#it's a miracle these two eventually became good FRIENDS proper; credit to them

[armed-with-a-waffle-iron]

"Let's call it an agreeable indiscretion and leave it at that."

"I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that. I don't do things on a casual."

Nightwing/Huntress (1998)

[memes-of-baebox]

Back around April 15th last year, an unknown editor on the Punch-Out!! Wiki inserted a made-up backstory into the Doc Louis page. This edit was ultimately reverted, but it’s left quite a good impact on me and I think it’s something that everyone else needs to read too. Here it is, copied exactly as it was written (Note again that I was not the writer of this; it was an anonymous IP on the Punch-Out!! Wiki. If this contributor had a username, I would give proper credit, but they have not been online on the wiki since making this edit. If the creator is reading this right now and would like for this to be removed, please IM me):

Doc Louis was born near Galveston Texas, the birthplace of the first African American Heavyweight Champion—the great Jack Johnson—whom Doc Louis’s dad idolized. Doc Louis’s family was poor and they worked hard, and Doc Louis was taught to earn every penny that came into his pocket. His father was a dockworker and a former sergeant in the Army—the kind of man who flew the Stars and Stripes outside his house every day of the year. He trained Doc Louis to fight using a stack of old tires as a heavy bag.

When Doc Louis was twelve years old he got beaten badly in a city league bout. The other kid taunted him when he was down on the mat. Doc Louis had never felt so ashamed. “Life isn’t about winning, son,” his dad told him. “It’s about losing and still keeping on. That’s called grit.”

But Doc Louis wanted revenge. Before he and the other boy fought again, Doc Louis removed some of the padding in his right hand glove and replaced it with a roll of quarters. He broke the other kid’s nose with one punch. The feeling of power was exhilarating. He started using different tricks to cheat, and won a lot of trophies until he finally got caught and was banned from the league. The one good thing in his life was gone.

Doc Louis was in and out of trouble at school and with the law from that point on. He tried to join the military after dropping out of high school, but he coldcocked a drill sergeant in boot camp and was kicked out. He bought a one-way bus ticket to Chicago, carrying nothing more than a duffel bag full of workout clothes and a pair of boxing gloves. He found a job at a boxing gym on the South Side, doing menial tasks like sweeping the floors, taking care of the bathrooms, and cleaning up the cutman’s bloody rags…all to pay for his own training. He slept on a cot in the storage room.

Nobody knew him here. Nobody knew about his cheating. He was starting over doing the one thing that he loved. He turned his life around.

Over the next five years Doc Louis grew tall and his body filled out. All during that time he studied the sweet science of boxing with the zeal of a scholar, analyzing the fighting techniques of his boxing idols like Captain Falcon and Tummus. And he worked his body until he was a rippling specimen of muscles and raw power. In his early twenties he started winning fights.

Journalists began calling him “Chocolate” for his devastating combination of jabs followed by a skull-hammering right hook. It took five more years of grinding it out on the boxing circuit, but eventually he got his shot and won the Heavyweight Championship. But he became the victim of every cliché: the over-the-top mansion; the grasping trophy wife; the collection of flashy cars; the entourage of worthless sycophants.

Doc Louis got sloppy in his training and abused his body, partying like a rock star. He barely won the next two fights in defense of his title, and when he finally lost the belt three years after his first championship victory, he fell into a deep depression. Soon after he found out that his manager had fled the country, leaving him in debt and owing millions in back taxes. That’s when Doc Louis’s wife left him. The boxer went crazy with rage and punched a brick wall, shattering his right forearm.

When he was in the hospital, drugged up on painkillers, a strange man approached him and told him about a special research program to rehabilitate athletes and make them superhuman. He was taken to an Ultratech lab and shown a production line creating cybernetic implants, and then given a demonstration of this tech’s miraculous powers. Doc Louis was mesmerized and signed a contract on the spot, essentially handing over his life, career and potential earnings to the megacorporation.

Surgeons implanted titanium shafts into his forearms to add bone-crunching strength to his punches. At first Doc Louis relished this newfound strength, and started training in earnest at an Ultratech facility. They put him through an array of tests, analyzing every aspect of his fighting style and even recording his brain waves when he fought. And they cut on him again and again.

Within six months he’d won back the title, pushing in his opponent’s face and putting the man in the hospital. Ultratech took the lion’s share of the purse and ordered him to live at their facility like a caged animal. He was watched day and night. Doc Louis looked in the mirror one morning and saw a man wearing an iron slave collar staring back.

Ultratech forced Doc Louis into fighting one of their Mark 01 Mike Tyson battle cyborgs in a highly publicized exhibition bout to show off their new military technology. ARIA—the artificial intelligence mind behind Ultratech—wanted to prove that her machine was better than a human. Doc Louis was ordered to throw the fight just in case, but he went into the ring filled with a rage that made him mighty, and he pounded that metal man into the floor. To punish him ARIA leaked the information about Doc Louis’s cybernetic implants to the press. “We made him a champion,” she announced. “He’s nothing more than an Ultratech product.” Doc Louis was stripped of his title belt and banned from boxing for life.

That night Doc Louis cut the cybernetic implants from his arms, screaming in agony as he pulled the metal from his flesh. He staggered to the local hospital and got them to stitch him up. His arms healed up fast. Too fast. He realized that Ultratech had done something more to him when they’d put him on the operating table and cut him open. They’d messed with his DNA.

His flesh healed fast, but his soul took longer. Using the little money that he had left to himself he leased his old gym on the South Side and slowly started to fix it up. He named it the “Chocolate Bar” and started training young fighters. He put up an American flag out front to remind him of his dad.

One day a man came around asking about him. A guy with a strange accent. He told Doc Louis that people had been watching him—a group called the Disavowed. Their goal was to utterly destroy Ultratech and they wanted to enlist him. The foreigner showed Doc Louis information linking his former manager to Ultratech. The megacorp had been playing the fighter for years. They’d bankrupted him so that they could get him in their clutches and study him like a lab rat. And now the Disavowed was offering to help Doc Louis get even.

Doc Louis told them everything that he knew about his procedures, and every detail about the Ultratech facilities and the cybernetic labs where he’d been operated on and trained. He even gave them his bloodstained implants.

The Disavowed started feeding Doc Louis information, enabling him to track down Ultratech agents, like the assassin Glass Joe. After a while Doc Louis and the spy Little Mac became friends, and infiltrated Ultratech together. He joined him on another mission to South America and the headquarters of the Night Guard to meet its last surviving member—the monster hunter King Hippo—and the warrior-monk Mr. Sandman. But then they were attacked by an Ultratech army of Mike Tysons and Yoshi units. Doc Louis was ready to go out swinging. And then, by some miracle, the army suddenly called off the attack and retreated.

The boxer had survived another round and will continue his training, hoping to live up to the nickname “Chocolate.”