I.
Though some writers treat a fight scene as a linear narrative, a fight—a real fight—is nothing of the kind. It does not progress simply from beginning to end, relating a single story as it goes. A fight is actually a climactic moment shared by many stories…many stories about many people, their individual narratives following their own circuitous routes through the book of life until the emotionally-charged chapter in which the paths of the principal characters just happen to overlap.
II.
Richard’s face was a battered ruin. Blood flowed freely from his mangled visage (we would later learn that despite winning the fight, he had suffered multiple facial fractures) and mingled with the sweat that covered his body to form a scarlet sheen across every inch of his exposed skin. Nevertheless, he fought on, trading savage blows with an opponent almost half his age. Richard’s adversary was tough: despite being repeatedly hit so hard that his mouthpiece was sent flying, he refused to fall down. It was the blood that kept the kid with the Mohawk going. Every time he’d pitch forward, on the verge of collapse, he’d look into the crimson mess he’d made of Richard’s face and find his resolve. He’d tell himself that the old man couldn’t possibly take much more, and that he could win if he’d just weather a few more of Richard’s jackhammer punches.
He was wrong, of course. Richard had a granite chin, and there would be no knocking him out. The kid couldn’t know that, because he didn’t know Richard like we did. Making Richard bleed was easy; he was a bleeder whose brittle skin bruised and split even under sparring conditions. Appearances, in Richard’s case, were very deceiving. We knew that despite his rough looks, Richard was far from being out of the fight.
Eddie screamed instructions from the corner, imploring Richard to throw yet another concussive right hand. It was an MMA fight and I was Richard’s MMA coach, but Eddie was the primary corner man for the bout. Eddie was Richard’s boxing coach, and the two of them had worked together longer, so it made sense that Eddie’s voice was the one Richard should hear behind him. In the thick of things, a fighter needs to hear his instructions come from a familiar voice. Since my field of expertise was grappling, my job as the second corner-man was to advise Richard once the fight hit the canvas; I was also charged with making sure our corner was ready and able to patch Richard back together between rounds. As the bell drew close, I whispered to Frank—our third man, in charge of our gear—“Frank, we’re going to need that ice bag.” Richard and his foe traded blows all the way to the bell.
III.
Nobody pays much attention to you when you’re the third man in a corner, no matter how valuable your experience or contribution. All eyes are riveted on the fighters. Between rounds, the audience’s point of interest drifts between the hives of activity in each fighter’s corner and the scantily-clad ring girls. Ring girls are a mixed lot: some have aspirations of modeling professionally and see the evening’s work as a legitimate stepping-stone opportunity; others are strippers picking up a few extra bucks on their night off, laughing at the ease of the work compared to hours spent naked in a smoke-filled club, enduring the clumsy advances and roving hands of blue-collar drunks. Some are legitimately pretty, while some just look, well, tired, but one thing remains true about a ring girl no matter what she looks like: she commands a hell of a lot more attention than the third man in the corner, who, you recall, was the star of this paragraph before the ring girls caught our attention.
Frank was old, his sparse hair white as snow and his deliberate gait betraying the fragility of his limbs. That said, he’d been relatively young when he started coaching. A black man who’d grown up during a racist era in a racist part of the country, Frank was tough and fast. He’d honed that speed running home from his rural school every night, hoping to avoid a confrontation with those who didn’t care for boys of his color, and he’d earned his toughness by surviving those occasions when, through bad luck or bad timing, confrontation caught up to him anyway. As a young fighter, Frank racked up several regional championships; even after he turned pro, coaching had never been Frank’s intention. Still, he was approached by some would-be sponsors interested in starting a boxing club in his hometown, and asked if he’d be interested in teaching what he knew to some of the local boys. Frank was no fool. He knew that coaching would keep him relevant in his beloved fight game much longer than fighting would, so he agreed to take the job. That was in 1948, and Frank had coached in some capacity ever since.
Frank was mentally sharp and, unlike a lot of fighters of his generation, showed no signs of dementia pugilistica. Nevertheless, he was prone to the occasional fall and dependent on a number of medications, and as such lived in a home. Every day, Eddie phoned Frank to ask if he would like to help coach, and every day, Frank said yes. Since Frank could no longer drive, Eddie picked him up and drove him to the gym, where fighters ranging in age from seven to fifty-seven—some just learning the ropes, some actively competing, and some long retired—would benefit from his advice and coaching. When an ex-fighter reaches Frank’s age without showing any signs of being punchy, he clearly knows a thing or two about not getting hit, and is therefore worth listening to.
Approximately thirty-six hours after giving my youngest son his first formal boxing lesson—if anyone was going to teach my kid to box, it was going to be a man who knew how to avoid taking a beating—and about 300 miles away from home, Frank was going unnoticed as the third man in Richard’s corner. We had brought him along because everyone knew it would mean the world to him; Frank hadn’t worked a road fight in many long years. Nevertheless, experienced hands are always good to have around. “Frank, we’re going to need that ice bag,” I said.
He had it in my hand before the bell ended the round, and got Richard’s stool into the ring with a speed honed by decades of experience.
IV.
Time is highly subjective in a fight. When you’re in the ring, it is absolutely meaningless: you have no way of accurately gauging time. When you’re winning, minutes can feel like seconds, but when you’re losing, seconds can feel like hours. When you’re working the corner, every round is an eternity. After what I’m sure was a period of sixty-five to seventy years, the bell ended the first round. Richard made his way to the corner. Frank had the ice bag in my hand and Richard’s stool in the ring. Eddie slipped between the ropes and positioned himself directly in front of Richard’s face; as Richard sat down heavily, I pressed the ice bag against the bridge of his battered nose, hoping to stop the bleeding. Eddie pointed at the side of Richard’s face I couldn’t see from my position on the ring apron. “We need it there.” I leaned forward to see a massive goose-egg that hadn’t been there seconds before, but already threatened to close Richard’s left eye…that last punch had landed harder than I’d believed. I moved the ice and applied pressure.
“I’m out of gas,” Richard wheezed. His eyelids fluttered, and his breath came in ragged gasps.
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie snapped.
“Yes, sir!” Richard sat up and fixed his eyes forward. My coaching style was much different than Eddie’s, but I have to admit that Eddie got results and knew how to reach his fighter through the red haze of battle. Richard, having spent much of his twenty-year martial arts career in traditional karate schools—where students are expected to hang on the every word of those who outrank them—was conditioned to automatically defer to authority figures once reminded of their authority. Eddie didn’t wear a black belt, so he asserted his authority with profanity and force of personality. It was a winning approach, if a bit old school for my liking. I used to think that Eddie had perfected his style by emulating the Mickey character from the Rocky films, but I have recently learned that he got it from his first boxing coach, a man who would literally scream at his fighters between rounds to bring their blood to a boil, and who sometimes threatened to follow his fighter into the ring to make sure they job got done correctly.
“You are one minute away from winning this fight,” Eddie snarled. “That kid is done…he doesn’t want you hitting him anymore, and he can’t hurt you. Keep your hands up so he can’t connect. Land that right. When he wobbles, you take him down!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get the takedown and work the top game,” I chimed in. “Watch your base. Keep your hips low so he can’t sweep you, and drop bombs on him.”
“Yes, sir.”
At the ten-second warning, Eddie and I were both back on the floor, and Richard was back on his feet. “Whoop that ass!” shouted Eddie. The bell rang. The crowd howled for more blood, and Richard plowed straight ahead, determined to give them what they wanted.
V.
There it sat, unattended and in all likelihood forgotten: a tiny vial of clear liquid labeled “Epinephrine 1:1000.” Nobody was looking, and it occurred to me that I could easily slip it into my pocket. They’d kept us in that emergency room for five hours—five hours, when as far as we could tell, all Richard needed was a few lousy stitches—and surely that alone justified such a minor pilfering. Besides, I attempted to convince myself, it’ll still go toward helping people, right? Epinephrine solution is used by specialized corner men called “cut men” to staunch the flow of blood from a fighter’s face; it constricts the capillaries in the skin when applied directly into a wound. You need a doctor’s prescription to obtain the stuff, but doctors tend to be very leery of prescribing medications purely to aid in the prolonging of an athletic contest. It’s easier to get when you’re a boxing cut man—boxing has a history, and that history has been romanticized by enough sports writers that doctors, either through sentimentality or some kind of subconscious childhood wish fulfillment, are happy to write the ‘scrip—but our sport of MMA is still maligned by many and misunderstood by most. We really could have used it during Richard’s earlier bout, but I hadn’t been able to track any down in the week preceding the event.
There it sat…taunting me with its very presence.
I couldn’t do it. Stealing is stealing, I thought, sighing in disappointment at my lack of criminal callousness. Someone would have paid for it in the long run. The male nurse who left the vial on the counter, for example, would likely have been fired when it turned up missing during the next shift’s morning inventory. He’d have remembered to put it away if he hadn’t been so obviously relieved that the room full of “tough guys” (identifiable as such because we were still wearing our passes from the fight) hadn’t treated him with macho contempt simply because he performed a job so many people still identify only with women. Was his nervous error justification for a criminal act, the commission of which might cost the young man his job in an economy as unstable as ours?
No. What’s wrong is wrong.
Though I still looked like a big hooligan, complete with shaven head and shoddy tattoos roughened by age, I was sorely lacking in brutish criminality. I stopped renewing my Angry Young Man Street Cred™ card somewhere around the age of twenty. The adolescence I spent on probation and under threat of incarceration had, against all statistical likelihood, actually taught me the error of my earlier criminal ways.
At the age of 37, I couldn’t even bring myself to purloin a vial of liquid from an institution the likes of which incited my liberal sensibilities into a flame of righteous indignation.
VI.
Dakota was asleep again. The dressing rooms provided by the promoter had been hot and crowded, and were too close to the hotel bar, meaning that the air in the already-stifling room was heavy with cigar smoke and the putrid stench of spilled beer and vomit. I found an open space just around the corner from the dressing room and set up camp there, hoping that nobody staffing the event or the hotel would have the temerity to approach a fighter and his coach to ask them to relocate. Nobody did, and Dakota had fallen asleep in the chair while waiting out the last half-hour before his fight. Smart athletes sleep as much as they can, both to reduce anxiety and keep the body happy and healthy. Dakota was a smart athlete. He also had a gift for falling asleep anywhere and with astonishing speed.
Though a relatively recent acquaintance, Dakota had quickly established himself as one of my best students. He’d wrestled since he was around four or five years old. Wrestling is a terrific base for MMA, but it isn’t enough on its own. Unfortunately, some wrestlers have great difficulty adapting to the subtleties of jiu-jitsu; they rely on timing, power, and athleticism to maintain a dominant position during a fight, never bothering to learn submission holds or defensive postures. This leaves them vulnerable to the submission holds they never come to fully understand, and puts a heavy strain on their endurance in the later rounds of a match. Dakota had no such problem adapting. His style of wrestling was highly technical, almost analytical, which made him able to transition to jiu-jitsu effortlessly. He eagerly digested every submission I showed him, even the ones initiated from the open guard (a position few wrestlers are able to master, since years of conditioning against being pinned leave them uncomfortable and even awkward when fighting off their backs). His wrestling game had, in only a couple months’ time, become a submission grappling game: it was no longer pure wrestling, but that deadly hybrid of wrestling and jiu-jitsu that can be so thoroughly dominant in the mixed martial arts arena.
Now, with his first fight only minutes away, and wearing the same gloves that Richard had bloodied so thoroughly in his fight earlier that night (Frank and I cleaned them up as best we could), Dakota was asleep. Richard and I sat chatting quietly nearby. The only thing in the room that drew more unabashed stares than Richard’s swollen and lacerated face was the serenely sleeping form of our eighteen-year-old gym mate.
Women—especially the young ones—loved Dakota. You could see them fall for him the instant they laid eyes on his six-foot, 185-pound frame. Fighters are rarely pretty. Dakota, on the other hand, had had braces as a child, so he got in the habit of wrestling in a face mask; since he hadn’t yet been punched or kicked in the face outside of sparring, he’d never been cut. His natural good looks were unmarred by the rigors of competition. Furthermore, he was soft-spoken, blessed with a talent for saying exactly what women wanted to hear, how they wanted to hear it, even when he had no intention of endearing himself to them. I once saw him order a combination meal at Taco Bell, and when asked if he wanted a crunchy or soft taco with that combo, he said to the young lady working the register, “Which one do you like better?” If she could have proposed to him then and there, she’d have done it. We ate our meal under intense observation, every girl on the staff watching Dakota’s slightest move with rapt adoration. They giggled uncontrollably as he left. I had to tell him about it later; he hadn’t noticed.
“Wake up,” I said, shaking him gently. “Time to work.”
Later, after a bout that lasted less time than it took for our entourage to reach the ring, an opponent who had spent the previous several weeks telling everyone who would listen just how badly he was going to demolish this kid from Kansas, found himself staring glassy-eyed into the overhead lights, the rough feel of canvas on his back and the taste of blood in his mouth. Dakota had flawlessly executed the game plan we’d drilled in our commandeered training space around the corner from the dressing room: he slipped the jab, scored an earth-shaking takedown, taken the top position, and landed so many unanswered blows to his downed opponent’s face that the referee had stopped the bout at less than two minutes in. When Dakota’s arm was raised in victory, the young ladies in the audience smiled and cheered, genuinely appreciative of the fact that his opponent hadn’t landed a single punch.
The boyish face remained intact and undamaged.
VII.
It was daylight by the time we left the hospital. True to form, Dakota had slept during most of the time we’d spent keeping Richard company; Eddie had amused us by inflating surgical gloves on his head. Our entire group marveled at the revelation that Richard had suffered multiple fractures to his face, a sobering realization made clear only by the CT scan ordered by the attending physician. Oh, he’d been an interesting character, too; the doctor had at first treated us with sneering disdain, chastising us for “getting in fights” while taking readily-apparent pleasure in his feelings of socioeconomic and moral superiority, only to undergo a complete change of personality once he realized we weren’t drunken brawlers, but serious sportsmen. He was then so friendly that I half-considered asking him for a prescription for Epinephrine solution.
“You’ve got fractures in the orbital bone, the cheekbone, and along both sides of your nose; there are pockets of air and fluid in your sinus cavities, and you’re got five stitches above your eye,” the nurse told Richard after the doctor had finished his report. “Here are copies of your CT scan…give them to the facial reconstruction specialist when you get home, and in the meantime, don’t do anything that’ll aggravate your injuries or pop your stitches.”
Deadpan, Richard replied, “So, only light sparring, then?”
No-one said a word; the nurse stared at him in disbelief, slack-jawed and speechless. Seconds later, we all exploded into laughter.
VIII.
Though some writers treat a fight scene as a linear narrative, a fight—a real fight—is nothing of the kind. It does not progress simply from beginning to end, relating a single story as it goes. A fight is actually a climactic moment shared by many stories…many stories about many people, their individual narratives following their own circuitous routes through the book of life until the emotionally-charged chapter in which the paths of the principal characters just happen to overlap.
Chatboard (11)