What I Know About Tomás Reyes-Montoya

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT TOMÁS REYES-MONTOYA A Scouting Document, Filed in Advance of Behind Closed Doors 12 Compiled from Available Federation Footage By "Simply" Shawn Cortez ———————————————— PREAMBLE The office has matched me against Tomás Reyes-Montoya. This is the second document of this kind I have filed publicly. The first was about Evan Morse. I want to address the obvious thing before I begin, because I would rather raise it myself than have somebody raise it for me. The last time I filed a scouting document to this site, the man I filed it about read it, took the observation I had volunteered about his half-second reset, and used it to beat me with a condensed version of his own sequence. I said so afterwards, in writing, because it happened and because pretending it did not happen would make everything else I have ever written worth less. I have been asked twice since whether I intend to stop doing this. No. I write these because writing them organises the work. I file them publicly because the audience that has read five documents of mine has earned the right to check whether the work behind the writing matches the writing. If the cost of that is that a good opponent occasionally gets a free line, then the cost is a line. I would rather pay it than become a man who thinks in private. Record, for the file: three and three. Two of those losses are the same loss twice. Section four addresses it. ———————————————— 1. ESTABLISHED FACTS Tomás Reyes-Montoya. Thirty-six. Guadalajara. Submission archetype. Eight wins, one loss. He held the STRIFE World Championship. He lost it at NO ESCAPE to Hideo Kuramoto, by submission, at twenty-one minutes thirty-six seconds, to a hooked-arm crossface that does not appear on any federation move sheet under a name. Third generation. Grandfather performed, father trained until a back injury took him out of it, and the father is alive and eighty-one and watches. Fifteen years professional. Lucha base, supplemented with submission work in Brazil and Japan in his twenties. Married eight years, two daughters. His published filings, in order: "Fifteen Years," "What I Check," "La Noche Antes," "Carta a Mi Padre," "La Segunda Vez," and "Las Tres Cosas," which was filed this week. I have read all six. I have read the last one three times. He shakes the hand before the bell. He does not disrespect a fallen opponent. He has never, on the available record, done a single thing in this federation that he would need to explain afterwards. ———————————————— 2. TENDENCIES (FROM FILM) Derived from full review. Not exhaustive. What I have seen. — He does not chase. This is the first and most important entry and everything below it is a consequence. He does not lunge, does not sprint the angle, does not follow a man who has left. He arrives where you are going to be rather than where you were. — He closes in straight lines and he closes slowly. Against opponents who circle, his footwork is not faster than theirs and does not attempt to be. He simply reduces the available floor by one step per exchange and does not give the step back. The room gets smaller and there is no single moment at which it got smaller. — The takedown is not the objective. The grip is. In six of the eight wins, the grip that ends the match was established between forty and ninety seconds before the finish, in a position that did not look like offence at the time. — Extraordinary hip flexibility, and he uses it defensively far more than the highlight packages suggest. Positions that should be escapes against a man of thirty-six are not escapes against this one. — The grapevine ankle lock is his opening statement roughly a third of the time. He does not expect it to finish. He expects you to spend something getting out of it, and he is counting what you spend. — He is beatable at range and everyone knows it. This has never mattered, because nobody has been able to stay at range for a full match against him, because of entry one. — He touches the top of the doorframe on the way out of a room. He has written about this — it is his grandfather's. I note it here because it is fixed, it is unconscious, and a man with one genuinely unconscious habit probably has others that are less charming. — At NO ESCAPE he walked into a correction built specifically for a lucha grip specialist with good hips. He has written about that too. He is right about what happened. Section five. ———————————————— 3. ON THE SENTENCE HE WROTE ABOUT ME He wrote one line about me. It is the most accurate line anybody in this federation has written about me, and it was buried in a journal entry about his father, which is a more elegant delivery mechanism for a scouting report than anything I have managed in five attempts. "He has never fought a man who does not need to catch him." That is correct. I am not going to argue with it, and I want the locker room to notice that I am not arguing with it, because I have spent a year in this building arguing with things. Static did not need to catch me. Healy did not need to catch me. Both of them beat me and both of them beat me by the same method, which is that they walked forward until the room ran out and then took what was standing in it. Mr. Reyes-Montoya does not walk forward. He shrinks the room. It is the same problem arriving by a more intelligent route, and I would be a fool to file a document pretending otherwise. Here is the part he did not write. I do not think he missed it. I think saying it would have been unkind, and he does not do unkind. Naming the hole is not the same as being able to get into it. Six people have fought me in this federation. All six knew about the wall — it has been on the desk since May, Reginald Graves says it roughly once a month, and it is not a secret in any meaningful sense. Two of them managed it. ———————————————— 4. WHAT I AM BRINGING Three principles. a) I do not need to win the floor. I need to make the floor expensive. Every step he takes to reduce the room costs him something small, and my entire night is making those small costs add up before his grip does. This is not evasion. Evasion has been beaten out of me twice and I have stopped selling it. b) I fight the grip, not the takedown. Everyone who has lost to this man has defended the wrong object. I will be spending attention on hands that are not doing anything yet, which is uncomfortable, and which is the work. c) Honest declaration stands. I will tell him what I am attempting before the bell, the way I told Morse. He has earned that and I would do it for him even if he had not. Ms. Randall's file note on this match contains a fourth recommendation. I have read it. I am not taking it. She is aware that I am not taking it and she has written down that she disagrees, which is her job and the reason she is good at it. ———————————————— 5. THE ARITHMETIC I beat Hideo Kuramoto in my first match in this federation. I am going to be precise about what that is worth, because imprecision in my own favour is the only kind I find embarrassing. It was a different man. He had not gone to Tokyo yet. The trailing foot had not been corrected. The Kuramoto I beat is not the Kuramoto who took a championship off Mr. Reyes-Montoya at NO ESCAPE, and anybody telling you those are the same win is selling you something. So it proves nothing about Kuramoto. It is not offered as proof about Kuramoto. Mr. Reyes-Montoya has written that his loss was not the one that told him the truth. He was not beaten by his own timeline, he says — he was beaten by a man who went away, found one detail, and came back with it. That is not a body failing. That is a man being solved. I have read that three times and I want to say plainly that it is the best piece of writing filed to this federation by anybody, and I include myself in that, and I do not enjoy including myself in that. I also want to say what it is. It is a man who lost, doing the arithmetic, and arriving at the answer he needed. I know exactly what that looks like, because I have done it. I filed a document before NO ESCAPE saying footwork beats output and distance beats volume, and then a man with one idea walked me into a wall and beat me with it, and for about four days I had a version of that where it was an anomaly. It was not an anomaly. It is the thing that is wrong with me. It has now cost me two matches, and it is in section three of this document rather than explained away in a paragraph about my grandfather. His father asked him which of his losses was the one that told him the truth. He had one to choose from. He concluded it was not that one. I would gently point out that when a man has exactly one loss and decides it was not the one, what he has actually decided is that he has not lost yet. ———————————————— He has said he will not be answering anything I say between now and Saturday. He should not. He has one thing to say this period, he has said it, and there is more discipline in that than he will ever believe I recognise. So I will do the talking. It is what I have. And on Saturday one of us finds out which loss was the one. Filed. — S. C. ———————————————— Postscript: Completed at 1:15 AM. Ms. Randall went to bed four hours ago and left the folder squared on the table with the fourth recommendation on top, face up, where I would have to move it. I moved it. I will be in the gym at six.