We find ourselves once again in the dusty old gym belonging to Jack Standard. He’s hard at work, as always, training his body for the daunting match ahead. He’s hoisting a faded leather medicine ball over his head, over and over again. His body is sweating, his muscles taut as he lifts the dead weight one final time, before tossing it across the gym.

“Here is what I know about dinosaurs…” He pauses, before explaining further. “Some of them eat plant, some of them eat meat, some of them fly. But all of them, every single one, is dead and gone, they’ve not been on this planet for a million years.” 

Jack takes a swig from his water bottle.

“I know that, you know that, every damn 8 year old kid knows that dinosaurs are extinct. And yet, this week at Slam, I somehow have a dinosaur as my damn tag team partner. What the hell is going on?”

He tosses his bottle away in frustration and growls. Then Jack pauses and shrugs to himself.

“Here’s what I know about OSW.” Jack shakes his head “OSW is a clown show, it’s a dumpster fire of anything-goes chaos. This week my tag team partner is a dinosaur, maybe next week I’ll be forced to wrestle a chicken nugget! And if I did do that, the fans are so starved of actual real wrestling that they’d still cheer for it and then run home to rate it 5 stars on their stupid website that nobody ever looks at!”

He reaches across and picks up a yellowing magazine from the old days. In a crowd of big, burly men we can see a young Jack Standard stood at the front, under the heading “The Next Big Thing.” Standard thumbs through the thick pages.

“This thing is full of real dinosaurs. The real old school wrestlers  were thunderous beasts, striding across the ring to inflict pain on all those who faced them. Real men, real monsters! But now real wrestlers are hard to find, almost as extinct as those old lizards. But something has survived…”

Jack drop the magazine on a stack of dusty publications. 

“At Slam this week, two wrestling archeologists are about to make the discovery of a lifetime. Aranza, Dr Vinell ; you are about to uncover a true dinosaur. And I’m not talking about my growling partner! I am a dinosaur too, a grizzled veteran with years of experience of kicking the crap out of entertainers just like you!”

Jack looks up, directly down the camera.

“When my foot hits your face you will realise that life finds a way – to kick your ass! And when my arm crushes your windpipe you will know that you cannot match up to Standard. And when you finally limp, shamefully out of The Temple, carrying the weight of a brutal defeat on your shoulders, you will know that real wrestling is not extinct yet.”

“Because here is what I know about real wrestling….

Every

damn 

thing.”