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Steve prided himself on being an even-keeled guy. In an office full of warring intellects and intense personalities, overseen by a well-intentioned megalomaniac, someone needed to be the voice of reason. The eye of the storm.
Of course, after ten years of staying out of office politics and deftly avoiding interpersonal drama, Steve figured he was owed a minor breakdown. Especially when he was given a bullshit fluff assignment.
The biggest professional wrestling promotion in the U.S. - some might say the world - was coming to Metropolis to film a Very Special Episode. The Planet was covering the event, with Steve as the assigned reporter. All the other tactics he’d tried to reassign coverage failed so he’d resorted to presenting the issue to Perry in extremely plain terms. One might describe Steve’s demeanor as ‘begging,’ but he was desperate at this point and felt like he was owed a favor.
‘This isn’t my area,” Steven insisted for the umpteenth time. “It’s entertainment. Arts and Leisure. Give it to Grant.”
The Chief was unmoved.
“Sports entertainment,” Perry insisted. “Sports is your area. This is your assignment. And that’s the bottom line.”
Steve wasn’t precious about being a journalist. Not like Lane who thought she was Woodward and Bernstein all in one. Or Kent, who was such a bleeding heart it was a wonder he didn’t leave red fingerprints all over the Keurig every time he made himself a cocoa. He knew he’d never win a Pulitzer, like Troupe or become a household name like Grant, but he was cool with that. Steve just loved sports and was pretty good at translating that love into readable text.
With the way ticket prices were going, it was harder and harder for lower and middle-income fans to make it to games and events in person, so he tried his best to bring the action home to them. Not that he expected accolades for the work he did (he knew he wasn’t out there saving the world), but every once in a while there would be a comment under one of his articles in the online edition of The Planet that said something to the effect of:
Not a football/baseball/whatever fan, but I always like reading these articles! Now I can talk to my uncles at Christmas!
Happened once or twice a year. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t make him smile. That was his goal with his writing: to make people feel like they were there in the moment, to capture the skill of the players, the energy of the crowd. To inform the die-hard fans what was up, while keeping the language simple enough that people new to the sport didn’t feel left behind.
How the hell was he supposed to do that with pro-wrestling? What was he supposed to talk about? The goofy outfits? The inane storylines? That was fodder for the movie reviewers, the fashion columnists, not him.
Steve had no idea what he did to piss Perry off, but he must have done something big to be forced to cover a glorified soap opera, featuring stunt performers, specifically crafted to pander to kids and rednecks.
Of course, Olsen and Kent were loud and proud fans.
Every Tuesday they’d take over the break room, loudly recapping the latest episode of the Monday wrestling TV show. They’d greeted each other by shouting, “YEET,” across the newsroom. While Steve was sitting at his desk, stewing over his inability to get someone else to cover the show, he overheard them scheming at Olsen’s desk.
The two knuckleheads were doing math out loud, calculating costs to attend the show, studying the seating chart with the intensity of generals overlooking a battlefield, trying to figure out where they could sit in their budgets that would still give them a decent view of the action. There was a lot of discussion about ‘hard camera placement.’
It didn’t take long for Steve to find a way out of his predicament. Here was the situation: He didn’t want to cover the wrestling, but he couldn’t get out of it. He worked with two fanboys who would probably talk nonstop during the show the way his eldest son talked about Minecraft. If he got higher on Perry’s shit list and was forced to cover elementary school gaming competitions, that would be a piece of cake. He’d just mention “the Nether” at dinner, turn on his mobile audio recorder and let Jaydon jabber for an hour, take notes, and turn those notes into a publishable article.
Anyway, it wasn’t plagiarism if he didn’t have them do the typing.
When Steve approached the boys with an offer to take them to the press box, they were predictably embarrassing about it. Olsen immediately wanted to know if they’d be able to meet the superstars. Kent was even worse, he asked if his dad could come.
The answers were, of course, no and hell no. How was Kent’s farmer dad supposed to get to Metropolis on twenty-four hours notice, anyway? Attach a jet engine to the tractor?
Their gratitude overcame their disappointment and Steve’s second-hand embarrassment threatened to overcome both. When he met the boys at the arena, they were decked out in themed t-shirts. Kent’s shirt featured a skull painted the colors of the flag with the words AMERICAN NIGHTMARE in horror movie font and Olsen’s apparel of choice was even worse. He’d cut the sleeves off of a bright blue t-shirt, featuring cartoon people, captioned ALPHA BABES.
And before anyone made the comparison - no, wearing fanboy merch from Hot Topic was not the same as donning jerseys or scarves or other pieces of sports memorabilia. The difference between professional athletes, who gave blood, sweat and tears honing their skills, putting their bodies on the line day in and day out, and jacked-up actors pretending to beat each other up for three hours was pretty stark, as far as Steve was concerned.
“Thank you so much for inviting us,” Kent gushed, with the kind of piss your pants excitement Steve got from his kids when he and the wife surprised them with a trip to Disney last Christmas. “I’ve never been to PLE before, I’ve always wanted to go. This is going to be awesome.”
“You are the man, Steve!” Jimmy crowed, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. His camera bag bagged against his side, jostling the thousands of dollars worth of equipment inside.
“Anytime,” he grunted, leading the way into the arena.
As a rule, Steve didn’t like covering games from the press box; the angle at the Metropolis Arena (sponsored by LordTech) wasn’t the best and he preferred watching from the stadium seats to replicate the fan experience as closely as possible. On this occasion, because it was a show, rather than a game, he figured the jumbotron would provide an accurate viewing experience.
One thing he would say for the wrestlers is that they put out a decent spread: beer, wine, and a truly impressive array of snacks, which the Planet boys loaded up on. Glancing around, Steve was surprised to see that he looked more out of place than Kent and Olsen. He’d opted for a casual Friday look, polo shirt and decent jeans. Nearly everyone else was wearing fan t-shirts. He wondered if he was missing something, until he saw all the little handheld cameras and fuzzy clip-on microphones.
Steve was surrounded by vloggers and streamers. With a sinking feeling he realized that not only was he the oldest guy in the room by about a decade, he was also the only one who worked in print journalism.
Kent and Olsen seemed right at home. They made easy conversation with the influencer crowd while Steve slunk off to a corner, chowing down on mac and cheese bites, mood souring further. He set up his laptop and only looked up when Kent sat his big ass down next to him. He was holding half a dozen business cards.
“Promoters,” he shrugged, pocketing them.
That made sense; take off the nerdy glasses and replace the ugly sweaters Kent usually wore with a t-shirt and even Steve could see he had a good look for the “sport.” Guy was jacked; Steve probably shouldn’t have been that surprised, farm-strong was a stereotype for a reason.
“Thinking about switching careers?” Steve smirked.
Kent laughed and shook his head. “Ha, no way. I told them the same thing I told the high school football coach: ‘Thank you very much for your interest, sir, but my mom won’t let me. She’s worried about CTE.’”
Yeah, that made sense. Both that Kent was a Mama’s Boy and that he wasn’t cut out for fighting - even fake fighting. The guy might have a square jaw, but Steve didn’t doubt it was made of glass.
Jimmy joined them, looking disgruntled.
“They’re all fake fans,” he said, not nearly quietly enough not to be overheard. “Don’t come at me wearing an Austin 3:16 shirt and then not know who Bret Hart is. Like, dude. You are making way too much Twitch money to be that ignorant.”
“Ooh,” Kent winced. “I don’t want to be a gatekeeper, but that is basic.”
The two of them then proceeded to have one of their geek conversations, during which time Steve discreetly turned on his audio recorder.
“You think El Grande Americano is going to make an appearance?” Kent asked Olsen.
“Pfft, no,” Olsen countered. “Gable’s still out on injury.”
“...weird that you’d bring up Chad Gable, but okay.”
“Bro, Gable is clearly El Grande Americano.”
“Lies. Conspiracy. You and Michael Cole need to start a haters podcast.”
Steve got up to get a beer, swallowing a sigh of frustration; maybe his master plan wasn’t going to be as useful as he thought. What was the use of gathering all this intel if he couldn’t decode any of it.
“How long have you guys been into this?” Steve asked, taking a sip of beer. To his continued frustration, Clark and Olsen started talking at the same time; the audio transcript was going to be fucking useless.
Still, he managed to get some separate comments from them, once the initial wave of gushing was over. Olsen was bitten by the wrestling bug in middle school.
“I was such a simp for Cena,” he said, grinning ear-to-ear. “I got detention once because my teacher asked why I didn’t do my homework and I was just like, ‘Ruthless aggression.’ My parents didn’t watch, so they were like, ‘What the fuck is wrong with our kid?’ I got in so much trouble.”
“I always watched with my dad,” Kent said and Stever barely kept himself from rolling his eyes; Papa Kent was probably Clark’s best and only friend. “He's been a fan forever. He was raised Quaker and his grandparents didn’t like the violence, so his best friend would tape it off the TV for him and they’d watch it later. He did a moonsault off the porch railing once and gave himself a concussion.”
“Your dad sounds like the man, CK,” Olsen said admiringly.
“He is, my dad’s a badass,” Kent agreed, causing Steve to nearly drop his beer.
Was that a curse word out of the Kansas Goodie-Two-Shoes? Kent had only had half an Angry Orchard, there was no way he was drunk - unless he was a ridiculous light-weight, which, given his actual weight didn’t seem likely.
“Pa’s gonna watch live,” Kent said, looking down at his phone screen. “He said he’d look for us, but I told him there’s no way he’ll see us in the press box. He said that’s okay, it’s cool just knowing we’re here.”
All of a sudden, Steve was struck with the most depressing mental image: some tired old Kansas farmer sitting in front of an ancient TV set with bunny ears, searching the crowd for a glimpse of his son. A guy like that could get drinks on the house in his miserable small town bar for years if he was able to tell his fellow yokels that his boy was on the TV. Even if it was in a blink-and-you-miss-it pan over the crowd.
Maybe it was Steve’s annoyance with the assignment. Maybe it was the fact that he was surrounded by vloggers and streamers who wouldn’t shut the fuck up. Maybe it was just the note of wistfulness in Kent’s voice when he talked about his dad looking for him on TV, but Steve got up to talk to one of the building managers. He returned a minute later.
“Get up,” he said to Kent and Olsen. “They’ve got some unsold seats we can park our asses in. Move it or lose it.”
Again, he was reminded of his own kids. Kent and Olsen lit up like Christmas trees and followed him out (Olsen grabbing a fistful of complimentary soft pretzels on the way). They weren’t quite ringside, but they were definitely close enough that they’d be visible during panning shots.
Beside him, Olsen was taking a million pictures, of the ring, the ramp, the announcers’ desk. Kent was practically vibrating with excitement, taking out his phone and filming the crowd, joining in with a wide array of chants and wordless exclamations. (The first five times people shouted ‘WOO!’ at top volume, Steve assumed something was about to happen - it turned out that was just some weird WWE mating call.)
“LET’S GO CENA!”
“CENA SUCKS!”
“Is John Cena going to be here?” Steve shouted to Kent over the noise (this was still better than the endless drone of the streamers in the Press Box). He might not have been a fan, but he was alive. Everyone knew John Cena.
“Probably not,” Kent acknowledged. Then he turned slightly away from Steve to cup his hands around his mouth and shout, along with half the audience, “CENA SUCKS!”
Who the hell was this guy? Where was Clark Kent, his loser coworker who apologized to the coat hanger for bumping into it? Who was known to say, ‘Dang it,’ when the printer ran out of ink? Off of Steve’s look of shock, Kent grinned in an abashed way and shrugged his shoulders.
“I gotta stand up for my guy,” he said, plucking at his American Nightmare t-shirt.
“Cody’s gonna turn heel!” Olsen leaned forward to talk to Kent through Steve, who’d made the extremely poor choice to sit between them. “It’s gonna happen! If not at SummerSlam, then before the end of the retirement tour!”
“I’m not mentally and emotionally prepared,” Kent said, closing his eyes and putting a hand over his heart. “If he does, though, I’m all in on Stardust making a comeback.”
Olsen cackled like a fucking witch, louder than all of the chanting around them - nothing was even going on yet, the crowd was going to be completely worn out by the time the actual show started.
“You’re out of your fucking mind, CK!”
“Don’t crush my dreams, Jimothy!”
Then the lights changed and something seemed to be happening. The crowd cheered as the ring announcer came in and declared the first match. Steve checked his watch; it was still a half an hour until broadcast.
“They going early?” he asked Olsen.
“Dark match!” he replied gleefully, holding up his phone - until Kent held out a hand to stop him, shaking the lanyard of his press pass meaningfully.
“Not while we’re repping the Planet,” he said, in such a rule-abiding, Boy Scout tone, that Steve stopped being concerned about him having been Pod Personed. Olsen pouted, but put the camera down as the ring announcer started speaking.
THE FOLLOWING CONTEST IS SCHEDULED FOR ONE FALL…”
Two girls, Stephanie Vaquer, (who was dressed kind of like a ballerina dragon) and Piper Niven (who was dressed kind of like a character in the Henry VIII musical that he and his wife saw when it came through Metropolis last year) came out, to raucous applause.
Steve figured it was going to be more runway show than anything resembling fighting. They two of them were all made up, so there was no way they were going to be working up a sweat, especially for something that wasn’t even going to be on TV.
A referee entered the ring and the bell rang, like this was a real sport, and the two women…well. Looked like they were trying to fucking murder each other. But with style.
Despite his low opinions of professional wrestling and his lower expectations for the night, they put on one hell of a show. Yeah, he could see them slapping their legs to make a louder impact sound, pulling their punches, and covering their faces when they went into the turnbuckles…but those girls took some hits .
You couldn’t fake climbing up to the top rope and jumping. You couldn’t fake being tossed around like a rag doll and hitting the mat. At one point, one of Vaquer’s elbows caught Niven in the face and she started bleeding, but they still kept going.
Steve found himself getting into it. By the end of the match, when Niven picked Vaquer up and slammed her down onto the mat, Steve found himself yelling along with everyone else, both because he was impressed and because he was a little concerned that she’d broken the Vaquer girl’s neck. Kent and Olsen were on their feet on either side of him, counting along with the ref.
“ONE…TWO…THREE!!!”
The place erupted in cheers and boos - Niven paraded around the ring with a smug look on her face, while Vaquer lay there like she was dead for a few seconds before she rolled out and limped off, to cheers of her own. The crowd seemed more on the side of the girl who lost than the girl who won.
“LA PRIMERA! LA PRIMERA!”
There was another match before the broadcast started, this time it was two guys - specifically, two of the largest men Steve had ever seen in his life.
“REPRESENTING ONE HALF OF THE WAR RAIDERS… IVAR! AND REPRESENTING ALPHA ACADEMY… OTIS!”
They were such big dudes, Steve expected more of a sumo-style of fighting than anything, but once again his mind was blown. Those big guys could move. They were jumping off the ropes and doing fucking cartwheels and handstands - Steve hadn’t been able to do a cartwheel since elementary school.
When Otis won the match, Kent lost his ever-loving mind. They were too far away to possibly be heard, but Kent stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs.
“OTIS I LOVE YOU! I NAMED MY DOG IN YOUR HONOR!”
Not to be outdone, Olsen also started screaming, “ALPHA BABES LET’S GOOOOOOOO!”
It should have been so humiliating to be with them that Steve should have been chiding his colleagues for bringing shame to his press pass. And yeah, if they were still in the box it would have been, but out in the stands, Kent and Olsen were just two voices among, many, many passionate people. Staying in his seat and not screaming was the exception, not the rule; Steve was starting to feel a little bit like a dud, surrounded by thousands of chanting, screaming, singing people.
The singing really ramped up once the broadcast part started. It was like being at a very violent concert, all of the wrestlers had theme music and everyone in the crowd knew every word. The soap opera stuff was also unexpectedly funny. Steve always had a sense that wrestling fans were just too dumb not to realize everything was fake, but the crowd struck this precise balance of being very into the action (both on mic and in-ring), while seeming to be in on the joke.
In short: he was impressed. Both by the actual athleticism displayed by the wrestlers and by what a fantastic fan experience he was having. The crowd enthusiasm was infectious and, when a sunglasses-clad guy emerged from the audience and everyone started maniacally waving their arms, 16,000 people engaging in Kent and Olsen’s morning greeting ritual, Steve joined right in, even though he had no idea what he was doing.
At one point, Steve left to go to the bathroom and when he came back, Olsen had moved seats at was sitting next to Kent. Steve was extremely confused to find them holding hands and speaking in hushed whispers.
“There’s no way…” Kent’s eyes were glued on the entrance ramp as the announcer declared there would be a mystery challenger to go against The Ring General.
While Steve had been in the bathroom, apparently someone attacked the original challenger with a lead pipe and now there was no one to wrestle the scary Teutonic man. The fact that there was a random person, ready to swap in at the last minute seemed cheesy and contrived to Steve, but it left Olsen and Kent literally breathless with anticipation, so even though it was a gimmick, it was clearly a gimmick that worked.
“They’ve got a deal with TNA,” Olsen pointed out, white-knuckling Kent’s fingers.
“Should we summon him? Can we conjure him?” Kent suggested.
The two of them did exactly that. Together they started murmuring, “Joe Hendry. Joe Hendry. Joe Hendry.” Like they were a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls at a sleepover, trying to do the Bloody Mary mirror thing. They started a trend because, in a handful of seconds, the rest of the arena was chanting for this Joe guy.
There was a drumbeat. A moment of silence. Then the speakers chimed out with:
“SAY HIS NAME AND HE APPEARS!”
The place came completely unglued. Kent jumped up and Olsen jumped onto Kent who then proceeded to hold Olsen against his hip, like a mother koala with her baby, while some blonde guy in blue shorts and a cheesy grin walked down the ramp.
“WAVE YOUR HANDS FROM SIDE TO SIDE AND SAY: I BELIEVE IN JOE HENDRY!”
Once again, Steve fell under the spell of crowd momentum. He stood up and, as instructed, started waving his hands from side-to-side. A replay of the entrance on the jumbotron played and, right there, in the middle of the screen, was the exact moment Olsen jumped on Kent. The camera caught the absolute elation of these adult men screaming and singing at the tops of their lungs. There was no question that Pa Kent would be seeing his kid on TV that night.
Steve was weirdly proud of himself for that. And felt a slight pang of guilt that he hadn’t tried to get a ticket for Kent’s dad to come. Maybe next time WWE came through Metropolis, he’d talk to his contacts at the arena, see if he could get them some good seats on the cheap. Maybe…maybe he’d bring his own kids along. They’d probably have fun. And, hey, open the invite to Olsen too. Make it a party.
The event was two hours, but they went by in a flash. When the house lights turned on Steve stayed seated; surely this was half-time, right? There had to be more.
There was not. It was ten o’clock and time to head home. They were slightly delayed in leaving the aisle because Kent went through and picked up all the popcorn boxes and beer cans left behind by the assholes in the crowd who couldn’t bother to clean up after themselves. He and Olsen kept up a continual stream of conversation.
“Breakker is a fucking machine, man, I think he needs to break out of the Heyman faction.”
“I think he needs to stay a little longer and then turn on them, maybe do something nefarious with the Money in the Bank briefcase - ”
“You think he has a 33% chance of turning?”
“Thirty-three and a third percent chance, Jimmy. Thirty-three and a third.”
“Yeah, well I would have said there was a 0% chance of Gunther putting Joe Hendry over and then that happened.”
“Ahhh! I know, I feel like I should be less conflicted, but Gunther does excellent work and they keep using him to put over talent, I want him to have something else going on in his story…”
When they got outside, Olsen and Kent thanked Steve again for letting them come to the show with him. Steve thanked them for accepting the invitation and he meant it; it had been a fun night. As they went their separate ways (Olsen to the rideshare pick-up, Steve to the parking garage, Kent to the bus stop), Steve saw Kent take his phone out of his pocket and overheard his side of the conversation as he went down the street.
“Hey, Pa! You saw me? Oh, that’s great! I’m gonna have to watch the highlights on YouTube when I get back. Yeah, that was my friend Jimmy - it was awesome, we loved it. It was incredible to watch live, I wish you’d been there…”
The audio recording was absolutely useless; there was no way Steve was going to be able to use any of it to write his article, but he already had a pretty good idea of what it was going to say.
I always say, you can’t have a game without fans. The fans are half the experience, they’re the heart. This is true in sports and in sports entertainment…