[Filed by hand. Shawn Cortez, the week of Behind Closed Doors 9. Distributed to the locker room and the federation site. No interview requested.]
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This is a short note. I want that on the record before anyone reads further, because brevity is not my habit, and the locker room — who reads me more carefully than the audience does — will understand that a short note from me is a deliberate one.
I lost to Evan Morse at Behind Closed Doors 8. I am not going to file a grievance about it. There is no grievance to file.
I asked the office, months ago, for a fair room and an honest opponent. The office gave me both. I walked to Morse before the bell and told him my opening to his face, because I said I would — and I did it to the second, because that is who I am. He beat me anyway. He took the one observation I handed him and he used it better than I used it myself. That is not the office's thumb on the scale. That is a man being correct on the night. I have spent a great deal of this federation's broadcast time demanding the room be made fair. The room was fair. I do not get to complain about the result of a fair room. So I won't.
I have no paper to file this time. The last document I wrote is folded at Evan Morse's hip, where I left it. Let him keep it.
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Now. Callum McCready.
I have watched the tape. I will tell you what I am not going to do: I am not going to write him a dossier. I wrote Morse a dossier because Morse is a system, and a system can be read. McCready is not a system. McCready is weather. You do not scout weather. You dress for it.
So, briefly, what I know. He hits hard, he hits honest, and he brings fifteen years of hands and no plan beyond using them. He has told anyone who will listen that my folder does not come into the cage. He is right. It doesn't. Neither does his.
What comes into the cage is footwork, distance, and a man who was just reminded — expensively, by a better technician than McCready will ever be — precisely where his own walls are. I am 1-2 in this federation. The two are a hardcore specialist built to erase me, and the finest clinician in the building on the one night he solved me. I am not embarrassed by either number. I am also not adding a third against a man who fights on instinct and calls it a philosophy.
He opens the show with me. One of us restarts a ledger. It will not be him.
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I have less to say than usual, Callum. You should find that more frightening than the folder.
How does it feel to want?
— "Simply" Shawn Cortez