My Cobra Guy

Episode Eighty

Kreese's phone was full of voicemails when practice ended. He'd intended to spend the rest of the evening perusing the news articles about the centipedes. He'd spent the afternoon discussing the incident with police, insisting he had nothing to do with the centipedes. Maybe they came with the bonsai trees? They were at all the LaRusso locations.

Every single message was from the media. He wasn't returning all of these. He settled on contacting one Gale Riley, a newscaster for a national outlet.

Gale answered in a husky voice after only two rings. "Mr. Kreese, I'm so glad you got back to me. If you have time, I have a few questions for you about the incident at LaRusso Auto Group."

"I don't know anything aside from what I read in the papers," Kreese said. "I do know Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence have a long-standing grudge against me and are ready to blame me for anything they can."

"Understood. But how do you feel about Happy Gilmore's statement?" Gale asked.

"Who? What statement?" Kreese asked.

"Happy Gilmore, the reigning PGA Champion?" Gale prompted.

Kreese typed the sissy name into a search engine, expecting a fragile man in prissy clothes. He did not expect to see images of him punching Bob Barker, or more photos of him wrestling a one-eyed alligator on the green. He was a solidly built man, who preferred to wear loose jeans and baggy shirts to golf. "What does he have to do with what happened?" Huh. How feasible would it be to have his students practice wrestling gators?

"Gilmore was in an accident when centipedes exploded from the dashboard of his new Porsche," Gale said.

Oh, this couldn't have possibly played out better. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that this happened to a national treasure like Happy." Happy? What kind of a name was that?

"His earlier social media post referenced the centipedes as being planted by a snake dojo," Gale explained. "You're the only local dojo with a snake logo."

Kreese logged into the Cobra Kai social media to read Gilmore's statement, and saw he had several hundred new messages, new reviews, and lots of people writing on his profile.

He opened one of the first messages. It was a death threat from a glasses-wearing, middle-aged man named Norm. There was another, threatening to rip him limb-from-limb by a man who looked to be over seven feet tall named Mr. Larson. There were paragraphs about how Larson was going to do it. There were more from women, another from some guy who just wrote "Jackass!," and one from a Shooter McGavin, who said he didn't need help to beat Gilmore.

"I know Mr. Gilmore is well-liked," Kreese said carefully. "And his fans are very passionate, but they don't know the whole story. And I can assure them I had nothing to do with the centipedes."

"What is the whole story?" Gale asked. "Would you be interested in telling it to audiences?"

"I would. When can we meet, Gale? You tell me when, and I'll accommodate you." Kreese needed to contact Silver about this, before someone came and attacked the dojo. This kind of reaction was not what he'd expected from golf fans.

"Come to the studio," Gale said. "10:00 AM?"