Wins and losses can mean money gained or lost. A big win over a tough competitor can mean a title shot or a pay per view booking. Moreover, a good performance can earn you fan approval or grudging respect. It can mean a nice, shiny new t-shirt or foam finger, which in turn means a better cut of the merchandising pie.
Phillip Kennedy and Alexandra Pierce are old rivals, two proud competitors with scores to settle with one another. But even they are but pieces of the much larger puzzle that is SCCW Temptation. They are the co-main event, on a night where Lance Marshall and Jared Sykes will also do battle.
The fact is, though, that Kennedy vs. Pierce means a lot to a great deal of people. It means a lot to SCCW as a whole, as it's a match between two of the top talents. It means a lot to the fans of Sin City, who want a resolution, who want to know which of the two is better.
Again, though, this is all obvious.
It's the most detailed stories that are more interesting. It's the little things you'd never know about if you tuned in to Temptation from the comfort of your own recliner.
These are the stories of people you don't know about.
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I. Sarah
Sarah totally doesn't like Alexandra Pierce because she's a girl.
It's the blood-red hair, which to Sarah, is the most awesome hair color she's ever seen in her life. It's the take-no-prisoners attitude. It's the fact that she can take one Hell of a pounding and come back from it.
...and, yeah, okay, it's because she's a girl.
This is understandable even when you're grown up, so it's even moreso considering Sarah's a spunky ten year old.
She has about as much of the Lady Pierce's merchandise as one could imagine. A Dead Man's Hand t-shirt, even. A hand-made DNA shirt. Posters. Action figures.
Sarah understands that it's probably a bit excessive. She knows Alexandra Pierce isn't most people's definition of a good person. Her mother and father are very quick to point that out when the Rhodes family sits down to watch Temptation on their TiVo at a more kid-friendly hour than it airs on Cinemax.
This also gives Mom and Dad the ability to fast forward through the objectionable parts, which, being SCCW, tends to happen a decent amount.
Sarah is sitting on the floor, clutching a Desade action figure in her left hand. Before her is the official SCCW ring toy, with a Phillip Kennedy action figure in the corner, propped up against the turnbuckles.
It's not often she gets to play alone. Usually, her stupid brother Jimmy is here, playing with HIS action figures. Jimmy's battles usually end with Aimz or Alexandra Pierce missing an arm or a leg, courtesy of Phillip Kennedy. Or Lance Marshall. Or Jared Sykes. Or James Varga, or anyone, really.
It may or may not be revealing that Jimmy's an eight year old, a good five or six years away from discovering that girls do not, in fact, have cooties. (His pet theory as to why Alexandra wins so much is that she transmits cooties to her opponents, resulting in easy victories.)
Jimmy's habit of destroying action figures ended up being why Sarah got her own Desade figure, one that Jimmy was expressly forbidden from destroying. She also got a few of her own figures, so that she could enact matches to end the way *she* wanted.
Desade and Amy don't *always* win, but they do tend to win a lot more and retain many more of their limbs than when Jimmy's involved. Along with the girls, Jared Sykes wins a lot (she finds him cute), and Spacely also racks up his fair share (he's actually the Universal Champion right now, having taken the belt from Amy, and is scheduled to defend against Desade whenever she makes a new belt for him out of tinfoil and paper.)
But enough about the Sarah City Championship Wrestling card.
Today's playing is in anticipation of a match that she's looked forward to more than any other: Phillip Kennedy vs. Alexandra Pierce. She saw the first one, not live, but on SCCW's Best of 2009 DVD compilation. She doesn't like Phillip Kennedy very much. Not even then, seeing him play the hero, seeing thousands of fans boo her *own* hero.
She did see Pierce beat Kennedy, but she knew that he'd have an excuse. Even worse, she knew his excuse was a pretty fair one. They'd talked about concussions in gym once. They seemed really nasty.
No, this was going to be the real thing, just like the first match. This would determine whether Pierce was better, or whether Kennedy and his stupid fans like her stupid brother were better.
As she enacts the match in the ring, Desade takes it to her plastic counterpart. She hits lots of moves, but Kennedy keeps managing to kick out.
See, Sarah's learned a few things about being a fan from SCCW. Part of liking someone as much as you can is having a proper foil for them. Being a Boston Red Sox fan would mean less if you didn't have the New York Yankees to hate.
There were, by some standards, better foils for Alexandra than Kennedy, but for a ten year old girl, Phillip was the epitome of everything she disliked about boys. That stupid hat. The arrogant grin. The way he just...it made her mad to think about it.
When she got older, she would understand that this was how it was supposed to be.
II. Reginald V. Lovecraft
For Reginald Victor Lovecraft, Desade's seeming shifts of late have made his life both easier and more complex.
Lovecraft is a politician. As such, he knows what it means to be beholden to special interests. It's the part of the job that everyone knows about, but no one speaks of.
As he sits in his office in Atlanta, Georgia, he can't help but think about what's coming up in November. This November, there will be a race for his seat on the state Senate.
A race that he will not be in.
No, after a long political career, Mr. Lovecraft is hanging up his red suit, and returning to live the quiet life of a retiree. Maybe he'll do some speeches at Southern universities. He'll definitely get in a good deal of golf.
It's almost hard for him to believe that he was actively wrestling over a year ago. Reginald Lovecraft was never going to be a superstar in the business. Too old. Too this. Too that.
But at the end of the day, he can say he was a tag champion everywhere he went. He can say that he beat Xavier Kannon one on one. Those achievements aside, Lovecraft isn't a man for personal glory.
No, Lovecraft did his best work as a weight upon which others could depend. Kannon and Tyler Nelson were his bosses in PCW's Front Office. Ivan Stanislav was his superior in the OSW incarnation of the Red Army.
And his tag team partners, William Powell and Phillip Kennedy, were the faces of their repective teams.
That's fine with Reginald. Being the rock means you get less publicity. Politics, by his line of thinking, is one of the fields disproving the old adage that all publicity is good publicity. Avoiding bad publicity means staying in office longer.
Even in his late fifties, though, Reginald still watches wrestling. SCCW. PRIME. GCW. Anything he can get his hands on in his spare time.
He watches because he truly enjoys it. Growing up and going into politics, never in a million years did Reginald Lovecraft think he'd get to wrestle for a living. When you grew up and watched something as much as Reginald did, the chance to actually DO it was indescribable.
Most kids get that chance when they play Pop Warner football, or little league baseball. Needless to say, there were no minor league pro wrestling leagues for children.
Reginald didn't step in the ring until he was in his late forties, an age most people are starting to settle down and grow old peacefully. Today, Reginald still bears the scars of war. Arthritis has set in, possibly due to his age, partially due to his career. But no matter the pain, he knows he wouldn't trade it for anything.
He will tune in to see the man he held SCCW Strength In Numbers gold with, Phillip Kennedy, do battle with the woman he was once beholden to, Alexandra Pierce. Who he's going to root for he doesn't know. In an odd sort of way, he's thrilled that both are where they are. Kennedy is the uncompromising sort of man he'd hoped Phil would evolve into back in the day, while Alexandra Pierce no longer needs him.
For Lovecraft, Kennedy vs. Pierce is a chance to curl up on a nice reclining chair with a good beer, and watch two people he knows beat the crap out of each other.
As a good Southern boy, there's few things better.
III. Evan Andrews
Explaining to your buddies why you're staying home to watch pro wrestling instead of going out with them is always a difficult task.
It's somewhat more difficult when you're a doctor in your early thirties making a ridiculous amount of money, are single, and by most standards should be out trying to find your first trophy wife.
Evan Andrews isn't most doctors, though.
He's one of the fleet of doctors SCCW generally keeps on call. He's not an arena medic, though. No, he's the company's concussion specialist. In an age where concussions are being found more and more serious, he is an important figure to have around. It shows responsibility on SCCW's part.
Athletes are a rare breed. They tend to have the desire and will to fight through injuries that would break the average person. Wrestlers work through things that would have people in other jobs on disability leave.
The first wrestler Andrews ever dealt with was Phillip Kennedy, fresh off of being concussed and having his head injuries exacerbated by continuing to compete.
It was an eye-opening experience for the doctor. For him, it was his first glimpse into how seriously wrestlers took competition. How important it was.
There were athletes in major sports who protested less than Phillip had.
Watching SCCW was part of his job description. Evan had never really seen pro wrestling before on any sort of scale, so what he saw sort of shocked him.
It was a far cry from the sort of wrestling that had been on the air when he'd grown up. Today's sport was more athletic. More skilled. And yes, more dangerous. It wasn't the sort of chairshot paradise that he'd heard wrestling had devolved into, but he could definitely see how concussions were occurring.
No helmets tended to lead to such things.
Normally, he didn't watch the shows live. He watched them after the fact. It was work to him, no more and no less, save for the fact that he felt himself with a minor attachment to Phillip.
Kennedy was his first patient, after all.