And Winning is...?

He went down, hard. The crowd went silent, every nerve in the stadium tuned to the man fallen to the mat. He was the underdog, the surprise, the one no one expected to make it, or, honestly even knew. He was supposed to just make up the numbers, lose in the first round. Every one looked at him weirdly when they saw him train with such dedication outside his tent each morning before his first fight. ‘didn’t he know these were the best fighters in all the land, and that he was just meant to lose, no matter how hard he trained, these guys were just better, and if he was anywhere near their class, they’d have heard of him. They hadn’t, so why was he working out like he mattered?’ He didn’t notice, the poor guy had a tough time counting, keeping track of the number of push ups he was doing, so he focused on doing just that, counting. The push up part was much easier.

But he had one the first fight, and from a upset victor, to a new prospect, to a real contender, the verdict on him kept changing, as he progressed in the brackets, up the knock tables. Of course, no one really thought he was any good for the finals, and no one had put any real money on him, except a few hopefuls, and his mother, ‘He’s my son, what can I do, but back him up, I mean, I’ve taken care of him for all these years, and if I don’t support him, who will? So why shouldn’t I put my money, where my son is? And anyway, if he loses, he’ll come home to me, and with the amount he eats, I’ll have lost the amount of I’m betting in about a week… so it’s pretty even either way’ No one else was asking for his odds, a few were asking for his name though, and perhaps that was the bigger gain.

When the finals began, the first few rounds went of peacefully, which is obviously relative when you’re talking about a full contact fighting match, with weapons, and supposedly the world’s deadliest fighter’s at platy. Of course he wasn’t, still considered the world’s deadliest fighters, but the other guy, ooooh yeah, he was. The other finalist was a three time winner at the same tournament, and before beginning his career here, was a coal miner in the Penitentiary for murdering three guys, in a blade fight. He didn’t apologise, ‘they had it coming to them, and I’ll do my time peacefully,’ pretty much being all he had to say about the whole thing. He did his time, but came out, angry and disgruntled at the sorry state of the world he lived in. ‘my experience in jail was so much better than outside, there is something wrong with this world.’ He then decided to dedicate his life to a two-fold goal. The first being eradicating crime on the streets, and the second one being sent back to prison.

In pursuit of these two goals, he became comic book hero(type character) and put really tight slacks, that made his butt itch, and leather jackets that smelt bad in the rain, and went about his work of stopping crime, using his excellent fighting skills to prevent crime, quite successfully. However, he had a rather novel way to achieve the second part of his two fold goal, was to, having successfully thrashed the crimnals, and making them pinky promise to be good, he then would pose as the perpetrator himself. Initially he wasn’t very good at it, and his ‘proud to be guilty’ pose was often confused with a ‘proud to have brought justice to the night’ pose, popularised by Batman. This lead him to become a hero overnight. Which was very distressing, because heroes rarely go to prison, except to break out, which he really didn’t want to do.

He did get close a few times, in the early days, before they were composing songs about him, (‘dada dada dada dada watch ooooooooouuuut! Here comes the dadaaaaa) he actually been arrested for rape, and even been sentenced, when some internal politics in the police department, had his file reopened and DNA testing requested, which obviously didn’t match his, he was released. ‘Damn, so close,’ he’d said.

He never succeeded, finally just as he was despairing and planning to try something a little subtler like barking at a cop, the guys from the prince found him. He’d made quite a name amongst the criminal types because of his fighting, and a few were even afraid of him, but no one knew his name… (yes not yet) so the Prince’s people had a little difficulty finding him… but they did, and they told him, the Prince would happily throw him in his prison, being a despot, he could act faster, in return for fighting under the prince’s banner in the tournament. 

He agreed….

And now in the Prince’s presence he was given a name, growf! The Prince was a sentimental silly boy, who based nomenclature on looks, ‘it’s easier to remember that way.’ So Growf was his name. And he fought for the prince, and won, after his first tournament victory, the Prince offered him a choice between a room in the harem, or a his own cell in the prison. Now the Prince had been watching growf stair out of his cell window at all the beautiful women in the harem. And the prince had heard his chief queen say that he should reward Growf by giving him the choice to move to the harem. The Prince always did what the queen said, he knew what was good for him. The truth was the Harem had been watching Growf as much as he’d watched them! Finally, when he was called to the Prince’s private chambers to hear the offer. Poor Growf, when he heard the word Harem, he wasn’t sure what it mean, but it didn’t sound very good. He was a poor uneducated criminal turned super hero, turned fighter, when did he have time to read Arabian nights? And Persian porn wasn’t all that popular at that time. (Of course he read/watched porn)

So he chose the known discomfort of prison over whatever fate the harem was. And also, he knew that from his window he could watch the women in the tower next to the prison, play with themselves, what rapture it would be to have sex with them he thought for the umpteenth time.

Ah well…

This story isn’t about that fighter, it’s about the other one. The one who wasn’t called Growf, and who was now lying on the mat in the middle of blood soaked mat, they used the same one throughout the tournament, breathing in long laboured gasps, clasping his left side, his whole body spasming. This was the end for him, that was certain… he couldn’t get up from that one. But he did something very interesting instead. He put his hand up,  twisted it around, in a clockwise half circle… then straightened it out, pointing towards the ceiling, fingers together, and jabbed the air three times.

This time the stillness was of a different kind, confusion floated around. It was true, he could do that at any time he wanted, but now? What the fighter who was not Growf had just done was made the official sign for a potty break. Now it is well known that fighting can have strange effects on the human digestion, though vomit is the most commonly documented and referred form, when you’re in a bear hug, amongst other things, potty is the far more common reaction… initially it was decided that they were men, and should fight through it all. But with an accumulation over three weeks (the duration of the tournament) it became a little difficult to sit around the pit, much less fight in it, and they couldn’t change the mat, because of the superstitions. Then they tried disqualifying anyone who dirtied the mat. That worked but only to a limited degree.

Since the shock value of having dirtied the mat/self, actually helped shitters, get out of bear hugs amongst other things, the crap hit, became a favourite way for lighter fighters to beat of stronger slower opponents. They would try to deliver a knock bout blow, just as they were crapping, hoping to record a knock out and end the bout before they were disqualified. This lead to a lot of technical questions like when exactly did the disqualification take place, when the shit leave the ass, or when it hits the floor, because the millisecond interval often meant the difference between loss and victory. These kind questions were a little too much for the board who controlled the tournament, were in all honesty a little retarded. They still used pictures to try to convey messages, and they wrote in columns, and folded papers into very useful and elegant fans, when they weren’t overseeing the fighting. Well, they did try valiantly to adopt better technology to help with the decisions, and installed a hawk eye system over their pit. Problems soon developed, no one knew how to communicate with the three hawks, to get the video. Ultimately the whole project was labelled unable to complete due to technical error, and dumped.

But the main problem of dirty fighters, (literally) and mats, continued, until finally, the potty signal was invented, basically, if you needed to, you could make the sign, call a time out, and happily do your business in the convenient sulabh just across the road, and then come back and continue the fight. The system worked, people loved it, the sulabh prospered, and ultimately put up posters of it’s more famous patron above the urinals, with I was here, inscribed below. The question of duration had come up, but the Prince at that time, had decided that the right to a peaceful crap, is inalienable from man, and therefore, stipulated that a man may spend as much time as he wanted in there.

Which brings us to our current situation. Our fighter had now caused, potentially an infinite extension to the fight, obviously after this tournament, the rules would be changed, but until he came out of the loo, everything was suspended, even the clocks in the room( they were timing the fight.) and he could wait in there indefinitely, right till he healed completely. He did no such thing of course, but promptly got out of the small back window, and ran away.

This naturally caused a stir, even though, people kind of figured that was what he was going to do anyway,  what next, what of the tournament etc… started buzzing around. The match couldn’t end tied, in fact it couldn’t end at all. But before anything could happen, even the clocks tick another second, he would have to come out. Growf was the most distressed initially, he wanted that fourth crown… he started calling himself the fourth time champion, and he did it everywhere, and constantly. Over time he shortened it to just calling himself four, even introducing himself like that. To distract him the Prince commissioned a movie in which he would star, what do you think he called that? I am number four. But at the press conference for the release, a solution was found, when the reporter in pink, with the push up bra, asked him, how it felt knowing that he would be reigning champion of the world’s hardest tournament forever, since his opponent was still in the loo. Growf liked that, so he was appeased, and stop calling for the fighter to ‘come out and fight him like a man…’

The reporters were a little distressed when this happened, they had all downloaded ‘victory story’ templates for their newspaper and ‘underdog,’ or ‘dream run ends’ templates, now after a quick search, they found ‘surprise move’ templates, and ‘mystery at ’ templates. Quite satisfied with this, they set about to fill in the data fields. This is where they hit their first hiccup, what was the fighters name? they didn’t know a few phone calls later, they realised no one knew, so they made one up, as all reporters do in a tight spot, and called him Mattie, so shall we.

Ultimately the perpetual tournament was forgotten, it’s last final, still incomplete, but a new movie star was born and the Prince had a new revenue stream, and production house. The only people really left behind, were the board of controllers of the tournament, but they too found they had a lot of ink, they always bought for a century at a time, it saved money because of the bulk, and a lot of paper and brushes. They sat down and started drawing their silly pictures and kept showing each boards, trying to tell each other things like ‘the sky is divine and blue like the setting petals of a june breeze in spring as the blossoms open the delicate petals,’ successfully, and ‘your fly is open,’ less successfully. They were quite happy left to themselves…'this is so much better than trying to draw 'growf' what kind of a name is that?' so people left Mattie to himself, and he got a job and the world progressed, though the clocks in the room were still stuck, and people began to find that strange.

Incedently the name the reporters gave him, Mattie, is exactly the name people who knew him well, called him, the name he called himself, was Mathew, but one out of two for a lazy 2 am guess isn’t really that bad, right?

Mathew though, was a football star, one of the latest of a long history of footballers to come of out domestic clubs in Brazil and tear the European scene up. He’d spent a year in England, on first coming over to the continent, and then been quickly signed by Real, in only his fourth season as a pro, for an amazing ten year contract, and a whopping 45 million per year. He was quite happy. His team was one of the best in Europe, and for once was performing like that too. They had one the champions cup the previous year, and were looking at an easy domestic campaign and another European success. Mathew, soon after coming over became a midfield striking sensation, his dribbling and lightening quick sprints saw him completely decimate opposing defences, to set up deadly strikes for himself, or to set up teammates with equal frequency. That was the best part about him, that he was very unselfish.

When Mathew went down an entire continent of people sighed, tv screens all over the world developed fine coatings of mist, beers spilt, smokes fell, and people generally got jerked around. He was the sweetheart of everyone who knew anything about football. Dashing, cute, and with an amazing body, it wasn’t surprising, nearly everyone knew his name, even my mother, though she thinks he’s English, ‘with a name like that he must be, even he was born in brazil.’ ‘yes mother.’

The tackle was ugly, a free kick, and yellow card and ensued, but Mathew was still on the ground, clutching his left side, breathing in long laboured gasps, his body spasming. The manager called time out, the referee called time out, everyone called time out… and he was carried off the field. But the clocks kept running there would be injury time, that’s all.

Mathew was taken into the locker room, his shirt was taken off, ‘gingerly, avoid the elbows.’ Nurses marvelled at his eightpack, while the doc took a look at his side. Oh it’s nothing he said, just a bad bruise. To prove his point, the doc placed his fingers very slowly and deliberately over the place where the bruise was forming, and pressed. Mathew jumped and grimaced, and gritted his teeth. The doctor satisfied that he was right turned to the nurses, ‘two ice packs, for half an hour…’ ‘just half an hour’ and he turned back to Mathew, ‘he nothing to worry about, you’ll be fine, just a rather bad bruise. But you’ll bounce back by half time, and you can play again the second half.’

The doc seemed quite cheerful, the nurses did to, Mathew not so much, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone all that much. His mum wasn’t watching, she still hasn’t figured out how to switch to the set top box, and is too old, in her estimation to learn.

The match was carrying on, as usual, the fans had been told, it wasn’t a very serious injury. Mathew wanted to come back on, and probably would return in the second half, ‘I don’t think a guy, with Mathew’s attitude will want to sit out even a minute of this game… it’s by far the biggest game this season. They’re probably having to retrain him the dressing room, he’s probably trying to get back already.’ The nurses were trying to restrain something rather different.

Mathew really wasn’t interested in the match though. The team would play, the team would win, either he would score a goal, or a lot other very talented people would, what difference would it make? Even if they lost the match, it wasn’t the end of the world… and his back really did hurt, why would he want to go back out there.

After a while the nurses left, half time came, the manager came to see him. Mathew made a painful grimace, and spoke to him about the pain. The manager decided to leave him out, for the rest of the match. Later tests showed he would take longer to heal than initially expected. He had the rest of the season, to relax, then he’d have to start playing again, or the club would drop him.

He thought about it, in much the same way that Mattie thought about finishing that fight. He’d go back, he’d win or lose, or something else would happen… both of them uncorked beers, and decided to keep it simple.