Blind Date with the President

by Swale, Lizzie

  Samantha straightened up away from the wall and walked toward him with a good natured smirk on her face. She had short brown hair and delicate features, although it was apparent that she'd had her nose broken a few times and that whoever had set it hadn't really known what they were doing. That was a common sight to see in the fighting world. A lot of fighters didn't want to spend thousands of dollars after every fight where a glancing jab sent the cartilage in their nose sideways, so they'd have a trainer set it.

  “Really?” she asked. “Because the place you're coming from, the nice little fitness place that is open all hours of the day and night, is a lot nicer than this place. There you have someone that will talk all sweet to you and go over how you are really letting yourself down by drinking all the time and constantly stuffing your face with junk food. Here, well, here you aren't going to have that.”

  Dan wasn't taken aback by the somewhat abrasive hello. He figured that if Samantha was really as tough a cookie as everyone said that she was then she wouldn't hesitate to talk some shit about how Dan was one of those fighters that didn't work out in a dungeon.

  “That isn't what I'm looking for from you,” Dan said. “What I need from you is someone that is going to push me. Someone that is going to keep me in check and really hold me accountable. My next fight is with that maniac WW, the one that has killed a few people in some of his fights. I'm sure you've heard of him. Well, I plan on winning that fight. And beyond that I plan on kicking his ass. So that's why I'm here. To learn and grow.”

  Samantha smiled and slowly circled around Dan, looking him up and down.

  “Call me Sam,” she said. “And hurry up and get changed, we have training to do.”

  Without saying another word, or even so much as looking at Sam again, Dan headed back to the locker room and started to get ready. It took a little bit for him to get all the way ready, almost as long as it had taken his ex to get ready to go out on a Friday night. First he had to change and then tape his hands up. Then there was what some fighters called “getting in the zone.” Although it didn't take Dan as long as some fighters he'd met to “zone in,” it did take him about fifteen minutes of meditating while he listened to heavy rock to get in the mood to train. Because training wasn't like fighting; there wasn't a huge adrenaline rush that went along with fighting a trainer. The trainer wasn't another fighter, who Dan could wear down bit by bit. The trainer was going to wear him down. Dan had to be ready for that.

  By the time Dan walked out of the locker room in a hoody, gym shorts, and training shoes, Sam had already set up a few bags for him to hit. He had kind of thought that maybe she would start him off with some of the fancy drills to see where he was at as a fighter. Showing off technical skill was something that people that weren't amateurs asked Dan to do on a regular basis, so he expected the same from Sam. But that wasn't what she had waiting for him. Instead of doing anything fancy, she just had him work the bag.

  So, for the next few hours Dan worked the bag. He worked it and worked it, up and down, left and right, until he could barely lift his arms. The bag was one of those super heavy bags trainers fill with sand and chain from the ceiling. Sam held it for him so it wouldn't spin or sway, and every time he let his guard down she lashed out with jab to his face. It wasn't a hard jab, and she'd put on some soft training gloves so that it wouldn't hurt him, but it still stung. And it stung a lot more than just Dan's face. He could feel his pride start to well up a little bit, and he had to remind himself that he wasn't too good for a trainer, that every jab she landed was actually his own doing and if WW would have landed it he'd be in a world of pain. That was what Dan focused on while he worked the bag in fervor—how he was going to beat WW, and then the whole world would know that he was a very “for real” fighter.

  Lately the talking heads that ran the MMA sports round up shows had been criticizing Dan in ways that he had never thought he’d be criticized for before. Usually it was all about how he was a sloppy fighter, or how his footwork wasn't that great, or how maybe he would be a better fighter if he gained some weight, or dropped some weight, or whatever other fool idea had flitted into the minds and out of the mouths of talk show hosts with no fighting experience of their own. Not that the public watching at home cared if the people running their mouths had ever stepped in the ring, or had even so much as been in a fist fight on the playground at some point. All anyone cared about was breaking fighters down, and the more of a chance you had at being a truly great fighter, the more that people wanted to break you down.

  Suddenly Sam pulled the bag away from him.

  “What are you thinking about right now?” she asked.

  Dan wasn't sure how to respond. He'd thought that he'd been giving one hundred percent while working the bag, but now he realized that he must have been giving it away that his mind was somewhere else.

  “I was thinking about what the fucking MMA newscasters say about me on television,” Dan answered. “And I know that sounds like some super insecure shit, but at least I'm being honest.”

  “And what do they say about you?” Sam asked, looking around the bag at him with blue steel eyes.

  “They say I'm not good enough,” Dan said. “More or less. It's always something with them. But mostly it revolves around how I'm not technical enough, and how I should be a little more defensive minded.”

  Sam nodded at him and disappeared back behind the bag. Dan went back to hitting the bag, working it up and down, but this time he didn't think so much. He didn't really think about anything. He just made sure to keep his defenses tight, and that he wasn't ever just standing around between punches. Because that's how one of the guys that WW had killed went down—he'd landed a decent punch on the giant Russian and then, for a brief moment, dropped his guard. WW had smashed him so hard in the head the poor guy never got back up. The boxing world had said it was a freak thing, that usually people didn't get killed from a single punch to the side of the head like that, but they said this even though it was the second man that WW had put in the grave. The third had been similar, a punch to the head, but instead of a punch through dropped defenses, it was a punch that simply burst through the other fighter’s defenses.

  After what seemed like forever, Sam said that Dan could take a break and went to her office. Dan got a drink from a fountain and sat down on a stool near the ring. The gym didn't have a moldy smell to it, and that was something Dan was thankful for. He had secretly hoped that the place wouldn't be an outright dive. Although he wasn't stuck up about where he trained, Dan wasn't a huge fan of the mindset that thought gross gyms were legit by way of their nasty smell and feel. That wasn't what Dan thought at all. Sam's gym was clean, very clean. So clean in fact that when Dan peeked under the flap of the ring to see the floor below the canvas he didn't find a single speck of dirt or anything that would indicate the place wasn't cleaned nearly every day.

  “Don't worry,” Sam said walking out of her office and catching Dan peeking under the flap. “I clean this place, and I also have some of the kids who can't pay their dues clean the place. That's how it goes sometimes when you run an actual gym and not some place for out of shape yuppies to feel good about themselves after they do thirty minutes on the stair step machine.”

  Dan nodded, and Sam turned away to do something at the far end of the gym. Dan couldn't tell what she was up to, but figured it meant that the gym was about to officially open. He'd come in extra early for the first day of training, wanting to get to know Sam a little bit. That wasn't what had happened though; not that Dan was upset or anything.

  “All right,” Sam said walking back. “So the gym opens soon and I'm going to be running a boxing clinic for at risk youth.”

  Dan nodded again. He couldn't remember the last time he'd nodded so much to communicate. It reminded him of back when he first started coming to gyms and talking to trainers a little bit, before he had decided that he was just going to do it on his own.

  “I understand,” Dan said once he realized
that Sam wasn't going to let him off the hook that easy. “I'll be out of here before anyone shows up. I know that having a MMA fighter around can be distracting for some people.”

  Sam nodded. Dan realized that that was what she had been getting at, and she had just been waiting for him to figure it out. Dan could feel his face burning as he stood up to head back to the locker room to change back into street clothes and head out. Just when he started to walk away Sam spoke again.

  “I want you to watch video of this WW guy,” she said. “And I really want you to study him. Don't take it lightly. This guy has killed three people in past matches, and although you are a way better fighter than any of those people were, that doesn't mean that the same couldn't happen to you. So study it. And I mean really study it.”

  Dan nodded, then turned back toward the locker room. It had been a long morning of training, and he was exhausted.

  Chapter 3

  Watching tape was a lot more involved than Dan initially thought. For some reason he'd thought that it would be like plugging in a video and relaxing. Instead, he found himself tensely engaged with what was going on in the ring beyond just the punches and jabs themselves. There was a lot to a boxer’s choreographed rhythm; it was almost like watching a dancer in some ways, except that the progression of a dancer would happen in an arc over their career—or so Dan thought. With boxing it was different in that fighters would go through different phases sometimes. Dan was watching some of WW’s early fights when he'd realized that the fighter, now seasoned, wouldn't be using such simple footwork anymore. And sure enough, when Dan checked the most recent footage it was just as he'd thought. There was indeed better footwork. There was also more agility overall, and a kind of weariness in all of WW’s movements.

  Dan noticed this and thought that maybe it was WW nursing some kind of injury: favoring a foot, or trying to hide a shoulder. But after a few fights of seeing it in WW's face, Dan realized it was just the look of a very seasoned fighter settling in for the long haul of the match. WW was like a tank at times, but other times he was moving at, and through, opponents at a speed that amazed Dan. There was a lot to WW, Dan realized, much more than whatever sob story his team was selling to get asses in the seats of the arena.

  As Dan got up to get a drink after watching several hours of tape, his phone chimed. He looked at it and didn't recognize the number. The text asked him how he was doing and said something else that Dan didn't even bother to read at all. Instead he just texted back an inquiry about the other person's identity and headed to the fridge.

  He'd forgotten to buy beer before heading home, but then he remembered that he hadn't forgotten at all—that beer was something that Sam had said he needed to stay away from if he wanted to have a chance against the Russian Bear, as some of the media had taken to calling WW. Dan regretted that decision now. He didn't smoke weed—as a rule he didn't put anything in his lungs that might slow him down in a fight—so there was really no other way for him to unwind.

  Dan sat back down in front of his computer, an older model he'd been gifted by his father that Dan had never had the heart to throw out, and saw his phone. The person had responded, and it was Sam. She was wondering how the evening was going for Dan, and if he needed any help breaking down the video.

  This stuff is way more complex than I thought it would be, Dan texted her.

  I thought it might be, Sam texted back.

  They talked for a while about MMA, and then talked about other things. It was strange, almost, to Dan that he was thinking of Sam as his equal, maybe even his superior, and that she was a female. It made Dan wonder if he'd really been one of those people that didn't realize they had a couched prejudice inside of them. He'd never really thought about it in terms of fighting before, maybe that's why it was so strange. But at the same time he'd never really been forced to confront femininity before like he was now. There was no way around the fact that Sam was a woman, and that she was clearly running the show. And not only that, but she was doing it with style and grace.

  It made Dan wonder, as he watched WW smash people and texted Sam, if he would have been as cool as her if he'd been in her place—some MMA guy walking into the gym and being like, “teach me.” She could have been a dick about it; she could have humiliated him, told him he had to clean the bathrooms or some shit like that. Because that was how it went sometimes with trainers, you really had to earn their respect before they would work with you.

  Maybe Sam had respected him before he'd walked through the door. It was something that he never asked her, and probably never would ask. But he couldn't help but wonder if she'd seen him fight on television, and if so, what she had thought. If she'd looked down at his somewhat sloppy fighting style, or if she had seen potential far greater than what was going on.

  Sam ended their texting conversation by telling Dan that she was headed to bed and how she looked forward to working with him the next day. Dan found himself texting back something polite even though deep down he still begrudged the fact that he'd had to seek help for something that he'd been doing his entire life. But then he thought of how WW was working with a bunch of trainers; how WW was watching the film with them too, not just working bags with them, and how WW might have already outworked him.

  Dan shook the thought from his mind as he pushed his seat back from the desk and shut down the computer. He was ready for the next day, even though he felt tired and alone. Sam would want to run drills all day tomorrow. It wasn't that she didn't think that he could do them, it was now obvious that he could but didn't. The irony of the whole situation dawned on Dan slowly, much the same way a soft blush hue will color the sky when the sun settles into the horizon for dusk—Dan's mind was so illuminated. It wasn't some thunderclap realization. He didn't really realize it until he woke up to drive to the gym the next morning.

  Then it hit him: Sam was the only woman in his life, and also, up to this point, she was also the healthiest female relationship he'd had. As he pulled out of his driveway he thought about his taste in woman and how it was usually much different from Sam. Usually Dan liked the curvy, super busty women that he'd grown up seeing in magazines. But Sam wasn't like that at all. She was slim, lithe, and she could move her hands so fast Dan's eyes had a hard time keeping up that morning.

  The drills went fairly well, Dan thought, mostly because Sam was gracious enough to let his ego take the beating instead of his face. When Dan would be lazy, which wasn't often, but did happen, Sam would slam him upside the head with the pad. It was more of a love tap than anything else, and Dan took it for what it was—correction. He needed to learn and grow, and sometimes that meant that things had to be shaken up a little bit—that he needed to be shaken up a little bit.

  Dan could tell that Sam was starting to respect him more as a fighter and as a person the more they worked together. Where at first she had acted like he was an average fighter that wanted to review the basics when they initially squared off that morning, by the end she was running some of the most complex drills that Dan had ever done. Some of them he couldn't keep up with, and others were the kind of drills that people couldn't really finish unless they had done them before a few times. Dan didn't mind messing up a little bit, though. That was what he was ultimately here to do.

  Toward the end he could tell that Sam felt let down for some reason. He tried to think back on his energy level and didn't know why she was acting like he wasn't putting in his all, like this was high school sports or something and he was just trying to make it to the end of the practice so he could go get high in the parking lot.

  “What's the problem?” Dan asked her as things wound down. “You're acting like I'm not keeping up or something.”

  “It's not that,” Sam said. “It's that I think you get off in your head sometimes. The most important thing about training is actually being present in the moment to participate. You can't phone this stuff in. And yes, you are acting like this is high school football practice. You're acting like the coac
h is having you run speed drills and you aren't trying to outpace yourself.”

  Dan didn't know what to say, and Sam didn't give him a chance to say it as she stormed into her office and slammed the door. In the locker room he sat and looked at the floor despondently. What was he doing wrong? Why was she so hard on him? Then he started to laugh. This was exactly what he needed! This was what he came for. Dan had forgotten all about Sam's military training. It would be wise of her to break him down and then build him back up. That was what Dan had always heard went on in the military—people came in, were broken down, then built back up to be something more than they had been before. He wasn't sure if he liked her taking it straight to the mind games, but maybe she wasn't at all—there was always the chance that she was being totally for real about her feelings.

  Dan laced up his street shoes and figured he was over thinking it anyway. He'd go home, have a beer if he damn well pleased, and show up tomorrow even more prepared than he had today. Last night he'd been up too late watching film. Tonight he would take it easy and get plenty of sleep so that when he woke he'd be a step ahead of the rest, and ready to take on the world.

  As he prepared to leave the gym, just when Dan was ready to put the entire business of being an MMA fighter out of his mind, Sam called him into her office.

  “Are you scared?” she asked him before his ass had even had a chance to touch the seat. “Is that why you're acting like you’re off in another reality in your head while I'm trying to teach you how to fight like a professional instead of some lucky school yard brawler?”

  Dan's mouth fell open. He wasn't sure what to say. She did have a point. He had been off in his mind a lot lately. Maybe that was why he was here—that and he had finally realized that he needed to tighten up his game so he could go to the next level without having some kind of trauma in his brain. That was one thing he remembered most from watching WW fight; that he looked confused in some moments when he should have been in complete control. Maybe he was doing the same thing to himself by getting up in his own head so much and thinking about things.