler, king of his era—went blank and couldn't get a word out. Rolling Jay finally managed an answer.
"Yes, sir. A stable."
"Hey, dumbass, Johnny's a babyface!"
"Well—yes, but what am I supposed to do about it? The higher-ups want him working heel."
"You make a man a heel, they'll leash his moveset. The kid's whole game is high-flying—how's he supposed to fly?"
"That's the 'main show' for you."
Rolling Jay exhaled a long sigh. Heels take the crowd's boos and deliberately wrestle dull, stalling matches to make the faces shine. Johnny Ace, meanwhile, had built his popularity at GCW on aerial offense that held absolutely nothing back.
"The Virgin Mary herself oughta take a shotgun to the bigwigs upstairs, that's what."
A wrestler you'd poured your whole heart into raising gets called up to the main show, gets handed a screwball gimmick and garbage booking, and flames out. It was hardly a rare story. Harley and every executive in the company felt the same hollow ache about it.
But there was nothing to be done. This was a "developmental territory," after all.
"Get next week's booking drafted and bring it to me. Aw, my aching head......"
"Yes, sir."
"Harley."
When that thread ran out, Baku spoke up from across the room.
"You know we started testing the new hopefuls today, right?"
"Eh, that? I know it. ...So those were the kids moving into the dorms earlier?"
"Yes, sir. Kicked off this morning."
"Memory goes when you get old. Well? Any of them worth a damn?"
"That's exactly why I'm bringing it up."
Baku flashed a grin.
"He could walk onto tomorrow night's show and hold his own. Fundamentals polished to a mirror shine. If I didn't know better, I'd swear the man's been in this business for decades."
And that was the simple truth.
"Who is he?"
"Uh... kid called Joon."
"Joon? Where's he from? Czech?"
"Czechs don't write their names like that. He's American, for starters."
"What's his line, then?"
"Asian."
"Asian? Hell's bells—what am I supposed to do, book him with a 'good at math' gimmick?"
"...Harley. My friend Harley. Why's your mind always go straight to race?"
Baku raised his hands.
"We're 'pros,' remember? Our job—no matter what kind of son of a bitch he is—is to forge him into a prime stallion."
So we could sell him, that is.
"All I'm saying is simple, Harley. We've got a future."
"Hmm......"
At that, Harley mulled it over for a moment, then stretched out his hand.
"Get me the kid's file."