The Birthplace of Kung-Fury
A few days later, my phone rang.
It was Tiffany McMahon.
"Are you out of your mind?!"
I was behind the wheel at the time, and her voice hit with enough force to snap me wide awake. It struck me as an entirely fair reaction, all things considered, and I answered with a wry smile.
"Easy now. You'll take my eardrums off."
"No—how can you accept a gimmick like that and still be laughing?! Why on earth didn't you call me?!"
"...You say that as though you've actually been watching the show?"
"I've been buried in work lately, so I only went through the photo stills — but even so, a Kung-Fury gimmick? On you? How does that possibly make sense?!"
A young miss who wouldn't listen to a soul, I see.
Those of us with deep insight and devastating good looks keep a saying on our lips at all times: the devil, after all, is in the details. Tiffany, who hadn't heard the post-match mic work, was laboring under a misunderstanding — but instead of setting her straight, I let it dangle a while longer on purpose. I was curious how she saw this arrangement of ours.
"It was the Chairman's order, you see?"
"Th-that much I can't argue with either, but... we were partners, weren't we? We promised to tell each other whenever something like this came up."
A wounded note crept into Tiffany's voice, and with it I reconfirmed the delicate thread of trust running between us.
"I'm touched. To think you'd worry over me like this on the very day you walked out of GCW."
"Don't be ridiculous. It's because the former king of GCW taking an important role on the main stage raises this side's standing along with him — that's the only reason."
"Of course, I know. So — how are things on your end these days?"
"My end?"
"Yes. I keep up with your broadcasts, you see. I was wondering whether anything had changed."
"We're pushing a national broadcast deal at the moment. With Russell as champion, the picture reads better than it ever would with you."
"I imagine so. He is the white champion the company wants, after all."
A long silence stretched across the line. I had answered without thinking, and only there did the slip register. I laughed it off lightly.
"Kidding, kidding. Honestly though, a face as the company's flagship is smoother sailing in every way than a heel."
"Should I... try to do something about it?"
But it didn't blow over.
Tiffany McMahon had registered that I was the one who'd raised the racial issue first, and judged that something was wrong with me. And in truth, I felt a faint stirring of the same thing myself.
Was it the trauma?
No matter how different this 'Kung-Fury' gimmick was from the one before my regression, could it be needling me somewhere below conscious thought?
Maybe so.
The gimmick was, beyond argument, the worst. Brazenly, dirtily racist — even the newsletters had torn into it. It had rattled my acquaintances enough that every last one of them, Tiffany McMahon chief among them, worried whether I was alright.
At that, a short laugh escaped me.
"No — like I said, this isn't something you could have prevented either, is it?"
"Even so, someone should do something. Are you going to let your talent just rot away?"
"Certainly not."
"Then do something about it!"
"Calm down, Tiffany. You've got one thing wrong."
"Wh-what's that?"
"I'm still Sin."
"Pardon?"
"Didn't I tell you to look with your own eyes before you judge?"
"Yes, and I did see—"
"You watched a show through photographs?"
Tiffany had no answer for that. In the end, we agreed to speak again once she'd watched the show properly.
Then again, she's sharp enough — one viewing and she'll grasp my point straight away.
That said, having her fuss over me like this didn't feel bad at all. Though if she was going to spend that concern anyway, I'd have preferred she spent it somewhere better.
On Shawn Cena, for instance.
He was the one who needed a helping hand more than I did, at this point.
I'd have to have a word with him later.
Having settled that, I caught myself smiling without quite meaning to.
Life on the WWF main roster would surely be a different animal from GCW. With Tiffany McMahon at the head, I'd have to conduct myself with far more political cunning — not simply gathering allies, but thinking about how these men were consumed as performers. Hunter's clique, who had mastered exactly that, were still starring in the heart of Burning Kong's central scripts to this day. I needed a team of fellow GCW men who wouldn't lose to them.
For a start, the Rakedown side can be grown around Cena.
And I'd have to put together one more supporting unit to look after him and help carry the load.
And beyond that, there was me—
Who would be the right choice?
Drowning in that pleasant dilemma, I drove on toward the South.
As I said, carving a path through the treacherous main show would take a team.
Fortunately, the Rakedown side had begun to resolve itself, naturally and without my lifting a finger.
Rakedown. Call it the company's second show. On paper the two programs were equals, but most people put Burning Kong above it for its longer broadcast history. Even so, plenty of wrestlers preferred being Rakedown talent.
There were those, like Casket-Taker, who simply hated backstage bloodsport. And there were wrestlers with modest drawing power but superb technique, who favored Rakedown because it kept them clear of Bart Maxen — Bart, true to form, had wrecked those men too, insisting that even the ones pulling in the core fans displeased him personally.
Like the time he ordered a Mexican luchador to make his entrance shaking maracas — an instrument of 'his people,' no less.
And when those wrestlers' reactions inevitably cratered, he cut a whole handful of them for the crime of 'never having had any talent to begin with.' Put plainly, Rakedown was the bomb shelter to which wrestlers fled from psychopaths like Hunter or Bart.
And conversely, ambitious wrestlers like me set their course for Burning Kong.
That was the current that had formed among the roster. Only by reading it could I hope to put them to use.
Stripped of all politeness: Burning Kong pursued success, and Rakedown pursued pro wrestling. When a dream becomes a job, that purity takes damage no matter what — but the Rakedown wrestlers were the ones with a little less of the damage.
To be precise, they had either tried everything there was to try or made their peace more or less gracefully, and now buried themselves in the work they loved. Either way, to the Rakedown roster, Cena's rap landed as something genuinely fresh. Add Tiffany McMahon's influence into the mix, and Cena promptly set about preparing his rapper gimmick in earnest.
This side can run itself now.
One weight off my mind. Now it was my turn.
Burning Kong. Here, as I'd said, the logic of success outranked the logic of wrestling. Which meant one thing: the first words out of your mouth when you set out to seduce a crowd were already decided.
An arena in Miami, Florida. In a small meeting room, I sat in a script meeting with my assigned writer.
The very first question I fielded there was why on earth I had said that line, and my answer was truly simple.
"The crowd reaction wasn't bad, was it?"
"What?"
I knew this man. We had met only briefly, and twenty years had passed, but the memory was vivid — because the man before me would be fired from the company before long, on the grounds of poor results. Even now, whether from stress, the shadows under his eyes were strikingly dark. Having watched what I'd done, he was in a towering rage.
I, on the other hand, was at my leisure.
"My final line. I was simply expanding the gimmick in my own way."
"We agreed you wouldn't speak on anything that hadn't been discussed."
"We agreed I wouldn't deny the script. And I didn't, did I? Getting gleefully torn apart out there and then saying it was hard — that isn't denying the script."
"...Thanks to you, I've spent days unable to sleep, wringing my brain."
Already on the chopping block, and now saddled with a rookie like me on top of it — his face was black as thunder.
"It's not a difficult matter. You simply do the right thing."
"...Let me put this plainly, you brat."
The writer's eyes blazed into a glare. And he dropped all honorifics. This bastard.
"I know what you're thinking. You want the Sin gimmick back, right? That's why you're pulling this stunt."
"One could read it that way."
I shot back with an easy grin.
"But surely you know why people cheered when they saw me."
"Of course I know. Because they thought you were Sin — the Sin who'd started working for this company wearing that Kung-Fu idiot's mask."
"And if they did?"
"Damn it, listen here. Sin."
The writer had called me by that name.
"It's not as if I don't understand. But this is a gimmick Bart assigned personally! I can't just smash it out of nowhere and switch you back to Sin! The second I file a proposal like that, I'm fired!"
"There's no need for any of that."
"What?"
"Do you mean to go on lapping the essence out of Bart's asshole, eking out a fly's existence? Or will you trust those expert eyes of yours when it comes to story?"
The writer went silent.
"You came up as a writer yourself, didn't you? And yet since joining this place, you've never once been allowed to show what you can do. A shame, truly."
"H-how did you—"
"Greg told me."
I was bluffing through my teeth.
"He said it was a pity — a good writer, left completely unused. And as it happens, that very writer turns out to be mine."
"G-Greg..."
"Mr. Writer."
I said, taking my time.
"We're bound to be cooperating for a while now anyway. So let's be flexible — let's each look out for the other."
"But the Chairman—"
"I'd wager even that old man intends to sit back and watch for a while."
"Wh-why would he?"
"Because the one who signed off when I added that clause to my contract was Bart himself."
The writer's eyes went round as saucers.
"He handed me Kung-Fury to test what I'd do with it, didn't he? But tilt your view just slightly, like this, and isn't he a genuinely fascinating character?"
"Kung-Fury?"
"To be exact — Sin, made to wear the Kung-Fury mask. Doesn't that ring entirely plausible? The company hands him something other than what he originally signed for, and he has no choice but to choke it down, weeping."
"Ah, so... you mean to show that there's a believable, human reason woven into this cartoon of a gimmick?"
"Yes. Everyone's going to love it."
"Hmm..."
Presented with the vision, the writer turned serious, quite unlike a moment ago. Lost in thought, he typed out a few lines on his enormous laptop.
Truthfully, this was a real stroke of luck. The more desperate a man is, the more he hungers for success — and the likelier he is to find my story tempting.
And so I set about remaking the man who had become my trauma.
This time, it would be different.
That week's Burning Kong. The script had cleared, and midway through the show, I climbed into the ring alone.
If anything, Bart's test had turned into a windfall. I had been allotted a full five minutes of segment time on the show.
First and foremost, a comedy babyface. That was Kung-Fury's position.
[SIN! SIN! SIN! SIN! SIN!]
The moment I stepped onto the ring, several in the crowd were bellowing my name at the top of their lungs.
But mic in hand, I bowed with impeccable courtesy.
And in the same breath, I spoke in Korean.
"Annyeonghaseyo."
At the foreign tongue they couldn't parse, the crowd's mouths clapped shut for an instant. Before them, I rolled out an English delivered in a Chinese accent thick with every racist inflection in the book.
"This mean 'hello,' in birthplace language of Kung-Fury."
None of which was true, in fact.
"My name Kung-Fury. I sign contract wlong... ah — no. I am great Kung-Fu warrior from faraway countly of the East. Annyeonghaseyo."
Another bow.
The arena howled with laughter. A few of them were even bending at the waist to bow right along with me.
"Anyway — I come here to teach Kung-Fu wrestling to the entire wolld. And the very first thing, I teach the straight punch to you, the Amelican people."
That was the shape of it.
Intrigued by my fluid mic work, the crowd lent the story its ears. And before them, I roamed freely between reality and script.
Though of course, that reality too was scripted.
But the character called 'Sin' truly sat flush against reality. He was a piece of me — and that was exactly why I could speak through him without strain.
"...And so, today you all learn important lesson too: read contract carefully before you sign. So — everybody try it now."
I improvised a catchphrase on the spot as well.
[Anyenghaseyo!]
The Americans parroted it back in their own mangled drawl, and I answered with a resoundingly theatrical bow. Fists knocked together — pik, pik — then I whirled my arm overhead with a strident "Ki-yo-yooo—!"
Right after that.
To the tick of a clock, entrance music suddenly detonated through the arena.
Revolution. The swaggering rock track might as well have been their arrogance set to melody.
The crowd knew the man parting the curtain at once, and the boos came pouring down.
[Boooooooooooooo!]
It was Lance Orton.
The youngest member of Revolution, and the reigning WWF Intercontinental Champion — the man the company hailed as the future of the industry.
His face was arrogant. And in truth, so was he.
Well, this was that stage of his life.
The Orton of this moment was the very portrait of an insolent thug who had never once suffered as a pro wrestler. Call it being spared the beatings — everyone around him had only ever coddled him.
In time, he would somehow come to his senses and climb into the ranks of the Legends.
But that was the future.
At present, he was a walking problem — forever causing incidents, forever falling short on skill.
So when the man looked at me and flashed that wide grin, something in me stirred with a vague unease.
And that unease became reality.