Las Tres Cosas

LAS TRES COSAS Home, for once. Guadalajara. Two nights out, and the knee has opinions about the flight. ———————————————— I have not written anything since I lost. That is not avoidance and I want to say so at the top, because I know how a silence looks from the outside and I have never in my life been the man who lets a thing look like something it is not. I did not write because I did not have anything true to put down yet, and these pages are only worth keeping if what goes in them is true when it goes in. I have it now. So. I lost. Twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds, a crossface with no name on it, and my own shoulders on the mat in the middle of a room I had never lost in. Eight and one. The one is real and it is mine and I have not spent a single hour of the last fortnight pretending otherwise. What I have spent the fortnight doing is the arithmetic my father taught me, properly, for the first time in my adult life. ———————————————— EL SILLÓN He did not call. He has never called before a match — I have written that here before and I have always framed it as trust, and it is trust, and it is also that he does not believe a man should have a voice in his ear the night before he works. Fine. Understood. Forty years of it. He did not call after, either. I want to be honest about how that landed, because I was not expecting to notice it and I noticed it for nine days. My father watched his son lose for the first time, from the chair he has sat in through his own career and through the careers of every man he ever trained, and he did not pick up the telephone. Not that night. Not the next day. So on the tenth day I called him. And before I had finished saying it — before I had really said anything at all beyond hello and that I was coming home — he asked me the question he has asked me since I was a boy in his gym with tape on my hands, in exactly the words he has always used, in the voice he uses when he is not going to be argued with. Do you know the three things? ———————————————— LAS TRES COSAS I have referred to them here before without ever writing them down. I think I did not write them down because I had never once needed them. A man who has not lost does not have to do the accounting; the record does it for him and the record is flattering and he can go to bed. So here they are, in his words, translated badly, the way I have carried them since I was nine years old. One. How many years you have left. Two. What those years are still good enough to win. Three. Which of your losses was the one that told you the truth. You are meant to know all three at all times and be honest about all three. He would say it and then he would go back to whatever he was doing, and I would go back to falling correctly, and neither of us would mention it again for a year. The third one is the one I could never answer. I did not have any. I have one now, and my father knew that, which is why he did not call, because the whole point of the third thing is that you have to sit with it alone until it tells you what it is. If he had rung me on the night he would have been handing me his answer and I would have taken it, because I am his son and I have never once wanted to disappoint him, and then the answer would have been his and not mine and it would have been worth nothing. Nine days of silence from a man who loves me. That is not coldness. That is the most careful thing anybody has done for me in years. ———————————————— WHAT THE LOSS TOLD ME So. Honestly. The third thing. It would be very easy to write here that the loss was the one — that a man of thirty-six with the mileage I have on me finally met the wall, that the body sent the bill, that this is the beginning of the part where I am the veteran everybody speaks about kindly. That version is available. It is even flattering in a mournful sort of way, and audiences like it, and I could sell it. It is not what happened and I am not going to write it down. Here is what happened. He fixed his trailing foot. That is the whole of it. Hideo Kuramoto flew eleven hours to stand in a cold room and let an eighty-one-year-old man correct one small thing in the way he plants his back leg, and the correction was built specifically for a lucha grip specialist with good hips, and I am a lucha grip specialist with good hips, and I walked into it and it held. That is not a body failing. That is a man being solved. I know the difference. I have spent fifteen years doing it to other people. When you solve a man you do not beat him with your youth or your size or your luck — you go away, and you find the one thing, and you come back with it, and it works, and afterward everyone says he looked slow. He did not look slow. He looked known. So the answer to my father's third question is: not this one. This loss did not tell me the truth about my timeline. It told me the truth about Hideo Kuramoto, which is that he is more dangerous than the twenty-three years suggest, because the twenty-three years are not the weapon — the willingness to fly eleven hours for one detail is the weapon. I told my father exactly that. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: bueno, and asked me whether I had eaten. That is how you know you got it right. ———————————————— WHAT I INTEND I want that championship back and I am going to say so once, here, plainly, and then I am not going to say it again in public until I have earned the right to. I am not owed a rematch. I want to be very clear about this because there is a version of a former champion who spends the next six months telling anybody with a microphone that he never really lost, and that man is a bore and I would not want to share a locker room with him. I had it. It was taken correctly, in the room built for taking things correctly, by a man who bowed to me before and after and meant both. So I will go and get in the line and I will go through whoever is in the line. Starting with Mr. Cortez, who I understand has quite a lot to say about me already. I have watched him. Everybody dismisses him and everybody is wrong to — the footwork is real, the striking is real, and the reason he is three and three instead of six and nothing is not that he is a fraud. It is that he has never once been made to fight somewhere he did not choose. He picks the range. He picks the angle. He leaves before you arrive. He has never fought a man who does not need to catch him. I do not have to catch Shawn Cortez. I have to make the room smaller, one exchange at a time, until the range he has chosen is a range where I am already holding something of his. That is not a prediction. It is a description of what I do. He will talk. He should — it is his and he is good at it and I have no complaint about a man using what he has. I will not be answering. Not because I am above it. Because I have exactly one thing to say in this whole period and I have now said it in this journal, and I would rather it stay here than get chopped into six seconds of a video package. ———————————————— CASA Camila has abandoned marine biology. It lasted three weeks. She is now going to be an architect, because she saw a building on television that she describes as "wrong in a good way," and she has been drawing wrong-in-a-good-way buildings on the backs of Sofía's grocery lists ever since. Ana, who has strong opinions about everybody's plans, has declared that she will also be an architect, which Camila has appealed to me to overturn, and I have declined to rule. I have been home nine days. It is the longest stretch since the tournament started and I had forgotten what my own kitchen sounds like in the morning. Sofía has not asked me once how I am about the loss. She has instead put me in charge of things — the school run, a shelf that needed rehanging, an argument with a neighbour about a tree — and I understand exactly what she is doing and I have let her do it, because after eight years the useful thing between us is rarely the thing anybody says out loud. My father came for dinner on the seventh night. He did not mention the match. He sat in the chair, which in his house is a different chair, and he watched Ana explain architecture to him for eleven minutes without once correcting her. ———————————————— EL CUERPO, HONESTAMENTE The knee: talking. It talked on the flight and it has been talking since, which after twenty-one minutes with that man is not a surprise and not a warning, only a bill. Within tolerance. Right shoulder: the crossface was on the neck and the arm, and the arm has been slow to forgive it. Improving. It will be right. Hips: good. Better than the arithmetic says they should be. They are the last thing that will go and I have known that since I was thirty. The first thing my father taught me and the last thing I will forget: your body is not lying to you. It is only ever early or late, and you have to know which. Two nights from now I touch the top of the door frame the way my grandfather touched it, and I go back to work, and I start walking the line back toward the only thing in this business I have ever wanted twice. I know the three things. All of them. Honestly. And the third one is not this. — TRM