LEGENDARY INSIGHTS

By Notorious JON
First off, thanks for all the warm wishes. The recovery is going as planned, I’ve started upping the rehab to some work in the pool and I’m trying to wean myself off of crutches. I’m beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve tried to keep a low profile since the injury, but recent events have made it necessary for me to start sharing my opinion with the cWo fan base.

On the last episode of Driven, I heard Lance Wilden say something that got me thinking. He said that cWo is, right now, the worst it’s ever been. Now mind you, he didn’t mean that it was bad in terms of talent, he simply meant that in all his years in cWo, he’s never seen it as chaotic, lawless and seemingly hopeless as it is now. Being the only man besides Lance Wilden to be in cWo since the very first episode of Carnage (You were 2 weeks after me, Hot Shot), I thought long and hard about this, and I realized that he’s right.

I’ve always believed that cWo gets what it deserves. For three months in 2002, it deserved to get the worst ratings in company history. cWo’s deserved every ounce of praise it’s received since its return in 2007. But does cWo deserve its current era? Does it deserve the darkness that’s seemingly on the verge of enveloping it? Yes. cWo has allowed a man to rise to the top of the organization who has no regard for the rules, has no knowledge of boundaries. Pro wrestling is a sport. It’s a game. But this man doesn’t know that, and if he does, he doesn’t care. This is someone who has taken sport and turned into into warfare.

I’m sure there’s been a lot of speculation as to what I have to say about my long-term partner, Heretic. Well, I wish there was more I could say. In all honesty, the man who currently holds cWo’s world title isn’t the Heretic I’ve known for all these years. That Heretic “shut off” several weeks before Cyberslam VI, and the man who replaced him… I’ve never seen anything like this. The Heretic I know had a few screws lose, but he at least had a trace of humanity. I can honestly say that there has never been anything like what Heretic has become.

But as far gone as he is, I believe there’s still some method to his madness. Watching his interactions with Andrew Phillips something became clear to me: Heretic didn’t want to destroy Andrew Phillips the wrestler, he wanted to destroy Andrew Phillips the man. He wanted to not just to take the world championship, but he wanted to make someone re-evaluate his or her entire existence… and he did it. We saw a cocky champion turned into a paranoid, defeated husk, because Heretic did what was necessary, he involved Andrew’s children, he involved Andrew’s wife and Andrew’s sister… he changed the very nature of who Andrew Phillips is.

Now, here comes something you may not be expecting: Heretic saved my life. That’s right, when Heretic blew out my knee at Cyberslam, he saved my life. And when Heretic defeated Andrew Phillips at Slam In The Sand, he saved his life too. See, I was what Andrew Philips wanted to be. I was someone who was only as good as the belt around their waist, someone who let wins and losses in the ring define their very identity. Heretic made me realize that everything I held important was folly. In cWo, I was at the top. But now I’m sitting in a bed in an empty house, empty because of all the time I put into this business instead of going after what was really important in life. What do I have to show for everything now? I can make a phone call and get a blog thrown up, big whoop. If not for Heretic, you’d see me at one of those “legends of wrestling” shows 20 years from now still strutting like the cock of the wok… he spared me that fate, and cleared a new path for me to follow.

Andrew, you HAVE what I never had. You’ve got a wife and kids, you have something going for you OUTSIDE of the business. Just like Heretic opened my eyes and pointed me in the direction of what’s really important, I hope at least some of that registered with you. Don’t throw it all away, because in the end you'll just find yourself rehabbing a knee in an empty house, supported only by people you pay to care about you.

I really wanted to write this column as a warning to Johnny Serious, and anyone else who thinks they can bring cWo back on course. He’ll make you do things you don’t want to do. Don’t throw it away. Heretic will make you see things you don’t want to see. Don’t be fooled and think this is still my WOW playing sidekick. Don’t assume his avoidance of your challenge is cowardice; in fact, don’t even try to put yourself in his mindset at all, because I promise you, you won’t like what you find. SERIOUSLY, stay away from this guy, because you won’t be the same afterwards. Heretic may have saved me, but one man’s salvation is another man’s destruction.

Someone should have nipped this in the bud. It shouldn’t have fallen on Muru, it shouldn’t have fallen on Andrew Phillips. Nobody took this threat seriously and now there’s nobody that can stop it. Johnny Serious can’t. Christian Roman cant. Heretic will rain destruction on cWo to the likes of which it’s never seen. And when all of cWo’s possible heroes end up like Phillips and Muru, they’ll look to the one man who they’ve always looked to right the cWo ship. And on that day, I’ll say “No.”

I’ll say no because the only thing anyone can do is sit back and watch cWo wither as the poison at the top runs down the veins of this organization. cWo wanted a new era, and that’s what they got.

Things have never been worse, Lance… but you and I both know that this is just the beginning.