Narratives of Disaster: Champion vs Valentine (Script)

This was like getting stabbed in the brain.

Not all disasters are massive. Some of them are beholden at small scale, before a crowd of people in a studio, with television cameras taping, for only two minutes of cable TV time. Some disasters aren’t necessarily events, but rather people who are desperately unprepared to deliver on the job. This is the story of one of the worst pro wrestling matches I’ve ever seen, entirely because of one person. This is a Narrative of Disaster.

[TITLECARD]

Professional wrestling is a form of live entertainment with a goal that’s far easier said than done, that of putting on a fight where nobody actually gets hurt, to tell a story and thrill a crowd. It’s one that’s often maligned for being fake, you know, unlike nearly everything else on television, and somewhere along the line, people got the idea that just anyone can wrestle. Now, far be it from me to be a gatekeeper, that’s not what I’m trying to do here. But wrestlers are highly trained individuals, people taught in gyms the endless minutia of little-but-important things that actually make up pro wrestling before they even start doing basic body slams. You need to learn how to bump, how to fall properly, so that you can both sell damage and land without hurting yourself. You need to learn how to run ropes, because keeping a cadence between them is important for the people you’re working with to time their own movements. You need to know how to approach and grapple your opponent, how to back into ropes, tip forward into ropes, learn how to take kicks and chops again and again, and then practice it until it’s polished enough that there’s a confidence in putting you in front of a crowd who is willing to believe what you’re doing is real, but only willing enough to meet you halfway, based on a good effort.

Wrestling is really hard.

Jaded and, frankly, obnoxious wrestling fans like to chant “you can’t wrestle” at people who often can. These chants have historically been directed at individuals such at John Cena and Roman Reigns, who regardless of your personal opinion on them, are people who actually can really, really wrestle.

Don Valentine, though? That guy couldn’t wrestle.

[THE 1980s

THE LATE TERRITORY YEARS]

Wrestling in the United States and Canada used to be broken up into a series of promotions spread across the map, with the basic idea that the promoters could operate a regional territory and run their own shows, with their own homegrown talent, but also benefit from stars travelling between. The idea was, you’d strike out in one territory with the hopes to build your star and become a draw, making bigger paydays. Then, when word gets out of some unseen megastar from another territory over, you make the jump and continue making that big money- in turn, the promoter the next territory over gets a bankable star. Least, that’s how it’s supposed to go. On the flipside though, if you failed to make your mark in a territory, you could always start fresh again a state or two over.

The history of the territories and the wrestlers that roamed them is long and faceted. We’re not here to retell it. All you need to know is, the governing body that ran the whole shebang was called the

[NATIONAL WRESTLING ALLIANCE

JIM CROCKETT PROMOTIONS, AUGUST 6, 1988]

This is Chris Champion. He’s what you’d call a journeyman wrestler, an individual who travelled the territories for 4 years now. This is not the first place he’s wrestled, and he’ll have moved on by the end of the year, after taking up a Karate Kid character, then making powerful enemies by kicking Ric Flair too hard. Oops.

What you need to know about Chris Champion is that prior to this match, he cut a promo stating to the fans to look out for a special surprise he was cooking up for them. Oh, if he only knew.

This is Don Valentine. He’s what’s known in wrestling as a jobber, someone who exists to lose. These are individuals who are typically depicted as unskilled no-hoper hopefuls that show up to wrestle the real talent, only to get soundly destroyed. They are supposed to be stand-ins for common people, to demonstrate what would happen if we stepped in the ring- we’d be flattened. But the thing is, jobbers are often actually skilled wrestlers, who specialize in making people look good beating them up. You have to be skilled to do that.

Don Valentine is not skilled. He is the vacuum of skill in professional wrestling. He’s the worst wrestler I’ve ever seen.

This match is what’s known as a squash, a one-sided win for a competitor to be built up by having them completely destroy someone beneath their level. The match itself is also concluded in about two minutes, one second. It is a small, largely inconsequential part of a larger show, on a wrestling card broadcast on 80s cable TV, seen by many, yet also without the reach to become infamous in its day- it could be considered nothing more than a fragment off a larger archeological specimen. Yet this fragment displays such sheer incompetence that it can be used as some means to transplant the knowledge of what mechanical inability to wrestle properly looks like into a non-wrestling fan. This is a Matrix brain download of identifying suck.

A two minute squash match is not a difficult thing to catalogue. There’s less than ten very basic moves in this match, give or take giving what you consider a move. Every single one of them is botched in incredible fashion, based almost entirely on the sheer lack of ability embodied by Don Valentine. Witness, the light through my magnifying glass.

[MINUTE ONE

WELL MET, FRIEND, SHALL WE WRESTLE A MATCH?]

We kick off with a wristlock immediately after lockup, leading Chris Champion to immediately ripcord Don Valentine into a lariat. Now the argument could be made that Champion might have came in a little hot on this move, but look at the way Valentine in no way leans backward into his bump, he just stays hunched forward, clamped in the hold. Champion just completely wallops him and he awkwardly splats sideways into the mat. Let’s be clear that bumping still sucks a lot, but when you can do it properly, it lets you absorb punishment and play up the damage with theatrics. It’s basically learning how to roll with a punch with your entire body, while also acting.

Wrestling is really hard.

As it stands, Champion winds up hooking his arm around Valentine’s neck and dropping him like a side of pork. This probably sucked a lot to experience.

The knife edge chop is a tool employed by many wrestlers, because it’s simple in principle for how much of a reaction you can get off one swing. Hit someone with the flat of your hand, hard, in the chest- yes, this hurts, but it does no real damage and makes a hell of a sound. Except when you take one by lightly rolling backwards onto your hands, like Valentine does here. It’s sort of incredible how much of a pillow he resembles as he does this. He just becomes a cloud, and fades backwards, dispersing like vapor across the mat. Feels like I’m wrestling nothing at all…

Champion scoops Valentine off the mat and shoots him into the ropes, and here we see the importance of timing your rope running. Because Champion goes for either a dropkick or a Rider kick, it’s unclear after the fact, and Valentine suddenly gets gunshy and slows his pace slightly, completely disrupting the timing of the spot. Champion is faced with the difficult decision to either rapidly evolve the ability to fly, or extend his kick as far forward as humanly possible. The end result? He lightly binks Don Valentine on the face, looking like he nearly hurt himself on the way down. Don “Whitewurst” Valentine sells this by flinching backwards, then fainting like a goat.

We will now take a moment to engage with Chris Champion’s mullet.

[Menacing]

It’s at this moment that Champion loudly declares for his opponent to get up. Someone in the audience tells him to stay down. That person was right to shout this. But Don Valentine stands, and Chris Champion steps in for a standing side kick. Valentine again becomes lighter than air, and just feints backwards, rolling off the sole of Champion’s foot and then, just… not selling it at all.

Champion responds to this by immediately grabbing Valentine, shouldering him back into the ropes, then shooting him across the ring. Valentine manages the feat of crossing the mat and rebounding back across, though again, watch how bad he is coming off the rope. Spotting an opening, Champion pounces on it and hurls his entire body at Valentine, scything a lariat through him. There is no real sell here, no faking this; that was a potato, a real hard hit. This is the act of desperation by a wrestler who is now, given no other option, is trying to literally beat entertainment out of an otherwise incapable opponent.

This is a real thing that can happen, by the way. The “beating for cheers” thing. It actually happens more than you might think. Wrestling is really hard.

At this point, diplomacy has failed. Chris Champion is now talking to himself and appears to be actively looking for an exit sign. Don Valentine, a man whose own skeleton has appeared to have given up on him, flops moistly on the mat, displaying his wrestling acumen. Like a man attempting to scoop up spilled tapioca with his empty hands, Champion gathers Valentine, appears to give him a tremendous amount of instruction as he backs his opponent in the ropes. He then gives him an Irish whip and chops him on the trip back.

“Big Mayo” Don Valentine toddler jogs into his open hand, then turns into a man made of wet papier mache, concluding the dark chapter known as “minute one.”

[MINUTE TWO

YOU MADE THIS INEVITABLE]

What is a wrestler to do when they come to work a ring with someone utterly incapable of working? This is the classic ‘ass naked in class’ nightmare, played out in real life for a man that is only partially clothed, with everyone in the room actually looking at him, and also, TV cameras present and taping. This ring has become a beartrap, baited with a gooey idiot who should not have been allowed in the building without a ticket. A man who started this match teasing something special for the fans to watch out for, is now looking for a way to saw off his foot at the ankle and escape.

Champion levels Valentine and hits him with a vertical leap dropkick, charged with pure sadness. Champion knows how terrible this looked by the way he sits up, by the sheer discomfort in his posture. He understood mid-motion, how his opponent awkwardly kept his hands slack, to the front, and how he tipped backwards with semi-rigidity, making it look as though he’d just dropkicked an enormous platinum blonde erection. This is ability meeting anti-ability and an annihilation event being observed; this is tragedy, as imagined through the lens of wrestling on TBS.

Notice how when Don Valentine tucks his legs up, he looks like a wierd egg? I wonder why that is…

Chris Champion attempts a pinfall, and against logic, refrains against holding down The Big Beige Machine for an illicit three count. Look at his face in this camera angle. Is that directed to the promoter, to whom he assumes is doing this to him out of cruelty or spite? Is he staring at us, through time and space, displaying the power to make us uncomfortable remotely and immortally, having achieved status as a cosmic joke?

I mean probably not but

The pace slows to a crawl, as Champion raises Valentine to his feet, and once again slowly backs him to the ropes. This is the equivalent of someone trying to waste time at work by repeatedly going to the bathroom, just in a wrestling match. I don’t blame the guy, mind, because at this point, Champion has come to the realization, that the man he’s been placed in the ring with is utterly incapable of fulfilling his end of the grappling bargain. So in this push, Champion feeds Valentine the details of the final sequence.

First, Champion thumps Valentine in the chest with an overhand chop, a maneuver which only requires the attacker to connect their forearm to the target’s chest with enough weight to make a sound. In this case, Champion makes the sound by stomping his foot. Which leads me to believe that, at this point in his career at least, Chris Champion had the patience of a saint. Don Valentine sells this by jiggling slightly.

Second, Champion snapmares Valentine over. A worked snapmare is functionally someone grappling your head, then you doing a front somersault as they mare you over. Don Valentine sort of does this, kinda, managing to sort of barrel roll out of it, while looking like he smells something bad. This has been Valentine’s selling-face the entire time, by the way. This is the look of someone that doesn’t want to get the gross thing on him.

Third, Champion scoops Valentine up by his upsetting Hank Hill ass, body slamming him like a semi-frozen cadaver. This is almost all Chris Champion, and yet, somehow, it looks awkward and wrong. There are ways of controlling and shifting your weight when you take a bodyslam, so that you make things easier for the person slamming you. I can only assume that Don Valentine is doing none of these things here, and is perhaps doing many things counter to them. 

At last, we come to Champion’s surprise. On wobbly legs, perhaps as a result from emitted radiation from the failure elemental he’s been in close proximity to for the past few minutes, Chris Champion struggles to stand in position for a Crane Kick, the ultimate technique from The Karate Kid. The same person who yelled for Don Valentine to stay down even points this out.

In this moment, all lies in a precarious position. It’s not impossible to imagine Chris Champion tilting over in one direction or another, falling out of his finisher entirely. The mind boggles as to what would have occurred if he did. Instead, he manages to stick it out, and raise into the stance of a wounded Daniel-san. Here, he faces a difficult question: what now? Chris Champion is now stood on one leg, in the ring with a man who might be an idiot, but is definitely incompetent to an alarming degree. Don Valentine has done everything in his dread anti-power to make everything he has done look terrible. This is especially the case with kicks, to which Valentine has been able to completely render down to slop. But this is his Crane Kick, his special surprise, the lead-in to his new karate gimmick. He needs this. 

So Chris Champion punts him right in the fucking face.

There is nothing to say here that the footage doesn’t. This is the wedge of a human foot colliding with the t-zone of another human being. Its presence in this match was prearranged, but there is nothing fake about the impact delivered. Physics arm their red right foot, and scatter this pudding man to the winds.

Stricken, “The Shape of Clamminess” Don Valentine falls, one armed cocked over his head. He doesn’t move. It’s the first correct decision he’s made in this match, as Chris Champion pins him for a three count.

Look at how happy this man is, to have won in such convincing fashion.

[THE AFTERMATH

MORE LIKE A MORAL FOR OUR STORY]

So maybe the first thing I should say, is that this is not the last match Don Valentine ever wrestled. He would go on to continue to job for many more individuals, all of whom he was dwarfed by in skill. And not everyone he wrestled with, mind, was any good, it’s just that it’s sorta hard to be mad at the efforts of Kendall Windham, when across the ring is a locus of sludge, despair and inability. Even “Doctor Death” Steve Williams, a man known for both sheer strength and grappling ability, was unable to wring a good match out of his carcass. In an after-match interview, Williams appeared emotionally disheartened, despite Valentine having been squashed once again. Don Valentine was a literal demoralizing experience for him.

Professional wrestling is a highly specialized occupation, one that takes both will and training to pursue, even as a hobby. Yet somehow, we have this record of a man who called himself Don Valentine, who claimed he was a pro wrestler, and yet very clearly wasn’t anything close. Like almost any other job, he was that guy who you wonder what he’s even doing, who hired him, who okayed whatever it is that he’s trying to get done. He’s a boat anchor, destined to drag down any who get too close with sheer inability, the worst sort of coworker. As humans, we seek meaning to experience, so take this as your meaning: the worst thing you can try to do with the Don Valentines of the world is try to wrestle him. Sometimes, it’s a better idea to just cut to special surprise, and end the suffering.