Monkey Flip: NOVA 2016

It's 2016, a year away from destiny, and Alex Helton begins it by telling himself the same nonsense he's been telling himself all along, and he keeps getting the same results.  He drops the tornado championship at Idolwild, giving Cairo Brown the rub, and then in February working yet another program with best friend and long-time enabler Scott Peavy.

Things get interesting in March.  The Russian Koba, the monster of a machine who is only just beginning to steamroll the sport of professional wrestling, lobbies hard to work with Alex.  Colt Carson, the perennial prig who succeeds with the cult promotion NOVA despite himself but will never admit it, is dead-set against it.  He won't budge.  It's actually the first crack in his grip on Koba, but he doesn't know it.  Koba knows what he wants, and he's already important enough in the company despite having arrived only last September where Carson is forced to take his demands seriously.  But not without a price.  This is a fight Koba has been waging on Alex's behalf for months.  While Scott had headlined a couple cards over NOVA's three-year existence, Alex never has, despite being one of its most dependable performers.  But in Alex's case, it's made him easy to take for granted. 

Koba, though, knows what he sees, and he threatens to walk away if Carson doesn't give him what he wants.  Carson's retaliation is swift and brutal: Koba's forced to drop the NOVA title to Oz Hedges at Idolwild.  The backlash from fans effectively tanks Oz's popular career, even though he'll go on to certain success in WPW, just nowhere near where he might have if he hadn't been branded a stooge backstage.  Koba will walk away after July, and end up with the same impactful career he'd left behind, taking his eternal fight with Bronson into NWW and perhaps one day even beyond, once Bronson's made his transition to WPW.  Time will tell.  Bronson is a guy who realizes Koba has been given a raw deal, and talks his way into NOVA merely to help point it out, but he has bite behind his bark, and he becomes more successful than even Koba, and in a shorter length of time, and leaves even sooner, just as fed up with Carson's bullshit.

They're the first chinks in the company's armor, but because guys like Alex stay, it survives.  Actually, it's because guys like Alex stay that it survives, because they stick around precisely to prove it's endurable.  But even Alex leaves as soon as he hits it big, a year later...

The match with Koba, at the Pink Mist card in March, becomes Alex's signature, the match that makes his career, solidifies it, makes everyone really sit up and pay attention.  He breaks all his rules.  For one night he embodies everything he'd previously feared.  Koba knows as well as he does that his reigns with the kendo championship didn't mean what his reputation became because of them, but that he'll have to use brutality in order to sell his ability to keep up in this clash.  He in fact uses a kendo stick at various points, never with the signature monkey flip, never again, but every other thrilling variation he can imagine.  It's enough to give Koba his longest match to that point in the company.  Alex loses the match, and the next month is given a complete throwaway match with the eternally overwhelmed Gabe Parkman.  Koba keeps the title a few more months before dropping it permanently, to "Stunner" Steve Williams, who makes it seem credible while Koba works his greatest, and career-defining, NOVA match with Bronson in July's Warrior card, just a few months before Bronson repeats history, claiming the NOVA title and quickly walking out on the company...

Alex is nowhere to be seen the next two months, after the pointless Parkman match.  He resurfaces on the same Warrior card, once again battling Scott.  His pal is well on his way to solidifying the slow burn "Beast" character he'll one day elevate to WPW in the Helton/Peavy feud to end them all, their names changed but their chemistry once and forever intact.  This is all Koba needs to tell Bronson he needs to work with Alex, too, and the lobbying to make that happen...But it does.  At Three Rules in August, Alex and Bronson compete in a stretcher match.  The company had actually ditched the gimmick championships by this point, hoping to legitimize its business to mainstream fans, but this is the card where they will always live on, year after year.  By being placed in one of the eponymous "rules" matches (including a NOVA title match) on the card, Alex is being given the begrudging nod he's earned, and against the company's would-be replacement prospect.  Bronson wins the title at the fifth Unleashed card the next month, and then...yeah.  Where is Alex on that card?  In a losing effort to Damian Goch, an indy star well on his way to accepting that NOVA would be someone else's spotlight..

Carson's become desperate, though.  Now, he's always telling Alex that.  He's confiding in Alex as never before.  In the biggest irony of the whole company, the man Carson has tried so hard to bury over the years by keeping him always just on the cusp of a breakthrough is suddenly desperately needed to keep everything together.  Alex is booked in October to help launch another would-be hot prospect, Tupra, who will dance as Alex has danced over the years, perhaps forever, perhaps never to realize his full potential.  Alex realizes too late that Carson has actually used him, that he used Alex to bury another potential Koba, another potential Bronson, because looking back, he sees that Tupra had exactly that potential, but in being clipped off at the knees...

Still, he doesn't have too much time to feel bad, as he helps launch Anton Jericho into the next level in November.  Jericho is part of the emerging next generation of NOVA stars, and he's just found himself, one of the first stars NOVA has genuinely created.  The experience of working with him at this point in Anton's career is enough for Alex and Scott to remember him later, when they've been granted permission by WPW to write their own checks, so to speak. 

It's important to remember, too, that this is the period where NOVA undergoes a drastic format change that sweeps the rest of the wrestling landscape before long.  Having been exposed years ago as scripted, wrestling had struggled to find a way to reclaim a semblance of credibility.  NOVA's solution is to give real value to wins and losses.  The idea is that a win will advance you further up the card, until you've earned a shot in the main event.  Everyone has a fair chance now, and fresh matchups are guaranteed every month, the spirit of NOVA's competition-based mentality.  Those who rack up a lot of wins will deserve competing for and winning championships, and holding on to them for long stretches at a time (even if NOVA itself will never quite figure out how to keep someone champion for very long). 

In theory, it's the greatest thing to ever happen to professional wrestling.  In practice...it's frustrating.  The gods truly must smile on you.  When they do everything's great, and you instantly look like a million bucks.  But if they don't...And Alex fears that once and for all Carson has actually devised the perfect system to justify keeping him down, where hotter fresher names will find Alex low on the card, even if they have less real talent...Case in point, a loss to Oliver Pine, another guy who will never live up to his potential, in December...

But again, all this changes in 2017...!

Elsewhere, Steve Williams begins his campaign for greatness in RoG, which has suddenly lit up hotter than NOVA, thanks to realizing just how far behind it'd fallen in recent years.  Names like Williams, Nero, Bobby Brisco, Gorilla Graham, and Freddie Hammond emerge as the futures of WPW and NWW.  In NWW, meanwhile, Andy Lethal begins to emerge as a breakout star, years before he and Iron Henry join NOVA.  And who's that in October?  Bronson!  But much, much more on in in 2017.  And 2018.  And 2019...And...In WPW, Paul Tugend continues to prove that he's the face of the company for the foreseeable future.  And least, until Alex arrives...