Post by Sam Kidsgrove on Aug 7, 2022 11:22:42 GMT -5
“No, no it’s all wrong here.” Kidsgrove insisted for the 100th time while walking around the studio tour of the Harry Potter franchise, just outside of London. He’s taking some much needed time off and has gone back to his roots, for the first time as an American citizen.
“The Goblet of Fire was much, much taller, the plinth is a completely different one than in the movie.”
“You weren’t in any Harry Potter movies” replied Zooey, rather bemused. “You were famously left out of them, I’m pretty sure you’re the only British actor who didn’t have a part in them in fact.”
Kidsgrove gives her the side eye.
“It doesn’t mean I wasn’t there though! I was on set more often than Alan!”
“You were his assistant, weren’t you?”
“Maggie’s actually. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t there! They had no use for someone in his teens who was already obliged to do new seasons of TV and already had 4 feature productions in the works.
They said it was too much, that I just had to focus on one or two things at a time, so they couldn’t, in their role as a responsible studio, hire me in good conscience.”
“Did you feel like butter, scraped across too much bread?” Asks Zooey, twinkle in her eye.
“Nice try, that’s Lord of the Rings. But yes, that’s what they were worried about, so they didn’t offer me a role. They did allow me to be there as an assistant though so I could see how massive projects were shot in the industry, those days were some of the most informative of my life.
I felt that recently, that my Hollywood Career and my AW career couldn’t intertwine, that it was one or the other. If I want to become a true legend in the sport, if I want to become that Hall of Fame worthy guy I felt that I had to leave this behind.” He motions to the studio.
“Simply because I couldn’t prepare for facing the likes of Dandy or Lissie while learning my lines for a Die Hard reboot, I couldn’t prepare myself mentally and physically to go 12 rounds with my mortal enemy when half of my brainpower was used to get the nuance right between various incarnations of the phrase Yippee Ki yay motherfucker. It’s a skill I tried to master, something I tried to balance for years until I finally realised it’s all or nothing in both industries. AW especially needs all of your attention because that’s the only place you could at one moment destroy a legendary hall of fame multiple time world champ one week and then get your ankle snapped off by someone who’s been around for 5 minutes the next.
Which is why I don’t understand Elijah Martin. At all.
Not only does the guy bastardise Harry Potter quotes to an almost alarming degree, he insists, as you put it, via Bilbo Baggins, to scrape himself over too much bread.
He puts his record in AW down to not much luck, simply wrong place wrong time. As if results would be better, hell life would be better if he just had that intangible thing down, as if the Goddess Fortuna is somehow deserting him, if she’d only hear his prayers or whatever then things would work better and he’d just have it all.
It’s not because he’s working through every single organisation in wrestling, dropping different acronyms every week like he’s just discovered the alphabet and is trying to work out which order they go.
It isn’t because he turns up at AW and attacks one of the biggest names this company has seen, then promptly shits the bed and presumably does the same in some other indy fed then forgets who and when he’s supposed to be fighting at any one time. How the fuck can you prepare for Kyle Kemp, or a tournament as prestigeous as the pure cup, or challenging me for a spot in one of my bucket list matches that I’ve shockingly, some might say scandallously, yet to complete in when you’re jetting around the world facing Bobby Bouchet in the Tokyo Dome car park in front of 12 angry Japanese folk who just want to go to work instead of studying tape, strategising, going to the gym and doing your damn best to win the match?
I gotta say it straight though, unlike him, the gods don’t take on too much, they aren’t forgetful, they don’t think “Oh yeah I need to bestow upon him some luck today, but I haven’t had the chance because there’s only 24 hours in the day.
They just choose to ignore him, because the simple fact is, and allow me to quote one of the forefathers of our United States, Thomas Jefferson who allegedly said:
“I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
Elijah doesn’t have a problem with luck, he just has a problem with work rate.
Yeah he can argue that he works harder than anyone because he fights 12 times a week in different places but is he really?
I mean you gotta work smart too right? Hard work in 5 or 6 different pies is just half assing it in 5 or 6 different pies. I should know, I’ve been struggling with that exact problem for years. This is why I am not considered top tier talent, why I’m not thought of for the main event - or why I have never been called to even be in one All in match, despite being a prime contender for just that very match. I mean come on - it’s designed to give people who haven’t had the chance to stake a claim for the title a chance.
It’s designed to be there for the guys who just need one opportunity, one shot to go up there when the management just ignores them.
Well what happens when the management ignores the people who should be in this match too?
Me, I’m what happens. A man who could have been on his 3rd or 4th title reign by now if he had a chance, rather than being constantly overlooked. A guy on his last legs, his contract running out in 4 months and still only one step closer to winning the World Title than I was before. And that’s because finally they’ve given me the chance to be in this match.
They can’t use the excuse of me being embroiled in the US title this year, when the current US champion is in the match, they can’t say I’m too busy with Hollywood, because I’m out of the game.
They had no choice this year but to at least give me a qualifying match and, quite frankly this is my chance to go in there and do what I have to do to get into All In - win that briefcase and go on to cash it in, finally becoming the world champion I was always destined to be. Shedding that stupid label that oppenent after oppenent has used to denigrate me and my achievements.
“Oh you’ve never won the big one” they all say ad nauseum, as if I didn’t already know that. As if I didn’t already know standing there on the sidelines when management basically overlooked me time and time again for title shots, sending their flavours of the month up ahead only for them to crash and burn then eventually leave while I persist, because I am a survivor - not a flash in the pan guy who quits as soon as the going gets tough.
But I must admit the reason I didn’t get those shots, that I was overlooked, was because I was doing too much and wasn’t 100% focussed on AW. I had my attention on a thousand projects at the same time so I didn’t devote my time to this noble art. It’s why I lost to Lissie, it’s why I lost to Angelo, hell, it’s still why I lost to Park. I’m still getting the hang of being a one career guy, that comes with time. Time is something that is quickly running out.
So this represents possibly my last chance to be in this match, the last chance to take that title, and I’m not letting it go. It doesn’t matter who’s in my way - it could be Tort himself but it wouldn’t make any difference. I’m going to take this chance and go on to All-in where I will not fail.
Elijah might be thinking the same, he might be sitting there on his big chair thinking “Wow, Lexi, maybe this is my chance to do something in AW, maybe the luck is finally turning and we can go on to have our big break.
He can think that, but you know what? It ain’t happening. He’s sitting on a throne of lies.
Lexi has more of a chance appearing as the next Black Widow and cutting a multi platinum album of pop country than Elijah has of using this as a big break.
When this match is all said and done Elijah is going to be wishing he was a one fed guy, wishing that he could spend all his time training and strategising for that one fight a week, hoping that he won’t have to endure days upon days of being tortured, harmed and battered to the point where he just wants to give up. He’s going to wake up thinking “What the hell, was it worth it” and decide once and for all that he’s all in.
At anywhere other than AW of course. Because rest assured, the guy has never been in the ring with anyone like me, not here, not wherever else he’s been, nowhere. He’s not been in the ring with someone who just survives. I can take punishment day after day after day and still live. I can go the distance with anyone on that roster and more I can win the US title 4 times and win the tag team title many times and I do it with zero fuss.
And I do all this while having my time split between two very demanding industries. Imagine how I am when I’m focussing on one. Oh and let’s not forget I got fuckin’ diabetes. So that means I’m doing all this with a fuckin’ handicap already.
So yeah, Elijah has never been in the ring with anyone like me. No one who fights tooth and nail for a gram of respect, no one who is disrespected in the way he is by half the roster in this company. No one who, despite all his achievements, is considered a top talent by anyone but the fans.
But you know, the fans know more than most, they know when someone is there fighting for them, they know when someone is sacrificing everything they have to give them what they want. They saw that with me v Spence, they saw it with me v Lissie, they saw it against Jill.
What do they see when they see Elijah?
Well, the way I see it, they see nothing of note. They see a guy who only cares about him and his brand, who doesn’t have a connection with the fans. The reason he doesn’t have a connection with the fans, and he won’t ever have one is simple.
He doesn’t know who the fans are. Are they the AW fans? The XWF fans? The YMCA fans? The fans of NOW? When you serve multiple masters you never have true allegiance. You don’t know who’s going to boo you one day and cheer you the next. You can’t just treat all the fans the same and expect them to all act the same way. There’s something different about AW fans, something intangible that we can never fully appreciate. They will get behind you if they think you are worth it, if you’re doing everything you can to entertain them - putting it all on the line so the money they spent in packing that venue was good value. They are the most knowledgeable fans in the industry, honestly.
So they know when a guy doesn’t really care and is only out for the money. And that’s what they feel about Elijah. Dude makes out like he eats, sleeps and breathes wrestling but does he really? It seems like he actually found something he was semi decent at and decided to do the shock and awe approach - just go to as many companies as he can to get his name out there, saturate the market and build his brand. Problem is this isn’t the way to do it in this industry. You gotta build your brand in the biggest place you can. Not everywhere, this ain’t the 70s - wrestling isn’t territories now. So you gotta go to the big house or you’re nothing. The fans know this, they can argue between themselves which company is bigger of course, outside of AW - because we all know AW is THE place to be.
And our fans know this, they also know that anyone who doesn’t want to try their best when they get to the big house then there isn’t a reason to cheer them. In fact most of our fans will go out of the way to do the opposite. Believe me, I know.
Now Elijah is in the big house, not only that, he’s facing the big guns in the big house. So he should be absolutely switched on right now, ready to do what it takes to win this match and go on to the all-in match. After all, all-in is the launchpad to superstardom. It was the match that launched the careers of Lockhart, Holliday, Hope and Carter Shaw. Hell it even provided a platform for Kemp, who tempted Elijah to AW in the first place apparently. So he should know first hand what it means. He should be all over this.
I can guarantee he isn’t though, I can guarantee the guy is too busy thinking about 23 other things - maybe it’s Lexi’s latest adventure in Tinseltown, maybe it’s his forthcoming appearance against a low rent local talent who wouldn’t pass tryouts in AW in front of a few people in Missouri. Maybe he’s busy thinking of bad quotes or pretending to be a king, anything but training and getting prepared for the biggest match of his career.
Because that’s what it is, the biggest match of his career. It’s the biggest match of my career too. Not just because of the permutations I mentioned earlier, that allows me to join the names that have been all-in, not because of the platform being in the match will allow. No, it’s the biggest match in my career because it’s the next match in my career.
Every week I go out there like it’s my last. I have to, it’s the way I have to live because I don’t have long left.
4 months to build a legacy, as summer turns to Autumn and eventually winter - that’s the only time I have left for sure. I have to do what I can to make myself indispensable and I realise now that isn’t just the US title. It’s about collecting all the accolades. It’s about being the World Champion, it’s about making sure that I am the top dog in this organisation and that means treating every week like I have everything riding on it. Because I have.
I can’t just lose this contract and be all “Oh cool, I’ll just carry on in another fed”. I can’t just lose these matches and act as if nothing happens because I got another one on Wednesday. I have to go out to win, I have to go out to do the business. Hell not just have to, I need to.
I need this life, I have the life that I have for a reason. I’m all-in on AW now so I can be an all-in winner. I have no distractions and no reason not to go out there and meet my goals.
In short, I’m fresh out of excuses. It’s time for me to put up or shut up. This means absolutely taking out Elijah and then the rest of the all-in field. It means giving it maximum effort every single day to represent everything good that AW represents.”
Kidsgrove sighs for a moment.
“Simply put, this means, on Monday night - going out there and absolutely destroying Elijah’s hopes and dreams at AW. It means sending him packing to wherever he wants to go next. It means ending his AW career before it really began. It means stopping him dead in his tracks and making sure that I go onward to fight at Uprising.
Just like in Harry Potter there can be only one chosen one. And in this business I’m the boy with the scar on his forehead. Elijah? He’s just the Irish kid who is in way over his head. He’s the one who when the war comes we don’t hear from because he’s somewhere else.
We’re not on the same level. I’m going to prove the hell out of this on Monday.
In the meantime,” he smiles to Zooey “You wanna go grab a butterbeer? They’re so good.”
“The Goblet of Fire was much, much taller, the plinth is a completely different one than in the movie.”
“You weren’t in any Harry Potter movies” replied Zooey, rather bemused. “You were famously left out of them, I’m pretty sure you’re the only British actor who didn’t have a part in them in fact.”
Kidsgrove gives her the side eye.
“It doesn’t mean I wasn’t there though! I was on set more often than Alan!”
“You were his assistant, weren’t you?”
“Maggie’s actually. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t there! They had no use for someone in his teens who was already obliged to do new seasons of TV and already had 4 feature productions in the works.
They said it was too much, that I just had to focus on one or two things at a time, so they couldn’t, in their role as a responsible studio, hire me in good conscience.”
“Did you feel like butter, scraped across too much bread?” Asks Zooey, twinkle in her eye.
“Nice try, that’s Lord of the Rings. But yes, that’s what they were worried about, so they didn’t offer me a role. They did allow me to be there as an assistant though so I could see how massive projects were shot in the industry, those days were some of the most informative of my life.
I felt that recently, that my Hollywood Career and my AW career couldn’t intertwine, that it was one or the other. If I want to become a true legend in the sport, if I want to become that Hall of Fame worthy guy I felt that I had to leave this behind.” He motions to the studio.
“Simply because I couldn’t prepare for facing the likes of Dandy or Lissie while learning my lines for a Die Hard reboot, I couldn’t prepare myself mentally and physically to go 12 rounds with my mortal enemy when half of my brainpower was used to get the nuance right between various incarnations of the phrase Yippee Ki yay motherfucker. It’s a skill I tried to master, something I tried to balance for years until I finally realised it’s all or nothing in both industries. AW especially needs all of your attention because that’s the only place you could at one moment destroy a legendary hall of fame multiple time world champ one week and then get your ankle snapped off by someone who’s been around for 5 minutes the next.
Which is why I don’t understand Elijah Martin. At all.
Not only does the guy bastardise Harry Potter quotes to an almost alarming degree, he insists, as you put it, via Bilbo Baggins, to scrape himself over too much bread.
He puts his record in AW down to not much luck, simply wrong place wrong time. As if results would be better, hell life would be better if he just had that intangible thing down, as if the Goddess Fortuna is somehow deserting him, if she’d only hear his prayers or whatever then things would work better and he’d just have it all.
It’s not because he’s working through every single organisation in wrestling, dropping different acronyms every week like he’s just discovered the alphabet and is trying to work out which order they go.
It isn’t because he turns up at AW and attacks one of the biggest names this company has seen, then promptly shits the bed and presumably does the same in some other indy fed then forgets who and when he’s supposed to be fighting at any one time. How the fuck can you prepare for Kyle Kemp, or a tournament as prestigeous as the pure cup, or challenging me for a spot in one of my bucket list matches that I’ve shockingly, some might say scandallously, yet to complete in when you’re jetting around the world facing Bobby Bouchet in the Tokyo Dome car park in front of 12 angry Japanese folk who just want to go to work instead of studying tape, strategising, going to the gym and doing your damn best to win the match?
I gotta say it straight though, unlike him, the gods don’t take on too much, they aren’t forgetful, they don’t think “Oh yeah I need to bestow upon him some luck today, but I haven’t had the chance because there’s only 24 hours in the day.
They just choose to ignore him, because the simple fact is, and allow me to quote one of the forefathers of our United States, Thomas Jefferson who allegedly said:
“I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
Elijah doesn’t have a problem with luck, he just has a problem with work rate.
Yeah he can argue that he works harder than anyone because he fights 12 times a week in different places but is he really?
I mean you gotta work smart too right? Hard work in 5 or 6 different pies is just half assing it in 5 or 6 different pies. I should know, I’ve been struggling with that exact problem for years. This is why I am not considered top tier talent, why I’m not thought of for the main event - or why I have never been called to even be in one All in match, despite being a prime contender for just that very match. I mean come on - it’s designed to give people who haven’t had the chance to stake a claim for the title a chance.
It’s designed to be there for the guys who just need one opportunity, one shot to go up there when the management just ignores them.
Well what happens when the management ignores the people who should be in this match too?
Me, I’m what happens. A man who could have been on his 3rd or 4th title reign by now if he had a chance, rather than being constantly overlooked. A guy on his last legs, his contract running out in 4 months and still only one step closer to winning the World Title than I was before. And that’s because finally they’ve given me the chance to be in this match.
They can’t use the excuse of me being embroiled in the US title this year, when the current US champion is in the match, they can’t say I’m too busy with Hollywood, because I’m out of the game.
They had no choice this year but to at least give me a qualifying match and, quite frankly this is my chance to go in there and do what I have to do to get into All In - win that briefcase and go on to cash it in, finally becoming the world champion I was always destined to be. Shedding that stupid label that oppenent after oppenent has used to denigrate me and my achievements.
“Oh you’ve never won the big one” they all say ad nauseum, as if I didn’t already know that. As if I didn’t already know standing there on the sidelines when management basically overlooked me time and time again for title shots, sending their flavours of the month up ahead only for them to crash and burn then eventually leave while I persist, because I am a survivor - not a flash in the pan guy who quits as soon as the going gets tough.
But I must admit the reason I didn’t get those shots, that I was overlooked, was because I was doing too much and wasn’t 100% focussed on AW. I had my attention on a thousand projects at the same time so I didn’t devote my time to this noble art. It’s why I lost to Lissie, it’s why I lost to Angelo, hell, it’s still why I lost to Park. I’m still getting the hang of being a one career guy, that comes with time. Time is something that is quickly running out.
So this represents possibly my last chance to be in this match, the last chance to take that title, and I’m not letting it go. It doesn’t matter who’s in my way - it could be Tort himself but it wouldn’t make any difference. I’m going to take this chance and go on to All-in where I will not fail.
Elijah might be thinking the same, he might be sitting there on his big chair thinking “Wow, Lexi, maybe this is my chance to do something in AW, maybe the luck is finally turning and we can go on to have our big break.
He can think that, but you know what? It ain’t happening. He’s sitting on a throne of lies.
Lexi has more of a chance appearing as the next Black Widow and cutting a multi platinum album of pop country than Elijah has of using this as a big break.
When this match is all said and done Elijah is going to be wishing he was a one fed guy, wishing that he could spend all his time training and strategising for that one fight a week, hoping that he won’t have to endure days upon days of being tortured, harmed and battered to the point where he just wants to give up. He’s going to wake up thinking “What the hell, was it worth it” and decide once and for all that he’s all in.
At anywhere other than AW of course. Because rest assured, the guy has never been in the ring with anyone like me, not here, not wherever else he’s been, nowhere. He’s not been in the ring with someone who just survives. I can take punishment day after day after day and still live. I can go the distance with anyone on that roster and more I can win the US title 4 times and win the tag team title many times and I do it with zero fuss.
And I do all this while having my time split between two very demanding industries. Imagine how I am when I’m focussing on one. Oh and let’s not forget I got fuckin’ diabetes. So that means I’m doing all this with a fuckin’ handicap already.
So yeah, Elijah has never been in the ring with anyone like me. No one who fights tooth and nail for a gram of respect, no one who is disrespected in the way he is by half the roster in this company. No one who, despite all his achievements, is considered a top talent by anyone but the fans.
But you know, the fans know more than most, they know when someone is there fighting for them, they know when someone is sacrificing everything they have to give them what they want. They saw that with me v Spence, they saw it with me v Lissie, they saw it against Jill.
What do they see when they see Elijah?
Well, the way I see it, they see nothing of note. They see a guy who only cares about him and his brand, who doesn’t have a connection with the fans. The reason he doesn’t have a connection with the fans, and he won’t ever have one is simple.
He doesn’t know who the fans are. Are they the AW fans? The XWF fans? The YMCA fans? The fans of NOW? When you serve multiple masters you never have true allegiance. You don’t know who’s going to boo you one day and cheer you the next. You can’t just treat all the fans the same and expect them to all act the same way. There’s something different about AW fans, something intangible that we can never fully appreciate. They will get behind you if they think you are worth it, if you’re doing everything you can to entertain them - putting it all on the line so the money they spent in packing that venue was good value. They are the most knowledgeable fans in the industry, honestly.
So they know when a guy doesn’t really care and is only out for the money. And that’s what they feel about Elijah. Dude makes out like he eats, sleeps and breathes wrestling but does he really? It seems like he actually found something he was semi decent at and decided to do the shock and awe approach - just go to as many companies as he can to get his name out there, saturate the market and build his brand. Problem is this isn’t the way to do it in this industry. You gotta build your brand in the biggest place you can. Not everywhere, this ain’t the 70s - wrestling isn’t territories now. So you gotta go to the big house or you’re nothing. The fans know this, they can argue between themselves which company is bigger of course, outside of AW - because we all know AW is THE place to be.
And our fans know this, they also know that anyone who doesn’t want to try their best when they get to the big house then there isn’t a reason to cheer them. In fact most of our fans will go out of the way to do the opposite. Believe me, I know.
Now Elijah is in the big house, not only that, he’s facing the big guns in the big house. So he should be absolutely switched on right now, ready to do what it takes to win this match and go on to the all-in match. After all, all-in is the launchpad to superstardom. It was the match that launched the careers of Lockhart, Holliday, Hope and Carter Shaw. Hell it even provided a platform for Kemp, who tempted Elijah to AW in the first place apparently. So he should know first hand what it means. He should be all over this.
I can guarantee he isn’t though, I can guarantee the guy is too busy thinking about 23 other things - maybe it’s Lexi’s latest adventure in Tinseltown, maybe it’s his forthcoming appearance against a low rent local talent who wouldn’t pass tryouts in AW in front of a few people in Missouri. Maybe he’s busy thinking of bad quotes or pretending to be a king, anything but training and getting prepared for the biggest match of his career.
Because that’s what it is, the biggest match of his career. It’s the biggest match of my career too. Not just because of the permutations I mentioned earlier, that allows me to join the names that have been all-in, not because of the platform being in the match will allow. No, it’s the biggest match in my career because it’s the next match in my career.
Every week I go out there like it’s my last. I have to, it’s the way I have to live because I don’t have long left.
4 months to build a legacy, as summer turns to Autumn and eventually winter - that’s the only time I have left for sure. I have to do what I can to make myself indispensable and I realise now that isn’t just the US title. It’s about collecting all the accolades. It’s about being the World Champion, it’s about making sure that I am the top dog in this organisation and that means treating every week like I have everything riding on it. Because I have.
I can’t just lose this contract and be all “Oh cool, I’ll just carry on in another fed”. I can’t just lose these matches and act as if nothing happens because I got another one on Wednesday. I have to go out to win, I have to go out to do the business. Hell not just have to, I need to.
I need this life, I have the life that I have for a reason. I’m all-in on AW now so I can be an all-in winner. I have no distractions and no reason not to go out there and meet my goals.
In short, I’m fresh out of excuses. It’s time for me to put up or shut up. This means absolutely taking out Elijah and then the rest of the all-in field. It means giving it maximum effort every single day to represent everything good that AW represents.”
Kidsgrove sighs for a moment.
“Simply put, this means, on Monday night - going out there and absolutely destroying Elijah’s hopes and dreams at AW. It means sending him packing to wherever he wants to go next. It means ending his AW career before it really began. It means stopping him dead in his tracks and making sure that I go onward to fight at Uprising.
Just like in Harry Potter there can be only one chosen one. And in this business I’m the boy with the scar on his forehead. Elijah? He’s just the Irish kid who is in way over his head. He’s the one who when the war comes we don’t hear from because he’s somewhere else.
We’re not on the same level. I’m going to prove the hell out of this on Monday.
In the meantime,” he smiles to Zooey “You wanna go grab a butterbeer? They’re so good.”
