Clockwork Orange House of Fun. New Orleans Street Fight. No Holds Barred. Death Match. Hardcore Rules. In professional wrestling, there are thousands of ways to describe a match having no rules, where the only ways to win are by pinfall or submission. No rules rules, right? Well, as Mitch McLeod found out in a message board wrestling RPG, you still have to work within the limits of the law. You can’t shower your opponent with an AK-47. You can’t strap a dynamite vest to a random audience member to extort your opponent into quitting. You shouldn’t be able to do what Stone Cold Steve Austin did and raise a car that Triple H is in with a forklift before dropping it upside down from twenty feet high. Don’t worry about Trips, though, because he was back on TV the next night with only “contusions” on his medical record. There are lots of ways you can win a Death Match, none of which include murder. You can’t take the world championship to prison with you.
As a side note, Mitch McLeod shouldn’t be confused with Kentucky politician Mitch McConnell. One of them will inflict so much pain on you that you’ll develop an addiction to Oxycontin. The other is a hardcore wrestler. McLeod was OTT Wrestling’s version of Tommy Dreamer: the hardcore heart and soul of the company. Mitch would scramble your brains with a steel chair and deduct a hundred IQ points from your test. He would scissors kick a glass water pitcher over your head and deduct another hundred IQ points from your test. He would put a set of steel stairs over your head and leapfrog over the top rope onto them…there go another hundred IQ points. By the time Mitch McLeod was done fucking with your brain, you’d be more than qualified to vote for that Kentucky politician I mentioned earlier.
Unfortunately, none of those credentials would be enough to earn him a victory in his first OTT match ever against the seven-foot tall behemoth known as Yeti. No, I’m not talking about the toilet paper mummy from WCW in the 90’s. This version of Yeti was a legitimate powerhouse. He towered over everybody and made them look and cry like children. His breath reeked of human flesh and sour blood. His horns gave you the impression that the devil himself was standing across the ring from you. And those muscles…so many fucking muscles, but not the kind that belong on the cover of a cheesy romance novel. If Yeti wanted to hurt you, the National Guard would merely delay the inevitable…by about five seconds. He was the perfect first opponent for Mitch McLeod.
With Yeti already waiting to feast on the walking corpse that awaited him, Mitch McLeod’s music hit and the crowd went ape shit, no pun intended. Then again, how do you not go ape shit when “Wollt Ihr Das Bett En Flammen Sehen?” by Rammstein is blasting out of the speakers? German heavy metal for an American ass-kicker. You would think that Mitch would have all the (literal) tools necessary to beat Yeti like a war drum. But prior to joining OTT, he didn’t know that every match in this organization was contested under hardcore rules. Therefore, he did what every good baby-faced hero did in wrestling and attempted to cheat. What a great guy! Such a role model for the youngsters in the crowd!
The rules of the RPG were simple: each player would post a series of moves to perform in the match and whoever had the best writing and most impressive showing would be declared the victor by the GM/referee. At this point, the only thing that dwarfed Mitch’s opponent was my ego. I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to “do the job” as they say in the wrestling industry. Sixteen-year-old me didn’t make sacrifices for the good of the story. I just wanted to see Mitch be undefeated in everything he did, because I believed in my own hype. I was my own “mark”, to use another wrestling term. So when Yeti and Mitch locked up, it was game on, motherfucker.
While I don’t remember the exact choreography of the match, I do know that it started off with some actual wrestling maneuvers. Yeti hit a few body slams, suplexes, and clotheslines, each of them rattling Mitch’s bones like a Haitian earthquake that would surely be referenced in a Max Caster freestyle rap if given the opportunity. Max had already made fun of Simone Biles’s mental health, the Duke LaCrosse rape case, COVID testing, and Julia Hart’s vagina, why not a Haitian earthquake? You know what Max didn’t do, though? Put Yeti in a torture rack before slamming his spine across the knee. Mitch did that. He also spiked Yeti on top of his head with a brainbuster. He also hit a power bomb. And a spinebuster. And any other move that a man with Mitch’s size disadvantage had no right to use. Remember, I wanted to win and make Mitch look good, even at the expense of a much bigger star like Yeti.
Mitch would do anything to win at this point. Anything, even “accidentally” knocking out the referee so that using weapons (which was already legal) could be a thing in this match. He pulled a fire extinguisher from under the ring, sprayed Yeti in the eyes with it, threw it at his face, and gave him one final brainbuster onto the extinguisher. A normal man would have died from these wounds long before he had the chance to vote for unsavory Kentucky politicians. Not Yeti. He kicked out just as the referee was about to slap the mat for a three count. What kind of military grade weapons would it take to keep Yeti down? A Sherman tank? A nuclear bomb? Space lasers? Mitch could have used them all and Yeti would still no-sell everything and defeat him with a move called “The Heart Slam”, where he literally grabbed Mitch by his heart and slammed him to the mat before pinning him, one, two, three.
That should have been the end of it all. Mitch McLeod should have picked up his own carcass off the mat and gone back to the locker room to shower. It would actually take a lot more effort to do that considering Yeti gave Mitch another Heart Slam after the match was over, that cheeky heel. But instead of swallowing my pride and selling the injuries, I had Mitch throw the fire extinguisher at Yeti again and then lure him backstage with insults. Yeti, being an angry yeti, took the bait and got clobbered with another fire extinguisher for his troubles. Mitch then tied Yeti’s ankles to the back of his car and drove into town while dragging his big ass across the cement. A normal man would have died after thirty feet, the skin on his back shredded like Floydian beef. If that wasn’t bad enough, Mitch drove Yeti to a suspension bridge, tied cement blocks around him, and threw him into the ocean. Isn’t Mitch such a great role model? Dexter Morgan would be so proud of him! Wait a minute…
In the same way that Mitch no-sold everything Yeti did, Yeti in turn no-sold the attempted murder. I say attempted because Yeti was napping during the whole time he was being dragged. He woke up from his nap, jumped out of the water, and destroyed Mitch’s car so badly that it exploded in a climate change-like fireball. Yeti then advised Mitch to keep all the action in the ring, which would only be bad advice if the match was contested under Falls Count Anywhere rules, which is yet another form of no-disqualification rules. My never-ending ego would have taken this murder spree to the ends of the earth if the GM didn’t intervene when he did. He deleted all of the post-match violence and I was half-relieved that he did. Yeti then gave me a congratulatory “Good match” without a hint of irony, which meant we as players were still on good terms.
The one thing I would like to unpack from this story above all else is that good storytelling comes with sacrifices. If Mitch McLeod won all the time against all challengers in brutal apocalyptic fashion, yes, he would be elevated, but the story would be boring and he would be labeled a Gary-Stu. Flawless characters aren’t fun to read about because they’re not relatable to the reader. Even Hulk Hogan and John Cena, as big as their egos are, wouldn’t be able to relate to Mitch McLeod if he was an indestructible Gary-Stu. The role of the characters is to create a cohesive story through teamwork, and teamwork requires sacrifices. If the heroes have to lose every once and a while to make the stakes believable, so be it. If the villains have to look strong until the very last match when they’re finally defeated, such is life.
Mitch McLeod should have had flaws during his time in OTT Wrestling, but those flaws shouldn’t have been evil attempts to make himself an unstoppable god. In other words, he shouldn’t make himself so unlikable that nobody in their right mind would ever cheer for him. Baby-face heroes shouldn’t have “go-away heat”, or the kind of audience anger that isn’t born from good character work, but from a genuine desire to see them disappear forever, even if that means death itself. No-selling an opponent’s offence in wrestling is a big taboo in the industry, because it completely kills the illusion and undermines the team effort in building a narrative.
After Mitch took his second Heart Slam, he should have stayed down. Let Yeti have his heel heat, let Mitch train harder and grow as a wrestler instead of turning into a whiny serial killer. When Mitch starts to win matches again and develop his skills, then maybe he can have another crack at Yeti and get even closer to victory this time. Mitch would look impressive as a plucky underdog who has to constantly overcome the odds by the skin of his teeth. Beat him down until he has nothing left, so that when he finally earns his big comeback, he will have worked for something he can be proud of.
That’s what you have to remember not just with wrestling, but with every story you tell: the protagonist has to work for everything he has. Sometimes he has to work so hard that his body and mind fail him when he needs the energy the most. Sometimes he has to work hard enough to bring him to death’s door. But unlike in a capitalist society where unsavory Kentucky politicians hold the brass rings hostage, Mitch McLeod actually has a chance of having his hard work pay off. A theater teacher I had once advised us to, “Throw rocks at our protagonists and make them run up a tree.” In other words, make life difficult enough so that when those difficulties are conquered in a believable way, the protagonist will have something to be proud of. And so will you, fellow writers. So will you.
