Title: "Fifteen Years"
(Tomás is seated in what appears to be a hotel room — not a glamorous one, just a working wrestler's road room. A suitcase half-unpacked in the background. He's wearing a simple dark t-shirt. His hands are in his lap, resting naturally. He is not tense, not performing, not prepared with lines. He speaks in lightly accented English, slow enough that every word is chosen, warm enough that the slowness doesn't feel heavy. He takes his time.)
My wife asked me, before I left for this tournament — she asked me, Tomás, are you nervous? And I thought about it, because she deserves a real answer. Not the interview answer.
I told her the truth. I said: a little. Not much. But a little.
(Small smile.)
This is my fifteenth year. I've wrestled in Mexico, in Japan, in Brazil, in Germany, in the United States. I've been in front of three thousand people in a gymnasium and twenty-eight thousand people in an arena and the difference, I will tell you, is less than people think. The ring is always the same size. The ropes are always at the same height. The man across from you is always one man.
I have wrestled many men.
Some of them were frightening. Some of them were very good. Some of them were both. I have lost matches. I have won matches. I have walked out of a building knowing I was beaten fairly, and I have walked out knowing I should have done better, and I have walked out knowing the other man was simply the better wrestler on that night. All of these are real. All of these happen.
This is what fifteen years teaches you. It teaches you that a match is a match. It begins, it happens, it ends. You do your work. The work is the work.
(He shifts slightly. Hands come together, loosely.)
I know who my opponent is.
I have seen the footage that exists. I have read what has been said. I have heard the stories — the ones people tell in locker rooms, when they think someone who has not been in the ring with him is listening and they want to see the face you make. I made the face they were looking for. It is a frightening story.
But I will tell you something about frightening stories, and you can decide what to do with it.
A frightening story is still a story. It has a beginning. It has a middle. It has an end. And the wrestlers in those stories — the ones who did the frightening things — they went home afterwards. They ate dinner. They slept. They woke up. They are men. Whatever else is true, they are men, and they came from somewhere, and they learned what they know the same way all of us did — in a ring, from another man, one lesson at a time.
I do not know where my opponent learned what he knows. I do not think anyone does. But he learned it somewhere, from someone, and what was learned once can be met.
I have learned a few things myself.
(He holds up his right hand. Turns it. Examines it for a moment — not theatrically, just looking at it, the way a man looks at a tool he has used for a long time.)
I learned the armbar in Brazil, from a man in his sixties who had never wrestled professionally and did not approve of the business, but agreed to teach me because my money was good and I did not talk too much during the lessons. I learned the triangle choke in a gym in Tokyo, from a former shoot fighter who corrected my positioning with a wooden stick for six weeks until I stopped making the mistake. I learned the ankle lock — the one I use, not the one you see on television — from my grandfather, in the yard behind his house, when I was eleven years old. He told me that the ankle was a small joint with a big man at the end of it, and that this was useful information.
I have been collecting these things for a long time. I have put them somewhere safe.
(He lowers his hand.)
I am not going to tell you I am going to win on Friday. I am not going to promise. I do not make promises about matches. My father taught me not to. He said: the only man who promises a match outcome is a man who has not thought about what a match is.
What I will tell you is this. I have two daughters. My oldest is six. She has started asking me, recently, if the men I wrestle are bad men. I have told her — and I believe this, it is not something I tell her to make her feel better, it is what I actually believe — I have told her that there are not bad men in wrestling. There are men who do bad things in the ring, because it is their job to do them. Outside the ring, most of them are just men.
I do not know if that is true of my opponent on Friday. It may be that it is not true. It may be that he is the exception to the thing I told my daughter.
(A small pause. He looks directly at the camera for the first time.)
If he is, I will find out. And I will go to work. And I will use the things I have collected for fifteen years, and we will see which of them he has an answer for, and which of them he does not.
That is the whole of it. That is what a match is.
(He nods once. Settles back. The camera holds for a moment as he reaches, off-screen, for something — a cup of coffee, by the sound of it. He takes a sip. The interview is over.)