Findings: Morse, E.

FILED WITH THE STRIFE OFFICE AND THE FEDERATION SITE. D. PRYCE. NEW WAVE CHAMPION. FOR THE RECORD, IN THE PERIOD BEFORE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS 11. ———————————————— PRELIMINARY NOTE The last time I filed one of these I opened it by explaining that I was writing it so that the federation would stop asking me the same question in corridors and car parks, and that having written it once I did not expect to write another. That was true for exactly one match. I want to record the difference, because the difference is the only part of this that surprised me. Nobody has asked me anything. There is a man coming to collect a debt from me in the main event of the next show and not one person in this building has stopped me to ask about it. No producer. No handler. Not the fellow with the clipboard who asked me four separate times what I intended to do to Mr. Dlamini. The corridors have been extremely quiet, and people who were perfectly comfortable talking to me a month ago now find that they are needed elsewhere. I am writing this one unprompted. Take that as you like. I have taken it as data. ———————————————— ONE. WHAT THE MAN IS. Evan Morse is the most rigorous mind in this federation and it is not a close question. I will put that on the record in the same place and in the same terms I put Mr. Dlamini's athleticism, because I am consistent or I am nothing. He is a technician of genuine, unglamorous quality. He does not have a natural gift. He has never claimed one. What he has is the most complete refusal to accept an approximate answer that I have encountered in a wrestling context, and he has applied it for so long and so unsentimentally that people mistake the result for talent, which irritates him in a way he is far too disciplined to show. He fought Hideo Kuramoto and lost, and I have watched that match more times than is reasonable. The interesting part is not the finish. The interesting part is minute twelve, where he abandons a plan that is working in order to test a better one, on the night, against the best technician alive, with nothing to gain by the experiment. Men do not do that. Men protect the thing that is working. He would rather be right than ahead. Remember that sentence. It is the whole document. ———————————————— TWO. WHAT COMPENSATION IS. My mother was a physiotherapist in Bristol for thirty-two years. I have written about her once before and I will write about her once more and then I will leave the woman alone. There is a phrase in her trade that I have been carrying around for weeks and turning over: compensation. When a joint cannot do its job — because it is injured, or badly built, or was asked for something it was never designed to give — the body does not stop. The body is not sentimental and it does not file a complaint. It simply hands the load to the nearest structure that can bear it, and that structure takes it, without discussion, and carries it. And it carries it well. That is the part people never expect. Compensation works. It works for months. It works for years. A man can walk on a compensated hip for a decade and win things while he does it. But the load does not disappear. It was never forgiven. It was relocated. And one day the structure that has been quietly carrying somebody else's work for ten years presents its bill, and the bill is not proportionate to the moment, because it is not for the moment. It is for the decade. My mother used to say: that isn't where that goes, love. Look at what it's for. I have quoted her on that before, and I meant it about opponents. I did not, at the time, notice that it applies just as cleanly to obligations, which are also a load, and which also go somewhere whether or not you put them anywhere. That is what a debt is. It is not a moral instrument. I have no interest in the moral version and neither does he. A debt is load that has not yet been carried by the structure that owes it, and it is being carried, right now, by something else, and that something else has been carrying it a very long time. I am not paying this to be honourable. I am paying it because unpaid load does not sit still, and I have seen exactly what it does to a body that pretends otherwise, and I decline to find out what it does to a career. ———————————————— THREE. WHERE THE ANGLE IS. This is the section where I tell you which joint. I have written four versions of it. I am going to file the fourth and I am going to be honest about why the first three went in the bin, because a document that is dishonest in one section is worthless in all of them. There isn't one. Not that there is no angle — there is always an angle, the body is a finite object and I have never met one I could not eventually read. There is no *useful* one. Mr. Morse is thirty-something years of correct maintenance in an unremarkable frame. Nothing about him is over-extended. Nothing is compensating. He does not fly, so he never has to open the chain the way Mr. Dlamini opens it. He has no habit I can price. He is, anatomically, one of the most boring men I have ever assessed, and I mean that as the compliment it is. So I did what I do, and I went looking one level up, and I found it immediately, and the finding is the reason this document exists at all. The thing that opens on Evan Morse is not a joint. It is the requirement to be right. He cannot leave a question alone. He will take the worse position in order to have tested the better idea. He will let go of something that is working because working is not the same as *demonstrated*, and demonstrated is the only currency he accepts, and he has never once in his life been able to walk past an unresolved thing and simply let it stay unresolved. That is his range of stability, and it is smaller than he believes, and it is closer than he thinks. And I want to say one more thing here, plainly, and then say nothing further about it in this or any other document. I did not get that from the tape. ———————————————— FOUR. WHAT I WILL NOT DO. I will not name it. Not in writing, not to a camera, not in the ring, not afterwards. I want to be exact about the reason, because there is a sentimental version of this that I would find humiliating to have written. It is not delicacy. It is not respect, although I do respect him. It is that the thing between us is the only property either of us jointly owns, and it is worth precisely as much as it is unspoken, and the man who spends it first spends it for both of us without asking. He has not spent it. He had the perfect opportunity in a corridor at NO ESCAPE with a camera running and he stood there and talked about collecting instead, and he inclined his head one degree, and he left. I noticed. I will not be outdone in that particular discipline by anybody. I will also not pretend that this is a grievance. There is no anger in this. I am not owed an apology and he is not owed an explanation and neither of us has raised his voice at any point in this entire business. People find that more disturbing than shouting, which I have never understood, but I have stopped arguing about it. And I will not take the easy version. The office would have given us a non-title match. It was offered. I declined it, and I want that on the record in my own words rather than somebody else's: I asked for the championship to be on it. A debt paid in a currency that costs you nothing is not a payment. It is a gesture. He would see through it instantly and he would be right to, and I would rather lose the belt to him than hand him something hollow and watch him decline to accept it. ———————————————— FIVE. CLOSING. I am 5-1 in this company. I have defended this championship once, against the finest athlete in the building, and I retained it by finding an angle and holding it until the referee decided the matter on his behalf. None of that is relevant to Behind Closed Doors 11 and I want it understood that I know that. He asked me to name the room. I named the next one. Not because I am eager — I am not eager, I have not slept especially well, and I would be lying if I filed a document claiming otherwise. I named the next one because I have just spent an entire section explaining what happens to load that gets deferred, and I would look like an idiot filing that and then asking for six more weeks. There is a version of this where I am the student and he is the teacher and the match is about which of us was correct. That version will be written by other people, at length, and I will not be reading it. Here is my version. Two men who talk exactly alike are going to find out which of them can leave a question unresolved for longer, in a room with no rope breaks, where the answer stays found once it is found. Last time I closed a document by writing that he should tap and he wouldn't. I have thought about the equivalent line for some days. He will not tap. I want that written down before the night rather than after it, so that nobody can accuse me of adjusting. Neither will I. — D. Pryce New Wave Champion Filed.