A Note For The STRIFE Office

A NOTE FOR THE STRIFE OFFICE "Simply" Shawn Cortez ———————————————— I have been told, by multiple people whose names I am not going to use here, that filing a written piece in advance of a match is, in this federation's culture, considered the action of a man who is trying to compensate for his confidence. The implication being that a man who is comfortable with his preparation does not need to write about it. I am writing this anyway. Confidence is not the question. Documentation is. ———————————————— Tomorrow night I make my debut in Strife Combat. My opponent is Hideo Kuramoto. I have been informed that I am, in this matchup, the heavy underdog. I have been informed of this by: — The federation's internal preview, which lists me as a "newcomer" and Mr. Kuramoto as a "veteran technician," — Two members of the production team, separately, who used some variation of the word "interesting" when describing the matchup, — And one fighter, whose name I will not use, who congratulated me in the hallway on getting "a real match" for my first appearance. I want to address the framing. Not because I object to it — I am, in fact, a newcomer to Strife — but because the framing assumes a number of things about my career that the federation has not yet investigated, and that, if it had, would alter the framing. Allow me to walk you through it. ———————————————— I trained under Paolo Vázquez in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from 2013 to 2015. Paolo's gym is documented. Paolo himself is reachable by telephone. His phone number is, to the best of my knowledge, listed in the same place it has been for thirty years. Anyone with a moderate degree of investigative interest could verify what I am about to claim. I debuted professionally in late 2015 at Atlántico Pro Combat's Coliseo Roberto Clemente card. I lost, badly, to a fighter whose name I will not use because he has, in the years since, requested anonymity for reasons I respect. I learned more in that loss than in the eighteen months of training that preceded it. I have continued, in the years since, to lose more matches than I have won — for the first three years of my career — to fighters who taught me what I needed to learn. By 2019, I had stopped losing. By 2021, I was holding regional titles in two organizations simultaneously, neither of which were considered prestigious enough for the office of Strife Combat to factor into its onboarding evaluation. By 2022, I made the finals of Bushido in Osaka. I lost. I was twenty-six years old. I was, at the time of that finals appearance, the youngest non-Japanese finalist in the history of that event. I am telling you this not because I expect the federation to retroactively credit me for accomplishments it did not previously acknowledge. The federation's evaluation of me at the time of my hiring was based on the information available to it. That is, in fact, how all evaluations work. I am telling you this because the federation has now had several months to update its evaluation, and I am not certain that it has. Tomorrow night I will provide an update of my own. ———————————————— A word about Mr. Kuramoto. I have, in preparation for this match, watched approximately fourteen hours of his matches across his career — his New Japan Dojo work, his independent runs in Mexico and the United Kingdom, his return matches following his knee reconstruction, and his recent matches here in Strife. I would like to say, on the record and in advance of any potential post-match reframing, that Hideo Kuramoto is one of the best technical fighters I have ever observed. He is also, in my professional assessment, the wrong man for me to face in my debut. I do not say this because I expect to lose. I say it because the federation has, by booking him as my opponent, demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of competitor I am. Mr. Kuramoto is a fighter who rewards opponents who fight him on his terms. I am not a fighter who engages opponents on their terms. I am a fighter who alters the terms of the engagement. The federation, by booking this match, has unintentionally provided me the platform on which to demonstrate that distinction. I want to be precise about what I expect. I expect to win. I expect to win in under fifteen minutes. I expect to win by submission. I expect Mr. Kuramoto to walk out of The Crucible under his own power and to be, in the days that follow, the same fighter he was before the match. I do not intend to damage him. I intend to defeat him. The two are, despite federation-cultural assumptions to the contrary, not the same thing. I expect, after the match, that the federation will need to revisit its initial evaluation of me. I am telling you all of this in advance, in writing, so that whatever happens tomorrow night will not be reframed, after the fact, as anything other than what it was: a competitor of fifteen years' professional standing producing a result consistent with his career, against an opponent of higher repute, in the federation's first opportunity to observe him. I am, as ever, simply Shawn Cortez.