La Segunda Vez

LA SEGUNDA VEZ The night before. The hotel again. A different city, the same knee. ———————————————— It is not talking tonight. I want to note that, because I have gotten used to writing these pages with the knee as the first subject, and tonight it is quiet, and quiet is its own kind of information. My body tells me things by what it withholds as much as by what it reports. Tonight it has decided to save its complaints for tomorrow, which is either mercy or a warning, and I have learned not to ask which. I fought Hideo Kuramoto once already. Non-title. I do not need to go looking for the memory of it — it is close to the surface, the way a match against a man that good stays close. He is twenty-three years into this work. I beat him that night because the match ran long and long favors me, and because I do not think he knew, yet, exactly how long he wanted to make it. I think he knows now. I think he has spent the time since deciding exactly how long he intends to make this one, and I have spent the time since deciding I will not let the length be his to choose a second time. This is the part of the letter — I keep calling these letters even though half of them go nowhere, which my father would find very funny — where I am supposed to tell you what has changed. What has changed is that it is for the championship now, and a man does not fight the same match twice just because he is fighting the same opponent twice. ———————————————— THE CORRIDOR I have not written about the corridor yet and I want to, because it is still sitting with me the way certain moments do — not loudly, just present, the way the knee is present tonight by staying silent. We passed each other backstage at The Foundry. Neither of us planned it. I had just finished with Healy — the towel, the tape, the belt too heavy on my shoulder to carry any way but slung — and he was walking the other direction, already somewhere past me in his own head, toward the one thing twenty-three years has not given him. We stopped. Neither of us said anything. I do not know exactly what made my body do what it did next, except that when he bowed — small, precise, a shape I have not made with my own body since I was very young — I recognized the room it came from before I recognized the man giving it to me. I trained under Ogata for two years in my twenties. I did not know, until Fukazawa's name came up somewhere in the broadcast noise around this match, that Kuramoto trained under people who shared a hallway with the people who trained me. I do not know the details. I know the shape of the bow, and the shape does not lie about where it was taught. I returned it. I did not decide to. My hands did the deciding, the same way his did. I want to be honest about what that meant, because I do not think it meant what people will assume it meant. It did not mean respect softened anything about tomorrow. If anything it sharpened it. You do not bow to a man you intend to go easy on. You bow to a man because the tradition requires it before the tradition asks you to hurt each other honestly, and tomorrow the tradition is going to ask exactly that of both of us. ———————————————— WHAT HE IS FACING I want to write this plainly because I think it is the truest thing I know about tomorrow's match, and because I do not think the broadcast is going to say it as plainly as I am about to. He is forty-two. He has never held a world championship. Everyone in the building knows the arithmetic on how many more chances a man his age reasonably gets at something like this, and I suspect he has done that arithmetic more carefully than anyone in the building, including me. I do not know what it costs a man to carry twenty-three years of being correct and to still be waiting, at forty-two, for the one result that would make the correctness feel finished. I have some guesses. My father is alive to watch what I do. His mother, from what I understand, is not the reason he still trains the way he trains — I do not know his private reasons, and I am not going to pretend I do, in a journal or anywhere else. But I know what it looks like from the outside when a man has decided that this is the one he is not going to let get away from him, and I saw that man in the corridor at The Foundry, and I am going to see him again tomorrow, and he is going to be exactly as dangerous as that arithmetic suggests. I am not going to let sympathy make me careless. I want to be precise about that too, because it would be easy — the audience will want it, the desk will probably frame it this way — to make tomorrow's story about giving the old veteran his moment. That is not respect. That is condescension wearing a nicer shirt. The correct respect is to fight him exactly as hard as I would fight a man half his age with nothing on the line, because anything less is an insult to twenty-three years of work he did not spend so that I could hand him the ending. He would not want it handed to him either. I know that much about him without needing to guess. ———————————————— HOME I called Sofía before I started writing this. She was up later than she should have been, which she does the night before my big ones, and did not admit to it. Camila got into an argument with a girl at school about whether it is possible to be a marine biologist and also afraid of the ocean, and settled it, apparently, by deciding she is now going to be a marine biologist specifically to prove it is possible. Sofía was laughing when she told me this. I could hear Ana in the background, insisting on something I could not make out, which she does now whenever a sister's ambition is being discussed within earshot, because she has strong opinions about everyone's plans, especially her own, which rotate weekly and are never up for outside comment. I asked how my father was. Sofía said he watched the BCD 10 broadcast twice — the corridor bit, she said, twice more than that, which she found funny and did not explain further, and I did not ask her to. He will be in the chair tomorrow night the way he has been in the chair for forty years of somebody's fights, first his own, then the men he trained, now mine. He does not call before the big ones. He has never needed to. He trusts that I know what he would say, and he is right, and what he would say is the same thing he has said since I was a boy: know all three things about your own timeline, and be honest about all three. I am being honest about mine. I have years left in this. Not the years I had at twenty-six, and I have stopped pretending otherwise to myself even if I have not said it to a camera. But years. Enough for the men still coming. Enough, God willing, that when Camila is old enough to actually watch instead of just being watched watching, there is still something worth her attention. Sofía asked, at the end of the call, the thing she always asks, the thing that has stopped being a question and become something more like a blessing: whatever happens, come home. Of course. I always do. ———————————————— THE BODY, HONESTLY Right shoulder: reporting normally, nothing new. Hips: within tolerance, better than they have any right to be at thirty-six years into using them this hard. The knee, tonight, quiet — I am choosing to read that as readiness and not as the calm before something worse, because a man can only carry so many warnings from his own joints before he has to decide which ones to believe. I taped my own wrists tonight the way I always do, in the hotel room instead of waiting for the locker room, because I like to know they are right before I have anyone else in the building to think about. Tomorrow I touch the top of the door frame the way my grandfather touched it, the way I have touched it before every match of my life that mattered, and I go in against a man who bowed to me in a service corridor and meant it, and who is going to try to take from me the one thing he has never had. I am not going to let the length of the match be his to choose. I am not going to let the arithmetic of his career make my hands slow. And when it is over, whichever way it goes, I am going home, because Sofía already asked, and because that is the whole of what any of this is for. — TRM