Volume Twenty-Five

VOLUME TWENTY-FIVE Training journal, current volume. Private record. Entry begun in Tokyo, in the office at the back of the dojo, on the second morning. ———————————————— I have come back to the dojo before this match. I want to record the reason accurately, because I have noticed that when I do not write a reason down I invent a better one later. The reason is not sentiment. The reason is that I have one match remaining before I compete for a world championship, and I have never competed for a world championship, and I wanted to be in the room where the standard I have used for twenty-three years was set, so that I could check the standard against the room rather than against my memory of it. The room is smaller than my memory of it. This is normal and I had expected it. Everything else is the same. The floor is the same floor. It has been resurfaced twice and it is still the same floor, in the sense that matters. The window at the east end still does not close correctly and there is still no plan to repair it, because a room that is slightly too cold in the morning produces men who move sooner. I trained here from eighteen. I have written in previous volumes that this method is the only honest one I have encountered for producing wrestlers. I have been asked, in interviews, in three countries, whether I would describe the regime as excessive. I have always declined the framing. I want to note, in private, that I decline it because it is the wrong question, not because the answer is no. ———————————————— THE BOY There is a trainee here, second year, whose name I will not put in my journal because he has not earned the right to be discussed by a man who is leaving in four days. He is not talented. I want to be exact: he is not talented. His hips are stiff, his footwork is late, and his ukemi is adequate rather than good. In a system that selected for talent he would have been removed in his first month. He is also the only one in the room who is failing correctly. The others are failing in the ordinary way, which is to say they are hiding it — shortening repetitions when the instructor turns, taking the version of the drill that looks acceptable rather than the version that is correct. This is universal. I did it. Every man in every dojo I have ever entered has done it. The boy does not do it. He does the full repetition, badly, four hundred times, and then he does it badly the next morning, and there is no evidence yet that this is working. I watched him for one full session and I want to record what I concluded, because it is relevant to the man I am fighting. Evan Morse would look at that boy and see wrong numbers. I am confident of this. He would be able to name every deficiency in the boy's structure inside ninety seconds, and he would be correct about all of them, and he would file the boy as a matter already settled. And he would be wrong, and the reason he would be wrong is that he has never been in a room that hurt him for a year without offering him a result in exchange. That is the whole of my read on him. The rest is scouting. ———————————————— MORSE Six feet, two hundred and fifteen pounds. Three and two. Kinesiology and psychology at university, then professional training in the American southwest under a technician whose work I know by reputation and respect. From the tape: - The five-strike sequence is the setup, not the offense. The offense is the reload. He resets his stance for approximately half a second between the fourth and fifth strike, and everything he intends arrives out of that reset. - Cortez found the reset. Cortez published it. Morse then faked the reset and finished him with it. I have watched this three times. I want it on my record that faking his own tell, in the main event, against a man who had announced he was watching for it, is the single most dangerous thing anyone in this federation has done to another fighter, and it was done with no violence at all. - He wins by narrowing. He does not look for a finish; he removes options until only the finish remains. Against opponents who respond to this by trying to force an option, he is close to unbeatable, because the forcing is the error he is waiting for. - He requires his opponent to behave like an argument. Everything he does assumes the man across from him is making a case. My approach follows from the last observation. I am not going to make a case. I am going to work. I do not intend to disrupt the reset, because he expects that and has already demonstrated what he does to a man who arrives there. I intend to be somewhere he has not assigned meaning to. His system converts my intentions into data. It does not convert repetition into data, because repetition contains no intention to read. Four hundred bad repetitions, every morning, in a cold room. ———————————————— FUKAZAWA He is eighty-one. He was not my primary instructor but he was in the room for all six of my years, and he is in the room now, sitting on the same cushion, which I am told he occupies for approximately nine hours daily and which nobody has succeeded in discouraging. He did not congratulate me on the championship match. He did not mention it. He asked whether I was still doing the entry correctly and then asked me to show him, in front of the trainees, at forty-two years of age, in the clothes I had travelled in. I showed him. I did the entry eleven times. He corrected the third one. He was right about it. The correction concerned my trailing foot and it is a correction I received in this room from a different man more than twenty years ago, and I had drifted back into the error, and I did not know it, and if I had gone into the Reyes-Montoya match carrying it, a lucha grip specialist with exceptional hips would have found it in the first four minutes. I flew for eleven hours and I received one correction that may decide a world championship. I consider the trip repaid. Afterward he mentioned Ogata. I have written in a previous volume that Reyes-Montoya and I share at least two trainers from his Tokyo period. Ogata is one of them. I have known this. I have not thought about it in the way I thought about it yesterday, because Fukazawa did not present it as a coincidence. He presented it as a fact about a man he taught, and then he said that Ogata had spoken about the Mexican boy more than he had spoken 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 have been turning this over for a day. I do not yet know what to do with it. I am writing it down so that it is on the record before I know, which is the purpose of a journal. ———————————————— A SEPARATE NOTE There has been no reply from Wone. I put a question on the federation's record and I have received nothing in return. I said, when I filed it, that I would accept refusal as data. I am obliged to honor that, and I do. But I want to be precise about what the data currently says, because silence is not one thing. There has been no refusal. A refusal is an act. What there has been is an absence, which is a different object, and I do not yet know how to weigh it. I will not raise this again publicly before the championship match. The question stands where I left it. It does not require repeating, and a man who repeats a question he has already asked correctly is asking a second, different question, which is: will you please answer me. I am not going to ask that one. ———————————————— THE BODY Right knee: the eleven entries produced measurable heat in the joint by the evening and stiffness on waking. I am recording this without editorial. It resolved by the second session. The replacement is holding and is not the limiting factor. The limiting factor is that I am forty-two and I have one match before the only thing I have not done. Left shoulder unremarkable. Right wrist unremarkable. Sleep poor on the first night, adequate since. Diet on plan, with one deviation for a meal I was not permitted to decline. Tomorrow: the hour of stillness. Morse tape, second pass, the fourth-to-fifth strike specifically, at quarter speed. Then the entry, four hundred repetitions, cold room, trailing foot corrected. The work remains the work. — H.K.