Monkey Flip - Fluid Karma iPPV 4/21/13

The night’s already over.  It’s all over and Alex is sure that everything’s over.  The match was horrible.  His deal with NOVA will be terminated.  He’ll be lucky to work as a special attraction every couple of months.  Every promotion will think he’s priced out of their league for any kind of regular basis.  It’s back to being a regular joe, and Alex was never any damn good at that.

He watched the first match, which was unbilled, a pre-show special attraction featuring most of the locker room in a battle royal.  It ran twenty minutes.  That kind of thing never happens.  There were a couple of new faces.  Obviously Billy Swift, an up-and-coming Canadian talent working as Thunderbolt, is the star attraction of the night, someone Colt Carson is for some reason high on, a favor to Owen Smulders, the hottest Canuck on the indy circuit, a real technical marvel who can put on a show.  Probably the only reason Smulders himself doesn’t appear in NOVA is that he would steal too much of the spotlight from Carson.  Sometimes professional jealousies are bad for business.

From what Alex could tell, Swift is still green.  His were some of the first but certainly not the last botched moves of the night.  Still, he was pretty exciting.  Carson will ride him as long as he can, which will probably be a few months.  Crowd reaction was tepid, never a good sign for someone you’re trying to make a star, much less an instant sensation.

The tornado match that opened the iPPV was an unusually awkward affair.  Maybe Carson has a good idea, keeping himself away from similar talent, or then maybe it’s just Clete Kubeck, who oversold everything, like a parody of what he was supposed to do.  It also exposed the essential weakness of the tornado concept as a regular feature.  He had absolutely no chemistry with Nemo, who is more of a refined version of Billy Swift.  Every tornado match has a different set of what still amounts to tag team partners.  The weird part is that of everyone who’s competed in these matches so far, it’s Kubeck, Nemo and Scotty who have the most experience, and all three of them were in that one, Scotty teaming with Carson.

It may explain things a little that Scotty mostly sat in the corner.  Carson was in the ring as much as possible, and from a certain standpoint it made sense, considering that it was his first iPPV out of the main event, and to keep him somewhere and prominent only sounded like the right thing to do.

Yet in the night’s main event there was another title change for the NOVA championship, with two old pros doing their best to sell an awkward situation for everyone.  Alex has nothing but respect for Phil Brodeur and Damian Goch, but even they couldn’t pull that off.

To make things that much harder, it was him and Oliver Pine that made not only a tough but crucial night that much more excruciating for everyone.  It was all Alex could do to finally resort to exactly what every wrestler fan expects from a match involving a kendo stick.  It was bloody and brutal and graceless and not even exciting on a visceral level.  The more Alex panicked the more he forgot that he was supposed to help Oliver shine, regardless of how he handled the pressure of appearing on his first iPPV with the promotion.

Oliver was doing a poor job well before Alex made it easy for him.  Even with basic techniques he was looking sloppy, and he was winded within the first few minutes.  The saving grace was that while he was sucking wind and shedding blood, it became easier for the fans to confuse the two sensations.  Alex didn’t appreciate this right away, but by the end of the match he finally began taking his time, and let Oliver sell the match himself, even if he had to do it the hard way.

The minute they stepped back behind the curtain Alex knew that he was in trouble.  Carson was livid, and to watch a man who spends most of his time cracking jokes lose his cool is one of the most frightening things you can experience.  At least he waited until the main event talent was gone to throw his tirade.

“You’re lucky you’ve already got name recognition, Helton.  That’s the only reason I’m not firing you on the spot.  You nearly killed Oliver!  What were you thinking?  You’re going to make this up to all of us.  You’re going to pay, starting tonight.  Your check is going to be spread around to the rest of the boys.”