Weight
The evening before Josh’s fight, I met N at a sports bar in downtown Tucson to watch the fighters weigh in. The place was full of fighting people, easy to spot by their builds and the sets of their jaws. I arrived early and spent a few minutes scanning the room, watching bodies move around the space. There was a medical scale and a microphone set up in the corner, along with the promoter’s flag, which the fighters would pose shirtless in front of after being weighed. No one was drinking anything, and I guzzled my club soda guiltily, knowing some of the fighters had spent the past twenty-four hours sweating every possible ounce of water out of their bodies so they could make weight. It was obvious who was there to be weighed in: they looked skinny, hungry, vulnerable. In the training camps, the fighters had been manipulating their bodies, their appetites, and their survival instincts for months now, and each carried palpable residue of those efforts in their posture and mien. They were parched and starving, their faces cavernous and wan. The combination of visible musculature and visible starvation was an odd one, making for strange facial geometrics.
I spotted Josh from across the room and did a slight double take. I had seen him just the day before, but he was noticeably skinnier now, his face sunken, his head looking huge, his smile now so wide it seemed to take up half his face. The day before, he had been all eyes and canine teeth, but at the weigh-in he was all cheekbones, his flesh like wax melted over his bones. He was dressed up in chino shorts and a button-down—everyone else was in joggers and sweats—and he looked profoundly hungry. New valleys caved down into his jawbone and temples, the angles and ratios of his features skewed like a Cubist portrait, forehead and cheekbones taking up more space than my eye expected.
After stripping down to his underwear, stepping on the scale, and having his weight called out—one hundred and forty-six point six pounds, four tenths of a pound under his target—Josh sat down next to his girlfriend, Lara, and opened the cooler of food he had brought with him, visibly delighted with the spread.
I could not imagine the temptation to just tear into it, or his accumulated hunger and thirst. Over the course of the training camp, Josh had lost twenty-three pounds that he hadn’t had to spare, and after weeks of calorie restriction, the crescendo of the past week was two days during which he consumed little more than a bit of spinach and eight ounces of water.
When I asked him about the cut and the camp, he told me, “Fighting is traumatic and mentally depleting. It’s hard to make decisions. So you have to have enough trust in the person who’s coaching you that they know what they’re doing and also that they have your best interests at heart. Like, weight cutting? You can die from it. It’s very clearly bad for you, and people die from it. You can’t just have someone who’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll just put you in the sauna for fucking eight hours and you can’t come out until you weigh a hundred and forty-seven pounds.’ You have to have someone who wants you to win but also doesn’t want you to die doing so.”
There is a system of refeeding and rehydrating for fighters, based on largely anecdotal science that doctors won’t offer much commentary on because of how dangerous the whole weight cutting enterprise is. After a hard cut, you can’t just start guzzling Gatorade on the back end of the weigh-in without risking, at best, severe gastric distress, and at worst, a heart attack or hyponatremia. Some of the fighters go to clinics for intravenous rehydration after their weigh-ins to more safely bring themselves back from the depths of malnourishment and dehydration. The fighters’ bodies milling shirtless around the bar might have been strong, but they were also bodies in distress. To deprive a body of food, to force water out of a body, to be repeatedly bludgeoned with fists, elbows, and feet while in such a state: it did not take Josh’s testimony or scientific training to understand that these small violences accrue into great trauma, the body like a bucket, collecting them drop by drop and on weigh-in day brimming to the very edge of spilling over.
Josh pulled a packet of organic peanut butter cups out of the cooler, his eyes gleaming. We all watched him slowly start to open the package. Lara’s eyes were filled with concern as he told us he had spent the morning sitting in his truck with the heat turned on high and the Arizona sun blazing, trying to eke out a few last ounces of sweat, and while doing so his phone had gotten so hot it shut off and the surface temperature of his sunglasses had burned his skin.
He got the peanut butter cups open, and they were melted. His face crumpled.
Wait
8:00 A.M.
On the morning of the fights, N woke up early to meet Josh for a light workout. I slept in and prepared my materials for the day: notebooks, voice recorder, camera, pens. After spending so much time observing the lead-up to this event, I was nervous about missing something important, some profound or revelatory detail that could slip right past me.
Alone with myself in the quiet of N’s absence, I started feeling stupid. Why had I gotten so obsessed with something I wasn’t part of? Why wasn’t I content to just be a fan, to watch the fights for sport? I had a sense I was trying to edge my way into a vicarious experience—that the violence of Josh’s camp and fight was something I wanted to get closer to, as if I was moving closer to a light so that I could see.
2:27 P.M.
I arrived at the venue with N. Josh wasn’t scheduled to fight for hours, but there was preparatory stuff—I was still unclear what that entailed—and I wanted to take advantage of the access I’d been afforded, to try to see some small backstage moments. The difference between research and voyeurism was growing less and less clear to me as I worked on this project, and the question of what had drawn me to this particular spectacle was becoming more obtrusive in my own mind, more difficult to leave unanswered.
The air felt tense. I sensed it as soon as N and I rounded the corner of the venue, he carrying a gym bag overflowing with Thai pads and a spit bucket full of gauze and medical tape, I with an iced coffee in one hand and an iced tea in the other. There was a mat set up under a tent in the loading dock. Two fighters lackadaisically shadowboxed and a collection of corner people perched on benches. I followed N to a door into what turned out to be the medical inspection area. Josh was inside. N flashed his corner person’s wristband and walked in. I had a wristband too, but it felt intrusive, crowding myself into the tiny room, so I didn’t follow him.
Inside the room, a doctor looked over each fighter’s HIV and Hepatitis C tests, and checked their vital signs, pupils, and reflexes before declaring them fit to fight. I sat outside waiting for N and Josh to come back out and thought about what I was doing there, what I wanted to see, what truths I had hoped would be revealed. I knew writing about this fight wasn’t exactly about sport—I had little in common, as a writer, with the MMA journalists who hovered around the cages at UFC events. What I wanted from this insular world predicated on peril and bravado was to understand something about roughness and to locate myself in proximity to it, a few degrees removed from participation, close enough to see but not feel. This distance from violence was a curious space for me, one that allowed me to obsess over everything about it from the comfort of a chair, a far cry from the ways I had put my own body into the mix when I was younger. Tourism into the lands of violence felt new, but truly it had been a part of everything back then, too.
When I was a teenager I witnessed nightly the wanton pursuit of body damage via sadomasochism and the culture around it, myself intimately involved but separate, always feeling a bit the tourist even as my years as a sex worker stretched into a decade.
Later, after the first move in my series of erratic reinventions, when I found myself welding high-rise buildings, I was again immersed in a culture of men, again seeing their bodies in peril. To be a part of that world, I had to slap my own body down on the felt as my buy-in. But still, I was different, and not just for my gender. I ate differently, voted differently, read a different newspaper, had a wholly different set of reasons for being perched on frozen steel in the dead of New York winter, spitting into the wind to watch my saliva harden into tiny shimmering specks of ice on the beam beneath me.
And later, as a writer? Once I had divested myself of the professional pursuit of being tough, once my life fit me in a way no previous iteration had? Even there, I found myself back on the precipice of a space I wanted to worm my way into, a space marked by sweat and danger and camaraderie, of ritual and tradition, of action and proof.
At the venue, I recognized some of the fighters from the weigh-in, and I was stunned by how different they looked after not even twenty-four hours of food and water. Josh’s body had regained a bit of its heft and his face looked human again, pinkish and alive where yesterday there had been white and waxy pallor. I wondered, not for the first time, what indefinables had driven him and his cohort of fighters to this place, parched and starving in a parking lot, performing battle rituals from two continents away. Looking around at the stress clearly visible on nearly all the fighters’ faces, I wondered what it was they all liked so much about fighting, and what they’d convinced themselves of to arrive at this place.
When I talked to Josh about those questions, he said a lot about a self-testing that is familiar to me. By fighting, he has set up a controlled scenario in which to test his skills and mettle as a person, to demonstrate how powerful he is and expose any cracks that he needs to fill in. That kind of hardness testing is what I was doing on my metalwork crew and at the marathon starting line and in a hundred other places, so I get it. During a fight, he told me, “I have the ability to execute complex plans and immediately react to changing situations under the worst kind of stress. That’s everything in a fight. The ability to recognize patterns, knowing when to pull the trigger, when to back away. Being mentally present and focused on the important parts of winning the fight.” It was wild to me that he had that much self-awareness, nearly in real time, that it hadn’t taken him years of growth and reflection to see his own motivations. For me, that process never happened so quickly.
I know about stories we tell ourselves, and about using the mind to conceal things from the mind, but it had always taken me so much time to figure out what I was up to. Twenty years ago, it had been easy to convince myself that I beat men up for a living because I liked money and power. Ten years ago, it had been easy to convince myself that I walked I-beams because I was tough. But the truths lurking beneath these reductive understandings of what, exactly, a girl with big, sensitive feelings, a girl who grew up in academia, who went to prep school, who aced the SATs and could read a whole book in a single afternoon was doing in these bastions of a certain kind of embodied mindlessness, wherein the purpose of the mind was not to exist for its own sake but to propel the body through sensation? Those truths proved as difficult to suppress as they were inscrutable.
It was hard to explain to myself what I was doing on the outskirts of the fight world, how and why I had located yet another arena of rough culture, why I had again squirmed my way in against its edge. Was it even a valuable exercise to pull apart the ingredients and formulas that make up a magnetic attraction? I felt less driven than pulled, as if I had stopped paddling and just drifted, arriving back at an oddly familiar place, the smell of fear sweat in my nose again, the presence of men weighing heavy against gravity.
I wondered what I was seeking in these spheres of authenticity, the places where no one could talk their way around or out of what would happen, where there was no way to be clever enough or pretty enough to find a loophole. Pain is a great equalizer. Fear, too. We find out who we really are when we face pain and fear, and perhaps I was trying, in my own tentative and vicarious way, to discover who I might really be.
4:00 P.M.
At the pre-fight meeting, the officials went through a long list of rules and requirements: No knees to the head. No strikes to the spine, groin, or throat. No charging a down fighter. Putting your head down to escape the clinch will cost points. Make sure to have your hand wraps inspected and signed off by an official. If you wear protective headgear, take it off for photographs, but leave your gloves on. The fighters looked dazed, glazed, and restless, their faces and bodies full of the accumulated weight of all the anticipation that had gone into preparing to fight. I wondered how much information they could reasonably be expected to take in.
“This is when I get nervous,” Josh announced after the meeting, dropping his overstuffed bag of gear on the asphalt. He had described this emotional sequence to me weeks ago, and it was unfolding exactly as he had said it would: pure focus and calm during training, full commitment to the weight cut, then a sudden and acute hit of anxiety immediately preceding the fight.
He was second-to-last on the card, which meant there were still hours to sit, wait, and think, and for Josh, thinking about fighting was not a casual act, but an obsessive mental exercise. After unsuccessfully looking for somewhere to lie down he curled up on a concrete bench and rested his head on a metal planter. I felt sure that he was visualizing feints, blocks, kicks, and punches in his head, and I wondered how much of this waiting one man could take.
4:31 P.M.
There was a lot of waiting. The interminable feeling of the day’s timeline felt heightened by the speed of the past few weeks, in which whole days had seemed to fly by, six weeks out becoming two weeks out becoming ten days out becoming the day before.
Perhaps this stretching and compressing of time is the way of sport itself: delay and anticipation, a perpetual holding pattern, long slow hours punctuated by minutes that hurtle by with gut-twisting speed. Josh described it as “surreal while it’s happening, and surreal in retrospect. It just seems like a long blur: boring, boring, boring, punctuated by excitement and terror.” This is the way of war, too: what writer Tim O’Brien calls “boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders . . . you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs.”
I wonder what all this waiting and anticipation does to a person—or, maybe, what it does for a person.
5:08 P.M.
N wrapped Josh’s hands and I sat close, taking photos and enjoying the particular pleasure of watching someone you love do something they are very good at. The process took a long time—thirty minutes, maybe, longer than the fight itself would last. Josh sat backward on a folding chair with one hand at a time outstretched. N was meticulous, measuring strips of tape and gauze against his own hand, using the flat end of his bandage shears to smooth down the edges of the tape, N’s firm hand on Josh’s pale wrist, these tiny moments of expertise and care bearing the tenderness that I kept finding just beneath the surface of the fighting life.
“A fighter–coach relationship is a weirdly intimate thing,” Josh told me, about him and N. “There’s a lot of trust you have to have in someone, to let them coach you to fight. And along with this trust aspect, there’s also—any time I’ve had a friend and we’ve gone through some shit, maybe both got arrested together, or whatever fucking adventure you went through—every time we fight, that’s going on. We prepare together, he’s there while I fight, he’s there to nurse me back to health. It’s a very intimate thing. I think the more you do it, the closer you get.”
The fighters’ dressing room smelled of menthol rub and anxiety sweat, which wafted out into the air each time someone opened the door. The sun was fading, a vendor was grilling onions, and people were smoking cigarettes around the corner. On his jawline and the side of his head, N had a few grays speckled into his rich black hair. I’d never noticed them before, and I felt so much affection for him when I saw them that it was almost physically painful, a tight fullness in my chest threatening to burst or spill over. As he worked, I watched his profile for so long that I became self-conscious about it, but I still didn’t want to look away, tracing his full lips and strong features with my eyes. The feelings I had for him were unfamiliar ones, for me, and they overwhelmed me at unexpected moments, robbing me thoroughly of my ability to act like anything resembling a journalist. I wanted badly to touch him but managed to resist.
Once Josh’s wraps were finished and signed off by an official, N explained to me where we would walk when Josh’s fight was called. I was nervous to make a mistake, conscious of treating carefully the access that N had afforded me. My only job here was to pay attention and not get in the way, but it was so consuming that I had given myself a stomachache. From so much observing, I had become all eyes and ears, nearly silent, and I felt deeply stressed when I needed to speak.
N and I had been out until two in the morning the night prior, which was not helping my mental state. Another of his fighters had been defending his championship belt—or, as it turned out, relinquishing it—at a title MMA fight for Combate Américas, another fight league, which is like the UFC for Latin America. The fight was late and the energy in my body had felt weird after watching N’s fighter get knocked out in the first round, after sitting in the front row next to the fighter’s parents and wife as it happened. The speed of the thing had baffled me. One moment, he was flexing in front of his flag, a dangerous peacock about to charge into battle, and not three minutes later he was done, out, defeated, taking his oversize rhinestone champion’s belt and buckling it around his opponent’s waist.
No sane fighter walks into a ring or a cage unless he believes he can win, though every fighter must understand, at least in theory, the practical reality that it is possible for him to lose. In any arena in which two people enter and only one can prevail, there must exist a delusional sort of optimism as well as a fatalist acceptance of the possibility of loss, and I wondered how those two convictions can coexist in one fighter, how delicate that balance must be in order to say to oneself, I know I can win, I believe will win, in the face of the mathematical certainty that it is just as possible to lose.
It was an odd feeling to witness a loss, to feel the emotional register of a group of people shift so rapidly from hope and excitement to concern and demoralization. There was a whiplash of sorts, as everyone was abruptly extracted from the future and placed uncomfortably in the present, and even though my association to N’s fighter was tangential, I had felt the lurch into the reality of a new moment, which had registered as a dullness in my belly, a heaviness in my lower throat. I wondered how the fighter felt, and how much space exists between verbal description and emotional actuality.
I wondered if, for the fighter who loses, a loss was truly, as N said, “a part of the game,” accepted as a cost of this bloody business.
6:42 P.M.
About half an hour before his fight, Josh stripped down to his Thai shorts and pulled on his gloves. He looked both powerful and diminished, his swagger intact but his abdominal cavity gaunt. He hit pads with N for a few minutes, loosening up his body, and returned to our staging area with more vigor in his eyes.
“I forgot I’m good at this shit!” he announced, grinning, and stood for N to coat his face with Vaseline, a standard practice that allows punches to slide rather than stick.
It was almost time.
Speed
When it was nearly Josh’s turn to fight, I walked with him and N to the backstage area to wait a little bit more. The match before his ended, the emcee announced his name, and suddenly it was happening.
Josh walked up to the ring, N and his other corner person behind him carrying the spit bucket, water, and a rag in case of bleeding. I was supposed to walk with them but I was so frazzled by trying to pay attention and not get in the way that I took a seat on the side, unsure of where I was meant to be. A machine sprayed fog up around Josh’s body on cue as the photographer took his photo. His fight song, from The Lion King, filled the theater: “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” I wanted so badly to catch every detail that I considered recording the fight, but I suspected that most of what I wanted to inspect and consider was beyond the scope of auditory and visual data.
Josh’s opponent was roughly his same height and build: nearly six feet tall, long of limb, carved up with striated musculature. Their two lanky bodies glowed pale under the stage lights, the silk of their Thai shorts glinting. I felt sure Josh would win. Aside from N, I had never seen anyone hit anything as hard as Josh hit things, and so I couldn’t reasonably imagine anyone but N dominating him.
In the ring, Josh touched gloves with his opponent, another local fighter who I had seen compete at a Tucson fight night back in December. That night, he had led with his right hand in what is known as an orthodox stance, but tonight, to Josh’s surprise, he came out with his left: southpaw.
From my seat directly behind the ring, I could see everything: Josh’s body, N’s face, the flex of the ropes when Josh got pushed back into them, the collective expressions on the faces in the crowd. I could hear people shouting at him, shouting his name, cheering and demanding and doing that thing that sport crowds do, only more so, because it was his friends and family out there. I wondered if he could hear any of it, if the mental space of the ring had porous boundaries to things like noise and light and sound. I wondered how he felt, right then.
Later, he would tell me, of those moments, “I wasn’t scared, but I was lost. Everything was foggy, I couldn’t figure out what to do, and I didn’t know why.” The combination of starvation, dehydration, and exhaustion had left him so cognitively impaired that he could hardly keep track of what was happening: “I was falling apart on the inside.”
For all three minutes of the first round, Josh moved his sinewy body around the ring, throwing punches and kicks, but something felt off. I didn’t sense the tremendous power and swagger I could always feel misting off him in front of the heavy bag or sparring in the gym; he wasn’t moving exactly like himself. But, I thought, an actual fight was necessarily different than practice, and perhaps I just didn’t know what that difference looked like?
He traded punches, kicks, and knees with his opponent and landed plenty, neither of them holding the upper hand, at least to my eye. But the meanness of his punches and kicks wasn’t quite there, and he didn’t dominate the way I had expected him to. He looked a little shook, whether by his own lack of power from the weight cut, by the unexpected left hand of his opponent, or by some other indefinable confluence of factors, I couldn’t say, but I saw it in the wideness of his eyes, the missing curl of his lip, a tiny difference in the way he placed his feet on the mat.
I have never been kicked the way Josh was getting kicked. I have been kicked just enough to have the vaguest inkling of how each of the blows he was taking to his legs and body might feel. Before knowing these men, watching them so much, and trying to dabble in what they do, to watch a fight on television or even in person was to grossly misunderstand what was happening on a physiological level. I imagine much of the experience of fighting is impossible to understand without actually stepping into the ring. But my endless questions had afforded me some body knowledge, and I understood that the largely noiseless kicks Josh’s opponent was sending into his thighs were causing more pain than most people would offer themselves up for, perhaps more pain than some people will experience in a lifetime.
When the bell clanged to end the round, N jumped into the ring with a stool and Josh sat to breathe and listen. N’s face was intense, full of concentration. I had seen him in the corner before with other fighters, and it was a side of him I had not seen in any other space, his usual unflappability replaced with naked will and effort. He leaned close to Josh’s face, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to gird him with strategy for the next round.
Each of the next three rounds was a slightly heightened version of the same: Josh looked to me like he was fighting well, but when he landed strikes, they didn’t seem to have much effect on the other fighter, who kept kicking him, kicking him, kicking him. There were no decisive blows, and enough reversals of fortune that until the last round I, with my novice eyes, was genuinely unsure who was winning. His opponent got him into the clinch, but he fought out; he got pushed back against the ropes, he fought out. But there wasn’t a moment in which I saw the glint of the Josh I had seen in training—the scary Josh, the one who looked like a killer—and by the fifth and final round his leg was visibly red and swollen, his movements had slowed down, and he was spending more time defending himself than advancing.
I knew he hadn’t won when the bell rang to end the fight, and he surely did too. He dropped to his hands and knees and let his forehead fall to the mat, whether in obeisance or exhaustion, I couldn’t tell. His opponent stood tall next to him, though he, too, was heaving and pouring sweat, and Josh rose to his feet as the judge’s decision was announced: the win went to the other fighter, by unanimous decision.
Time shifted again as N helped Josh out of the ring; gone was the interminable anticipatory space of the backstage waiting, gone was the weird fast slowness of the fight itself, which had felt like watching slow moves on fast-forward. Now everything was fast-fast, Josh and N moving off the stage and hobbling to the back area, the doctor coming out to inspect the damage to Josh’s wet and limp body, which slid down to the floor, legs splayed out, thigh reddening and filling with fluid even as I stood and watched.
In a few moments, when Josh was cleared to leave and his girlfriend found her way to him, N helped him back up and supported him on the long limp outside, back to the fighters’ lounge, depositing him gently in a chair next to the man he had just fought. The pent-up restlessness I had come to think of as emblematic of his character was gone. Fully spent, he sprawled backward, melting into the chair, more tired than anyone who has never done a thing like this could understand.
I carried the spit bucket and tried to help put everyone’s belongings back in place. It was dark and a bit chilly, and I had a vague bad feeling that I couldn’t place. Josh had already started to reanimate a bit, making jokes with his opponent as they sat and iced their legs together. Their rivalry had lasted only as long as the actual fight, and this was my favorite part to see: the parts that were not on the stage, with the fog and the fight songs and the pageantry of combat. That part was exciting, and I enjoyed the spectacle of it, for certain. But this easy rapport between men who just twenty minutes ago had been spending every ounce of energy they could muster to inflict maximal damage on each other, it transcended common logic. In witnessing such scenes, I understood a little more of what N had told me months ago, about the way fighters can be with each other, the space for affection and respect that is carved out by making a game of violent dominance.
Josh was hurting. I drove him and Lara to the fight’s afterparty, and when I offered him a hand to help him out of my truck, he accepted it. He looked like a young bird who had flown through some rough winds, or like a puppy who had tangled too hard with a big dog. Or maybe just like a man who got really skinny and really dehydrated and then got kicked and punched for fifteen minutes without succumbing to exhaustion, fear, or his opponent. He looked tattered, but also fierce, and in that moment I felt overwhelmed with respect for his fighter’s heart.
I drove away feeling deeply strange, quiet and full of an unfamiliar swirl of chemicals coursing through my body, though I had done nothing, not really, except sit and watch other people do things. The urge to smoke a cigarette flickered in and I batted it aside, my curiosity about the contents of my state trumping my desire to make it go away.
Distracted, I rolled my truck slowly through a busy four-way intersection. Someone honked and yelled “Bitch,” and I very nearly started to cry. I went home, ate some chicken, and fell asleep, and in the morning I still felt it, a strange sensation that had welled up and lodged itself in me somehow. I was embarrassed by this feeling, by my sensitivity, by the likelihood that I was claiming some experience that was not my own. The fighters weren’t my people, they were N’s. I had just attached myself as a curious researcher and hanger-on, and as a writer I felt duty bound to interrogate my own sense of stakes. But the truth was I felt weird, exhausted beyond what a night of bad sleep could reasonably account for.
I’ve never been a serious sports fan, but I remember my father’s relationship with the Bird-era Boston Celtics: a relationship of adoration and rage, of spittle flying at the television, of an altar boy’s reverent gaze and an ogre’s bellowing growl. He didn’t go to games back then, probably because of the expense, but he watched feverishly as Larry Bird—a man who I know he imagined a bit of himself in—moved into the paint like ballerina, snake, bulldozer, as he swished three after three over the dumbfounded heads of the men who could never quite guard him. I watched my father’s feelings during those games, and I watched him afterward, too, and I learned then that you don’t have to do something with your own body to feel the reverberations of having seen it.
Steve Almond, in his treatise on violence, fandom, and spectacle Against Football, writes, “What kept me hooked was the limbic tingle familiar to any fan, the sense that I was watching an event that mattered. The speed and scale of the game, the noise of the crowd, the grandiloquent narration and caffeinated camera angles—all these signaled a heightened quality of attention.” Was that part of why I was there, as much as my grim attraction to the violence? In watching the fights, was I having an experience that mimicked taking a drug? I had noticed, from the first fight N took me to, how time seemed to simultaneously stretch and compress when the fighters were in the cage, the same way it does during experiences of altered consciousness. In my stadium seat I was rooted, alive in my transfixion, fully present in a way I almost never achieve in my daily life, flush like Kerry Howley with Schopenhauer’s “sensations fine and fleeting,” all details enhanced in a way I hadn’t felt since I’d given up my various mind-altering habits.
The next day, Josh and N were on Instagram, posting pictures of Josh’s leg—it looked quite bad—and publicly acknowledging the spirit and labor they had each poured into the effort to get ready for the fight.
“Josh did a lot of good and new things, and we made some errors. I am proud as a friend and coach of your performance. We will continue to learn and grow as a team,” N wrote.
“The credit for everything I do right is all yours,” Josh wrote back. “Thanks for always being in my corner.”