Tank’s arrogance gleams from every bead of sweat coating his wrestle-ready body. The brawny, relative newcomer is damn near blinding to behold, so thickly spread is his sweaty sheen. By the time Morgan Cruise arrives to the mat fight meetup Tank looks like he’s several hours deep into grappling already. Only his calm and even, yet subtly macho sounding smoothness of voice tells that despite looking like he’s just finished an intense workout, Tank is rather just perfectly warmed up and indeed has a – excusing the pun– fully loaded tank. The man is clearly ready to chomp into his competition, which may explain his folly of taking Cruise at his word, that Morgan is merely a novice with but a few matches under his belt.

Morgan indulges himself in the psychological dismantling of an opponent, enjoying it nearly as much as the physical upending of that opponent, which is ever the habit of the Mastodon to deliver. So while Tank is practically frothing at the mouth to thrash a rookie, Cruise is secretly the one salivating over that very same opportunity. In order to achieve the proper payoff for his ruse, Cruise will allow Tank to take the upper hand and build his confidence into truly heightened arrogance, at which point the Mastodon will seek to send his ripened adversary plummeting from the summit they thought themselves to have gained. Morgan’s manipulation requires the hairy heel to suffer some genuine hard knocks if he is to be convincing. With Tank’s unquestionable strength and grit, Cruise’s tactics become in turn, questionable, as Tank coils his tattooed pythons around his opponent’s neck. Morgan is certainly suffering from the leg scissors hold and other submission predicaments seem poised to break the Mastodon in half!

Reaching into his bag of tricks, the crafty veteran heel eventually establishes a course that many felled combatants of past matches will recognize. One minute, Tank is threatening with powerful holds, in the next, Cruise has Tank in a nelson, crushing Tank’s head forward until it seems to snap and sap Tank’s very vitality. As the truth dawns on Tank that he’s been had by a wrestling savage, he’s already feeling the effects of a mouth gouging camel clutch courtesy of Cruise. On top of submission after submission taking toll upon Tank’s oxygen levels, Morgan ices the physical beating with a frosting of malfeasance practiced on his straight opponent. Tank is, as the adage goes, stuck between a rock and a hard place but heartily afflicted by both as Cruise attacks his manhood, literally and otherwise. For the fan of sadistic ultimatums, it is a pleasure to weigh the anguish in Tank’s face while he is continually bent in ways that completely deprive him of air, against the moments of reprieve, in which Morgan berates the man psychologically, with an equally vindictive enthusiasm. For Tank however, there is no such ultimatum, no choosing the lesser of two evils; he will have to experience physical pain and mental onslaught, alternately and together, until the wrestling god is satisfied.