Spencer will have to answer.
And he’ll say what he always says:
“We’ll get to that.”
We always do, but by the time we hit the heavy bag, the ten-to-twenty mile run, the training routine in full, the fight can be seen, looming in the distance of next week. I’ll ask Spencer, “Why didn’t we train? Why didn’t we focus on a longer, more effective regimen?”
His response is the response of a trainer, an agent, a longtime friend that has lost confidence in his project, lost confidence in me:
CANDID
“The truth is that no amount of improvement to your body will make any difference. If you are going to win, you need to win using fight psychology.”
According to the only “friend” I have, I have a slim to nil chance of winning and even if I did, it would be less on skill and more to do with luck.
I’ll admit that this isn’t very reassuring at all.
It kind of makes me feel like a nuisance.
Makes me worry about what the world really thinks and what they will think about ‘Sugar’ in the weeks and years after my inevitable demise, my retirement from the sport.
Makes me think about how I can prove them all wrong.
All of them.
Spencer, yes, you too.
I get to thinking…
A THOUGHT
And it comes to me on that same night, dark room, the orchestration of slumber without any real truth.
And it takes me a week or two of media junkets to fathom what I need to do to begin.
And it takes a single sentence to turn the attention around onto me, limelight and thrill.
And it’s a sentence from a different kind of story:
I KILLED A MAN
And it doesn’t fit.
And that’s why it would work.
Why it would turn the fight around and maybe, just maybe, I’d have a chance to win. Like Spencer said—
Only real chance I have is to psych X out.
Yeah well, how’s this for psyching someone out?
VERSUS
A hurtful but hopeful thing to say:
THIS IS WHAT YOU DID WRONG
I’m supposed to learn from my mistakes.
I learn from the mistakes but I lose it all during the lecture. Spencer sits me down in a seat like this is Sunday school and draws on a dry-erase board to the constant playback of the fight.
The fight.
Executioner at his prime, Sugar losing favor.
Spencer isn’t about to analyze what I looked like, or even how hard I worked leading up to the fight. No, he zeroes in on the omission.
Punches not thrown.
Punches not blocked.
This is what I did wrong, and I might have won the match but Spencer would still sit me down for an hour-long lecture. Clean KO or biggest loss, Spencer will still preach; he will show me where I went wrong.
“To start with, how many times have I said to land first attack?”
First attack meaning first jab, first impact—
Like it’s some kind of competition.
Wait a minute…
When isn’t it a form of competition?
When are we not fighting to better understand ourselves?
“I agree,” my go-to reply during post-fight analysis lecture holy-shit-how-long-is-this-going-to-take-please-blow-my-brains-out come on I understand, I understand. How is this helping?
We’re wasting time.
I should be training.
ROUND ONE
X hops forward, two-stepping around the ring taunting me.
I put my fists up.
SHELL
I play it defensively.
I do not land the first punch.
First punch is a jab.
JAB
X leads jab, jab, jab, jab, all of them absorbed. They aren’t landing clean, but tell that to the audience, the CompuBox fuckers, the crooked judges that want me out of the picture. This league needs the new and improved. I do a poor representation of myself. They want a Willem that reminds them not of the times but of the timeless. They want my prime performance.
They want to forget that we are all aging, squirming in our shells.
Try and forget that as you age so too does your personality.
You are not the same person you were when you walked into this fight.
This is what they really want.
I land my first.
JAB
Round one starts slow, feeling out X, waiting for his strategy to present itself. I know it can only be one of four possible plans. When I was his age, I didn’t have a whole lot of patience. I had to outbox everyone.
Spencer scowls, “What is this passive bullshit?”
And:
“That’s not you!”
Actually, it is.
Who else would I be?
JAB
ATTEMPTED HOOK TO THE BODY
Not my best. I lead with the right not quite sure of what I’m thinking. It’s because X had me down for the ten count long before this fight. I had psyched myself out of the dance long before sole met canvas.
Spencer cups his hands, “My god, why didn’t you block any of those jabs?”
JAB
JAB
JAB
JAB
STRAIGHT TO THE CHIN
I didn’t see them coming.
But don’t tell him that.
“I was buying an opportunity.”
My excuse.
Spencer rubs his eyes, “You can’t afford to do that any more, you understand?”
Again, this time louder, writing on the dry-erase board:
CONSERVATIVE
BOXER-PUNCHER
“This is what you need to be!”
He circles it once, twice…four, five times.
“This is what you need to be!”
Louder this time.
Back to the fight.
Round two is about to start.
ROUND TWO
As he said, round two is where I got it all wrong and I’ll admit that it’s true.
“My fucking god, what the hell were you thinking?!”
Spencer is starting to sweat. I played right into X’s plan and what hurts the most is that I came up with this tactic. It’s mine, all mine, and yet he uses it and worst of all, I let it happen. I fell into line and blocked the jabs.
BLOCK
SUDDEN IMPACT
Problem is the jabs were ploys for the cutting shot right to the body.
He lands three well-formed punches, all of them straight shots, to the body where I hadn’t been prepared to take a three-punch flurry.
I narrowly block the uppercut X continued to use throughout the fight. The uppercut that would eventually end the fight in round eight, sending me to the ground where for a brief moment I lost sight of where I was and all I wanted to do was sleep. Take a nap. The ring might as well have been a queen-sized bed.
I was out cold.
But round two, I was a little more active.
JAB
JAB
STRAIGHT
JAB
STRAIGHT
JAB
JAB
STRAIGHT
BLOCK
DUCK
TO THE BODY
JAB
JAB
HOLD
“Why are you holding?”
Spencer widens his eyes, “Explain that to me because I’m dumbfounded.”
“Explain why…”
“Why would you hold? You should have used the goddamn left hook!”
I watch the footage. I avoid scrutiny with a yawn.
“If you weren’t that lax in the ring, you might have won this!”
Another combination, attempted, alongside with notice of which punches actually landed:
JAB (miss)
JAB (miss)
HOOK TO BODY (miss)
HOOK TO THE FACE (miss)
BACKPEDAL (to avoid X’s own jab)
>
BLOCK (wait for it)
JAB OUT OF POSITION (fight out of it)
JAB (miss)
JAB (impact)
STRAIGHT TO FACE (impact)
I tell Spencer, “That wasn’t so bad, right?”
He watches, silent for a moment, as X follows it up with a combination that turns into the first flurry that stuns me. I am able to fight out of it, holding once or twice, not that anyone noticed.
Spencer sighs.
Except for Spencer.
“It’s bad.”
Solemnly, he returns to the dry-erase board and writes down a phrase to be further explored later, “Footwork & energy management.”
I think my footwork is fine.
Not that I say anything.
Round three is about to start.
ROUND THREE
I do better this round but what the audience doesn’t realize is that it’s not because I stunned X or even managed to hurt him.
It’s because he took the round off. I should have identified that he was merely resting, saving it up (much to his dismay, because I know how little patience I have for that kind of thing) in order to send me down to the canvas in round four, five, and for good in round eight.
Spencer writes on the dry-erase board, “Round management.”
Management.
He might as well just write that on the board and save some time.
Manage this old, confused fighter. Help me figure out why the moment I step into the ring, I feel gassed, completely absent, detached from my body.
Seeing this should make me feel better. I land a classic combination, not that it does anything to X. He takes it in stride, trading shots with me until I reach out and clinch, because truth is I’m winded, I’m hurt, I’m tired, and most of all, I’m confused.
The combination:
JAB
JAB
NOTICE AN OPENING TO THE BODY
JAB TO BODY
HOOK TO LEFT SIDE OF FACE
HOOK TO BODY
STRAIGHT
STRAIGHT
JAB
SHORT CROSS TO THE BODY
LEFT POWER SHOT (MY BEST)
I give him my best combination, finishing it off with a clean power shot to the body, something that should have at least registered but X, as I had said earlier, follows up with a combination of his own.
I shut my eyes, not wanting to see it.
I hear Spencer breathing heavily, “Unacceptable! You are falling into your own traps!”
I am.
Yes.
I know that I am.
How can I avoid the past’s snares and spikes if I forget where I had left them, and moreover, what can you do if every time I look in the mirror I see someone new, someone older, someone that I’m not at all familiar with?
This is me, I say.
But I don’t believe it.
ROUND FOUR
X uses this round to catch up on the cards.
The round is a mess. I am stunned early and I hold.
Much of round four looks like this:
BLOCK
X LANDS A COMBINATION
COMBINATION CONSISTS OF:
JAB
LEFT HOOK
JAB
LEFT HOOK
RIGHT HOOK
JAB
STRAIGHT
TO THE BODY:
JAB
JAB
POWER SHOT STRAIGHT
POWER SHOT STRAIGHT
UPPERCUT (impact, stun)
My best bet is, of course:
BLOCK
HOLD
BLOCK
BRACE FOR IMPACT
HOLD
BLOCK
HOLD
Spencer’s head is in his hands, not even watching.
I can hear him say, “You don’t need me to tell you. I’m sure you’re still feeling the impact of that left hook.”
I tell him that I am.
The left hook heard around the world.
“That should have been your left hook.”
It used to be mine.
Now all I do is hold.
HOLD
HOLD
HOLD
HOLD
Even though he doesn’t knock me down, the judges score round four an “eight,” two points that hit right at the heart. The round goes to Executioner.
It’s because I performed little more than the role of the punching bag.
I took the punches and grabbed for dear life.
X mumbled about thirty seconds from the end of the round:
What is wrong with you?
You tell me.
I’m kind of finding it difficult to say much of anything.
ROUND FIVE
No comment.
That’s the official statement.
Spencer stares at the dry-erase board, baffled at the scribble.
“You need a lot of work…”
You can say that again.
He stuns me this round with something that doesn’t quite register but it definitely stung. Much like a bee sting, it tingled and then shot right to the back of my brain, a numbing pain.
It’s the uppercut.
The same damn uppercut.
I was always good at carefully throwing in an uppercut at the end of a combination. I could really get the glove right under the chin, the kind of punch that sends glassjaws crying and cast-iron chins to the ground.
Not that I ever really did.
During my prime, I fought more just like me.
We took the punches like we planned on early retirement. They wear on you over the years. I wonder how bad my memory, my reflexes, my conditioning will be five, ten, fifteen years from now.
But okay, the uppercut.
Didn’t see it coming (which means X did a great job connecting).
I don’t remember how long I was on the ground but it wasn’t for long. You fight enough and you can get by for a while, at least half the fight, on instinct, muscle memory, the routine of having heard, smelled, and felt pretty much everything you’d expect in a fight.
Sensory cues from decades of self-affliction.
Remnants of a fighter that can’t stop fighting himself.
ROUND SIX
It all comes apart after that uppercut knockdown in the fifth.
Spencer is silent, chews gum. Watches in silent dismay.
It’s bad, and he’s no longer bothering to rant or even comment. I get the sense that he wants to shut the footage off as much as I do; however, it stays on as I look like a wreck in round six.
X has me pinned against the ropes for a third of the round.
BLOCK
HOLD
SHORT LIFELESS HOOKS TO THE BODY
It’s what I do to survive.
To the referee it appeared as though I was all right.
Can’t say that I was but again, fighter’s instinct.
“Were there any lights on during the last three rounds?”
Can’t say that there were so I don’t say anything.
Spencer blows a bubble, lets it pop and hang over his lower lip for a few seconds before pulling it back into his mouth with his tongue.
“Rookie mistake.”
ROUND SEVEN
So by now everyone in the audience expects X to win. If it goes to decision, X is victor, no doubt about it. This is one of those cases where I basically have to knock him out in order to win.
And that wasn’t going to happen.
Everyone knew it.
People stood up and left.
There were a few rounds left in the fight but it seemed as though everyone had it all fought out in their mind. They knew how it would end. We fought it out, lagging behind the times.
I watch the footage, not at all familiar with what happened in round seven.
I was out on my feet, nothing there.
You know how everything is muted when underwater, both sight and sound cloudy and obtuse?
That’s how it feels a
fter being stunned, your mind slush, random thoughts, sometimes as odd as the last time you called your mom, rise up from the grey matter of your memory.
For me, round seven was all about hamburgers. I tasted a bacon cheeseburger, craved it, after the half-memory of eating a double-decker at a local restaurant resurfaced somewhere towards the beginning of the round.
I could go for one right about now…
Spencer runs his palm across the dry-erase board, smearing everything he’d written. Conceivably, this would be alarming. Conceivably.
Yeah, well I’m just hopeful that there won’t be a follow-up lecture.
I mean look at what I’m doing:
JAB
JAB
JAB
JAB
HOLD
Versus what X is doing:
BLOCK
WEEVE-JAB TO BODY
LEFT HOOK
RIGHT HOOK
STRAIGHT
Keep in mind that this is all news to me.
Can’t recall what happened this round.
Turns out I didn’t miss anything. I missed every single punch thrown, leaving myself open fifty percent of the time for X to throw in a combination, score more points, make me look terrible.
It’s a horrible performance. I admit it.
When I attempt to clinch, I leave myself wide open. X sees every single clinch coming so what does he do?
BACK PEDAL
TWO STEPS
LEAN BACK
WATCH ME GRAB AIR
PERFECT STRAIGHT
HOOK TO THE FACE
I don’t cut easily. I have taken a lot of damage these last couple decades, compounded misery on layaway, but hell if I’ve kept myself fairly clean, give or take a welt or two on occasion.
But blood flows by round seven from the wound on my face that would swell and become the welt that led me to the hospital.
The Laughter of Strangers Page 5