Volume Twenty-Six

VOLUME TWENTY-SIX Training journal, current volume. Private record. Entry begun in the requested room. Two days out. ———————————————— I returned from Tokyo with one correction and I have spent the days since making sure it holds under load. It holds. I will come to the correction in its place. I want to begin with the structural fact, because I have learned that the structural facts are the ones I skip when they are large. I have never held a world championship. In two days I compete for one. I have written the first of those sentences in this journal before. More than once. I have never been able to write the second one beneath it. I am recording the act of writing them together, and nothing else about it, because the sensation is not information and this is a training journal. The man across from me is the man who beat me. I want to be exact, because I have noticed the temptation to be vague about this. Behind Closed Doors 6. Non-title. He beat me cleanly, I did not contest it, and I have not contested it since. I said at the time that a short decisive sequence favored me and a long match favored him. The match was long. It favored him. I was right about the mechanism and I lost anyway. Being right about the mechanism of your own loss is a specific professional experience and I do not recommend it. This time the match is the title. ———————————————— REYES-MONTOYA Thirty-six. Eight and zero. I scouted him fully before Behind Closed Doors 6 and the scouting was correct, so I will not repeat it. I will record only what has changed. Nothing has changed. That is the note. He is eight and zero because nothing about him has needed to change. The grip is the grip. The hips are the hips. He still fights at center and treats the corner as a road rather than a room, and the men who have gone in against him since I did have mistaken the corner for a place he can be trapped, the way Morse did, and paid the way Morse paid, and he is eight and zero. His finish is still the thing that cannot be prepared for, because it is not a thing. The Grapevine Ankle Lock is what the tape remembers. What ends his matches is whichever submission the moment hands him, and the moment hands it to him because his grip does not lose the exchange that produces it. You cannot disrupt a setup he does not run. So I will not try. I learned that against a different man last month — I did not attack the reset, because the reset was bait. Against Reyes-Montoya there is not even bait. There is only a man who is very good at holding on, waiting for me to give him the exchange that writes the finish. I am not going to give him the exchange. I am going to make the early sequence decisive, the way I said I would the first time — except that the first time I carried an error in my trailing foot that a lucha grip specialist with exceptional hips would have found in the first four minutes. I know this because an eighty-one-year-old man found it in eleven repetitions in a cold room and corrected it. The correction was for this man. Fukazawa did not say so. Fukazawa does not say things so. But it was for this man, and I carry it now, and it holds under load, which was the open question and is the reason I flew eleven hours to close it. There is a position I use to end matches. I have not given it a name. I will record the reason here, in private, because it is the correct place for it: Morse had a tell, Cortez published the tell, and Morse died by the published thing, in the professional sense. A named finish is a published thing. Mine has no name because there is nothing to publish and nowhere to watch for it. It is not mystery. It is hygiene. ———————————————— WHAT FUKAZAWA SAID I have carried this longer than I carry most things without resolving them, and a journal is where I resolve things. So. He told me Ogata spoke about the Mexican boy more than he spoke about me. I asked why. He said: because you were already doing it correctly, and the other one was still deciding whether he wanted to. I understood it, when I heard it, as a fact about attention. You watch the unfinished thing. You do not need to watch the finished one. I was, at nineteen, the finished thing, and I have been quietly proud of that for twenty-three years without once noticing that I was proud of it. Here is what I did not understand until this week. The boy who was still deciding whether he wanted it is thirty-six years old, eight and zero, and holds the championship. The man who was already doing it correctly is forty-two and has never held one. I do not write this as a complaint. I want that on the record plainly. Correct work has given me everything I have and I would not trade the method for a different result, because the method is the only thing I have ever fully owned. But I have to note the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the whole of what Fukazawa handed me and then declined to explain. Correct is not the same axis as wanting. I have treated them as the same axis my entire career. I was correct, so I assumed I wanted it — because in the room where I was made, the two were not permitted to separate. They separate out here. A man can want a thing so plainly that the wanting alone carries him to eight and zero while he is still learning to be correct. And a man can be so correct that he is never required to ask whether he wants it, and so never asks, and arrives at forty-two having never once said the sentence. So I will say it here, once, because a journal is a private record and this belongs on it. I want it. I have wanted it for twenty-three years. I did not write it down because wanting was not on the training plan, and the things I do not write down because they are too obvious to require writing are precisely the things I forget to think about when they begin to matter. It matters now. It has two days left to matter. ———————————————— A SEPARATE NOTE Still nothing from Wone. The question stands where I filed it. I said I would not raise it again before the championship, and I am a man who honors what he files, so this is the last of it in these pages until the championship is behind me. It is not forgotten. It is parked. There is a difference and I know it exactly, which is the whole reason I am able to park it. ———————————————— THE BODY Right knee: the eleven entries in Tokyo produced heat and morning stiffness and then resolved, as recorded in the previous volume. Quiet since. The replacement holds and is not the limiting factor. The trailing foot is corrected and the correction is surviving contact, which was the open question and is now closed. Left shoulder unremarkable. Right wrist unremarkable. Sleep poor the first two nights in this room, adequate since. Diet on plan. The limiting factor is no longer the match before the match. There is no match before this one. I have run out of matches before the match. There is only this one — the man who beat me, the thing I have never held, and two days. Tomorrow: the hour of stillness. The Reyes-Montoya tape, the Japan tape specifically, the one I admitted two volumes ago I had not studied as closely as I should. Then the entry. Four hundred repetitions. Cold room. Trailing foot corrected. The work remains the work. This time I have written down what it is for. — H.K.