*Monologue, at a pub, to nobody in particular, recording on his phone*
*[Background noise: a pint glass being set down, low pub chatter, a fruit machine.]*
Right, so. Tomás Reyes-Montoya. Thirty-six years old, fifteen years deep, two daughters, a wife he's been with for — what was it — eight years. I looked him up. I do that now. Used to be I'd walk into a fight without knowing the fella's Christian name, and that worked all right for a while, and then I got older and started getting hurt by details I hadn't bothered to learn. So now I learn them.
He's going to submit me.
I'm serious. I'm not being clever. He is, if the match goes long, going to apply a hold my body is not built to survive and I will tap to it, because I am not a man who tests whether something will cripple him. I tap. I'm not proud about it and I'm not embarrassed about it. I tap and I go back to my corner and I find a different fight on a different night. Tomás is better than me at the grappling. That's not news. The lads at the back have been saying it since he signed.
The match isn't about the grappling.
The match is about the first six minutes, before he's had a chance to get me where he wants me, and what I'm going to do in those six minutes is hit him in the face with everything I've got and keep hitting him until one of three things happens. One, he goes down. Two, the ref pulls me off. Three, he wakes up in the ambulance and the ring doctor is asking him what day it is. Any of those three is a good night for me.
He's not going to go down. I accept that. He's got a chin on him and a submission man learns to eat a strike early because everybody he's ever wrestled has tried to dissuade him from getting inside. So the first six minutes is me being the twelfth version of the same idea he's already beaten eleven times. Fine. I'll be the twelfth. Sometimes the twelfth one lands.
What I like about the matchup is this — he's a nice man.
I'm not saying that as an insult. He is a genuinely nice man. He shakes hands, he crosses himself on the way in, he doesn't trash-talk opponents in the press, he goes home to those daughters. Tomás Reyes-Montoya is one of the good ones, and the good ones have a problem, which is they pull the trigger half a beat late. They take that half-beat to consider whether they really need to hurt the man in front of them, because the good ones still believe there's a version of the night where everybody goes home healthy, and that half-beat is what I live in.
I am not a good one.
I don't mean I'm evil. I mean I don't have the moral delay. I have never once in a fight stopped to ask whether I needed to be doing what I was doing. I was doing it, and then I was done doing it, and the other man was on the ground, and then I went and got a pint. That's the whole machine. There's no floor above it.
Now, the Crucible.
Six sides. I like six sides. The corners are closer together than a traditional ring, which means you can force a man into them faster. You can be in his face from the start of the match. And the lower two-thirds of the cage — that's where I live. That's my office. Every brawler in this fed has been told that the cage wall is the brawler's friend and we've all been working on how to use it. I've been working on it more than most. I've got a thing I want to try with the back of his head and the hex corner, and I'm not going to spell it out here because somebody'll be listening, but if you see me drive him into the corner with a running lariat, watch what happens next.
I'm going to lose. Probably.
But I'm going to make him earn every inch, and if I catch him clean before he catches me? Skull Crusher, three count, and I buy the house a round.
Cheers.