Nine Voicemails

NINE VOICEMAILS OUTGOING VOICE MESSAGES — R. JOHNSON TO C. HEALY NINE MESSAGES. ELEVEN DAYS. NO REPLIES. SUBMITTED TO STRIFE MEDIA OPERATIONS BY THE FIGHTER WHO LEFT THEM. --- Attached note, handwritten, block capitals, no signature: SOMEBODY WAS GOING TO ASK ME WHETHER I'D BEEN CALLING HIM. SO HERE IS EVERY CALL. I GOT THE NUMBER OFF THE ROSTER CONTACT SHEET THE COMPANY GAVE ME ON MY FIRST DAY, WHICH IS WHERE THEY PUT IT AND WHAT THEY PUT IT THERE FOR. NOTHING ABOUT ME IS A RUMOUR. EVERYTHING ABOUT ME IS A RECORD. GO AND READ IT. --- MESSAGE 1 — TUESDAY, 9:42 A.M. — 1 MIN 04 SEC Mr. Healy. Rod Johnson. We haven't met. I want to say up front how I got this number, so it isn't a thing later — it's on the contact sheet the office handed me my first day in the building, right there under H, and I imagine mine's on yours under J. So that's all that is. I like to talk to a man before I fight him. Not to get in his head. I've never needed to be in anybody's head. I like to talk to him because in about a week and a half the two of us are going to be locked in a six-sided room with no way out of it, and I have always thought it was strange that we do that to each other having never once said good morning. I looked at your record. Three and six. Now, most men would tell you the six is the number that matters, and most men would be reading it wrong. Nine fights, Mr. Healy, and not one of them ended with somebody standing over you. Never finished. Never tapped. Never once had a referee wave a hand over you and decide on your behalf that you'd had enough. That's not a losing record. That's a man they can't close. Call me back when you get a minute. --- MESSAGE 2 — WEDNESDAY, 6:15 P.M. — 0 MIN 21 SEC Johnson again. No news. Nothing's changed. I'm going to keep calling, so I'd rather you heard that from me than worked it out. It's not a campaign. It's a courtesy that's going to take a few attempts. That's all. --- MESSAGE 3 — FRIDAY, 11:20 P.M. — 1 MIN 47 SEC Watched your tape tonight. All of it. Both directions, twice. I want to tell you something about that lariat of yours and I want you to understand I mean it, because people hear my voice and assume everything coming out of it is a threat, and it is not. That lariat is the most honest thing I have seen since I signed here. There's no wind-up on it. There's no invitation. You don't sell it to the room first. You just decide, and then it's already happened, and the fella's on the floor wondering which part of the last two seconds he was supposed to have reacted to. I have hands. I've had hands since I was fifteen years old and people are still surprised by it because they see six-six and two seventy-five and they stop looking. But I've never in my life thrown anything as clean as that. The other thing I noticed. You wrap your own wrists in the parking lot. Before you're in the building. Grubby by the time the bell goes, every time, because you did it an hour early standing next to a van. I do mine myself too. Have done for ten years. Nobody helps me and nobody's asked to. That's twice now we've got something in common and we still haven't spoken. --- MESSAGE 4 — SATURDAY, 7:03 A.M. — 0 MIN 11 SEC Still me. --- MESSAGE 5 — SUNDAY, 4:31 P.M. — 2 MIN 38 SEC All right. I'm going to tell you why I do this, because I've left four of these now and it would be dishonest of me to keep calling and let you think it's about you. Three times in my career, a man I was scheduled to fight stopped answering his phone. Not on the night. Nobody has the nerve to do it on the night. Six days out. Five days out. Once it was eight days, which I remember because I'd already made weight in my head, the way you do. Two of them said injury and produced paper for it and I have never once said a word against either of those men, because a body is a body and mine has let me down too. The third one never said anything at all. Not to me, not to the promoter, not to the press. Just went quiet and then wasn't on the poster. I went twenty-four and three, Mr. Healy. Nineteen of them by knockout. Nine years. I never fought for a belt. Not once, not an eliminator, not a number-one contender bout, nothing. And every single person who has ever wanted to explain that to me has explained it with their eyebrows. Here's what I'd actually like understood. It was never the fights that got to me. I won the fights. It was the eleven days beforehand where the phone doesn't ring, and you're training anyway, and you're eating anyway, and you're getting up at five anyway, and the whole time there's a part of you doing arithmetic on whether the man is going to be there — and you can't turn that part off, and it takes something out of you that the fight itself never touches. I am in those eleven days right now. So no, I'm not calling to rattle you. I'm calling because I would like, one time in my life, to hear a man say the words "I'll be there." That's the whole of it. --- MESSAGE 6 — MONDAY, 8:58 P.M. — 0 MIN 44 SEC I'm going to say this once and I'm going to say it loud so nobody has to ask me twice. I am not afraid you'll beat me. I want that on the record and I want it in that order. I've seen what you do and I've seen what I do and I know exactly how that goes, and when the time comes I'll say so out loud, in the building, in front of the people who paid. I am afraid you won't be there. Thirty-four years old and that is the only thing left that frightens me, and I've just said it into a stranger's voicemail, so make of that what you want. --- MESSAGE 7 — WEDNESDAY, 1:14 P.M. — 1 MIN 09 SEC I need to tell you something and I need to tell you before somebody else does, because that's how I do things. I called a gym in Limerick this morning. I didn't ask for you. I didn't leave a name. A young lad picked up and I asked whether Cormac Healy trained out of there and he said he used to, years back, and I said thank you and I put the phone down. Eleven seconds, maybe twelve. I didn't ask him anything else and I didn't want anything else. And I sat in the car afterwards and I thought: that is further than I have any business going. So I'm telling you I did it. I'm not telling you because I got caught, because I didn't, and nobody was ever going to know. I'm telling you because there are stories about me in gyms in three states and not one man who tells them was in the room, and the only defence I have ever had against any of that is that I put everything I do where people can see it. It won't happen again. You have my word, and my word is a thing I've kept in worse rooms than this one. --- MESSAGE 8 — THURSDAY, 10:07 P.M. — 1 MIN 31 SEC I've worked it out. Took me eight messages, which is longer than it should have, and I'd like to apologise for the ones in the middle. You're not ducking me. You haven't gone quiet on me. You went and had a look at the tape, same as I did, and you formed a view, same as I did, and then you did the thing you have done every single day since you walked into this company. You didn't say anything. Not to me. Not to the cameras. Not to the man in the loading dock in the rain who asked you a question with his whole chest and got handed a roll of tape for his trouble. Nine fights in this building and not one syllable, and it isn't a gimmick, and it isn't attitude, and I've stopped thinking it's rudeness. Here's the part that's mine to own. I have spent eleven years unable to tell the difference between a man who is not going to speak to me and a man who is not going to turn up. Those are not the same thing. They were never the same thing. Nobody ever taught me the difference because nobody ever stayed long enough to. You're not the first man in my career to say nothing to me, Mr. Healy. You might be the first one who's still going to be standing there on Saturday. --- MESSAGE 9 — SATURDAY, 5:00 A.M. — 1 MIN 22 SEC Morning. Last one. You'll have the rest of it face to face. I want to thank you and I want to do it properly, because you've given me something and I don't believe you meant to, and those are the only gifts anybody's ever given me. Nine messages. Eleven days. You never picked up, you never called back, you never sent so much as a word through anybody — and you never pulled out either. No paper. No injury. No promoter ringing me at eight in the evening with that voice they get. You just went on getting up and doing your work in Limerick or wherever you do it, and let me talk into the dark, and the entire time the only thing you owed me was to be there. You're going to be there. Eleven years, and a man I have never once spoken to is going to be there. Now — I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do to you. Not on a phone. Not in your ear at five in the morning where nobody can check it afterwards. I'm going to walk out under the house lights tonight with the whole building lit up as bright as I am, and I am going to say it out loud — which joint, which habit of yours hands it to me, and near enough what minute — and then I am going to go and do exactly that in front of every person who heard me say it. That's how it's supposed to go. That's the only way any of it means anything. You've had eleven days of me talking. You've earned the full version. You already know. --- END OF RECORD. NINE MESSAGES. NO REPLIES. NO WITHDRAWAL.