Notebook. Private. Thursday, late. Hotel desk. I have the Dorian Graves tape paused on the laptop and I am not watching it, because I have read Mr. Pryce's document four times today and I am not going to be able to work until I have written back to it.
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I will explain the name and move on. The man competes as Desmond Pryce. That is his legal name and his ring name and there is no gap between them to be respectful inside of. So: Mr. Pryce. He has extended me the same courtesy in writing — Mr. Dlamini, not "the kid," not "the contender," and he said so on the broadcast before he had any reason to. The convention is now mutual. I am noting that it is mutual because the last man who set the terms of address between us was Mr. Braddock, and I had to earn my way to the middle of that. Mr. Pryce started at the middle. I have not decided yet whether that is generosity or a tactic.
It is probably both. Most true things are.
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ONE. WHAT HE DID.
He filed a document about me before our match. He filed it early, deliberately, and he wrote in it that he would rather I read the findings than be surprised by them. He wrote: surprise is not the instrument I use.
I want the locker room to understand what happened there, because I do not think the audience will read it correctly.
That is not kindness. That is a man so certain of his work that he is prepared to give me every advantage of foreknowledge and still expects the result. He handed me the analysis. He is betting the analysis holds even in the hands of the man it describes.
Cortez writes documents to be admired. Mr. Morse writes documents to be correct in public. Mr. Pryce wrote this one to be read by me, once, in a hotel room, at night, and to sit in my head every time I climb.
It is the most aggressive thing anyone has done to me in this federation and he did it without raising his voice.
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TWO. THE PART WHERE HE PRAISED ME.
He wrote that I am the finest natural athlete in this building. He wrote that the Shooting Star Press I landed on Mr. Braddock is the best high-altitude finish STRIFE has produced and that it is not close. He put it on the record before he argued a single point against me.
Here is what I have learned since I got to this federation, and I am putting it down because I did not know it a year ago.
Praise from the man across from you is not a gift. It is a load-bearing wall. Once he has said the thing everyone can see, he has bought the right to say the thing they cannot. Mr. Braddock never praised me. He called me "kid" and I could dismiss the word. Mr. Pryce called me superb, and now every sentence after it arrives with his credibility already established, and I cannot dismiss any of them.
I read that document four times and I only noticed on the third reading that I had stopped defending myself and started agreeing.
That is his methodology working on me at a distance, from a page, weeks out from the cage. I do not think the federation understands yet how dangerous this man is.
I am writing this section so that when I walk down that ramp at NO ESCAPE, the audience knows that I saw it happening and that I said so first.
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THREE. THE CHAIN OF LEVERS.
Now the argument. This is the part that matters and I am not going to be clever about it.
He wrote that my athleticism is not a substance, it is a structure. He wrote that the leap is a chain — ankle into knee into hip into spine — and every link is a joint, and every joint has a range where it is strong and a range where it is not. He wrote that the higher I go, the more of the chain I commit. He wrote that a man cannot fly by keeping his structure closed; he has to open it; he has to extend the very things that are only safe when they are folded.
And then the sentence. The one I have been carrying around all day like a stone in my boot:
Mr. Dlamini's greatest quality and Mr. Dlamini's available angle are the same anatomy, viewed from two directions.
I have read this fifty times looking for the error in it.
There is no error in it.
He is right. He is completely, mechanically, unarguably right, and I am putting that on the record in writing the way I put Mr. Braddock's line about innocence on the record, because I will not pretend a man is wrong when he is not. My mother taught dance and my father built bridges and between the two of them I was raised to know exactly what he is describing. A body in the air is an open structure. An open structure is a structure that can be loaded. Everything that makes me the best thing in that building is also the thing that puts my joints where his hands can reach them.
That is true.
So here is my answer, and it is the only one I have, and I have thought about it all week.
I am going to open anyway.
Because the alternative he is offering me — the polite one, the one where I stay folded and safe and inside my correct range — is not a career. It is a man not fighting. Mr. Pryce has built a life around the proposition that the body has a range where it is strong and that leaving it is an error. My entire life is the argument that the range is a suggestion. He is asking me to accept his mother's sentence — look at what it's for — and I have looked, and I have decided that what it is for is the top of that cage wall.
He says the chain is what beats me. Yes. It is also the only reason anybody knows my name.
I am not going to fight him by protecting the chain. I am going to fight him by being faster than the hand that reaches for it.
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FOUR.
There is one more thing in his document and I have written this section three times and deleted it twice.
He wrote about men on the roster who spent fifteen years learning to do badly what I do correctly on instinct. He meant it as a compliment. It landed somewhere else.
Because the question underneath it is the one I —
No.
I am not writing that sentence in a document the locker room reads. He would like me to. That is what the document is for. He filed it early precisely so it could sit in my head at a hotel desk at half past midnight and open a door in me that I keep closed, and I have just watched myself walk halfway through it, and I am closing it now.
Well played, Mr. Pryce. That one nearly worked.
The angle you are looking for is not in my knee.
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FIVE. TONIGHT.
Dorian Graves. Saturday. Behind Closed Doors 9.
I am aware that I have written eleven hundred words about a man I do not fight until NO ESCAPE and two hundred about the man I fight this weekend. I am aware of what that means. Mr. Pryce is aware of it too — that is the second thing his document was for.
So let me be plain about the man in front of me, because he deserves better than to be a footnote in someone else's paperwork.
Dorian Graves is thirty-eight years old, he is the reason my first match in this federation ended the way it did, and he has spent six shows since then being told he is not on anybody's path. He is a powerhouse. He will put me against that wall, and against that wall my chain is his too — every word Mr. Pryce wrote about my structure is available to Dorian on Saturday, and Dorian does not need the geometry, he only needs the leverage.
The correct order of operations is: Saturday first. Then the champion.
I settled that at BCD 1. I will settle it again.
The kid has been studying.
— N. D.