Group Two: The Jerry Jarrett Bracket

Last night this shit was LIVE! at the historic Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, Tennessee, temporarily restored to its former glory thanks to my buddy Alain and his fellow super physicists at CERN.

If you missed last week’s recap of Group One action and don’t feel like going back and reading the long-ass explanatory intro, here’s the gist of it: Alain and his crew over there in Switzerland discovered chronotons and tachyons and that you can use them to pluck things out of the past and bring them into the present when you smash shit together at near-light speed in the Large Hadron Collider. So they did the only two logical things they could have done in the wake of this incredible breakthrough: they scheduled a 64-man tournament featuring the greatest stars from the history of professional wrestling, and they got me to book it. Last week saw The Rock defeat “Macho Man” Randy Savage in a gutsy performance to win Group One: The Sam Muchnick Bracket. Who will emerge victorious tonight to go on to join The Rock competing for the tournament championship in the final great eight? Let’s find out.

To start things off we get a brass band playing “The Armed Forces Hymn,” to mark Veterans Day. That wasn’t my idea. Those CERN guys, man. They might be Swiss, but they think of everything.

Calling all the action from ringside are our hosts, legendary Memphis announcer Lance Russell (subbing for an ailing Jim Ross, who is suffering from an inflammation of Bell’s palsy unfortunately triggered by his recent time travel), and the great manager and color commentator, Jim Cornette. Just in case I need to mention it, Lance’s hair is wind tunnel-tested and perfect.

Enough fucking around. To the ring!

Round One Match:
Sting vs. Ed “Strangler” Lewis

Lance pegs this one a “contrast of styles.” See, it’s for those sort of keen insights that they kept him around so long. Sting is here from his platinum blonde, bouncing babyface prime, a thirteen-time World Champion in the NWA, WCW, TNA, and WWA, and a former TV, U.S., and Tag Team champ as well. Ed Lewis, on the other hand, is a ten-time World Champion from back when there was such a thing as an undisputed champion in pro wrestling, the innovator of the sleeperhold, virtually unbeatable in his day, the key figure in the Gold-Dust Trio that essentially invented modern pro wrestling, pretty much the most important wrestler who ever lived, and a man who can by no stretch of the imagination be described as either a babyface or bouncing.

( Read the rest . . . )

You’ll probably want a little background on this to start. A few months ago I got a call from a buddy of mine at CERN (I’ve got sweet connections). He told me they had discovered the chronoton, which (for the benefit of those who have never seen Star Trek: First Contact) is the gauge boson that carries forward the flow of time. They weren’t even looking for it! My buddy and his fellow physicists were just smashing up random shit in the Large Hadron Collider (which is all they ever do at CERN) when one of them noticed that there was a meatball sub and a Dalmatian puppy in the tunnel. This wouldn’t have been so unusual, except they soon found these to be the exact same meatball sub and puppy which they had smashed into each other at near-light speed in the LHC yesterday. Somehow, impossible as it seemed, the sub and the dog had been pulled back into the tunnel from the past.

My buddy and his team spend most of the rest of that afternoon working out what had just happened. Before they left for home that evening they had it worked out. (These are some smart motherfuckers I’m talking about.) The precise mass and chemical composition of the two objects they had crashed together that day in the LHC (an iron railroad spike and a Derek Jeter Starting Line-Up action figure) had triggered an explosion of chronotons that exhibited a property relative to the previous day’s meatball sub and Dalmatian which they decided to call temporally sympathetic spin. My buddy (his name’s Alain, by the way) tried to explain it to me a few different ways, but I still can’t make heads or tails of it, though some of that’s the fault of his accent. Essentially, what they discovered is this: certain objects, when smashed together at near-light speed in the LHC release a shower of chronotons with a temporally sympathetic spin for a particular object at a particular location in the universe at a particular point in the timeline prior to the moment of the collision. When that happens, that object — whatever, wherever, and whenever it is — is pulled to the sight of the collision, in this case the tunnel of the LHC. Incredibly, the chronoton explosion that resulted from the collision of the railroad spike and the Jeter figure had a temporally sympathetic spin to the objects they had placed in the LHC the day before. From such coincidences great discoveries come, my friends.

Once Alain and his pals had that much figured out, it only took them part of the next morning to work out the precise equations necessary to smash the right amount of the right substances together to produce a precise object from a precise time. He emailed me the equations, but it feels irresponsible to reproduce them here. They’re mostly just a bunch of incomprehensible math symbols. I looked for like a plus sign, or an equals, but didn’t see one. Unless you happen to have an enormous particle accelerator, the equations wouldn’t do you much good, anyway. A partner of Alain’s also discovered the tachyon not long after that. Tachyons are particles a lot like chronotons, only they travel backwards through the timeline. This discovery allowed the CERN team to work out a way to send the shit they brought forward back to the exact moment it left when they were done with it, which was crucial to not altering the present.

“So, what are you guys going to do with this now?” I asked after Alain had told me all of this.

“We’re going to stage an epic 64-man tournament featuring the greatest stars in the history of professional wrestling,” he said. “What the hell do you think we’re going to do with it?”

I told Alain that had to be the most fucking balls idea I’d ever heard. “But who’s going to book this tournament?” I asked.

And Alain said to me, “That’s actually why I was calling . . .”

That’s right, me, bitches. Alain and his particle men have not only pulled 64 of the greatest wrestlers ever into the present from the primes of their careers, they’ve also used their time travel equations to summon the best announcers and color commentators, and to bring back some of the classic old school venues from the last century of professional wrestling history — legendary, now closed or demolished arenas like the Kiel Auditorium and the Mid-South Coliseum — because shit, we’ve gotta have these matches somewhere.

Choosing the participants took a bit of figuring. I wanted the various eras of wrestling history to be represented fairly, and I wanted workers from outside the United States to be a significant part of the tournament. I decided that the 64 would be divided up as follows: a dozen workers from the golden era up through the 1970s, and since they were the decades of wrestling’s greatest popularity, twenty workers each from the 1980s and the 1990s, and finally a dozen from the 2000s. I also made sure that twenty of those 64 were legends from Mexico or Japan, and wound up with a few from Canada, too.

I randomly seeded the whole bunch of 64 into eight groups of eight. Over the next nine weeks, starting last night and continuing every Wednesday night through the rest of the year, each group of eight will hold a one-night single elimination tournament to determine a winner. On the last Wednesday the eight group winners will meet to determine a single champion.

Last night the tournament for the first group was held. Sorry I didn’t mention any of this earlier. I’d tell you where to get tickets, but last night the house was packed to the rafters, and apparently all the other venues have been sold out for weeks, too. Lucky for you I’m only too happy to be able to report to you the detailed results of . . .

Group One: The Sam Muchnick Bracket

We are LIVE! from the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, Missouri.

Our hosts are the announce team from the heyday of Saturday Night’s Main Event, Vince McMahon and Jesse “The Body” Ventura. And let me tell you, Vince is rockin’ the powder-blue sport coat. Enough fucking around — to the ring!