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Aldermanic hopeful turns out to be super punch-out character after all
Kovac addresses somewhat shocked audience in press conference
By Stu Pidass
“*Yeah, it’s me,*”
Kovac confessed.
After years of heated debate, aldermanic candidate Nik Kovac finally admitted in a press conference Tuesday that the character Nick Bruiser, from the popular Super Nintendo video game Super Punch-Out, was indeed based on himself.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Kovac confessed.
Holding back tears, Kovac recounted his time as an aspiring boxer, who in his late teens began using steroids. After winning a state championship title, game and art director Makoto Wada took notice of Kovac’s impressive physique and fighting style.
Wada, who was also present at the conference in order to help add authenticity to Kovac’s claim, told of how he chose to base the character on the potential alderman.
“I had been traveling the world, looking for a worthy template for the final boss,” Wada said. “I found this in the mighty Nik Kovac.”
Kovac said he was initially apprehensive about the offer by Wada to travel to Japan and be studied by the games designers, but the deal turned out too good to pass up. While in Japan, Kovac was watched closely by Wada and other designers with the hopes that they would be able to accurately replicate the former boxing champion’s style.
The SNES character’s name was an altered version of Kovac’s then nickname, “Kovac the Bruisarian.” Game designers felt the name Nick Bruiser was more memorable, and thus, a legend was born.
Bruiser, the oldest of the Bruiser brothers, was characterized by limited speech and showing little to no emotion. An almost inhuman, robotic fighter, Bruiser had been undefeated until you finally beat him in the sixth grade.
Kovac spoke of how he had to change the spelling of his first name in order to dispel any links to the Super Punch-Out character.
“At first I thought it was gonna be really cool when people found out me and Nick Bruiser was the same person,” Kovac said. “But when I stopped using steroids and got accepted to Harvard, I decided I wanted to distance myself from the old me.”
Those who knew Kovac were suspicious from the get-go, noticing the uncanny resemblance between the two Herculean men. Mary Swanson, a high school sweetheart of Kovac’s, said she tried to ask the former boxer about Bruiser but couldn’t get an answer.
“He came back from Japan and then got accepted to Harvard to study math and completely changed,” Swanson said. “Whenever I’d ask him about it, he’d just mumble something incoherent about ‘the damn Japs’ and walk away.”
Kovac told the kind of astonished audience that he is “at peace” with his past and that he wanted to come out with the truth so that voters in the upcoming election would know everything about him.
“Before I was ashamed of my alter video game ego,” Kovac said. “Now I would invite citizens to embrace me as the character they used to beat their heads against the wall trying to KO,” he added.
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