Cory Is Looking At Things

johnztownsend:

The Masked Man already wrote a wonderful article about this moment (http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7374363/wwe-underdogs-your-moment), but I’d like to talk about it myself.

It’s been a rough few months for me. I got pretty down a lot, and for a couple of weeks more down than I’ve ever been. It was pretty scary. 

I’m sort of through it now. I guess. Yeah. 

I got through it thanks to a few things. The obvious first one is good friends who were willing to put up with me (Kudos to Fesh especially). The second was more of a “Wait, what am I crying about?” moment brought on by Hunter Nelson at McManus. I casually told him I’d been depressed because of ‘a string of recent failures’. “Wait-what failures!?” He asked, and in that moment I realized, oh yeah, I guess it’s not that bad, and I would have been too embarrassed to explain why I was sad. It wasn’t “I’m sad because they cancelled How To Make It In America”, but that’s what it would have felt like.

But the third thing and oddly most significant that helped me out of a bad depression was Wrestling. Namely CM Punk. Most of what was getting me down was creatively related, feeling like I wasn’t appreciated, no one liked anything I was doing, no one took me seriously. That kind of thing. In all aspects of my life. Felt like nothing was going right, I’d miss the boat on a lot of opportunities. 

But CM Punk really broke me out of that. Here’s a guy who never thought he would get to WWE. Everything that made him unique, the top brasses didn’t get. He didn’t fit the model they imagined. They wanted big boring guys. Punk is a relatively small straight edge dude who loves karate. He was his own man, and they didn’t like it. 

But he never gave up. Even when lame ducks like John Cena were headlining Pay Per Views while he was in tag team matches with David Otunga, he stayed in the game. He got another chance, and really showed them what he could do. And he never compromised. He stayed true to himself, stayed honest. 

Looking back, the moment that truly broke me out of my depression was playing WWE Allstars on the Wii. I was playing as CM Punk (of course), against The Undertaker or something. Or it might have been a tripple threat match against Eddie Guerero and Mr. Perfect. I was having a lot of fun in the match, but I somehow lost. I was sort of shocked to lose. I thought I had it in the bag. But I realized, “So what? That was a great match. That was fun.”

In wrestling, a squash is a match that’s over super quickly, maybe 40 seconds. It’s usually done before a Pay Per View, when two tough guys are going to face each other. They each have squash matches against some other, lesser foe, as if to make you think “WHOA! THESE GUYS ARE BOTH MONSTERS! THIS IS GONNA BE AN INSANE MATCH!!!”

But the truth is, squashes are boring ass matches. Uninteresting. We know what’s gonna happen. 

To take it the next level, I guess I’m saying I don’t want my life to be a squash match (Well, I probably do actually, but at this point it’s clear that that won’t be the case). In a great match, there’s a big struggle, a back and forth. You’re not sure if your hero’s going to make it, and then he pulls it off against the odds. And it’s a much more meaningful victory than beating Santino Marella in 30 seconds. 

And even if you’re guy doesn’t win, who cares? Who gives a shit? The winning element of a match is pretty short in comparison to the rest of the match. And at the end of the day, who cares? I’d rather be part of a great fight than an easy victory. 

Anyway, this video at the top is just a cool reminder that it’s not a fight in vain. That sometimes the underdogs can win. The nerds, the outcasts, the weirdos. We can come in from the crowd. We can be nerds about the shit we dig. 

And maybe, just maybe, we won’t have to be on a tag team with Heath Slater every again. 

If you know JZT, you know he’s the best. If you don’t know JZT, get to know JZT, you dope.