- Event: War Games 2023
“AS LONG AS STRONK REMEMBER
THE PAIN BEEN COMING DOWN
TRUCKS OF STRONK MEAT TRUCKING
CONFUCIUS CHINESE MAN
GOOD STRONK THROUGH THE RAGES
TRYING TO FIND THE ONE
AND STRONK WONDER
STILL STRONK WONDER
WHO WILL STOP THE PAIN?”
- STRONKENCE CLEARSTRONK REVIVESTRONK
***
“The man in the ruffled shirt keisters the weight of the world.”
Donald Watanabe, of Shovel Creek, MN
***
What a wild ride it’s been.
Debuted in February of last year. Multiple title wins since then. Popularity of a young prince. Considered the best to have ever done it already (okay, maybe not, but work with me here). Now, his second War Games, just weeks away.
A more observant, introspective man would’ve taken stock by now.
Stopped and smelled the roses. Sipped some stupidly expensive champagne, maybe smoked a Cuban cigar. Dug out a BBL-having influencer you found on the ‘Gram, posted up in some four-star hotel in the Maldives. Maybe (hopefully not, but maybe) copped a rape charge and engaged in some self-incriminating disputative dialogue on Twitter. Punched a decorated war veteran in the mouth at a Waffle House. Wrecked a supercar while high-as-fuck on oxys, also drunk off the Hennessy, and fled from the flaming husk of a vehicle with a brick of dirty cash in hand, pressed to ear, delusionally trying to ring the lawyer that fired you as a client six months ago.
But STRONK is no ordinary man, and he certainly isn’t observant or introspective—he’s got fighter pilot vision but the nose of a pug. He doesn’t give a Frenchman’s fuck about any roses. Also gives no F’s about stocks and/or bonds. Doesn’t care about how wild the ride was.
To him, the past is a thing soon to be forgotten, and the future is largely uncertain, so really, who cares?
STRONK is about as in-the-moment as a person could possibly hope to be… and yet it’s not a conscious choice on his part. He just is what he is.
Ever hear of cutting weight?
Athletes do it, mostly boxers, amateur wrestlers, mixed martial artists, beauty pageant contestants. Cutting weight involves depleting oneself of a large amount of water weight over a gruelling twenty-four hour period.
STRONK is adding weight.
Day in, day out, sun up, sun down. Always shovelling fatty cuts of meat into his maw. Always lifting heavier and heavier things in ever-increasing durations; Sisyphus pushing the ball up the hill. Stepping on the scale, stepping off the scale. Bigger is better. There is no arguing against that simple fact. If you think cutting weight probably sucks, imagine being STRONK, perpetually stuffed to the gills with protein, pushing yourself to failure during every exercise, dying on every single strain with every single lift.
It is fun as shit for him.
Weeks out from War Games, his body pulsates with hypertension–not occasionally, always. The constant ache in his heart could be due to his obscenely high blood pressure, or it could be nerves. That is, the anticipation of what’s to come: the most feared and prestigious match and accolade an HOW competitor can claim in any given calendar year.
It was in last year’s War Games match that Stronk lost the HOTv title and subsequently won the LSD. In the same match! It was also in last year’s War Games that Stronk was powerbombed through a table, causing the back of his head to ricochet off the concrete floor, giving him a severe concussion. Headaches persisted for months, and had just begun to fully subside when the evil and wicked wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Conor Fuse attempted murder against STRONK Daddy on Alcatraz.
He became mere mortal Stronk for the first time since his teenage years; that is, when he began his never-end bulk.
Had a quick stopover in STRonk territory.
Popped by STRONkville for a week and a bit.
Then one day he stepped on the scale and there it was: 307.1 lbs.
Months spent as a small man had humbled him a little. Made him more empathetic to the plight of the tiny-boned individual. Caused him to question whether trash-talking his opponents about their puny bodies was unnecessarily cruel. But then he was STRONK again, with a super-secret growth serum coursing through his veins, and he stopped giving a shit about any of that almost instantly.
So much to be thankful for.
But where did it all start?
The beginning.
No.
The actual beginning.
When, and why, did his obsessive adoration for size and stature start to germinate?
—
1999
SOMEWHERE IN MINNESOTA
The Minnesotan air smells of stale beer, burnt grass, and titty sweat. Fights are frequent and bloody. The cops show up, spot a few of their buddies from high school, get trashed, and fire their guns off into the distance. Everyone is having a great time.
Everyone except Stronk Godson.
Seated beside his father, Gordon Godson, a young (maybe six years old) Stronk fidgets in the front row of a shadily produced indy wrestling show taking place in the middle of a large field.
Abandoned, burnt-out cars line the perimeter of the field, acting as a man-made treeline, on the other side of which there are parking lots, discount stores, dive bars, and a factory that exclusively manufactures a single SKU of rat traps.
Gordon drove his son to the wrastlin’ matches that morning. It was Sunday; he woke up to a breakfast of two eggs and a half pint of vodka, roughed up his catatonic wife for gazing upon him with that dead, judgemental stare of hers, and heard about the matches on the radio as he was taking his morning dump.
After polishing off a sixer of beer, Gordon hauled his son from the fields where he was attempting to hunt for gophers, threw Stronk in his busted Ford Ranger, and drunk-drove them all the way across town to the very same field where some seriously racist shit had gone down only one week before.
And Gordon would know; Gordon was there.
Hell of a party.
The crowd around them is a motley crew of tweekers, screwballs, loafers, turnip tumblers, and a dude that had been kicked in the head by a goat at a fair and now manages the local WalMart. Meth smoke wafts through and around the two rows of seats, while an enterprising young man dressed like Fred Durst hocks warm beer from a backpack and picks fights with anyone smaller than him, male or female.
Stronk takes in the sights and the sounds. An elderly man behind him groans, telling his (most likely) war buddy next to him, “I remember when wrastlin’ was wrastlin’. Were you there with us that night when we drove the old tractor into the city to watch Hickory Joe break Cornfed Bill’s neck?”
Stronk doesn’t hear the other man’s response, as he’s too busy gawking at the behemoth of a man that steps out from a minivan in an adjacent parking lot. The man pops in a massive lipper of chewing tobacco, takes a swig of beer, and marches in the direction of the ring, pointed out by another much smaller man (the promoter of the event, though Stronk had no way of knowing that).
Gordon Godson has drunk considerably more since they showed up at the event two hours ago. He bought a bunch of beer, finished those. He sampled one of the local’s moonshine, then went back for seconds. He guzzled the tiny bottle of brown tucked away in his sock. By this point, he is slurring and belligerent, and his confidence in his own physical prowess has never been higher. Despite having a bad back and his left knee popping out of place every Christmas and Fourth of July, he starts jawing with their neighbors in the crowd, challenging anyone willing to test him.
The ring announcer (who also happens to be the Fred Durst look-alike) stands mid ring and points toward the giant man making his way through the paltry crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, making his way to the ring, standing six feet even and tipping the scales this afternoon at THREE HUNDRED and SEVEN point ONE pounds…”
Stronk shrinks in his seat as the imposing figure lumbers by him, but makes sure to sneak a fleeting gaze up close and personal, and that’s when he notices something out of the ordinary.
Jutting out of the side of the man’s neck is a beach ball-sized lump.
The man must’ve been turned such that Stronk couldn’t spot the lump when he first saw him emerge from the minivan. He definitely would’ve remembered the lump.
After a short coughing fit, a byproduct of a stringent two-pack-a-day habit, the announcer calls out the man’s name as he enters the ring.
“GOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIITTTTEEERRRRRRR!”
Goiter.
Stronk doesn’t know what that word means–it wasn’t among the twenty or so he had working knowledge of at that point in his adolescence–but he likes it. Everyone else who’d wrestled that afternoon had a nickname and a real name; a lot of stuff to remember. But ‘GOITER’ (as it was written next to the man’s poorly cropped picture on the flier) was just one word, simple and to the point. And unlike everyone else on the flier, all of his letters were BIG, which Stronk thinks is very cool.
The next few minutes go by in a flash, with GOITER’s opponent–who was a third of his size, and dressed in only a pair of pee-stained white underwear because he couldn’t afford knee pads, boots, or even a proper pair of trunks–running to the ring, bumping three or four times off clumsy but brutal running shoulder blocks, and finally getting squashed by the GOITER SPLAT, as Stronk overheard the move called.
Before Stronk knows what’s going on, GOITER has challenged “anyone in the crowd that thinks they can pin my shoulders to the mat” to a shoot wrestling match. Even the most drunk and unruly in the audience realize their chances of beating the massive guy in the ring at his own game are slim to none.
GOITER is still fresh as a daisy and lasciviously eyeballing the crowd, looking for a local ring rat to bring back to the minivan–and nope, not a looker in the bunch. Lot of missing teeth.
“I’ll take ya’on, y’phony saaaack ‘aaaaa shiiiiit!”
Oh no.
Gordon’s old, broken body, propelled by a potent mixture of cheap booze and hateful spite, scrambles over the front row chairs and rolls ungracefully into the ring.
Standing chest-to-chest with GOITER, Gordon speaks into the mic, still held by the announcer.
“I says I’ll kiiick yer FUCKIN’ ASS, I will.”
Gordon jams his index finger into the big man’s chest one too many times, which prompts GOITER to snatch it in his massive hand. GOITER turns his head (as much as he can with a huge goiter on his neck) and says, into the mic for all to hear:
“FRAIL HUMAN. YOU DARE CHALLENGE GOITER? GOITER WILL CRUSH YOU.”
And crush Gordon Godson he does.
Four minutes of powerful slams, punches with three hundred pounds behind them, fish hooks, eye gouges, and even a knee drop straight to Stronk’s dad’s testicles, and it’s mercifully over. Blood stains the mat, a single tooth lays on the canvas.
GOITER nonchalantly leaves the ring and stands, smoking a bummed cigarette from a ringside fan, next to the promoter, who looks shaken and nervous, probably worried about a lawsuit. They’re only a few feet away from Stronk, allowing him to eavesdrop on their conversation while watching his battered father collect himself unsuccessfully in the ring.
“You still runnin’ that strip joint, got the MC that deals blow out his TransAm?”
“Yeah, Goit. It’s fifteen minutes across town. Not far.”
“I remember. I been there before, idiot.”
“I’ll call over, make sure your drinks are comped.”
“That salty snatch still work for you?”
“Betsy? The one you like? Yeah, she knows you’re in town. She’s at the club right now, probably in the back giving herself a whore bath before you swing by.”
“Too bad. I like the smells.”
No one has come to help Gordon Godson, but still he manages to drag himself back to his seat, with a pronounced limp, broken ribs, and possible head trauma.
He looks down with great anger at his son.
Stronk hasn’t stopped smiling since Gordon’s beating commenced. He grins ear to ear uncontrollably as his father, through a haze of brain fog and tears, shakes his fist, chastising him.
“You little PUSSY! You… you LET this happen! You didn’t do SHIT!” Gordon screams, before swatting his son in the temple with an open hand several times.
“You LITTLE–”
A clenched fist rises up, preparing to slug the seated, terrified child with all its grown-up might.
But just as it begins to arc toward Stronk’s face, it stops suddenly.
A massive hand clenches Gordon’s forearm.
Stronk looks up to find GOITER, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, gripping his father’s arm.
“Now, there’ll be–”
GOITER sees the young Stronk sitting there, staring up at him in awe and gratification, and immediately transitions back to kayfabe.
“FRAIL HUMAN. YOU WILL NOT STRIKE THIS SMALL HUMAN. OR GOITER WILL DRAG YOU BACK TO THE RING.”
Gordon takes a deep breath to calm himself, but underneath he’s silently seething, his eyes burning a hole through his son’s face. He can’t stop thinking about how he wants to recapture some of his dignity by beating the shit out of his six-year-old kid.
Gordon rips his arm from GOITER’s grasp and walks back toward the parking lot, calling back to Stronk, “You can walk THE FUCK home then!”
And so Stronk does.
GOITER doesn’t come to his aid and offer a ride home. Home for Stronk is a two-hour drive away in the middle of the sticks. It’s out of the way. And GOITER has some dirty gash to French kiss and an MC with whom he intends to haggle.
Ain’t no good men in this world, Young Stronk. They’re all bad. And sadly, you’ll likely never learn this very important lesson.
Stronk walks for two straight days, sometimes in the wrong direction, before finally arriving home, his feet ravaged and bloody, skin burnt to a scabby crisp by the hot sun, badly dehydrated and just plain hungry. He limps straight past his mother’s rigid, unblinking body seated permanently in her rocking chair, and disappears into his bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.
The journey home was hell.
However, it was all worth it to watch his POS father get beaten and humiliated in front of members of his ilk. Stronk doesn’t remember much of his childhood, but GOITER flattening his dad with a splash, driving an errant elbow into his temple just to be a prick, is one he’ll never forget. It was Christmas to a kid that never had a Christmas. All forgotten birthdays combined and made good. It was the greatest thing he’d ever seen.
He’d never see GOITER again, but Stronk took from him an image of what it means to be the epitome of man.
Be big. Bigger than everyone else.
And CRUSH THE WEAK.
—
Crush the weak.
It’s a mantra I’ve heard my client, Mister Godson, say out loud to no one in particular on several occasions. He views the HOW roster, with the exception of his Final Alliance teammates, as largely feeble and fragile, undeserving of calling themselves pro wrestlers.
I can’t say I disagree.
But War Games is indeed a tricky situation. The Final Alliance is spread amongst multiple teams, each vying for the chance to call themselves a War Games victor and the new HOW Champion.
Christopher America has carried the gold for close to a year, winning the title at last year’s War Games. He has undoubtedly increased the prestige of the championship and made it the most coveted prize in our sport. He’s a champion any promoter of any era would be proud to have as their torchbearer. I can say with absolute certainty that my brother would like nothing more than for Christopher America to leave Mexico with 97RED still fastened around his waist. Gates are up, PPV buys are up, HOW receives more media attention than perhaps ever before–and a lot of it is thanks to the standard set by Chris.
Christopher America is not my client. And though I greatly value what he brings to the table, and I see all the positives of his historic reign continuing, I have to say, hand to GOD…
I just don’t see it happening.
A new time is upon us. The Christopher America 2022-2023 title reign will go down in the history books, but it will ultimately be usurped by an even greater champion, a man that has all the makings of being a mainstream crossover star.
STRONK Godson is that man. I know it. My brother knows it. The Final Alliance, deep down, knows it, too. The fans may be upset with him at the moment for justifiably seeking his revenge on Jace Parker Davidson, but we all recognize that they have incredibly short memories. What’s ‘in’ today is ‘out’ tomorrow. The ‘bad guy’ today is the ‘hero’ tomorrow. And though Jace Parker Davidson is currently suckling at the teet of the average sympathetic fan, he understands that, sooner rather than later, they will come to the same conclusion that my brother has known for years:
Jace is an excellent LSD Champion.
He was a good tag team champion.
He is NOT a WORLD champion.
I don’t care what he’s accomplished in the past–the fact remains that he is not someone the fans want to support long term. They may see him get stabbed in the eye, or tortured in a barbed wire bearhug, left laying in a pool of his own blood, and think, gee, that’s awfully sad, what a mean STRONK, boo STRONK. But give it a couple months of Jace failing to summit the mountain, and they’ll go back to shitting all over him on Reddit for being a Twitter sex pest and a decent hand in the ring.
Christopher America is a star.
Mike Best… a star.
Dan Ryan… star.
Conor Fuse… an evil little shit… but a star.
Jace Parker Davidson is window dressing. He works hard, but that’s just it, really–he works hard. He is the definition of an overachiever.
Mediocre athleticism. Subpar strength. So-so speed. One fucking eye.
Stupid haircut from 2004.
Still, it’s inspirational what he’s accomplished with such limited physical gifts.
Then you have my client.
Mister Godson.
The King of Stallions.
The only potential knock against him is his height, but as the sports psychologist I hired told him, time and time again: being sub-six-feet is, in fact, a blessing. Low center of gravity. That’s a lot of mass to try and push around. Most men can’t do it. They think they can, but they are sorely mistaken.
You could also say his promo-ing ability leaves something to be desired. It’s a lot of shouting and short, choppy sentences. Simple language spat by a simple mind.
Wrong!
The audience no longer wants long, nuanced diatribes. They want TikTok in human form. They want to be entertained, and then they want to go eat a Tide Pod or dance in the middle of Compton or get their asshole bleached for whatever ‘clout’ is. They want the so-called MEMES.
Mister Godson is a walking meme. He’s a YouTube short brought to life. He has the algorithm wrapped around his sizable manhood. He doesn’t have an appreciation for his own popularity, or emergent star power, but I do. My brother does. We see it in the numbers, the analytics.
HOW needs Mister Godson to win War Games. Not because Christopher America is a lousy champion. That’s not it, at all. Once more, Christopher America is a great champion. The best champion.
But the sport is constantly evolving… and mark my words… Mister Godson is the man to take it to the next level.