by P. S. Power
He still wasn’t really sweating or breathing hard. The main issue this time was a bit more energy and a little more power being used. About eighty percent of his own, which would be less than that for Valdis.
Sally managed to get some good take downs and was thrown once, but found it harder on the ground, since the other fighter was hitting her constantly. A bit desperately too, trying not to lose. Sally really stepped up her fight, which was good, but she still nearly lost. One wrong move and she would have been knocked out. A few times she would have been if he’d been her coming opponent. The goal was to get her ready, not make her afraid to fight.
Still, in the last round, Dan waved at him and called out loudly.
“Tony. Add in the ground work?”
That changed everything. He didn’t use more speed or force and only three joint locks and one choke. That and trying to hit her like the man would be doing in the cage on the night of the fight. Sally was gasping for air by then and he was breathing at a good, but controlled pace. Like he’d trained for a real fight, but wasn’t used to what he was doing.
He jumped on her back when it was exposed and purposefully botched a naked rear choke hold. Sally desperately fought her way out of it, so he stood up and started to box again. Diego was always going to default to that. At least he had in every other fight. Then he moved in and performed and odd version of a single leg, grabbing the lead and prying her over using his head. It caused her to fall and he started automatically into an ankle lock, then let it go. After all, that wasn’t one of the things he figured the man would know yet. Instead he tried for an arm, which didn’t work that well, since Sally wasn’t horrible in a fight. Especially on the ground.
In the end he managed a clumsy arm bar, which left room for Sally to get out of it, if she could notice it in time. The woman missed it, fighting to desperately too understand what was going on. When the last bell rang, she stood up and hit him. Like a girl and on the shoulder.
“You jerk. I’m supposed to win.” She fake pouted, as if it was a joke and she really wasn’t hurt.
Dan laughed at the interplay.
“We’ll go over this later. There’s a lot that we need to address, Sally. Great work, Tony. We’ll meet again in two days?”
He nodded, feeling like he was just being lazy, eating their food and doing that little. Still, it was what he was there for.
“Can I get a copy of the video on this? That way I can correct any mistakes.” They were there. He’d yet to truly copy anyone else perfectly, after all. There were always little things that he missed in application. The closer he got though, the better it would be for Sally.
Lenny answered, his voice friendly.
“We can do that. That was… It was like watching Valdis again. I’m impressed. I really figured you were going to just come in and tear her apart. The was measured. Solid, but not too much.”
He nodded and then produced a Tony smile for the man.
“Yeah. We need to do a full force session, too. So she’s ready for that. She still might not get it, but…”
The dark skinned man exhaled through his nose, making his nostrils flare a bit.
“That’s… I don’t think she’s ever really done that. She’s fought some tough ladies, but they were mainly soft matches for her. She probably thinks that this was hard.” The man was talking not five feet from Sally, but pitched his voice for her to hear anyway.
She smiled and stuck her tongue out.
“I hear you. Aren’t you even tired, Tony?” She was panting a bit, but he’d recovered for the most part.
“Not really. I run a lot, normally. Other training stuff, too.” He shrugged and smiled back. After all, the goal wasn’t to make her feel bad. Just work harder, over all. Even that wasn’t his actual job.
No, he was there to pretty much do what he just did. Spar in a way that would be like the coming fight, without letting his partner get hurt. So far it had worked pretty well.
Curtis and Kris, the large men there, both had taken time to watch him work. Anthony expected then to make fun of him then, because he hadn’t looked that great. It was what he was there for however, so needed to see the vid before he felt bad for it.
Instead they both just nodded at him. Curtis smiled.
“Decent. We’re going to spar a bit. Light, like yesterday? You want to spot for us? Tell us when we need to make a correction?” It was a trainer’s job, but the big fighter shrugged. “Simpson is refusing to work with us now. Lenny is busy, which means that we’re being punished for daring to think.”
Tony shrugged, then tried to be pleasant about it. Not that he wanted to get into their drama. If his life had taught him anything it was to get away from people that were about to implode their own situations. Simpson was hitting that mark.
Still, Tony was going to get bored, having nothing to do.
“Sure? I probably can’t do as well as one of the trainers, but I’ll try not to be annoying about it?” He was still in his shorts, but had the gloves off already. They belonged to the facility after all.
The work out was going well, he thought. The men tried different things and when they found something that worked for them, or didn’t, they stopped and went over what was happening. Then tried it against each other at nearly full force. Tony was totally focused on what the two fighters were doing and did call out some suggestions when he noticed anything that might work.
Which was why he didn’t notice when Simpson came up behind him. Not until the punch landed.
It was hard, too the back of the head and knocked him out as he fell forward. It didn’t hurt that much, but there was no doubt that he went out. Thankfully he was able to turn and start fighting before the man carried on with the attack.
“You little…” There was cursing, as the man laid into him with bare fisted punches. The man was angry it seemed and meant to hurt him. There was no doubt about that. Still, even though it was clear the man knew how to fight, he didn’t press the attack fast enough. That meant he was able to block, covering from the incoming blows the man was launching.
Then he took the man down hard. It was a hip toss, but the other man slammed into the floor of the gym, off the mats. Without thinking about it, Tony started to grapple. He was going into training and that meant protecting his hands. So he moved quickly, getting a choke hold on the other man. It was from the front and he was being hit the whole time, but the larger man stopped fighting after about twenty seconds. There was no attempt to tap out. It wasn’t a match. It was a real fight.
There was a stench, one that smelled like an outhouse, since Simpson’s bowels released when he passed out. He also peed his pants. When Anthony looked up, his head hurting, inside, he noticed that everyone had gathered around. Lenny nodded and ran off to do something. Probably to get Dan, to have him removed. Sure, he hadn’t been the attacker, but there was no reason for anyone to believe that.
Instead, when an angry Dan got there, five or six minutes later Simpson lying on the floor, moaning and crying, Lenny was back, holding a thumb drive.
“We got it all. On camera. Ralph totally blind sided him. Then had his ass handed to him. Moron. Here look.” Dan stared at people, glaring hard, but moved across the room, where there was a screen and apparently a computer.
What it showed looked different than it had felt to Tony. The punch was a big one and had slammed him to the ground, but he was up almost instantly, fighting inside a second. The blocking was nearly totally tight, a lot like what Curtis had been working on the day before, rather than a boxing stance. Then he took the man down faster than it had felt like at the time.
The last bit, the choke, was longer than it had seemed.
Then, the adult man, who had to be nearly fifty, was still mewling a bit, sounding pathetic. It seemed off to Anthony. After all, Simpson was the attacker. Now he was acting like he’d been the one randomly attacked.
Dan nodded, looking at the tape.
“Get up Ralph. Get your
shit and get out of here. You don’t have to worry about quitting. You’re fired. Trust me, everyone is going to know about this too. It’s one thing to let your hot head make your mouth run, but attacking a guest here? You didn’t even do it like a man. You ran up on him from behind.”
Lenny got the man to his feet, his face set.
“No way back now. No way back. That was about the dumbest thing that I’ve ever heard of. Just be glad they haven’t called the cops yet. Stupid…”
Tony rubbed at his head, but didn’t comment on anything. He just watched Simpson, who had, apparently, decided they were enemies. Why that was, he didn’t know. Sure, he’d given the men some advice, but it was really generic stuff. It wasn’t like Simpson was being replaced by him or anything. It didn’t make sense.
Then, real attacks almost never did. He’d seen thirty or forty things like that in his life, so knew that one first hand. People got mad, or confused and lashed out. Normally at the closest target they thought they could win against. In this case that had probably seemed like him. Anthony got the idea.
He also got that the fight wasn’t over. The other man rushed him, pulling away from Lenny, moving in for a flying tackle. He threw himself out of the way, then they fought again. The other man showed a bit more skill and power this time than before. Not being caught off guard, probably.
Tony still took him out in about fifteen seconds. This time it was into an arm bar.
“Calm down and stop fighting. Please.” He didn’t sound polite really, feeling angry about being hit already, but the man struggled harder. “Stop. Your arm…”
That snapped. Worse, it wasn’t even that he’d tried to do it. The other man had just struggled so hard that he’d done it himself.
“Aaahhhh. You broke my arm! You broke my arm!” There was more moaning and crying then. Complaining about his broken limb as well.
Dan said something that sound familiar to Anthony, but under his breath.
“Damn-it, Ralph! I… Call the police. We’re going to have to deal with this that way, I guess.”
Anthony was not thrilled with those words. After all, he’d just broken the man’s arm. The police were likely to arrest him for that, no matter what. The thing there was that he wasn’t going to get much of a choice in the matter. On the good side they had a while before the cops were going to get there. It was tempting to run away then, but he was kind of stuck in the middle of nowhere. Hiding wasn’t going to work either.
Instead he stood up and shook his head.
“No. We don’t need to do that. Call it a training accident? This… We don’t need to let anyone see him this way.” Anthony wanted to see him hang for it, still feeling pissed about being hit in the first place. There was no denying it.
Tony however, wouldn’t act like that. So he forced himself to relax and act as calmly as possible, given the adrenaline surge that had hit him. Backing up, he tried for a peaceful expression. Still watching the downed adult man. He was big. As in muscular. More than a lot of the smaller fighters there. He had large neck veins, the kind that popped out. Arms as big as Anthony’s legs as well. It was kind of impressive, or would have been if he hadn’t been moaning about his arm still.
When he walked out the man waddled, the stink in his shorts bad enough to actually leak through, leaving a brown stain. There was a wet spot on the floor where he’d wet himself still. Lenny and Dan got the man from the room, one on either side of him. Half carrying him as he cried. It wasn’t a good look.
As soon as they were gone he turned to Curtis.
“Do you know where the cleaning gear is? We need to take care of that.” He pointed, then rubbed at his head again. He didn’t have a concussion. At least he didn’t think so. His ears were ringing pretty well and there was a knot on the right hand side of the back of his skull, but other than that he seemed fine.
Curtis didn’t just take him to the supply closet, he actually got the gear and helped clean things up himself. Everyone was still standing around, talking, when they were done. Anthony looked at them and spread his hands, smiling.
“I don’t work here, but talking won’t get you ready for your fights.” It was enough for everyone to mutter, most of them teasingly. Then they got back to work. It was, in the end, just another fight.
Before doing anything though, the big fighter walked over to Anthony and touched the back of his head. Gingerly and with care, like he’d dealt with such things before.
“I’ll get one of the ice packs. One second here.” He walked off, but quickly, coming back with a towel that had a white gel bag wrapped in the center. It was cold when it touched his head, but should help keep the worst of the swelling down. That was the basic idea anyway.
About twenty minutes later Sally came into the gym area. She was dressed in shorts, a too tight shirt that showed pretty clearly that she didn’t love bras as a rule and had her thick glasses back on. There was no blue hat this time at least. He didn’t want to make fun of anyone, but that thing was ridiculous. Her hair was down, as well as slightly damp. That caused it to be in little black ringlets.
“Hey… I… Dan and Lenny took Ralph off to the hospital. Does anyone know what happened?” She sounded concerned. Not just a little bit either. It was enough that he wasn’t the only one to notice it. In fact, it was Kris that groaned then.
“Holy… Let me guess, you were sleeping with him?” He glanced around and shrugged. “It’s against the rules, but Sally and I… We broke that off though, a week ago.”
One of the other men, who was smaller, being about one-forty-five or so and a bit shorter than Tony made a noise that was almost like a laugh.
“Damn girl, you do get your groove on, don’t you? I guess I was the one before that?”
She didn’t seemed ashamed of herself. Then, she was an adult and the only thing she should have felt bad about was disrupting things by breaking the rules.
“Well, he was nice. To me anyway. But yeah. Last night. I blame Tony for that.”
Half the people looked at him, like it was about more than just training advice and him being annoying. It wasn’t.
The woman made a face then.
“He was all… You have to take this fight seriously. You don’t have time to play around. You have a career to think about. So, you know, I did. Then…” She glanced at the room then and noticed Tony holding something to his head.
“Crud. Did I do that?”
Curtis, who was normally nice, glared.
“No. Simpson did. A sucker punch, no warning at all. Then Tony got up and choked him out. After that, the idiot went for him again so the kid had to break his arm. He probably put two and two together and got Tony as the reason you didn’t want to do him anymore. That kind of low rent garbage is why we shouldn’t do mixed training camps.”
He seemed ready for his own bout of drama, but Tony just shrugged.
“She was trying to do the right thing. We can let it go? Still, cut that out now, Sally. You’re a fighter in training, this… I don’t even know what to call it. What if he’d gone for someone else? They could have been hurt. As it was I nearly started hitting him first thing. Do you know what they call a fighter with broken hands? Unemployed.” Not that he’d ever heard that before, but half the people seemed to agree with him, including the remaining trainers.
He was about to get his own bit of lecturing in, when he realized that wouldn’t help.
“Well, anyway, we need to figure out how to manage this now, so that he doesn’t lose everything. I’ll try talking with Dan, when he gets back? Or one of you can? I might not be the perfect person to do that part.”
Curtis looked at him, his face hard.
“I’ll get that done. If I can. This kind of thing happens, but not normally aimed at a kid. You’re what, eighteen?” The man seemed serious and like he didn’t know, even if he’d gotten who Tony was right off. That part had been a bit weird.
Sally grimaced.
“Fifteen. That means he’s
a minor. So, yeah, I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to lose this fight, but… Dan is going to kick me out, isn’t he?”
Kris shook his head.
“You mean he should kick you out, right? I doubt he will. Still, let Curt deal with it. That’s his thing. You’re good though Tony? I mean, you messed him up, but is that enough for you? We could probably find him again, or have him sent to jail for a while.” He meant it, but didn’t at the same time.
That was pretty clear, to Anthony at least. He was actually needling the woman that he used to sleep with. Probably over hurt feelings. It was a waste, but the kind of thing people did.
“Nope. I’m fine. I think we have the reason here. We just need to stop it from now on. Don’t just blame Sally. She might have been there for all of it, but she wasn’t alone. Anyway, people should get back to work and entertain me with fighting expertise. We were going over some things?” Before they were interrupted.
Sally stood around while the rest of the people worked, finally leaving, since she had the story in full. Probably more than that, given it was, as it turned out, hers.
Though there was almost no way that Ralph Simpson hadn’t figured that Tony wasn’t banging his little girlfriend. He could even get how that would happen. She’d probably mentioned that she was breaking up with him and it was Tony’s fault. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that would mean he was sleeping with her. To almost anyone that heard the words or some variation of them. It was screwed up, but at least it probably wasn’t really about him. Meaning he didn’t have to keep withholding advice from the men he was working with. Not that he saw that much. They were both pretty good.
The tighter, slightly hunched guard worked pretty well too. It wasn’t fool proof, but it closed a lot of gaps, most of the time. Along with the movements that Lenny had suggested, which looked like a boxer, slipping side to side, Curtis was able to move in pretty quickly. Snagging takedowns without catching a fist half the time. It still happened, but a lot less. When Kris got smart and managed a well timed uppercut, the other man accidently brushed it to the outside, trying to grab both of the legs.