Eleven Minutes

ELEVEN MINUTES A Sparring Floor Observation, Filed to the Federation Record By Wesley Mark Halloran, Strength and Conditioning Coach, Halloran Combat Athletics, Birmingham ———————————————— [A third submission from W. M. Halloran, Mr. Graves's strength and conditioning coach of nine years. Filed on Mr. Halloran's own initiative with Mr. Graves's permission. Mr. Graves did not read it before submission. Published as received.] ———————————————— Wes Halloran again. I notice this is now three of these, which was not the plan. The first one I filed because I thought somebody ought to say what a crossface does to a joint. The second I filed because I did not like what was happening in my gym. This one I am filing because something has changed and I have been sat with it for a fortnight and I would rather put it down properly than keep chewing it. Same arrangement. He knows. He has not read it. Neither of us has ever suggested altering that and I have stopped expecting we will. ———————————————— I will start where I finished last time, because it is only fair. He is doing the eleven minutes. All of them. Three times a week, the full programme, the band work and the scapular work and the boring bit at the end that everybody skips. He started the Monday after Behind Closed Doors 11 and he has not missed one. I did not ask him to. I want that on the record. I had raised it twice already and got nowhere both times, and after the second time I decided I was not going to raise it a third, because there is a line between coaching a man and nagging him and I have watched better coaches than me stand on the wrong side of it. So I said nothing. He came in on the Monday, did the conditioning, did the bag, and then he went and got the bands off the hook without looking at me and did eleven minutes. The shoulder was sat at seventy per cent for the better part of three months. It is at eighty-two now and it is moving in the right direction for the first time since Kuramoto. If it keeps going the way it is going it will be structurally sound inside six weeks and functionally sound before that. That is the good news and I am aware of how it sounds. Here is the part I have not been able to get comfortable with. I got what I wanted. I have been asking for that eleven minutes since April. And the thing that finally produced it was a man kicking that shoulder forty-odd times in front of eight thousand people until it stopped working twice and cost him the fight. I am a strength coach. I am supposed to be pleased. I am pleased. I would still rather it had come some other way. ———————————————— I have watched the Cortez match a number of times now and I want to describe what I actually see in it, because I do not think it is what the building saw. The building saw a man get his shoulder taken apart. Fair enough. That is what happened. Cortez went to it at eleven seconds and he did not look anywhere else for twelve minutes and it worked, and anybody telling you it was not good work is not being honest with you. But go back and watch what he did not do. He never went to the head. Not once. No knees in the clinch, nothing at the temple, nothing to the jaw when he had him against the wall and could have had it. He went to a joint, he took the joint, and he collected. It is a very tidy piece of business and it is also, mechanically speaking, a very narrow one. Which is why Dorian got up. People made a lot of that. He got up under his own power off a finish that has ended men, and the desk carried on about it, and the American stopped talking, which I gather is unusual for him. There is no mystery in it. The arm was gone. Everything else was intact, because nothing else had been touched. He beat the arm. He did not beat Dorian. Those are two different jobs and only one of them got done that night, and I suspect the only two people in the building who knew it at the time were the two men in the cage. I asked him about Cortez that week. I do not usually. He was on the bike and I said something along the lines of, well, what did you make of him. He said: "He wanted it." That was the whole answer and he went back to the bike. I have turned it over a fair bit since. I had assumed it would be an insult. It was not an insult. I have known this man nine years and I am telling you that was as close to approval as I have ever heard out of him about another fighter. ———————————————— Now. The next one. I looked the man up, because I had not heard of him. Callum McCready. Glasgow. Nought and five. I will be blunt, because there is no polite way to lay it out. Dorian has lost three on the bounce. The man they have put in front of him has not won a fight since this federation opened its doors. From the outside that looks very much like an office tidying two problems into the same drawer and hoping one of them comes out of it looking better than it went in. That is what I thought for about four days. Then I noticed what he has actually been watching. There is not much McCready tape worth studying and Dorian has not spent long on what there is. The man is not complicated. He comes forward, he hits you, he does something underhanded roughly once a match and grins about it, and he shakes your hand afterwards. Twenty minutes would cover it and Dorian gave it about twenty minutes. What he has been watching, over and over, in the late afternoons with the laptop on the bench, is Scottish footage from years before any of us had heard of him. Not STRIFE. Not even the same decade. I had to go and find out what it was. It is the tag match. The one where his partner turned on him in front of a full house. I am not going to describe it in any detail because the man has never spoken about it publicly and it is not mine to hand round. He has watched it more than he watched Kuramoto. And the bit he keeps going back to is not the turn. It is about a second and a half before the turn, when McCready still has his back to him and does not know yet. I asked. I always ask, and he almost never answers, and this time he did. He said: "I want to see the last second of a man who still thinks somebody is behind him." Then he shut the laptop and went and did the eleven minutes. ———————————————— I have read that back three times and I am not sure what I have written down. I will say what I know and leave the rest to people cleverer than me. I know he watched the tag ruling twice and rewound the bit about your partner's failure being your failure. I put that in the last letter and I have had a good deal of correspondence about it, most of it from people who are certain they know what it means. I do not know what it means. I know that in nine years no one has ever stood beside this man, and that he has never once given me the impression he minded, and that I am no longer confident I was reading him correctly. And I know that he is about to walk into that cage against a man whose whole career came apart the last time somebody stood beside him. I do not think Dorian has a plan. I think that would be giving it a tidiness it has not got. I think he has an interest, and he has never had one of those before, and I am not sure any of us are ready for what an interested Dorian Graves looks like. ———————————————— The prediction, then, since it seems to be expected of me now. McCready will come straight at him and keep coming, because from what I can see the man has never had another idea and has never needed one. He will get further than nought and five suggests, because nought and five is a number and a fight is not. And Dorian will have both arms this time. That is the first time I have been able to write that sentence since April, and I would keep an eye on what he does with it. That is all I have to say. — Wes Halloran Halloran Combat Athletics Birmingham