Wrestling was a science to me.

It's something I studied, something I applied myself to in order to get better at it. Mind you, it's not like you can get a college degree in it. You won't find anyone with a PhD in Indian deathlocks, you won't see a guy like Lance Marshall giving a dissertation on why a Code Red will break you in half, and it wasn't like Desade had her own correspondence course on kicking people to death. But wrestling WAS a science, albeit a fickle and rarely consistent science that often changed when you least expected it. Part of the trick of this very scientific profession of mine was to make sure that, to the young people who watched us perform live or on television, this all looked like magic.

Yeah, I knew how strange that sounded. Science and magic? That's like putting together oil and water, right?

It's a lesson, though, that I tried to instill into anyone I happened to take under my wing as a professional wrestler. Some took my advice well, and still others...

'What kind of screwed up crap reasoning is that?'

I assure you that what Connor O'Reily really said to me was far more unpleasant than that.

Connor O'Reily was better known as one half of the Princes of New England, a tag team best known for a six month stay in PRIME. They had a wild and unruly reputation, so much so that Connor's sister served as their public relations agent and still had difficulty keeping the two in line. Connor was a little shorter than I was and he had messy black hair. He was Irish and he had the misfortune of loving alcohol.

It was two years ago that I took O'Reily and his tag team partner, Simon Knox, under my wing. Connor had trained in Joey Malone's school, otherwise known as 'the Backyard'. It's not a very creative name, because the school just happened to be the backyard of Malone's house in Mesa, Arizona. Joey decided to try training students again after his first, and rather horribly botched, attempt in 2001 that resulted in him thinning a class of fifteen students down to just me. He opted to do it almost exactly the same was as before, putting together a wrestling ring in his own backyard and training his students there. This time, however, he added a few 'co-trainers' to his lineup, primarily because he no longer had the mobility in his knee he wanted to train people the way he liked to. I was one such trainer, thanks to my unique perspective of already knowing exactly what Joey expected out of anyone who signed up for his classes.

The scientific part about Joey Malone's training? Charles Darwin.

Joey Malone had developed a certain reputation in some circles, and it was simply this: You paid the man a couple of hundred dollars to endure two full weeks of pure unending brutality. He believed that only the strong survived as professional wrestlers, and the weak would never go anywhere. He had a certain kind of logic to this, too. Anyone who didn't have the strength and endurance to endure the constant wear and tear that this business put you through was probably never going to succeed in the first place. To put it another way, Joey Malone liked to apply some of the same principles they used for Navy SEAL training for his own training in his 'camp'.

And then he wondered why so many people dropped out of his damn classes.

The magical part about Joey Malone's training? He still got students to come every year.

Anyway. I remember experiencing the volatility of Connor O'Reily's mouth the moment I met him. He was brash. He was cocky. He was also as stubborn as a mule and almost as smart as one, too. Every other word he said was some form of cancerous insult directed at me or whatever 'spawned' me. You couldn't imagine the outright pleasure I felt at ruining his day from the moment he came to the Backyard. Connor came to the school on the suggestion of Simon, who had already been wrestling for a short while and had been trained by Jeremy Odessa. Simon even took part in some of the training, though he mostly just watched the proceedings.

Joey assigned Connor to me when the class was made, and after Connor made a big deal about how he was going to be a big star in this sport... I subjected some of the old Malone doctrine to him in one simple question. 'How many pushups can you do in two minutes?'

'What?'

I repeated myself, 'How many pushups can you do in two minutes, Connor?'

'What the hell kind of question is that?' he asked, and he didn't say 'hell' when he asked that, either.

'Forty-two.' I said, as I crossed my arms and stared at the young punk kid. Connor was seventeen at the time, even though he lied to us and said he was eighteen. He was a high school dropout with a big dream. It was my job to show him that reality did not always adhere to people's dreams.

'Forty-two?'

'I'm sure you're wondering why Joey asked me to train you instead of doing it himself. I'm sure you'd love to prove something to all of us, that you're God's gift to this little 'sport' of ours. Well, the first step is to prove that you have the physical credentials to make it. The minimum amount of pushups you need to do in order to proceed is forty-two in two minutes. Get started.' I said to him.

'What, right now?' Connor asked, with a large degree of incredulousness in his voice. I have to wonder why he was so indignant about having to perform pushups. Did he think that he would learn an octopus stretch on the first day of training?

'You can always go home.'

'Man, F that.' he grumbled, getting down on his hands and knees. I guess I won that round. Idly, I picked up the stopwatch that was hanging around my neck, and signalled for Connor to start. He cursed every time he performed a pushup, and after two minutes had passed, I told him to stop.

'Thirty-six.' I reported to him, 'Not good enough. You'll have to do it again.'

'Oh, come on, that was close enough.' Connor complained. It sounded more like a whine to me.

'Close enough, huh?' I asked, a hint of amusement in my voice. I let the stopwatch slip out of my hand. 'We don't get the luxury of 'close enough' around here. 'Close enough' is the difference between a piledriver and a spinal injury, or the difference between a moonsault and a concussion. What we do in the ring has to be exact. Precise. Flawless. It's a science, Connor. It's a science to make what everyone else sees into magic.'

And here, we came full circle.

'What kind of screwed up crap reasoning is that? Science and magic? That doesn't make sense.'

I placed my hand on Connor's shoulder, 'Let's not focus on my little existential hiccup on professional wrestling. What I'm telling you will save you grief. You're asking the other guy to basically put his career and his life in your hands, and yours into his. You settle for 'close enough' instead of absolute precision, and you'll either hurt somebody or get hurt yourself. We're going to build your strength and endurance so you won't get burned out in long matches, and teach you how to pace yourself so you don't blow up early. That's what the push-ups are for, they're to show me where you are physically.'

Connor almost seemed like he was actually listening to me, 'Okay. And where am I?'

'There's room for improvement, but you're above most people. Hell, when Malone put me through that test the first time, I could only get thirty.' I told him. I decided I'd better continue before Connor got some sort of weird superiority complex, 'Take a minute, then do it again.'

Connor looked like he didn't want to do it at first, but maybe the double doses of encouragement and reality hit home.

He did eventually break the forty-two mark on his sixth try that day. By the time he accomplished that, we had wasted half the day. You can imagine how receptive he was to the fact that I told him to perform it every single morning before he came out for the training, along with a bunch of situps and a few pullups. By the end of the day, Connor was like anyone would be after the first day of training in the Backyard. He was completely and utterly wiped out. That look of exhausted pain, that inability to move with anything other than a lumbering walk, that look of spending an entire day using muscles you never knew you had... those were all things that I had once experienced so many years ago.

At least for one day, I felt good about seeing somebody other than me experience it.

I thought for certain that Connor would quit after that first day. Many did. Joey himself often gave a little sermon before the day's proceedings where he'd tell everyone to look around, and then announce that 'by the end of the first week, half of you will be gone'. That was Joey's way of being optimistic, it was usually that half of them were gone by the first *day* and then half of the remainder would then leave by the end of the first week. What often started out as a class of thirty would become a graduating class of five by the end of training, barring any horrible injuries suffered during training.

This training was not for the weak.

I thought Connor O'Reily to be weak.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw Connor shuffle into training the following day. He lacked the swagger that he had on the first day of training. His brashness had dulled. His cocky demeanor was diluted down to a slight sarcastic streak that very much mirrored my own. The insults had died down. He lacked the energy to do any of these things now, but the one thing he still had was the one thing I couldn't take from him by showing him reality. I couldn't take away that bull-headed stubbornness in his head that told him that he absolutely HAD to be a professional wrestler.

'So, what's next?' he'd ask me.

'Did you do your pushups?' I asked him on that second day.

'Forty-six in two.' he'd respond simply.

I nodded with a smile. That's some fine progress, 'Excellent. Situps?'

'Fifty in two.' he said.

'Well, that's the minimum, so that's good. And your pullups?' I asked.

'Well, I ain't got a crossbar in my room, so I hadn't gotten to that.' he said with this tired shrug. After he said that, he just endured my cold stare until he shuffled over to the nearby crossbar in the corner of the backyard and performed the six pullups I asked of him. When he dropped down from the crossbar, he shook his arms as if he could shake the muscle pain right off of the arms. All the while, he looked at me and started to get somesemblance of that swagger back.

'Alright, I did your damn exercises. What's next?' Connor said.

'Oh?' I asked. I had a half-amused smirk on my face that I couldn't hide, 'I guess you're ready to start learning how to take bumps, then. Come to the ring.'

Learning how to bump was the core of learning how to wrestle. This, for those who don't know, effectively meant 'how to fall'. Wrestlers had a way of falling in just such a manner that they didn't permanently injure themselves in the ring. Learning how to bump was an acquired taste, and the first few days of doing so will often make you wish you could do those pushups and situps until the end of time rather than taking them. I showed Connor a sample bump and invited him to try. His first time, he didn't quite tuck his head in on time and he banged the back of his head against the canvas. He didn't like that one too much. A few subsequent tries allowed him to get the concept down, and I proceeded to... well, squash him.

That was to say that we cooperated for a few hours on me suplexing the absolute bejeesus out of him. By the end of the day, I swore that Connor needed to be carried out of the Backyard. He somehow managed to leave under his own power, and once again, I thought I'd never hear from him again.

Yet, he came back again, the very next day.

It became a routine during that first week.

He'd suffer through unimaginable difficulty in training, he looked like he's dead when he was through, and then he'd slump out of the Backyard like a zombie. Then I'd swear to myself that that would be the last I'd hear from him. And then he'd come back, ready for more. Then it'd happen all over again.

All the while, I could see this little fire in his eyes. There was still life in there, some will within him that I couldn't break.

And that? That's something I can't explain with science.

That's magic.

Connor lasted the full three months of training. By the final month, he had grown used to the wear, tear, and general abuse that our training camp provided. At that point, Simon Knox had elected to join in on the proceedings. I could tell right away that despite his youth, he had developed a tolerance for the ring already. It was like he was born into it, which probably wasn't too far from the truth given the fact that he was practically wrestling royalty.

One day, the science simply became the magic.

These two guys clicked as a team immediately. It transcended science. They understood what it took to become a successful tag team quicker than any two students I'd ever seen before. Most guys just wanted to go out on their own and only resort to tag teams when they fail to hit it off right away. They were... okay, I can't use the term 'unselfish' because that would suggest that Simon Knox and Connor O'Reily weren't the most pretentious couple of jackasses that ever walked the Earth. But they were willing to share the spotlight with one another. That was a rare thing to see from two people as arrogant and as egomaniacal as they were.

So, I took them under my wing in the Squared Circle. I nutured their strengths. I taught them to hide their weaknesses. Until the day they went to PRIME, I was their mentor. When they left PRIME... well, they still needed mentoring over their collective irresponsible and chaos-causing nature.

But their ability in the ring? That's science.

And their ability to coexist? That's magic.

What more could I teach them?