Post by A.C. Smith on Jan 16, 2013 17:40:30 GMT -4
Our scene opens today in what seems to be an empty police station. Several desks are scattered about a very large room, with clutter on top of some and others very well-maintained. Several of the walls are bare, but one has a gigantic British flag hanging from it, taking up most of the space between two small windows on each side of it.
It seems like a seasonable winter day outside, with sun peeking through several passing clouds and providing additional light in the station. However, our attention quickly turns not to a sight, but a sound, the sound of an object tapping something repeatedly and in rhythm.
The camera pans right, and seated atop an empty desk is the APW Xtreme Champion, the Big Apple Asskicker, A.C. Smith. He's wearing the championship belt around his waist, and in his right hand is a black nightstick, one he's tapping his left palm with to produce the noise we heard when he was off-screen.
At first glance, nothing seems unusual about Smith's presence, one accentuated by a slight smile that creeps onto his face. However, as we look at his white t-shirt, one that fits snugly onto his muscular upper body, we see something that fits in all too well with A.C.'s current surroundings: His NYPD police badge, which is located just under his left shoulder over his heart.
After a few seconds, Smith stops the tapping with the nightstick and puts it down next to him. He squares up both his brown eyes and his broad shoulders with the camera stationed about 15 feet away from him, and after another brief pause of maybe a second or two, he opens his mouth to speak.
A.C.: “This week, I'm going to do something different. You won't see Bobby or Stevie here with me in Birmingham. Nor will you see any of the hijinks that you may have expected when you saw me sitting here.
Far from it. I'm here today thanks to a friend of a friend, one who happens to work for Birmingham's local police department. They're all getting briefed, and they've been kind enough to let me hang around, not as a relaxing diversion, but for demonstrative purposes that should teach you a lot about me in the span of 15-20 minutes.
This week, when I face Delikado and Michael Lively and put my APW Xtreme Championship on the line at Overdrive, I won't be facing a different challenge. Instead, I'll be going back. Back to a time where it was my duty to put up or shut up, and a time when nobody in the New York Police Department was better at doing that than yours truly.
Come with me.”
Smith springs off of the desk and to his full 6'8” height before speed-walking out of the camera shot. We hear his footsteps get softer and softer before a door opens and closes in the background, and as it shuts, our scene fades to black.
---
We come back, and we see Smith in his street clothes leaning up against a brick building off of a sidewalk. He's added a jacket for relief from the chilly weather, but the coldness in the shot goes beyond the weather.
Broken glass is strewn about the concrete, and we see several of the windows in the nearby brick building are either boarded up or shattered. In the background, several homeless people are collecting empty cans for deposit while smoking cigarettes and looking inside dumpsters for scraps of food.
Make no mistake, this is a bad area of town, with the one semi-reputable establishment being an old bar and grill across the street from our vantage point. Smith looks around, scanning the area and shaking his head before locking in on the camera once again.
A.C.: “Every big city has its run-down neighborhoods. They're the street corners you tell the GPS in your car to avoid for fear of getting car-jacked. They're where you make sure your kids stay away from, where you never want to see a loved one wind up, where cop cars and police officers seem to always be gathered at a crime scene.
People that grew up on blocks like this one didn't ever have much of a chance. It's a ton of work to get out of the projects, and it's more work than most people want to put forward. They resort to petty theft, to muggings, to breaking and entering, and it becomes an avalanche, a downward spiral that I've seen all too many times before.
I didn't just walk these streets as a cop. I grew up in that kind of a neighborhood. Only I didn't allow myself to fall into the same trap some of my childhood friends did. I busted my ass to get out of the ghetto, to make something of myself, and that's exactly what happened.
Some people I knew weren't as fortunate. They started finding people weaker than them to hang around with to help whatever self-esteem issues they had. Suddenly, they had a certain swagger about them, a cockiness that got really irritating after a couple of minutes. They hadn't seen anyone who could stop them because they'd willingly dodged them, and they got really loud up until...well, up until I shut them up.”
Smith chuckles a bit, rolling his eyes at the memories he's conjured up for good measure.
A.C.: “That's why I don't like Delikado. He carries himself like hundreds of morons I've put away, like someone who forgot how to shut up and needs to learn that lesson again. Everything he says and does goes under the illusion of how he's somehow cooler than everyone else on the APW roster. Of course, it's a mirage that the more experienced men and women in APW see right through.
Take out some of his snobbery, and Delikado's no different than any bum on the street trying to survive by any means necessary. He's a goon, a pitiful representation of a culture where cool somehow means greed and the ability to throw temper tantrums in a Wal-Mart. How is that the case, you ask?
I don't know. That dynamic has always bothered me. But the other constant in my relationship with those people has been my ability to put them somewhere where their behavior can't harm the good people they come into contact with on a constant basis. In my years on the force, nobody I worked with was asked to come into neighborhoods like this more often than I was. And in my years on the force, nobody got their man more than me.”
Suddenly, Smith pauses, shaking his head just a bit.
A.C.: “Yet what bothers me most about Delikado is that, on two separate occasions, I've had the chance to momentarily stop his diarrhea of the mouth. And both times, I've failed to do it. I'm not going to put forth some revisionist history or bore you with anything you already know. But the fact that he's still hanging around, still trying to be as rude as humanly possible to anyone who doesn't bow down and acknowledge him as the master and ruler of the world? THAT'S what keeps me coming back.
Thursday night, I'll go into the squared circle with him again, and this time, I'm putting my Xtreme Championship on the line. I spent months trying to get this belt, months trying to give fans of the Xtreme division a chance at a champion they can be proud of. And I'm CERTAINLY not going to let Delikado ruin my reign after just a few weeks and give fans another champ they can't get behind.
My motivation runs deeper than trying to convince people that don't give a damn about me that I'm cool. I'm going on my 11th year in this business, and I'm over that kind of bullshit. I'm going out there for something deeper than a reputation, or money, or anything else petty that drives Delikado once that bell rings.
When our match starts this week, the A.C. Smith Delikado will lock up with isn't the guy he's beaten twice. Instead, it's the Big Apple Asskicker who persevered through 2,000 stitches in four years to become the most revered cop the NYPD has ever seen. The Big Apple Asskicker who is finally, FINALLY, giving the best wrestling fans in the world someone they can get behind at a time when so few wrestlers like that exist. And the Big Apple Asskicker who won't allow himself to be beaten a third time with so much on the line.”
Smith is getting worked up, so he takes a minute to calm himself down.
A.C.: “Of course, getting criminals to a police precinct was only part of my job. As an officer of the law, I then had to break them in interrogation. Follow me back to the station. Once we get there, we'll continue this song and dance.”
Smith walks away from the camera, and our scene fades to black once again.
---
We come back from black, and Smith is seen standing inside the squad room, much as he was before. This time, though, the chair he’s sitting on is in a corner, next to a door with bold black type on it that reads, ‘INTERROGATION ROOM.’
The door is actually cracked open just a bit, and what we see inside is pretty much the stereotypical room cops use in trying to find out information. There’s a rickety, old table inside, and four wooden chairs, several of which already look wobbly on sight, surround it. Two of them face the classic one-way mirror, one that likely has an office behind it that sees all of the goings-on that take place in interrogation.
Smith still has his badge on his shirt, and he polishes it with his right hand before opening his mouth to speak.
A.C.: “So we get them here. Every once in a while, someone gets broken simply by the threat of interrogation. Those are the easy ones, the ones that mean you get to go home for dinner at a nice, reasonable hour. Some crooks, the ones that have been here before, lawyer up when you try and ask them anything, which really throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings.
However, a bunch of them just love the chance to talk and brag. All you have to do is give them the time of day, gently control the conversation, and let them dig their own graves. There were times where I had to control my own happiness at how inept those morons actually were, and yet they’d never learn from their own mistakes.
And this…this is where we address a certain Mr. Lively.”
Smith said that last sentence with a particular sense of disdain in his voice. He rises to his feet and saunters into the room, closing the door after the camera follows him in.
Smith knows better than to sit down in one of the chairs, which may as well have been designed by a chiropractor looking for new patients. Instead, he leans up against the wall, his arms folded and his eyebrows furrowed.
A.C.: “Lively has no shame in anything he does. He readily plays the role of bully, taking on people who aren’t capable of fighting back, and then he goes off and has the nerve to brag about it. One week, it’s his mother. The next, it’s a backstage employee who in no way signed up for what Lively did to her. What’s next, the couch in his dressing room after it has the gall to be too firm or too soft?
And then, on top of all this, he goes off and brags about how he’s a one-time Grand Slam champion. Maybe he was that good at one point in time. Now? Now, from a mental standpoint, he’s a shell of his former self, needing to resort to beating up female employees and accepting encouragement from Sabur.
From a physical standpoint, there’s no doubt that Lively’s talented. He did what I did last year in taking Terry Marvin to the limit last week on Overdrive, and I’ll never question his prior accomplishments. But he’s making several huge, huge mistakes in how he’s dealt with me, mistakes that will ultimately lead to his own embarrassment on the biggest stage possible.”
The brooding intensity radiating from Smith is palpable. He’s very much in control of his actions, but we see his face get just a tiny bit red in contrast to his tanned skin tone. A.C. continues.
A.C.: “One of my favorite sayings in history came from champion golfer Bobby Jones, who said that the highest level of competitive sports is played on a five and a half-inch court. That court is the space between one’s ears. Some have that ability to dial everything else out and focus on the task at hand. Some don’t. Some try all sorts of tactics to mess with their opponent’s head. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and in the case of Lively, his stunts have no effect on me.
Make no mistake, they’ve certainly been effective against some really high-level talents in this business. There’s a reason he’s achieved the success that he has. Put him in the ring against someone with a fragile ego, someone who’s always worried about what stunt he’ll pull next, and suddenly, Lively’s won that match before it even starts. Throw in what he’s been able to do from bell to bell, and he becomes very dangerous.
Unfortunately for him, lately he seems much more interested in mind games than war games. Since moving to Overdrive, he’s hit a plateau of sorts, one I know very well. His daredevil stunt against Terry cost him last week, but now he’s getting another shot at some valuable momentum, when he enters the ring Thursday night for the triple threat match. All three of us want the same thing, the APW Xtreme Championship, but only one of us will walk out with it.”
Smith comes off the wall, and dust seems to fly off his back as he takes a few steps forward towards the table before leaning down on it and glaring at the camera.
A.C.: “Once that bell rings, none of Lively’s charades matter. He’s another highly-gifted wrestler in a federation that has plenty of them, and anything he does outside the ring is of no circumstance to me. I’m coming into Thursday night’s Overdrive with one purpose, and one purpose only. That’s to walk out the same way I came in as the APW Xtreme Champion, and I can’t do that by worrying about what stunt Lively is going to pull.
I learned that lesson long, LONG ago. It’s one some people, including a few that have won some big matches, never learn. If we’re contesting this match at the court Bobby Jones talked about so many years ago, it may as well be a home-court advantage for me, even though we’re thousands of miles away from New York.
I don’t discount the talent of either man I’ll be locking up with in this triple threat match. But the unique circumstances surrounding it give me one thought, and one thought only: ‘I’ve been here before.’ It’s a sense of familiarity nobody else in this business could ever have or dream of attaining, and I fully intend on making the most of it.
I’ve seen Delikado’s antics before. I’ve seen all of Lively’s tricks before. And when the NYPD needed someone to clamp down on them to make the greatest city on Earth safer, they came to me, and I delivered. Nothing is going to stop me from doing the exact same thing Thursday night here in Birmingham.
Nothing.”
We hear the door opening behind the camera, and a man with a British accent is heard off-screen.
Voice: “Some monologue. You training for an audition?”
A.C.: “Hardly. You must be Frank.”
The camera swerves around, revealing a pudgy, 50-ish man in full police uniform.
Frank: “Yes. Hate to break it to you, but we need the room.”
A.C.: “No problem. Was just leaving. I appreciate the hospitality.”
Smith pats Frank on the back, but stops as he stands in the doorway.
A.C.: “Before I forget…how, precisely, do you know Stevie?”
Frank: “He stopped some bastard from attacking my sister in New York once. I offered to repay him, but he wouldn’t take money.”
A.C.: “Someone being the better man and staying grounded.”
Smith chuckles.
A.C.: “Sounds familiar. Thanks again.”
Smith leaves the frame, and Frank looks on as our scene fades to black for the final time.
It seems like a seasonable winter day outside, with sun peeking through several passing clouds and providing additional light in the station. However, our attention quickly turns not to a sight, but a sound, the sound of an object tapping something repeatedly and in rhythm.
The camera pans right, and seated atop an empty desk is the APW Xtreme Champion, the Big Apple Asskicker, A.C. Smith. He's wearing the championship belt around his waist, and in his right hand is a black nightstick, one he's tapping his left palm with to produce the noise we heard when he was off-screen.
At first glance, nothing seems unusual about Smith's presence, one accentuated by a slight smile that creeps onto his face. However, as we look at his white t-shirt, one that fits snugly onto his muscular upper body, we see something that fits in all too well with A.C.'s current surroundings: His NYPD police badge, which is located just under his left shoulder over his heart.
After a few seconds, Smith stops the tapping with the nightstick and puts it down next to him. He squares up both his brown eyes and his broad shoulders with the camera stationed about 15 feet away from him, and after another brief pause of maybe a second or two, he opens his mouth to speak.
A.C.: “This week, I'm going to do something different. You won't see Bobby or Stevie here with me in Birmingham. Nor will you see any of the hijinks that you may have expected when you saw me sitting here.
Far from it. I'm here today thanks to a friend of a friend, one who happens to work for Birmingham's local police department. They're all getting briefed, and they've been kind enough to let me hang around, not as a relaxing diversion, but for demonstrative purposes that should teach you a lot about me in the span of 15-20 minutes.
This week, when I face Delikado and Michael Lively and put my APW Xtreme Championship on the line at Overdrive, I won't be facing a different challenge. Instead, I'll be going back. Back to a time where it was my duty to put up or shut up, and a time when nobody in the New York Police Department was better at doing that than yours truly.
Come with me.”
Smith springs off of the desk and to his full 6'8” height before speed-walking out of the camera shot. We hear his footsteps get softer and softer before a door opens and closes in the background, and as it shuts, our scene fades to black.
---
We come back, and we see Smith in his street clothes leaning up against a brick building off of a sidewalk. He's added a jacket for relief from the chilly weather, but the coldness in the shot goes beyond the weather.
Broken glass is strewn about the concrete, and we see several of the windows in the nearby brick building are either boarded up or shattered. In the background, several homeless people are collecting empty cans for deposit while smoking cigarettes and looking inside dumpsters for scraps of food.
Make no mistake, this is a bad area of town, with the one semi-reputable establishment being an old bar and grill across the street from our vantage point. Smith looks around, scanning the area and shaking his head before locking in on the camera once again.
A.C.: “Every big city has its run-down neighborhoods. They're the street corners you tell the GPS in your car to avoid for fear of getting car-jacked. They're where you make sure your kids stay away from, where you never want to see a loved one wind up, where cop cars and police officers seem to always be gathered at a crime scene.
People that grew up on blocks like this one didn't ever have much of a chance. It's a ton of work to get out of the projects, and it's more work than most people want to put forward. They resort to petty theft, to muggings, to breaking and entering, and it becomes an avalanche, a downward spiral that I've seen all too many times before.
I didn't just walk these streets as a cop. I grew up in that kind of a neighborhood. Only I didn't allow myself to fall into the same trap some of my childhood friends did. I busted my ass to get out of the ghetto, to make something of myself, and that's exactly what happened.
Some people I knew weren't as fortunate. They started finding people weaker than them to hang around with to help whatever self-esteem issues they had. Suddenly, they had a certain swagger about them, a cockiness that got really irritating after a couple of minutes. They hadn't seen anyone who could stop them because they'd willingly dodged them, and they got really loud up until...well, up until I shut them up.”
Smith chuckles a bit, rolling his eyes at the memories he's conjured up for good measure.
A.C.: “That's why I don't like Delikado. He carries himself like hundreds of morons I've put away, like someone who forgot how to shut up and needs to learn that lesson again. Everything he says and does goes under the illusion of how he's somehow cooler than everyone else on the APW roster. Of course, it's a mirage that the more experienced men and women in APW see right through.
Take out some of his snobbery, and Delikado's no different than any bum on the street trying to survive by any means necessary. He's a goon, a pitiful representation of a culture where cool somehow means greed and the ability to throw temper tantrums in a Wal-Mart. How is that the case, you ask?
I don't know. That dynamic has always bothered me. But the other constant in my relationship with those people has been my ability to put them somewhere where their behavior can't harm the good people they come into contact with on a constant basis. In my years on the force, nobody I worked with was asked to come into neighborhoods like this more often than I was. And in my years on the force, nobody got their man more than me.”
Suddenly, Smith pauses, shaking his head just a bit.
A.C.: “Yet what bothers me most about Delikado is that, on two separate occasions, I've had the chance to momentarily stop his diarrhea of the mouth. And both times, I've failed to do it. I'm not going to put forth some revisionist history or bore you with anything you already know. But the fact that he's still hanging around, still trying to be as rude as humanly possible to anyone who doesn't bow down and acknowledge him as the master and ruler of the world? THAT'S what keeps me coming back.
Thursday night, I'll go into the squared circle with him again, and this time, I'm putting my Xtreme Championship on the line. I spent months trying to get this belt, months trying to give fans of the Xtreme division a chance at a champion they can be proud of. And I'm CERTAINLY not going to let Delikado ruin my reign after just a few weeks and give fans another champ they can't get behind.
My motivation runs deeper than trying to convince people that don't give a damn about me that I'm cool. I'm going on my 11th year in this business, and I'm over that kind of bullshit. I'm going out there for something deeper than a reputation, or money, or anything else petty that drives Delikado once that bell rings.
When our match starts this week, the A.C. Smith Delikado will lock up with isn't the guy he's beaten twice. Instead, it's the Big Apple Asskicker who persevered through 2,000 stitches in four years to become the most revered cop the NYPD has ever seen. The Big Apple Asskicker who is finally, FINALLY, giving the best wrestling fans in the world someone they can get behind at a time when so few wrestlers like that exist. And the Big Apple Asskicker who won't allow himself to be beaten a third time with so much on the line.”
Smith is getting worked up, so he takes a minute to calm himself down.
A.C.: “Of course, getting criminals to a police precinct was only part of my job. As an officer of the law, I then had to break them in interrogation. Follow me back to the station. Once we get there, we'll continue this song and dance.”
Smith walks away from the camera, and our scene fades to black once again.
---
We come back from black, and Smith is seen standing inside the squad room, much as he was before. This time, though, the chair he’s sitting on is in a corner, next to a door with bold black type on it that reads, ‘INTERROGATION ROOM.’
The door is actually cracked open just a bit, and what we see inside is pretty much the stereotypical room cops use in trying to find out information. There’s a rickety, old table inside, and four wooden chairs, several of which already look wobbly on sight, surround it. Two of them face the classic one-way mirror, one that likely has an office behind it that sees all of the goings-on that take place in interrogation.
Smith still has his badge on his shirt, and he polishes it with his right hand before opening his mouth to speak.
A.C.: “So we get them here. Every once in a while, someone gets broken simply by the threat of interrogation. Those are the easy ones, the ones that mean you get to go home for dinner at a nice, reasonable hour. Some crooks, the ones that have been here before, lawyer up when you try and ask them anything, which really throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings.
However, a bunch of them just love the chance to talk and brag. All you have to do is give them the time of day, gently control the conversation, and let them dig their own graves. There were times where I had to control my own happiness at how inept those morons actually were, and yet they’d never learn from their own mistakes.
And this…this is where we address a certain Mr. Lively.”
Smith said that last sentence with a particular sense of disdain in his voice. He rises to his feet and saunters into the room, closing the door after the camera follows him in.
Smith knows better than to sit down in one of the chairs, which may as well have been designed by a chiropractor looking for new patients. Instead, he leans up against the wall, his arms folded and his eyebrows furrowed.
A.C.: “Lively has no shame in anything he does. He readily plays the role of bully, taking on people who aren’t capable of fighting back, and then he goes off and has the nerve to brag about it. One week, it’s his mother. The next, it’s a backstage employee who in no way signed up for what Lively did to her. What’s next, the couch in his dressing room after it has the gall to be too firm or too soft?
And then, on top of all this, he goes off and brags about how he’s a one-time Grand Slam champion. Maybe he was that good at one point in time. Now? Now, from a mental standpoint, he’s a shell of his former self, needing to resort to beating up female employees and accepting encouragement from Sabur.
From a physical standpoint, there’s no doubt that Lively’s talented. He did what I did last year in taking Terry Marvin to the limit last week on Overdrive, and I’ll never question his prior accomplishments. But he’s making several huge, huge mistakes in how he’s dealt with me, mistakes that will ultimately lead to his own embarrassment on the biggest stage possible.”
The brooding intensity radiating from Smith is palpable. He’s very much in control of his actions, but we see his face get just a tiny bit red in contrast to his tanned skin tone. A.C. continues.
A.C.: “One of my favorite sayings in history came from champion golfer Bobby Jones, who said that the highest level of competitive sports is played on a five and a half-inch court. That court is the space between one’s ears. Some have that ability to dial everything else out and focus on the task at hand. Some don’t. Some try all sorts of tactics to mess with their opponent’s head. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and in the case of Lively, his stunts have no effect on me.
Make no mistake, they’ve certainly been effective against some really high-level talents in this business. There’s a reason he’s achieved the success that he has. Put him in the ring against someone with a fragile ego, someone who’s always worried about what stunt he’ll pull next, and suddenly, Lively’s won that match before it even starts. Throw in what he’s been able to do from bell to bell, and he becomes very dangerous.
Unfortunately for him, lately he seems much more interested in mind games than war games. Since moving to Overdrive, he’s hit a plateau of sorts, one I know very well. His daredevil stunt against Terry cost him last week, but now he’s getting another shot at some valuable momentum, when he enters the ring Thursday night for the triple threat match. All three of us want the same thing, the APW Xtreme Championship, but only one of us will walk out with it.”
Smith comes off the wall, and dust seems to fly off his back as he takes a few steps forward towards the table before leaning down on it and glaring at the camera.
A.C.: “Once that bell rings, none of Lively’s charades matter. He’s another highly-gifted wrestler in a federation that has plenty of them, and anything he does outside the ring is of no circumstance to me. I’m coming into Thursday night’s Overdrive with one purpose, and one purpose only. That’s to walk out the same way I came in as the APW Xtreme Champion, and I can’t do that by worrying about what stunt Lively is going to pull.
I learned that lesson long, LONG ago. It’s one some people, including a few that have won some big matches, never learn. If we’re contesting this match at the court Bobby Jones talked about so many years ago, it may as well be a home-court advantage for me, even though we’re thousands of miles away from New York.
I don’t discount the talent of either man I’ll be locking up with in this triple threat match. But the unique circumstances surrounding it give me one thought, and one thought only: ‘I’ve been here before.’ It’s a sense of familiarity nobody else in this business could ever have or dream of attaining, and I fully intend on making the most of it.
I’ve seen Delikado’s antics before. I’ve seen all of Lively’s tricks before. And when the NYPD needed someone to clamp down on them to make the greatest city on Earth safer, they came to me, and I delivered. Nothing is going to stop me from doing the exact same thing Thursday night here in Birmingham.
Nothing.”
We hear the door opening behind the camera, and a man with a British accent is heard off-screen.
Voice: “Some monologue. You training for an audition?”
A.C.: “Hardly. You must be Frank.”
The camera swerves around, revealing a pudgy, 50-ish man in full police uniform.
Frank: “Yes. Hate to break it to you, but we need the room.”
A.C.: “No problem. Was just leaving. I appreciate the hospitality.”
Smith pats Frank on the back, but stops as he stands in the doorway.
A.C.: “Before I forget…how, precisely, do you know Stevie?”
Frank: “He stopped some bastard from attacking my sister in New York once. I offered to repay him, but he wouldn’t take money.”
A.C.: “Someone being the better man and staying grounded.”
Smith chuckles.
A.C.: “Sounds familiar. Thanks again.”
Smith leaves the frame, and Frank looks on as our scene fades to black for the final time.
