Behind Closed Doors: 12

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS TWELVE — we are LIVE from The Foundry, I am Cassidy Quinn, alongside me as always Reginald Graves, and Reginald, in the year I have been sat next to you I have never once seen this company open a broadcast with somebody's homework.

It opened with four sentences that were written down by four different people who have never met, Ms. Quinn, and I would like the audience to notice that not one of them was a boast. That is what this locker room has become and I do not believe the rest of this industry has caught up to it yet.

Then let us tell them what it's for. Main event, tonight, in that structure — Hideo Kuramoto defends the STRIFE Championship.

Fifteen days into the first world championship of a twenty-three-year career. Against a man with no trainer on record, no debut logged, and no verifiable origin of any kind.

One of them has a paper trail you can follow to a dojo in Tokyo with a window that does not shut. The other one has nothing at all, and he filed a document nine days ago saying he does not want that championship, that he is coming anyway, and that the answer Kuramoto has chased for a year is not going to be written down for him.

He said it would be taken under load. Mr. Kuramoto's reply, in his own journal, was four words. Good. I will take it under load, where things are true.

A year of writing. Never once in the same room.

Never once in the same frame, Ms. Quinn. And that changes tonight regardless of the result, because they have to walk down the same corridor.

That is the top of the card. Here is the rest of it, and it is stacked.

Camila Ferreira stops asking this office questions. Four months of counting, a night with Pagan DuHast that she has publicly declined to call a moral victory, and the earrings are in a drawer — and tonight Diamante enters the women's division against Marisol Reyes, who filed a document this week asking what seventeen years of doing everything correctly was actually for.

Nought and four against one and four. On paper it is the least consequential thing on this card. In practice, Ms. Quinn, it is two women arguing about whether the correct way is the real way, and one of them is going to be answered on the mat in front of eight thousand people.

Dorian Graves — no relation—

Thank you.

—three straight defeats and a shoulder his own coach said publicly he was refusing to rehabilitate. That letter is on the site. Everybody has read it. And he meets Callum McCready, who has never won a match in this company and who has never once been finished in a way that meant anything.

And there is a portion of that letter concerning what Mr. Graves has been watching on a laptop in Birmingham, which I have decided I am not going to characterise until the match is over.

Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin is one fight away from a championship and she is taking a fight before it. Kira Volkov, nought and three, who published a four-page document this week in two languages taking apart the exact sentence you have said about her on this desk—

I am aware.

—and Tomás Reyes-Montoya is back in that cage for the first time since he lost the belt. Eight and one, no rematch demanded, no complaint filed. He goes through Shawn Cortez first, and Cortez has already published a scouting report on him and handed him a copy.

Which brings me to the New Wave Champion, who has requested the cage tonight and been granted it, and I want to be very clear that this was not an office booking. He asked. In writing. Through the appropriate channel. He is fifteen days into the first title of his life and he has something he wishes to say in a normal speaking voice to eight thousand people who hate him.

And I am told JC Barr has one piece of business.

One. He has asked for the time immediately before the championship, which he does not do often and has never once done without a reason.

STRIFE Nation — thirty-one thousand words in a fortnight. Everything anybody has claimed about themselves in this company gets carried through that door tonight, and the door only opens once.

Let us find out which of them wrote something true.

Behind Closed Doors Twelve starts NOW.

That robe is thirty years old. Her aunt made it by hand for a card in Guadalajara that nobody remembers, and she has mended the hem four times herself, and the last time she filed anything with this federation she was doing exactly that while her uncle told her the truth over a laptop.

One and four, Ms. Quinn.

I know the number.

I raise it because she raised it. She filed a document this week in which she said out loud that she has seventeen years of foundation under her and one win to show for it, and then asked what it was for. I have been on this desk a long time and I have never heard a competitor put the case against herself that precisely.

No earrings.

No earrings.

Four months of that woman putting diamond studs in her ears and daring this federation to enforce a rule it wasn't enforcing anywhere else — and she said in writing that the invoice was paid and they were going in a drawer, and STRIFE Nation, look at her. They are in a drawer.

And I would caution anybody who has decided that means something soft has happened. She wrote — and I have it in front of me — anyone who thinks this makes me easier to fight is welcome to find out. Nought and four, entering the women's division for the first time, having spent her last night in that cage giving away seventeen inches and a hundred and sixty-eight pounds to Pagan DuHast and refusing to step backwards. I would not describe that woman as easier.

She hasn't even — Reginald, there was no first exchange, she just started—

There is never going to be a first exchange with this one. She has fought five times in this federation and not once has she permitted anybody a settling period. Muay thai from fourteen years old, in a place where the settling period was not on offer either.

Every time she reaches, she's paying for it.

That is the arrangement. She reaches, she pays. She has a route to a submission from almost any position on that mat and it does not matter in the slightest until she can be somewhere long enough to start.

There it is! There is nothing in that corner of this cage but padding, there is no rope, there is no break—

There. Watch it again on the replay. That is the entire argument this match is having. Ms. Reyes did the correct thing, in the correct position, with the correct hold — and the other one simply refused to be in it. There is no technique in that escape. There is not one instructional element to it. It worked.

It cost her the shoulder.

It cost her some of the shoulder. She has the rest of it.

THAT'S IT — that is the same punch, STRIFE Nation, that is the exact punch, and Marisol Reyes just got out at two!

How.

She got out of the finish. She got out of the finish and she is 0-4 and she got out of the finish—

She got out of it because she has never once been in a room where getting out of it was optional. Ms. Quinn, I have spent this entire broadcast being asked to feel something about seventeen years of instruction, and I would like to enter into the record that the woman who taught herself is currently ahead.

She's got five — she's got five and the last one is RIGHT THERE—

SHE TOOK IT! First time she saw it — she did not check, she did not confirm, she did not ask anybody's permission, she just TOOK IT, and Marisol Reyes has her second win in this federation!

...Half a second.

What?

That is the entire difference, Ms. Quinn, and I want the audience to understand that I am not being poetic. At Behind Closed Doors 10 she had that hold five anchors deep on the champion of this division and she paused for approximately half a second to confirm the last arm, and Lacey Drummond headbutted her way out of it and beat her. Tonight she did not pause. Every other thing about her is identical. Same hold, same hands, same seventeen years.

I have been telling this audience for a year that technique is a slow religion for people who are frightened of fighting. I would like it noted that I have now had to say otherwise twice in one month and I am not enjoying the pattern.

...Did she just—

She looked at the tattoo. Yes. I would advise the audience to remember that, because that woman does not do anything by accident and she has just spent two seconds of a defeat learning something.

Two and four. And STRIFE Nation, I know what that record looks like on a page, and I am telling you that the woman standing in that cage just answered a question she asked her uncle in a garage in Monterrey nine days ago, and the answer was yes.

The answer was seis, Ms. Quinn. Let her have the word. She earned the word.

New Wave Champion. Fifteen days.

Fifteen days, and I would remind the audience that he has asked for this. The office did not book this segment. He requested the cage, in writing, through the appropriate channel, which is a sentence I have never had to say about anybody else on this roster.

I address this audience for approximately thirty seconds before every match I have in this federation. I have done it eleven times. Tonight is not thirty seconds and it is not before a match, and I would like to account for both of those departures before I say anything else, because I am aware that people notice when I deviate and I would rather explain it than be interpreted.

At Behind Closed Doors 11 I did not speak.

This was reported on the broadcast as significant. Mr. Graves said, at the time, that he had begun to suspect there was nothing about that night which required narration. That was correct. I had filed nine hundred words on a hotel desk in a document that was not mine, and everything I had to say was in the margins of it, and a man who says a thing twice has doubted it once.

He's confirming it. He watched the broadcast.

He has watched every broadcast. He has watched them the way other people watch tape of themselves.

So. The result.

Twenty-two minutes fifty-one seconds. Referee stoppage. The Crossroads, applied at the centre of the cage, correctly, with both legs hooked and nothing within eight feet of the man in any direction. Desmond Pryce did not submit. He did not submit at fifteen seconds and he did not submit at twenty and his hand did not move at any point, and the official lifted his wrist and let it fall twice and then took the decision out of his hands.

That is a legitimate finish. I want to be extremely precise about this, because the alternative reading is available and it is wrong. This federation recognises pinfall, submission, knockout and stoppage. It recognises nothing else and it needs nothing else. The stoppage is not a lesser object. I am the New Wave Champion of STRIFE and I hold this championship correctly and there is no asterisk on it that anybody in this building is entitled to draw.

And I did not get an answer.

I had The Crossroads on him at sixteen minutes. I let it go.

I have been asked about that eleven times in fifteen days and I have declined eleven times, and I am going to answer it once, here, and then I am not going to answer it again. I let it go because I had a stoppage and I did not have an answer, and those are different objects, and only one of them has ever been of any use to me.

Six minutes later I had it again. And I did not let it go. And I still did not get an answer — I got the same object I had declined, handed to me by a man in a striped shirt doing his job properly.

So the question I went in there to have settled is not settled. It is where it was. It is simply now standing behind a championship.

...He is doing it to himself.

Doing what?

Ms. Quinn, in May of this year that man filed a document about the inaugural champion of this company and he called it Provisional Custody. He has spent his entire tenure here arguing that a result you cannot explain is a result you do not own. He is now standing in the middle of that cage applying his own instrument to his own reign, in public, on the fifteenth day of it, and nobody made him come out here.

There is one further matter and then I will give the building back its evening.

When I marked that document I stopped at the top right corner of the first page. That is where a grade goes. Everyone who has ever been handed a paper back knows the place, and everybody who has ever handed one back has felt the specific weight of writing in it.

I put the pen on the corner. The federation published the footage unedited, as I requested, so you have all watched me not write in it.

I have been asked what the mark was going to be. That is the wrong question and it is beneath the people asking it. The mark was not withheld. The mark was unavailable. You cannot grade a paper whose conclusion has not been reached, and his had not been reached, and — as of fifteen days ago — neither has mine.

The corner is still blank. I did not take it home as a keepsake. It is in an envelope with two words on the front and it has not been opened, and I am not going to say anything further about that.

He never sent it.

He never sent it.

Reginald, he wrote D. PRYCE on that envelope in front of a camera he had aimed at himself and then he did not send it—

I heard him, Ms. Quinn.

So. The terms of this reign, stated once, in the cage, in front of the people who will be checking.

I will defend this championship against whoever the office selects, on whatever date it selects, without negotiation and without conditions. I will not be choosing my opponents. I have spent a year in this federation insisting that a competitor who chose his own formation must answer for it every time he is asked, for as long as anybody keeps asking, and a champion who selects the questions has stopped being asked anything.

What I require is narrower and it is not in the office's gift. I require the result to be an answer. I would like whoever comes to understand that in advance, because it changes what the match is for. I am not going to be defending an object. I am going to be attempting to obtain something, and the championship will be in the room while I do it.

He's holding it like the notebook again.

He will always hold it like the notebook. That is what it is to him. Ms. Quinn — I have spent a great deal of airtime telling this audience that man is better than them, and I would like to add a refinement tonight, because I do not believe I have been precise enough.

He is not better than you because he wins. He has lost three times in this building. He is better than you because he came out here, fifteen days into the first championship of his life, to tell eight thousand people who despise him that he has not yet earned the right to be certain about it.

You may boo. You are booing a man who is grading himself harder than any of you would dare to.

Nought and five. And STRIFE Nation, listen to that — that is not a courtesy reaction. They actually want him.

They want him because he is the only person on this roster who has never once asked them for anything, which I regard as a competitive deficiency and they regard as a personality. He is nought and five, Ms. Quinn. Five matches. Nobody has ever finished him decisively and he has never tapped, and both of those facts are worth precisely nothing on a record.

Three straight defeats. Kuramoto, Dlamini, Cortez — and his coach filed a letter this week, and it is on the federation site, and it says the left shoulder is at eighty-two per cent and climbing because Dorian Graves has been doing the eleven minutes of rehab that he refused to do for three months.

It says a great deal more than that and everybody in this building has read it. I intend to say nothing about the other portion of it before the bell. I would simply invite the audience to keep it in mind.

He gave up eight inches and sixty pounds and he did that on purpose.

He has no other option and he has never wanted one.

There it is.

Yes.

That is the first time since Behind Closed Doors 8 that man has thrown anything meaningful off the left side and expected it to arrive—

He did not expect it. Watch it again. He did not think about it at all. That is the difference between a joint that has been rehabilitated and a joint that has been managed, and it is the difference between the last three months and tonight.

That is the correct response and it is also, I think, the most disconcerting thing about the version of this man we are watching tonight. Nothing McCready does is registering as an insult. He is not being provoked. He is being observed.

TWO! Callum McCready had two on a former main event of this company—

He had two. He has had two before. There is a reason it is nought and five, Ms. Quinn, and it is not effort.

IT HELD. STRIFE Nation — it held, the arm held, and I do not think that man knew for certain until right now that it would.

He knew. Eighty-two per cent and eleven minutes three times a week is not a hope, it is an arithmetic. But I take the point. There is a difference between the number and the moment the number is asked a question.

What is he — finish it, what is he doing—

...Ms. Quinn.

What?

The letter. His coach's letter. The part I said I would say nothing about before the bell.

...He wanted the second and a half.

He wanted the second and a half. He has been watching Scottish footage of that man on a laptop in Birmingham for a fortnight, and the frame he keeps returning to is not the betrayal — it is the moment before, and now he has stood in the middle of that cage and produced one himself, live, with the original still in the building.

Reginald, that's ghoulish.

It is research, Ms. Quinn, and I do not expect that to be a comfort.

Somebody needs to tell me what that was.

Nobody is going to, Ms. Quinn. That is rather the point of him.

They said you'd already gone.

You're not on the card.

So you drove here. To a show you're not on.

I've been trying to work out how to ask you something for two weeks and I have not come up with a good way, so I'm going to ask it badly.

At eleven minutes you were down. You went into the plate housing at corner two and you did not get up straight away, and the referee stepped between us with his back turned, and I had a free shot at you.

I didn't take it.

And then you saw me not take it. And then you hit me harder than you'd hit me all night, and eighteen seconds later I was flat on my back and you were rolling out under the bottom rope and you did not look at that cage once on your way up the ramp.

Not once. I sat there and watched the whole ramp.

Here's the question.

I'm twenty-four. I've been doing this four years. Everything I can do, I could do the first month — I could always jump, I've been able to jump since I was fifteen years old on a runway in Johannesburg with a coach who told me I was the best thing he'd ever put a tape measure next to.

And I don't know what I'd be if it had been harder.

You started in function rooms at nineteen in a van that smelled of wet dog. Nine matches in this company and you have won three of them, and you have never once been finished in a way anybody would call decisive, and you're sitting on a tailgate in the rain wrapping your hands for a show you are not on.

I want to know whether the hard way is the thing that makes it real. Because if it is, then I don't have it, and I'd rather find out from somebody who does than keep guessing at three in the morning.

That's it. That's the question.

...He gave him the tape.

He gave him a roll of tape, Ms. Quinn, in order to leave a car park. I would counsel the audience against making it into a ceremony.

He could have said nothing at all. He could have got in the van. He has never given anybody anything in this building — not a word, not a filing, not one line to a producer in twelve months.

And he still has not. He answered a question about whether the hard way is real by handing a young man an object and going home, which I would remind you is not an answer, it is an errand.

Reginald. It is exactly an answer.

...It is an economical one.

Nobody has ever wrapped that young man's wrists but somebody else. STRIFE Nation, watch it back — he has a coat with gold lining that he drops on the floor without looking at it, and he is standing in a loading bay holding a roll of dirty tape like he doesn't know what it weighs.

I will grant you one thing and then we are moving on, because there is a fight to call. Cormac Healy did not notice what he did back there. He will not think about it in the van and he will not think about it tomorrow.

Mr. Dlamini is going to think about it for a considerable while. And that asymmetry, Ms. Quinn, is the only interesting thing in this federation nobody is currently booking.

Nought and three. And STRIFE Nation, if you have not read what that woman filed this week, go and read it, because it is the single most honest document anybody has put on that website.

I am going to have to address this.

You are.

I said on this desk, more than once, that Ms. Volkov had never been beaten in a way that told anybody anything. She has now filed four pages taking that sentence apart with a pen, in two languages, and enumerating the three separate mechanisms by which she has lost — and she concluded, correctly, that three different failures are a worse diagnosis than three identical ones. She did not ask for sympathy. She priced her own position and handed me the invoice.

I withdraw the claim. On air, before the bell, so nobody can say I waited to see what happened.

One fight from a championship. Fifteen years, three continents, two retirements, and she has said out loud, in public, for the first time in her career, that she wants it — and the last woman standing between her and that match is a woman who has read every word of it.

Standard rules again. No stipulation. Which means, for the second consecutive show, a hardcore fighter enters this cage without a single implement she is fluent in — and this time against somebody whose entire profession is what happens when there is nothing to reach.

That's not the same fighter.

No, it is not, and I would very much like to know why.

Decide where the damage goes. That is the third time this federation has watched her do that and it is the second time in a fortnight.

She's in trouble. Reginald, she is in real trouble and it is nine minutes—

She is in trouble and she has energy, Ms. Quinn, and I want the audience to hold both of those at once, because I have finally worked out what she is doing and I do not believe anybody expected it from this particular woman.

She is fighting to a schedule.

...She can't. She said she can't. One span and it's at the front — she has said it in writing and she said it to Saoirse Fallon in a gym in Dublin—

She said it. And then Ms. Volkov published a document containing the sentence I do not need to beat her in the first twelve minutes; I need to still be there at the twelfth minute, and Ms. Ó'Súilleabháin read it, the same as everybody else did.

And then — and this is the part I want on the record — she read the rest of it. Failure One. Sera Voss did not beat Kira Volkov with strength. Sera Voss beat her with time, because Ms. Volkov prepares techniques and does not prepare a schedule. She wrote that down herself. She put her own first failure in a public document nine days ago and the woman she is fighting tonight is currently using it.

She published it again.

She published it again. And she will be furious about it later, and she will write it down, because that is who she is.

It's on. It is on and it is centre and there is no wall, there is no rope, there is nothing—

Then this is the whole thing. Ms. Quinn — that hold is named for a principle. She constructs suffering the way an engineer constructs a bridge, and the name of that finish is the point at which a structure stops holding. She has spent thirty years learning to locate it in other people.

...She is looking for it.

Looking for what?

The point. She has the hold, she has it correctly, she has it at the only place in this building where it cannot be escaped, and she is searching, Ms. Quinn, because the thing she came here to find is not where it is supposed to be.

That woman wrote in her own document that she has been beaten three times and never once broken, and that Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin is one of the few people in this building who knows the difference.

She has just found out how few.

SHE'S GOT GAS. STRIFE Nation, at fifteen minutes, on a night she needed to have it — she has never once in her career had anything after twelve and she has something now!

SHE'S GOING TO THE CHAMPIONSHIP! Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin, five and one, and she did not do it the way she has ever done anything — she budgeted, she waited, she went past the twelfth minute on purpose and she had something on the other side of it!

She found a second thing.

Say that again.

At Behind Closed Doors 11 she beat Lacey Drummond with the only asset she had left, which was knowing what a body does three seconds before it commits. Tonight that asset was worth nothing, against an opponent it does not work on, and she went and got another one at thirty-eight years of age in the fortnight between two shows.

I have spent a year telling this audience that experience is sentiment. I struck that from the record a fortnight ago. Tonight I would like to add that I was not merely wrong, I was wrong in an interesting way, and I intend to think about it.

...She's never done that.

Nought and four.

Nought and four, and I would remind this audience that she published a sentence this week which said that her three losses had three separate causes and that this was worse than one cause. She now has a fourth, and it is a new one, and it is that she wrote her plan down again.

She will file that. She will file it in two languages and she will not soften a word of it and she will be more dangerous afterwards than she is tonight. I would advise this division to pay attention to the pattern, because I have finally started to.

Where's the champion?

Gone. And I would like the audience to note the time, because I have been watching that seat all match and she left at twelve minutes.

She left before the finish.

She left the moment the interesting part happened. Ms. Quinn — she did not come here to find out who won. She came to find out what that woman does at the twelfth minute, and at the twelfth minute she found out, and she had no further business in the building.

Ms. Ó'Súilleabháin.

Sera.

I read your document.

All of it. Twice — the second time on the Tuesday, with notes. I am telling you that in person because I wrote in my own filing that I had read it and that the correct response to somebody being honest in public at a cost to themselves is not to pretend you did not, and it would be poor practice to write that down and then not do it when the opportunity arrived.

So. I read it. I will be using it.

That is the whole of what I came to say and I have now said it.

You left.

Yes.

Twelve minutes.

Twelve minutes and about forty seconds. I would have to check.

You didn't see the end of it.

No.

Ms. Volkov published one sentence about what she intended to do. She said she did not need to beat you in the first twelve minutes, she needed to still be there at the twelfth. I did not come to find out who won. Neither of those results would have told me anything I could use — you are the number one contender either way and the match is made either way.

I came to find out what you do at the twelfth minute. At the twelfth minute you were still solvent, which you have never been, and you had budgeted for it, which you have never done, and you got that from a document that somebody else made a mistake in.

That is the entire piece of information. It was produced at twelve minutes forty. There was nothing available after it and I had a flight.

Fair enough.

Sera.

I read yours as well.

The schedule. The week of this show. It's up on the same site as mine, so — aye. Everybody read it.

You wrote that you've never defended anything. That eleven years of your working life have been arrive, compete, depart, and that the method has never once required you to stay in the room afterwards, and that you're very good at an empty interval and this one has an object in it.

I'm not going to tell you that was brave to write down. You'd hate it and it'd be patronising and you'd be right on both counts.

I'm going to tell you the one thing I actually know, and then I'm going to go and get this eyebrow seen to.

You left tonight at twelve minutes because there was nothing left in it for you. That's not a criticism — I'd probably have done the same at your age and I'd have been proud of myself for it.

In a fortnight you'll be in there with me. And somewhere around twelve minutes you'll have got whatever it is you came for, same as tonight.

And there'll be no door, love.

No count-out. No walking away. No leaving at twelve because the useful part's over. That cage was built by a man who took the exits out on purpose, and you have never once in eleven years had to find out what you are after the information runs out.

I have. Every fight I've had since I was thirty-four.

Safe flight.

...She nodded.

She nodded.

Reginald, that is the thing she does before the bell. That is the ready nod. She just did it in a hallway with her coat on, walking out of the building, fourteen days before the match.

I am aware of what it is, Ms. Quinn, I have been calling her matches for a year.

Then say what it means.

...It means the assessment was not finished when she left her seat.

She went there tonight to collect one item and she collected it at twelve minutes forty and she was walking to a car. And a thirty-eight-year-old woman with blood in her eyebrow stopped her in a service corridor and handed her a second one, unasked, for nothing, out of what I can only describe as courtesy — and the champion of this division has just stood in a hallway and processed it.

There'll be no door.

There will be no door. It is written on the wall in the back in letters a foot high and every person on this roster walks past it eleven times a night, and I do not believe that woman has ever once had cause to read it.

—and the reason you're in this room at all, which nobody has asked me but I'm going to say it anyway, is that I have never once claimed something in this federation and then declined to show my work. Eleven months. Five documents. You can go and check every one of them.

Katrina.

File note. Reyes-Montoya, Tomás. Eight and one. Submission. Thirty-six. Four hours of tape reviewed Tuesday and Wednesday, plus his six published filings, plus the No Escape broadcast twice.

Four recommendations.

Read them.

You've read them.

The audience hasn't.

One. He doesn't chase. Don't build your night around getting him to. Every man who has lost to him has spent the first five minutes trying to make him lunge and the last ten getting taken apart by a guy who never had to.

Two. Fight the grip, not the takedown. The finish is set up between forty and ninety seconds before it happens, in a position that doesn't look like offense. If you're defending the throw you're already late.

Three. Make the floor expensive. He shrinks the room a step at a time and doesn't give the step back. You can't out-move him, because he isn't moving. You can make each step cost something and hope the arithmetic lands before the grip does.

All three of which I'm taking. Verbatim. She wrote them, I'm using them, I've said so in a public document and I'll say it again here — the tape work in this operation is hers and it always has been.

Four.

Four. Stop telling them what you're going to do.

There it is.

You asked me to read them.

I did. Keep going. Give them the whole thing, she's been sitting on it for four months—

Behind Closed Doors 8. You told Evan Morse your opening, in person, before the bell, as a professional courtesy. He broke your first sequence at strike three and beat you in nineteen minutes with a condensed version of his own.

Behind Closed Doors 8, again — the document. You published, on a federation website, a paragraph identifying his half-second reset as an exploitable tell. He read it. He faked it. He beat you with the fake.

This week you filed seventeen hundred words on Reyes-Montoya, including three principles, one of which is that you intend to tell him what you're attempting before the bell. Which he has now read. Along with everybody in that locker room, and every opponent you will have for the rest of your career in this company.

Four is: stop.

No.

I know.

I want to be clear about why, because 'no' on its own makes me sound like I haven't thought about it and I've thought about almost nothing else since June.

She's right. That's the first thing. She is professionally, demonstrably right — it has cost me two matches and she identified the mechanism before either of them happened and I have the emails. If you're keeping score at home, keep it honestly: the woman standing at that table has been correct and ignored, twice, in writing, with dates on it.

And I'm still not doing it.

Because the only thing I have ever had that this locker room does not have is that I say the thing first. Everybody in this building is very good. Kuramoto is very good. Morse is very good. The man I'm fighting in nine minutes has been very good for fifteen years and his father was very good before him. I am not going to out-good them.

What I've got is that I put it on the record in advance and then go and try to do it in front of eight thousand people who watched me say it. That's not courage and I'd like nobody to mistake it for courage. It's a constraint. I built it on purpose because I am exactly vain enough that I will not be seen failing at something I announced, and that has made me better than I would otherwise have been.

Take it away and I'm a guy with good footwork and a wall problem.

You want me to say you're right.

I'd take it.

You're not.

You're not right, Shawn, you're consistent, and you've talked yourself into believing those are the same thing because one of them is a compliment. Reyes-Montoya doesn't need a tell. He's not Morse. He isn't going to weaponize what you tell him, he's going to nod and shake your hand and then close the room a step at a time exactly the way he's closed it eight times, and your announcement will be a thing that happened before a fight rather than a thing that mattered in one.

So it probably costs you nothing tonight. That's my actual assessment and you can have it for free.

It costs you eventually. And when it does I'd like the file to show I said so.

Noted, dated, initialled. Same as the last two.

One more thing and then I want the room.

There is going to be somebody in that building tonight who says I've got a win over Hideo Kuramoto and that it means I belong in this conversation. It does not. I beat a version of that man who had not been to Tokyo and had not had his trailing foot corrected, and I put that in my own document because imprecision in my own favour is the only kind I find embarrassing.

But I did beat him. And the man in the other locker room did not.

Shawn.

She was on camera by herself.

The long-suffering Ms. Randall—

Reginald, that is the third time I've had to do this. She is not long-suffering. She is a fight manager with fifteen years in the industry who has been right about her client twice in writing before it happened, and 'long-suffering' is what men in this business call a woman who is correct on a schedule.

...Withdrawn. Second withdrawal of the evening, which I would like noted as a personal record.

She has never been alone in a shot. Not once, not in eleven months — it's a choice she made, she has said so to me directly. She does not want to be a character in his story.

And she has just been left in one, by a man who walked out of the room first.

Ms. Quinn, I would gently observe that when a fighter announces everything he intends to do, and the only person in the building who ever tells him no starts writing her objections down and dating them — that is not a partnership having a disagreement. That is a professional building a file.

For what?

For the day she needs one.

Three and three. And STRIFE Nation, whatever you think of the man, go and read what he filed this week, because he opened it by volunteering that the last document he wrote publicly got used to beat him, and then said he was going to keep writing them anyway.

He also, in section three, agreed in print with every word his opponent said about his own deficiency. I have covered this sport a long time. I have never seen a competitor concede the case against him in advance and then argue that it does not decide the question. I find it either the most sophisticated thing on this roster or an extremely elaborate way of losing, and I have not settled which.

First time in that cage since he lost the championship. Eight and one. And he wrote this week that he is not owed a rematch, that it was taken correctly by a man who bowed to him before and after and meant both, and that he intends to get in the line and go through whoever is in it.

Starting tonight with a man he has described, in writing, as somebody who has never fought an opponent that does not need to catch him. I would remind the audience that Mr. Cortez agreed with that assessment in public and called it the most accurate line anybody has written about him.

He told him. Whatever it was, he told him, exactly like he said he would in that document, and Katrina Randall told him not to and he did it anyway.

He filed a principle and then honoured it in front of eight thousand people at a cost his own manager has twice recorded a written objection to. Ms. Quinn, I do not like the man. I would like that on the record before what I am about to say. That was the single most professional thing that has happened in this building tonight.

He's not engaging.

He is engaging with something. Watch where his eyes are. Not the feet. Not the hips. He is looking at hands that are not currently doing anything, which is the second recommendation in Ms. Randall's file note and which he has decided is the whole night.

He's had to change something.

Yes. And it has taken five and a half minutes and it has cost him nothing yet, and I want the audience to be extremely clear that nothing whatsoever has gone wrong for the former champion. He has simply been made to do arithmetic he was not expecting to do.

And that is the tax. He wrote that the ankle lock is not expected to finish — that the opponent is expected to spend something escaping it, and that Mr. Reyes-Montoya counts what is spent. He knew it was coming. He wrote it down. He paid it anyway, because knowing about a bill does not settle it.

That's it. That is the grip, and if he's read his own homework he knows exactly what it means—

What is he doing.

He's standing still. Reginald, he is standing still, in the middle of that cage, with that man's hands on him—

HE LET HIM CATCH HIM! He let him take the grip — he stood there and gave him the grip, that was a PRICE, he paid for that position—

That is what he said to him before the bell.

You don't know that.

I have watched Katrina Randall's face for eight minutes and I know it, Ms. Quinn. She stopped writing.

He has taken that off tape. He has taken a man's escape off a match he was not in and used it in a championship-calibre position and it worked, and that is not luck, Ms. Quinn, that is a person who watches this federation for a living.

...He made him chase.

He made him chase. Eight and one, fifteen years, and the one thing every scouting document in this company opens with is that the man does not chase — and Shawn Cortez spent eighteen minutes and both of his legs buying half a step.

Four and three.

Four and three, and I want to be extremely precise about what has and has not been proved tonight, because the audience is about to be told a story that is not true.

His wall problem was not solved. It was not tested. Mr. Reyes-Montoya does not use the wall — he closes the room to the centre — and so the hole in that man is exactly the size it was this morning, and Static and Cormac Healy will both have watched this and will both have noticed.

What was proved is narrower and it is worse for the rest of you. He said what he was going to do, out loud, to the man he was going to do it to, with his own manager on record objecting in writing — and then he went and did it in front of eight thousand witnesses. That is the fourth recommendation, declined, in public, correctly.

He didn't say it.

No.

He has said that over every man he has ever beaten in this building. He said it over Dorian Graves in this exact spot a fortnight ago—

He wrote this week that the thing his opponent filed was the best piece of writing anybody has put on that website, including his own, and that he did not enjoy having to include himself in that. I would suggest, Ms. Quinn, that a man does not deliver a catchphrase over somebody he has just publicly described that way, and that he knew it before he opened his mouth, and that is why he did not open it.

...He put that in the document.

Section two. He touches the top of the doorframe on the way out of a room. I note it here because it is fixed, it is unconscious, and a man with one genuinely unconscious habit probably has others that are less charming.

He has just watched him do it after a defeat, Ms. Quinn, which is the one condition under which it had never been observed.

And it still happened.

And it still happened. Which is either the most reassuring thing about that man or the most useful, and I would imagine the gentleman in the corner is currently deciding which.

Immediately before a championship is defended. That is not an accident — he has never once opened his mouth in front of a title match without a reason.

He has one piece of business. He told the production office he had one piece of business and he asked for the time and he got it, which he does not always ask for and always gets.

This'll be quick. There's a fight after this and I'm not gonna stand in front of it.

We've run two shows in this company that had a name on the poster instead of a number. Two. That's it, in the whole history of the place.

First one was Ignition. That's not a clever name and I didn't spend long on it. You gotta start something, so we started it, and I put the word on the poster that means you started it.

Second one was No Escape. I did spend a while on that one." He looks around at the wall. "Because that's not a stipulation and it's not a tagline. That's a description of a building. I took the count-outs out. I took the door and I made it one door. I priced a tag rope for the top third and I told the guy no, because a rope up there is a handle on the wall, and a handle on the wall is a thing a man can grab when the fight starts costing him more than he thought it would.

I've been in cages. Not this shape. But cages.

And the thing about a cage is that it don't care what you told everybody on the way in. That's all it is. That's the whole invention. You can be whoever you want in the parking lot.

So. Third one.

Two shows from now — after Behind Closed Doors 13, after Behind Closed Doors 14 — this company runs a special, and I'm naming it tonight, two shows early, on purpose, because I want everybody in that locker room to have time to do something about it.

It's called PROOF.

Now I gotta explain the word, because if I don't, somebody's gonna decide it means what they want it to mean and I'll be reading about it on the internet.

Here's what I've got in this company right now.

I've got a man who won't tell anybody where he learned to fight. I've got a man who's spent a year trying to make him. I've got a New Wave Champion who came out here two hours ago and told eight thousand people he hasn't earned the right to be sure about his own title. I've got a woman from Novosibirsk who publishes her losses in two languages with the reasons written under 'em. I've got a guy who files four-page scouting reports on his own opponents and then hands 'em the report.

I have never seen a locker room like this and I've been around some. Every one of 'em writes. Every one of 'em argues. There's more paper coming out of that back hallway in a month than I saw in six years of fighting.

And I want to be real clear, because somebody's gonna get this wrong — I love it. I'm not up here to complain about it. That's the best thing about this place and I'd put our record up against anybody's.

But a document is a claim.

That's all it is. Don't matter how good it is. Don't matter how honest. A man writes down what he is, and what he can do, and what he's gonna do to you — and it's a claim, and it stays a claim, until it gets settled in a room where claims don't work.

That room's right here. That's what I built it for.

So here's the one rule for PROOF, and it's the only one.

The office ain't booking it.

I'm not making that card. Nobody in the back is making that card. There will not be a single match on PROOF that I put together in an office because it looked good on a poster.

You want a fight on that show, you say so. Out loud, on the record, where people can hear you — a segment, a filing, a camera in a hallway, I don't care. You name who you want. And then that person says yes, out loud, on the record, and it goes on the card and I'll put it on the poster myself.

Nobody says anything, there's no card, and I'll run a highlight reel and refund the building.

You've got two shows.

That is — Reginald, that is the entire card in the hands of the roster.

It is the most interesting thing this office has done since it declined to install a rope, and I want the audience to appreciate what has actually been engineered here, because it is not generosity.

Every competitor in this company now has to state, in public, who they believe they can beat. Not who they resent. Not who they have a history with. Who they can beat. And the person named has to answer in front of everybody. There is nowhere in that structure to hide an opinion of yourself.

Some of them won't ask.

Some of them won't ask. Ms. Quinn, that is the design. That is not a flaw in it.

Last thing and then I'm gone.

There's a championship getting defended here in a few minutes by a guy who's been doing this twenty-three years, against a guy who's got no record anybody can find. One of 'em has a paper trail you could follow back to a dojo in Tokyo with a window that doesn't shut. The other one's got nothing. Not a trainer. Not a debut. Nothing.

And in about ten minutes neither of those things is gonna matter even a little bit.

That's the word. That's why it's on the poster.

PROOF. Two shows away, no card, and every single person in that locker room just got handed a pen.

And a mirror, Ms. Quinn, which is the part that is going to hurt some of them. Now — if the audience will permit me — I have spent a year waiting for the next ten minutes and I would like everybody to be quiet.

That is the first thing you have said to me that I did not have to read.

...I don't know what I just watched.

Neither do I, and I am going to sit in this chair for a moment and be honest with the audience about that, because I do not believe I have ever said it before.

He put the belt down.

He put the belt down on a road case and stepped away from it, and I understand that one, Ms. Quinn. That man has said in his own journal that he has never in his life learned anything durable from a sentence. Wone filed a document saying he does not want that championship. Hideo Kuramoto does not believe sentences. So he took the sentence and turned it into an object and put it in a corridor and watched.

And?

And he was telling the truth. I have watched that footage four times in the last ninety seconds. There is nothing in that man's face. He does not want it.

Reginald — the glove.

I know.

He has worn those gloves in every appearance he has made in this company. Every entrance, every match, every backstage shot. It is in his file as a ritual rather than a garment and he took one off in a hallway to shake a man's hand.

I know, Ms. Quinn.

Then tell me what it means.

...No.

I have spent a year on this desk explaining things to this audience and I have been right about most of them. I am not going to guess at that one on the way to the bell. Neither of those men explained a single thing they just did, and I have a suspicion that is the most respectful either of them has ever been to the other.

He said one sentence.

He said one sentence, and it was about medium. Which is the only thing those two have ever actually disagreed about, and they have just settled it in a hallway with a piece of leather and a bare hand, nine minutes before the STRIFE Championship.

Everything else gets settled in the cage. Where it was always going to be settled. Ms. Quinn — I would like the audience to be quiet now.

...He's not going to his corner.

Ms. Quinn.

What is he doing?

I want you to be quiet for a moment, because I believe I have just understood something and I would like to be certain before I say it out loud.

He's allowed to stand there?

He is allowed to stand anywhere inside that structure that he likes. There is no infraction. There is no count. There is no mechanism in this federation's rulebook that requires a man to occupy a particular six feet of padding before a bell, because until approximately forty seconds ago there was no conceivable reason anybody would want to.

Here it comes.

Here it comes. And I want everybody watching this broadcast to put their phone down.

I have said a sentence on this broadcast, on and off, for a year. I have said it during entrances, I have said it in previews, I said it twice at No Escape. The Crucible has six corners. He has counted them every time. None of us know what happens when one of them is missing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to formally withdraw the word none.

Somebody knows.

Somebody worked it out. Twenty-three years of walking a floor before you step on it, and a man in a dojo in Tokyo with a window that does not close, and he worked out what that count is for. He has not written a document about it. He has not said it on camera. He has come to this building tonight and he has stood in the fourth one.

He's not going for anything.

He is going for a great many things. None of them are the finish.

Somebody has to — Reginald, the referee has to do something—

The referee is doing his job perfectly and there is nothing in his job that covers this. Nothing being done to that man is illegal. Every single hold is inside the rules of this federation, applied correctly, by a technician of the first rank.

That is what has changed. Not the legality. The ceiling.

Ms. Quinn — for a year I have watched that man walk into a cage and count six corners and then compete like somebody working inside terms. I have described him as the immaculate executioner of this federation and I have always meant immaculate as the operative word. Tonight he counted three.

What—

He is restarting it.

In the middle of the—

He is restarting the count, Ms. Quinn.

Four. Five. Six. He has gone and got the three he was denied and he has done them in the correct order in the middle of a match he is winning.

It is not a reading of the room.

Then what is it?

It is a contract, Ms. Quinn. It has an order because contracts have an order. It cannot be skipped and it cannot be hurried and it has to be complete, and until it is complete the man standing in that cage has agreed to nothing at all.

And he has just re-signed it. Voluntarily. At a cost of a world championship. In front of everybody.

Reginald — the last six minutes—

The last six minutes were what he is like without it. That is what Hideo Kuramoto bought when he stood in that corner, and I do not believe he knew what he was purchasing, and I would suggest that neither did we.

He has nothing left. Nothing. Twenty-three years and he is running on the thing that got him here and nothing else—

That has always been sufficient. It was sufficient at No Escape. I would remind this audience that the man they are watching flew eleven hours to have one detail corrected by an eighty-one-year-old man, and that the former champion of this company wrote a journal entry this week explaining, at length, that it was not the twenty-three years that beat him. It was the willingness to go and get the eleven hours.

HE RETAINS! Hideo Kuramoto, twenty-three years, and he goes through the one man in this company nobody has ever been able to read!

He tapped immediately.

He—

I want that in the record precisely, because a great many people are going to describe it wrongly by the morning. He was not broken. He was not made to give up. He arrived inside a hold, examined it for four seconds, concluded it was correctly applied and inescapable, and filed the result. That is not a man surrendering. That is a man completing his paperwork.

He doesn't look like a man who just retained a world championship.

No. And I would direct the audience to the last line of his most recent journal entry, which replaced a closing line he had used for years. The work remains the work. It has simply stopped being about me.

He spent twenty-three years chasing an absence. He closed it a month ago and he has been publicly unable to identify what the work is in service of ever since, and he has just had the greatest night of his professional life and it has not answered the question. Look at him. That is not modesty, Ms. Quinn. That is a man who has won and is still holding an empty box.

STRIFE Nation — I have been calling matches in this building since the first show, and I want to say one thing before we go off the air, and I want to say it plainly.

We spent a year asking what Wone was. We asked it in previews and in packages and on this desk and in eleven filed documents. And tonight he showed us, and it was not a monster, and it was not a mystery.

It was a man who stopped four seconds from a world championship to go and stand in an empty corner, because of a promise he made to something none of us can hear.

That promise is the reason Hideo Kuramoto walked out of this building tonight.

...Yes.

And I would add one further thing, and then I will let the audience go home.

The champion knew what he was doing when he stood in that corner. He is a professional of twenty-three years and he read a floor before he stepped on it, and it very nearly cost him his career, and it will be described all week as a masterstroke.

It was not a masterstroke. He took the walls off a thing and then had to stand in the same room as it for six minutes.

And the walls went back up because the other man put them back. Not because of anything Hideo Kuramoto did.

I would think very carefully about that before anybody in this company decides to try it again.

He is still sitting there.

He will sit there until the building makes him move. I have watched twenty-three years of that man's work on tape this week and I have never once seen him leave a cage quickly.

STRIFE Nation, that is your world champion. Twenty-six minutes and fourteen seconds, one working arm, and the only thing between him and a very different night was a man deciding — voluntarily, at nine minutes and forty seconds — to go and stand in an empty corner.

I want to account for the evening, if I may, because I have said a number of things on this desk tonight that I am going to have to live with.

Go on.

Before the bell in the third match I withdrew a claim I had made repeatedly about Kira Volkov — that she had never been beaten in a way that told anybody anything. She took that sentence apart in two languages with a pen and she was correct and I said so on air.

In the fifth I withdrew the phrase the long-suffering Ms. Randall, which Ms. Quinn has now corrected me on three separate occasions, and which I concede is what men in this business call a woman who is right on a schedule.

And in the main event I formally withdrew the word none from a sentence I have been saying for a year.

Three.

Three withdrawals in one broadcast, on the night the owner of this company stood in that cage and told eight thousand people that a document is a claim and a claim is not worth anything until it is settled in a room where claims do not work.

I would observe, without enjoying it, that I appear to have been the first person held to that standard.

Then let's do the night properly.

Marisol Reyes took the sixth anchor the first time she saw it. Fourteen minutes twenty-six. Half a second is the entire difference between tonight and Behind Closed Doors 10, and she is two and four, and she raised one fist and then looked at her own wrist.

Camila Ferreira is nought and five and looked at the tattoo on her way out. I would advise this division not to enjoy that record for very much longer.

Dorian Graves got his arm back and won his first match since Behind Closed Doors 8 — and held a man in the air for a second and a half with his back turned before he dropped him. Callum McCready is nought and six and he is standing in a hallway somewhere looking at his own hand.

The New Wave Champion came out here and graded his own reign in public on the fifteenth day of it, and the corner of that document is still blank, and the envelope was never sent.

Bríd Ó'Súilleabháin found a second thing at thirty-eight years of age. Sixteen thirty-eight, past the twelfth minute on purpose, and she is going to that championship match with something she has never had in her career.

And the champion of that division left her seat at twelve minutes forty and got handed something in a corridor she did not ask for and cannot put down. Fourteen days.

Shawn Cortez told a man what he was going to do to him and then did it, at a cost his own manager has now objected to in writing three times. Eighteen twelve. He is four and three. And Tomás Reyes-Montoya is eight and two, and he touched the top of the door frame on his way out, after a loss, which nobody in this building had ever seen him do.

He has two now, Ms. Quinn. He wrote a beautiful document about which of his losses was the one that told him the truth and he had exactly one to choose from and he decided it was not that one.

The gentleman who beat him tonight wrote, in reply, that a man who has one loss and decides it was not the one has only decided that he has not lost yet.

I do not know which of them is right. I know that the arithmetic changed at eighteen minutes and twelve seconds and that the man in the amber lights has to do it again.

And him.

And him.

A year. Eleven documents. Every one of us on this desk and in that locker room and in this audience decided at some point that the count was superstition, or scouting, or a nervous habit that a frightening man had never grown out of.

It was a promise. He makes it before every fight, in the same order, to something none of us can hear — and the last thing he promises is the reason the man he is fighting goes home.

Hideo Kuramoto took three of them away from him tonight, and for six minutes this federation found out what is on the other side of that, and I do not want to see it again.

You will.

Reginald—

You will, Ms. Quinn, because somebody in that locker room watched the first ten minutes of that main event and wrote down that it worked. It did work. It very nearly won a world championship. And the reason it did not is that the other man chose to put his own walls back up, at the cost of the belt, in front of everybody.

Nobody should ever mistake that for a thing this federation is owed twice.

Two shows.

Two shows.

Behind Closed Doors 13. Behind Closed Doors 14. And then PROOF — with no card, and no office, and not one single match on it that somebody in that locker room does not stand up and ask for out loud, by name, in front of people.

Every competitor in this company now has to say who they believe they can beat. Not who they dislike. Not who they have history with. Who they can beat — and the person named has to answer where everybody can hear it.

Some of them will not ask. That is not a flaw in the design, and I would encourage the audience to keep a list.

STRIFE Nation — thirty-one thousand words came into this building tonight and every one of them got carried through that door, and the door only opens once, and it does not care what any of us wrote.

For Reginald Graves, I have been Cassidy Quinn. Your STRIFE Champion is still sitting on the mat.

Go and write something true.