Bodyslam

Bump

It's hard to describe the feeling the first time your body hits the ground for the day. As Mitch sucks a breath while lying stunned at the bad bump he just took, he struggles to come up with the words. Ideally he would have tucked his chin just a bit more to avoid slamming his head into the canvas, and he would have exhaled on the split-second fall instead of holding his fucking breath because he knows better. If he'd done those things, his body would have snapped backwards and landed with its usual jarring, neck-stinging crash, bodyweight spread evenly across the flat of his back to maximize noise while minimizing pain.

Instead he'd fucked up, stayed too loose, and knocked the wind out of himself.

Ain't the first time, won't be the last.

He gives himself a second to breathe, then with a snap of his hips he kips up into a crouch before racing full-bore into the opposite turnbuckle. He spins at the last second, his back slamming into the padded corner and his head whiplashing enough to look painful. The force of the impact throws him forward and he falls flat on his face. The sound of his body hitting the mat echoes through the nearly empty arena beautifully, punctuated by a practiced grunt that isn't wholly intentional.

Ahhhh. That was a good one. Mitch has a moment to relish the almost pleasant tingly stinging sensation across his chest and abdomen before he leaps to his feet again, and then he's off and running. This time he takes the turnbuckle with his chest, bounces off, and falls cleanly onto his back.

He stands and looks over the ropes at the two trainees watching him from the floor below. "Who's first?" he asks, voice even and unbothered by the apparent brutality of what he'd just been doing.

Chuck, the bolder of the two, hops up on the apron, climbs through the ropes and into the ring. Chuck isn't his real name. Mitch doesn't remember his real name; most of 'em don't last more than a few weeks of training so he gives everyone nicknames and doesn't bother getting to know anything about 'em until their first show. Chuck is short for chucklefuck, because this one's got an attitude that's either gonna get him stiffed until he learns to rein it in or it'll get him on TV if he learns to use it the right way. Mitch is pretty sure it's the former, though.

"You know how to do this, Chuck," he says. "Do what I did as cleanly as you can. Turnbuckle, back bump, up, turnbuckle front bump, up, turnbuckle back bump, up. Fast." He watches Chuck run and fall from corner to corner as instructed. His bumps are a little delayed and he sells like shit, but he's getting somewhere.

"Chuck, dude," Mitch says patiently. "Make me believe someone just threw you like a fucking rag doll into that buckle. Sell it to me. Do it again."

Chuck runs the drill a few more times until Mitch is slightly more satisfied, and then Twiggy gets in the ring for his turn. Mitch isn't nearly as critical with him. Twiggy's got maybe another week before he drops out, so there's no need to increase his stress or Mitch's stress about how utterly mediocre he is.

"Run the ropes," he tells his trainees. "Five minutes, cross over each time, do not fucking stop." Mitch watches as they start to run, clumsily at first, but quickly finding some sort of rhythm. It's hypnotic, and even though his days of running drills like this are long behind him, on some level Mitch misses it. Chuck is obviously taking it more seriously, his boots pounding across the mat as he runs, turns to bounce his back off the ropes, and times his steps back across correctly so he doesn't collide with Twiggy doing the same thing crosswise. Mitch takes note of the fact that Chuck is adjusting his pace to accommodate a struggling Twiggy and reminds himself to point it out to the kid later. "Three minutes!" he bellows.

Mitch grabs his phone from the announcers' table to check the time. The new guy is supposed to be there at 2:30 sharp for his working interview. With eighteen minutes until then, Mitch mentally rearranges his plans for this training session a little so he can keep the greens busy while he talks to this Hotwing dude.