Three Hours After Close

THREE HOURS AFTER CLOSE A Sparring Floor Observation, Filed to the Federation Record By Wesley Mark Halloran, Strength and Conditioning Coach, Halloran Combat Athletics, Birmingham ———————————————— [The following is a written submission filed at the federation's media intake by W. M. Halloran, who has worked with Dorian Graves as his primary strength and conditioning coach for the past nine years. Mr. Halloran filed the submission on his own initiative, with Mr. Graves's permission, after Mr. Graves indicated that he had no intention of filing pre-match material himself. Mr. Halloran is fifty-six. He was a journeyman rugby league prop in the English second division from 1989 to 2003. He runs a small mixed combat gym in Sparkbrook with his eldest son. The federation has not previously published material from him.] ———————————————— My name is Wes Halloran. I have worked with Dorian for nine years. Dorian asked me not to file anything for him in advance of the Kuramoto match because Dorian does not file things. I told him that was reasonable and that I was going to file something on my own because the federation site is where the audience reads what is happening in the build, and the audience reads things that affect their experience of the match, and Dorian's audience deserves to know what I have been watching this week in the gym. Dorian gave me permission. He did not read this letter before I sent it. He will read it when the federation publishes it, the same as everyone else. I am writing the way I write at home, not the way the federation writes. The federation should accept the document as it is. Dorian is not going to file a methodology paper. He is going to fight Hideo Kuramoto in The Crucible on Behind Closed Doors 8. I am going to tell you what that is going to look like, based on what I have been watching. ———————————————— Dorian arrived at the gym on Monday morning at six. This is normal. He has arrived at the gym at six every morning for nine years. He brings his own coffee, in a steel thermos. The thermos is older than my marriage. What was not normal was that he had a folder with him. Dorian does not bring folders. Dorian brings himself. The folder contained printed footage frames from the BCD 1 quarter-final match between Wone and Kuramoto, and from the Tomás-Kuramoto match at Ignition, and from the BCD 6 segment Kuramoto did at the announce desk. He had marked the frames with a black marker. I do not know who printed them. I did not ask. He worked the bag for forty-five minutes. He spent twelve minutes on the heavy bag and the rest on the wall pad. The wall pad is what he hits when he is thinking. The heavy bag is what he hits when he is angry. He was thinking. I sparred with him for thirty minutes after the bag work. I am twenty-three years older than him and forty pounds heavier. He does not hit me at full power and I do not hit him at full power. We trade positions. I work him into corners and he works out of them, and I watch how he works out of them, and I tell him afterward what I saw. What I saw on Monday was that he was working out of corners differently. Normally Dorian breaks corner pressure with a shoulder lift into a rotational throw — the same one he used on Rancid at BCD 4 to set up the Spinebuster sequence. On Monday he was breaking corner pressure with a low underhook to a sideways crab walk. I have never seen him do this in nine years. I asked him why. He said the rotational throw assumes the opponent is trying to keep him in the corner. The crab walk assumes the opponent is trying to read his exit. I said, you are not fighting Rancid. He said, no. ———————————————— Tuesday was film day. He sits at the desk in the back room and watches the footage on a laptop. I bring him tea every forty-five minutes. He drinks the tea cold most days because he forgets it is there. He watched the BCD 1 match four times. He watched the Tomás-Kuramoto match three times. He watched the segment from BCD 6 six times. The segment is the one where Kuramoto sits at the announce desk and asks Wone where he learned his work. It runs eleven minutes. Dorian watched it six times, the full eleven minutes each time. I asked him on the third viewing why. He said, I want to know how the man asks a question. I do not know what he meant. I know that on Wednesday morning he was different in the gym. ———————————————— Wednesday Dorian sparred with three different partners — a junior heavyweight from my own gym, a visiting middleweight from a fight camp in Liverpool, and finally, in the late afternoon, with himself in front of the mirror. He shadow-worked for nineteen minutes. I timed it. He went through what I am fairly certain was Kuramoto's entire opening sequence from the Tomás match — but reversed. He was working it from Kuramoto's side. He was not preparing to fight Kuramoto. He was preparing to be Kuramoto, briefly, so that he understood what it felt like inside the man's framework, so that when he met it on the night he would know what he was meeting. This is not something I have seen Dorian do before. He has, in nine years, never once shadow-worked an opponent's sequence. He prepares to fight himself, harder. That is the method. The method has changed for this match. I did not ask him about it. I think the change is private. I am noting it here because the federation deserves to know that the change is real. ———————————————— Thursday — yesterday — was a rest day. Dorian does not take rest days. He took one yesterday. He came in at six the way he always does, sat in the back room with another folder I did not see the contents of, drank his coffee from the thermos, and at seven o'clock he stood up, said "tomorrow," and left. He has never said tomorrow before. He just leaves. ———————————————— Tonight is Friday. I am writing this from the office at three in the morning. The gym closed at midnight. The lights in the main room are off. The only light in the building is the one in the office where I am at the desk, and the one in the corner of the main room where Dorian has set up a single floor mat. Dorian is still here. He has been here three hours after close. He is working the Spinebuster set-up from a low base — the entry he used on the kid Nkosi at BCD 1 — but he is doing it without an opponent. He is rehearsing the angle of approach. I have been watching from the office for ten minutes. He has done it nineteen times. Each one is slightly different. Each one ends in a different spot on the mat. I think — and I have known him nine years — that he is rehearsing how to put a man down without injuring him. The Spinebuster, as Dorian has used it in this federation, has finished four matches. He is not rehearsing the move. He is rehearsing the version of the move that allows the man to get up afterwards. Kuramoto is forty-one years old. He had his right knee replaced in 2024. Dorian knows this. The federation site published it. Dorian is not preparing to defeat Kuramoto. He is preparing to defeat Kuramoto correctly. ———————————————— I am going to close this submission now and walk out to the main room and tell Dorian to go home. He will not. He will work for another half-hour and then he will sit on the mat for ten minutes with his eyes closed and then he will get up and put his jacket on and we will lock the building together at four in the morning. That is what the week has looked like. If you are reading this on the federation site, you should now know what Behind Closed Doors 8 will look like, in the cage between these two men. It will look like a defeat conducted correctly, in either direction. That is all I have to say. — Wes Halloran Halloran Combat Athletics Birmingham