Suckerpunch: (2011) (5 page)

I bit down on my mouthguard. The rubber protested.

Gil was good at this. “After that, Eddie’s got no use for you. One and done. What do you think about that?”

“I think he’s going to get a surprise.”

He smiled. “Okay. So tell me the game plan.” Switch me from running through a wall to chess, just like that. “And take your mouthguard out. Don’t spit on me.”

I popped it out. “He’s going to try to take me down. I’m not going to let him.”

“And if he does?”

“I’ll get back up.”

Gil nodded. “Show me.”

Jairo shot in again, and again I sprawled on top of him and shoved him back. I wrapped his head in the Muay Thai plum on the way up and pulled his face down into my knee, stopping an inch from impact. I pushed him away before he could go for a Greco clinch and moved to my left.

“Good,” Gil said. “If you feel that Thai clinch is tight, keep it. But he’s a strong bastard, so be careful he doesn’t just pick you up with his head.”

The fights Gil watched didn’t show Burbank having to defend the Thai plum, but his neck was thick enough he might just bull right out of it. If I got a good clinch on him and he didn’t know what to do, I’d put some knees into his belly and liver and legs and hopefully open him up for a couple to the face.

But I had to be careful. If my elbows were too far out, he could get a single underhook by wrapping one of his arms under mine, hooking his hand over my shoulder, and pulling it close to his body. From there he could go to double underhooks and wrap his arms around the small of my back in the Greco-Roman clinch and pull my hips in, and once that happened I’d get a good look at the world upside down.

Gil said, “Let him get it. Work your way out.”

Jairo did a great impression of a wrestler and pulled me in. I dropped my weight down, but it didn’t matter. He lifted me off the mat and torqued his body to the left fast enough to make my legs flap around like charged fire hoses. He dropped to one knee and set me down gently on my back with his shoulder in my sternum. If he’d gone full force, I probably would have been dazed or had the wind knocked out of me. At the very least something would have shot out of my body from somewhere inconvenient.

Jairo dropped into side mount, his torso on top of and perpendicular to mine. He gained about three hundred pounds and put them all on my lungs. He had his right elbow tight against my left hip and his right knee digging into my right hip to keep me from turning. I bent my right leg and crossed that foot over my left knee to keep him from sliding over into a full mount.

He started pushing my left wrist away from my body, but that was to get me to pull it in so he could grab my wrist with his right hand, wrap his left arm under my triceps, reach through and grab his right wrist, and pop up into a kimura. I didn’t fall for it, but it was a decoy anyway. He dropped a few elbows into the air above my face to show he could. Point taken.

Gil said, “Now this is the tricky part.”

“Really?” It came out much higher than I’d expected.

Jairo paused but kept his weight on me.

Gil said, “You’ve been training with Jairo to avoid submissions, but I think Burbank will go for pure ground and pound. So while you’re working on angles and creating space, he’s going to completely smash your head.”

“Tricky,” I agreed.

“So you should probably get up. Jairo, don’t let him, but pretend you’re a big dumb blond wrecking machine instead of a big sexy Brazilian wrecking machine.”

“I can’t help this,” Jairo said.

We got back at it. Jairo wrapped his left arm behind my head to get a better grip and brought his left knee back to drive it into my ribs. I put my right hand on his left hip and pushed him away and off balance. The knee came in, but it hit my shoulder and didn’t cause any trouble.

He tried again, and I pushed and rolled to my right and shrimped my right knee up into the space created between us and twisted clockwise on my hip so we were face-to-face. I reached down and pulled my right leg all the way out from under his hip and locked him tight in my guard.

“Good,” Gil said. “But now he’s going to posture up and rain devastation on you.”

Jairo leaned back at the waist and brought halfspeed hammerfists down toward my face.

I covered up and moved and kept my head off the mat so it would have somewhere to go in case a hammer slipped through. I caught his right hand in my left and clamped down on the wrist and kept it close to my chest. I tried to pull it across my body to get him to fall to my left so I could roll him that way, but he was too strong. His left fist came down, and I snagged that one and got good hand control. He couldn’t hit me anymore, but that went both ways.

Gil said, “Now what? You can keep it stagnant until the ref stands you back up, but that could take all day. Meanwhile, the judges are thinking he’s in a dominant position and you’re just flopping around on your back because they don’t know shit.”

“I bait the powerbomb,” I said. “Make him stand me up. Or take him down when he tries.”

“I’m waiting.”

We went through it. Over and over. By the time we were done, we had half a dozen options for if and when Burbank took me down and tried to murder me. I kept saying
if.
Gil stuck with
when.
Jairo stayed out of it. He and I were soaked with sweat and sitting in the cage with our backs against the fence when Gil’s wife, Angie, came into the gym.

“Woody, the camera crew from Warrior just called. They’re on the way over.”

“That was fast.” I took a breath through my nose for the first time that day.

“Eddie wants his hype,” Gil said. “And you know what he wants you to say.”

I stood and waited to see if my body accepted it. I didn’t quite die. “I’m not going to say it.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

Angie said, “For me?”

I considered it. She was way too good-looking for Gil, taller than him, and ten years younger, blonde with a light spread of freckles across her little nose. She taught yoga and Pilates a few nights a week in the gym and spent most of the time trying to keep her class from lying on the bloodstains on the mats.

She had her head tilted to the side with a pouty lip. “Just once?”

“Sorry.”

“Come on!” Roth shouted from the ring. He and Terence had stopped sparring and were leaning on the ropes. Terence was from Detroit and didn’t say much, but he was grinning.

“You two get back to work,” Gil said.

“We want to hear it,” said Roth. “Say it, Woodrow. Then tell us what it’s like to be famous.”

“Shut up.”

“For me?” Jairo asked.

“Okay. For you.” I wiped a handful of sweat off my face. I looked around the gym at the faces. Edson and Javier had recovered from the circuit and were rolling in their gis. They stopped in mid-pretzel to watch. Roth had a gloved hand cupped to his helmeted ear. I took a deep breath. “I am going to impose my will upon Junior Burbank and prove our first fight was
not
a fluke.”

They all booed. Roth threw his mouthpiece at me.

“Go take a shower,” Gil said. “You can’t be filmed looking like that. There are laws.” He turned to Roth. “And if you’re done in there, grab a mop and clean these mats.”

I followed Jairo into the hallway at the back and down to the right, past the bathroom and then a left into the kitchen. He plucked an apple off the counter and offered it to me.

“Not yet,” I said.

He nodded and ate half of it in one bite.

Some of us stay at the gym during training camp to limit distractions and keep Gil from calling us every hour to see what we’re doing, so the kitchen has a constant stock of protein shakes, energy bars, lean meats, raw vegetables, and enough ice cream to keep a fat kid quiet for a week. Gil passes out the ice cream as a reward, and if he catches you with any unsanctioned, you work until your stomach gives it back.

I’d been sleeping in the back room, what we called the Hole, for the six weeks leading up to the Porter fight. Going back to when I started training with Gil I’d probably spent more time at The Fight House than at my apartment. Every month I paid the rent and wondered why.

Jairo and I went past the fridge and through the door on the other side of the kitchen into the Hole. It was a big open space with high ceilings where they worked on cars when the building was a dealership. We had a card table and foosball and console video games on the big screen that usually ended with somebody getting submitted on the floor while the game waited for someone to push a button.

I had my cot pushed up against the wall on the right, and past that in the far corner was the square of four showers sectioned off from the rest of the room with exposed framing showing and the drywall panels still taped together leaning against it. The inside was tiled and watertight, but Gil loathed drywall and thought if he let it sit long enough someone would get bored and hang it. I’d seen fighters in camp resort to lighting their leg hair on fire to pass the time, and no one had touched the drywall.

Jairo looked over to the far left corner at the big-screen and the person watching it on the black leather sectional couch. All I could see was the top of a head poking up past the back cushions. The head was covered by a sweatshirt hood the same forest green as Jairo’s gi. Jairo said something in Portuguese to the head. The tone sounded a lot like, “Are you going to watch that garbage all day?” The reply was short and made Jairo stop walking. He turned to me and said, “Do you believe that?”

I shook my head.

Jairo muttered into the showers. I picked the stall diagonal from his and got clean and into a pair of loose cotton pants and a Fight House T-shirt for the cameras. The shirt also featured Arcoverde Jiu Jitsu and some sponsors I’d try to thank after the Burbank fight if I could still talk.

When I walked out, the couch head was still hooded and aimed at the TV. I heard Jairo turn off the water, and I got the hell out of there before he came out with whatever rant he’d been brewing during his shower.

I grabbed a protein shake out of the fridge and entered the gym.

The Warrior Inc. camera crew was setting up to run the interview with the cage as a backdrop, using Roth as a stand-in for getting the lights right. He was telling the producer, “As for Woodrow’s face looking any better, it can’t be helped. If you want, you can keep the camera on me, and he can talk from the next room. Can we do a quick something for me to send to me mum?”

The producer saw me and walked over. “Kevin Jacobson. If we start doing or saying anything you don’t like, just holler, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Great. You ready for tomorrow?”

“I better be,” I said.

“Yeah, short notice, huh?” Kevin seemed like a decent guy, young with a good haircut and rectangular glasses and a wedding ring, but his job was to get me to say things that would create drama and conflict for the fight. I thought there was going to be enough of that, what with the punching each other in the face and all.

It’s a business—I get that—but I just don’t have it in me to hype a fight.

Besides, when it comes down to it, I’m in there fighting myself. My limits.

The other guy’s just a mirror.

“I think we’re ready over there,” Kevin said. “Now, if we could, let’s get you saying something along the lines of ‘I’m going to impose my will on Burbank and prove to the fans it wasn’t a fluke when I beat him before.’”

They sat me and Gil on the cage apron in the lights, and a burly guy held a microphone over our heads. Kevin pulled a step-up platform over from the weight corner and sat down with the camera on his right. Angie and Roth and Terence and the Arcoverde brothers lined up behind him and crossed their arms and tried to keep serious faces.

Kevin said, “When you talk, look at me, not the camera.”

Gil and I looked at the camera; then Gil put an elbow in my ribs.

Kevin opened a black binder and scanned the notes. “All right, guys, we just need a few clips for the preshow and prefight sequences. Eddie really wants this stuff to crackle through the building, you know? Get people in the crowd looking at each other and going, ‘Oooh, he’s gonna pay for saying that.’ Cool?”