*Diary, longhand, in a notebook he keeps in his duffel*
Been thinking about Graves for a week.
Not the way I usually think about an opponent. Usually I map the match out by what's available — what's in the aisle, what's on the entrance stage, what the apron edge looks like, which steel steps are the old thick kind versus the new hollow kind. You plan a hardcore match like you're planning a home renovation. You walk the space. You know what tools are on site.
Can't do that with this one. Graves doesn't bring tools and the Crucible doesn't hand you any. So I keep coming back to him and not the environment, which is not how I usually work.
Here's what I know. Graves is fifteen years of hurting people the exact same way. He's good at it. I watched tape on him, I watched it three times, and I'll tell you what's scary about him — it isn't the Annihilator. It isn't the size. It's that his matches all look the same and he wins most of them anyway. He's a man who has completely stopped adapting. He has one thing he does, he does it at a cellular level, and he does it to everybody. You know what's coming. You can't stop what's coming.
That's the part that reminds me of me.
I don't say that with affection. I say it with recognition. The difference between me and Graves is that I still feel something about what I do. He does not. Somewhere around his late twenties he turned off the part of his brain that registered the other human being as a human being, and he's been operating on closed circuit ever since. I know because I've met that guy before. I worked with that guy. One of them. The one I don't talk about.
Not going to talk about that one now either.
What I'm going to say is this — I carry a code. People make jokes about it. They think "hardcore guy with a code" is a contradiction. It is not. The code is why I'm still working. Without the code I am not doing this at forty. Without the code I am dead in a motel room somewhere, or I am a man who has put somebody else into a motel room somewhere, and those outcomes are not acceptable.
Graves, sitting in whatever dark room he sits in, is probably doing a monologue right now about my code. I can hear it. I can hear him saying it's a guilt protocol. He's not wrong. That's the insulting part. He's not wrong. But he thinks guilt is a weakness and I think guilt is a tool, and that's the difference between a man who's going to lose his next match and a man who isn't.
Match plan.
I'm not going to try to out-power him. That's stupid. His strength and his durability match mine on paper, and he's had fifteen years to refine exactly how he uses his. I'll take damage early. I'm built for it. Let him tire his arms out on me.
I'm going to target his knees. He has the worst knees in the locker room and he knows it. The Annihilator requires him to plant. If he can't plant, the finisher is not available. A man whose finish is not available is a man who has to improvise, and Graves has not improvised in a decade.
If the opening's there, barbed wire neckbreaker, transition into the Warzone on the apron edge. If the opening's not there, I take him twenty minutes and let him feel his own age.
One thing I'm not going to do is lose cleanly. That's the promise.
We'll see.