Seven o’clock on Saturday night, and I stepped into the ring for the fifth fight on the card. There was a good crowd in Billy’s gym, and the air was heavy with sweat, fear, aggression and tension.
This was amateur night, and Billy was showcasing the best of his teenage fighters against a boxing club up from Seattle. We didn’t have the home-crowd advantage. Seattle was close enough to Vancouver that a busload of fans had made the journey, and they were doing their best to out-cheer and out-jeer the friends and family of our hometown kids.
With the referee at the center, I touched gloves with my opponent, Alex Meunster. He was big and brawny. No surprise, his nickname was “The Monster.” Although we were in the same weight category, much of my muscle was in my upper thighs. I could run forever. I told myself I would be faster and more intelligent than him, and in my mind I was Muhammad Ali facing George Foreman.
Meunster the Monster wore his hair long enough that it was bound in a ponytail. He had tattoos across his gleaming pectorals and massive biceps. Crude tattoos. Like he’d had them done in juvie. Not cool, expensive tattoos like the ones curling around my left shoulder.
His grin—blue because of his mouthguard—was more like the leer of someone with a big appetite about to dig into a buffet.
Billy had prepped me. This guy wanted to throw the glamorous knockout punch, and he was 20 and 0 with that strategy. And I had no intention of being his buffet.
The bell rang and he moved in. I didn’t bounce on my feet, signaling what he expected, as I am sure he’d been prepped on my fighting style. He figured I’d be looking to counterpunch my way out, dodging his punches and looking for a big right-hander to take him out when he got tired.
Nope. Not this time. I’d already decided my strategy. We’d all been trained to throw the hard punches. Day after day at the heavy bag, that’s what we did, until our upper arms ached as much as our knuckles throbbed. Instead, to confuse his defenses, my strategy was to use something he probably hadn’t seen before. Light punches.
First, it would set me up for harder punches later. Second, light punches can be thrown from a wider range of positions and movements. Unlike a power punch, a light punch doesn’t need you to be perfectly balanced or grounded. The lighter punches wouldn’t hurt him, but he was going to be seeing lots of them—and feeling them—from a lot of different angles.
As he closed in, I leaned backward and jabbed, a movement that threw me farther backward and took power out of the punch. But it popped him on the cheekbone, and I saw his eyes flare open in surprise.
I knew it hadn’t hurt him, but he’d reacted. I had surprised him. That was my goal. I was trying to make him fearful of getting hit, even though none of my hits would do any damage.
That was the pattern of the first round. I wasn’t thinking punch. I was thinking touch and slap, like I was trying to knock a bug out of the air. With each exhalation, I extended a jab. Left, right. Falling backward to dodge a big swing or ducking beneath a haymaker, I made sure that I kept flicking my hands in his direction. Because I wasn’t throwing power into those punches, it took very little energy. I could do this for five rounds and be as fresh as when I started.
The bell ended the first round, and he was breathing hard as he went to his corner. I’d succeeded in puffing a point on his cheekbone, and he’d landed a heavy body blow to my right side that I knew would bruise later.
In the corner, Billy wiped my face with a wet towel and said only three words: “I like it.”
I nodded.
When the bell rang for the second round, Meunster took three hard strides toward me. He was irritated. Perfect.
Time to see if I’d softened him up. I made a quick jerking movement with my right shoulder. Didn’t throw a punch. Just that slight movement. It stopped him briefly.
That’s when I knew I had him. He was reacting to anything I did, worried about my hands and where the next punch would come from. He believed I had punching power from anywhere, when the truth was anything I did from my off-balance positions would have been no worse than a friend poking him unexpectedly.
My intent for the next half of the round was to alternate between throwing those fast light punches and faking punches. And then, because I didn’t want him to have a chance to talk things over with his coach after the second round, I was going to use the last half of this round for a complete strategy switch. I wanted to take advantage of his confused defenses and work on the five-punch combo that Ali had used to set up Foreman for the big punch.
It didn’t happen that way.
“Get him, Jace!” came a distinctive voice from the crowd. My father. The world-famous neurosurgeon. Beloved by all except his wife and his own two sons.
Impossible that he knew I was here tonight. This was my secret alternative world.
I couldn’t help but glance over. He was in the second row from the front.
Impossible.
And sitting right beside my father was Jo. Holding an iPhone sideways as she videoed the fight.
What was she doing with him?
And what kind of message was my father trying to send me by announcing his presence here? That he—
I never got a chance to finish the thought. Not until later in the evening, as I headed into the locker room to shower and change.
Because interrupting my thoughts was a nuclear bomb that exploded against the side of my head. I didn’t even realize I was on the mat until that familiar whoosh of nitrate to the brain came with Billy popping open smelling salts below my nostrils and telling me I was an idiot.
Billy was correct. I was an idiot for letting anything distract me.
With the fight, Meunster the Monster had gained a 21 and 0 record, and all I’d gotten out of it was two loosened front teeth, a headache of biblical proportions and questions that wouldn’t go away about my father and Jo.
There was one other thing I’d gained—a message in my jacket pocket: You know the Denny’s. Eleven PM. Be alone and waiting.