Volume Twenty-Four

VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR Training journal, current volume. Private record. Entry begun the morning after Behind Closed Doors 5. ———————————————— I am writing this entry from the same desk I wrote Volume Twenty-Three from, in the same hotel, three weeks later. The desk has been useful. I have requested the same room for future stays. I have one match this week. It is the main event of Behind Closed Doors 6 against Tomás Reyes-Montoya. The match is non-title. I have asked the office to confirm that this is correct. The office has confirmed. I want to address what this means, for my own record, before I begin the rest of the work. I have never held a world championship. I am not writing this for an audience. I do not require an audience for the observation. I am writing it because it is true, and because, in twenty-three years of this work, I have learned that the things I do not write down because they are too obvious to require writing are exactly the things I forget to think about when they begin to matter. The inaugural champion of this federation is competing against me in seven days. He will not be defending the title. I will not be challenging for the title. We will be competing for the kind of result that exists outside the question of championships, which is a kind of result I have a great deal of experience producing and which has, across the years, given me considerable professional satisfaction. I am content with the assignment. The match will be honest. But I am also going to note, for the record, that I am sixteen days from forty-two years old, and that the time during which a fighter at my stage of his career meaningfully competes for world championships is not infinite, and that a non-title match against the inaugural champion of a federation in which I am currently 1-2 is, structurally, the closest I have been to a world title in eleven years. I am not going to fight differently because of this. I am going to fight the way I have always fought. But I am going to allow myself to note that I am paying attention. ———————————————— REYES-MONTOYA Thirty-six years old. Five and zero. Lucha base out of Guadalajara, three generations of family lineage, supplemented in Brazil and Japan in his twenties. I have watched the Brazil tape carefully. I have not watched the Japan tape as carefully as I should, given that we share at least two trainers from his Tokyo period whose names appear in my own logbook. I intend to watch the Japan tape this week. What I have noted from study so far: - His grip is exceptional. He does not lose grip exchanges, which makes the conventional opening sequences against him produce information rather than position. - His hip flexibility is also exceptional and, for a fighter in his mid-thirties, mildly alarming. I will not be able to match his range of motion. I do not need to. I will need to anticipate it. - He fights at center more often than the camera shows. He uses corners as transition points, not destination points. Doctrine misread this and paid for it. - The Grapevine Ankle Lock is his finishing signature, but his actual finish — what he calls The Submission — is whichever submission opens up in the moment. He is not married to a setup. This is the hardest thing about him to prepare for, because there is no single setup to disrupt. My read: a long match favors him. A short, decisive sequence favors me. The work this week is on making sure the early exchanges produce a decisive position rather than information for him to capitalize on later. I have been drilling the Exploder Suplex into pin transitions every morning. The transition is mostly clean. It needs another fifty repetitions to be reliable under pressure. The match will be the match. I will report afterwards. ———————————————— A SEPARATE NOTE I am going to address something on broadcast this week. I have decided this. I have been deciding it for three weeks. I am writing it down here so that I do not lose the decision in the noise of the match preparation. Wone. I want to be careful about how I write this in my journal, because I want to be careful about how I say it on broadcast, and what I write here is the rough version of what I plan to read into the camera. The rough version is for me. The final version is for the federation. I have been in this work for twenty-three years. I know what training looks like. I know what a man who has been in a dojo for a decade looks like, because I have been in dojos for two of those, and I know what a man who has come up in the indies looks like, because I have wrestled them in twelve countries, and I know what a man who learned from a federation system looks like, because I worked in two such systems before they collapsed. What Wone looks like — and I am saying this now, in my journal, the way I will say it on Saturday into a federation media coordinator's microphone — is none of those. I do not mean this as an accusation. I mean it as an observation. Twenty-three years. I have watched him work in this federation. I have shared the cage with him in the quarter-final. He defeated me cleanly. I do not contest the result. What I contest, only with myself, only in private, only now in this journal, is the proposition that the man I shared a cage with arrived in this work through any method I recognize. The hex, also, he knows. The hex is new. The room was built last year. None of us have been in a room like this for more than a few months. He fights in it the way he would fight in a room he had spent ten years in. These are the two observations. They sit together. I am going to put them on the record on Saturday. I am not going to challenge him. I am not going to demand anything. I am going to ask the question, plainly, in my own voice, on broadcast. Where did the man learn his work. I am owed an answer to this question, in the professional sense, because I have spent twenty-three years producing my own answer to it, and the federation now contains a man whose answer to it is not on file. The federation may not require him to provide one. I am not asking the federation. I am asking him. He may refuse to answer. That is also informative. I will accept refusal as data. I will not require more than that on Saturday. I would like, eventually, to share a cage with him again. Not tonight. Not this week. But, I think, soon. ———————————————— THE BODY The right knee is stable. The Cormac match did it no damage. I had been concerned about the Boston Crab finish placing rotational load on the medial structure, but the medial structure has been quiet since. The replacement work in 2024 is producing returns I no longer track, which is the result I wanted from it. Left shoulder fine. Right wrist, the small adjustment from the Cormac match, resolved. Sleep adequate. Diet on plan. Tomorrow morning, the hour of stillness. The Reyes-Montoya tape after. The Exploder Suplex drills, the fifty repetitions, before lunch. — H.K.