“Do you have any actual advice or did you just want to bitch at me for a while before the fight?” I ask.
“You’re right,” Logan says, lowering his head. He adds mystically, “The fight comes first.”
Logan tells me what he can about Furyk, though it’s not much. The thing the guy’s most well-known for is his stamina, something I’m sure I’m lacking after taking so much time away from training this last week.
Ash and I hold hands as we make our way through the crowd. I’m occasionally stopped by random guys from my pit, who each has a different, often contradictory, opinion of how I should go into the fight.
After a while, we head toward the back of the crowd and I quickly change from my street clothes to my trunks.
“I’ll never understand how guys can be so comfortable quite literally changing in front of a crowd of people,” Ash says.
“Just one of those things, I guess,” I answer.
“All right, all right, all right!” some guy with an annoying voice bellows from the center of the now massive group. “We’re here for the semi-finals. First up, we’ve got the strawweights. Chelsea! Johnson! You’re up!”
“You’re a featherweight, right?” Ash asks.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Do you want to know the weight classes?”
She looks back at me with a smirk, and I take it that’s a “no.”
Two guys who are nothing but rib, muscle and scar tissue make their way to the middle and we’re off and running. The fight goes on for quite a while, and by the end of it, I’m not entirely sure who won because hands are coming to rest on my shoulders.
I’m up next.
The hands belong to Logan and a couple other guys from my pit, though Ash joins in when she deciphers what’s going on.
“Come on now,” Logan says behind me. “Nothing but clear thoughts, hard punches and kicks that’ll make what’s-his-name think he’s being beaten with an aluminum bat. Keep moving in there. Don’t let him get you pinned down. You’re a striker. Keep him on his feet.”
The next voice, surprisingly, is Tom’s. “You know I don’t know as much about fighting as I do about patching you guys up afterward, but stay out of your head,” the medic says. “You’ve got this thing.”
“Chelsea gets beat down in the fourth and you know that’s gotta hurt!” whoever they touched to be the announcer says from the middle of the crowd. “Next up, we’ve got featherweights, Furyk and Ellis. Let’s do this!”
The hands on my shoulders patting me and shaking me, and I look over to Ash, asking, “Do you have any advice before I get in there?”
She shrugs and shakes her head. “Keep your guard up,” she says. It might have been a bit more helpful if she didn’t tack the words, “Whatever that means,” onto the end.
I give her a quick kiss and make my way through the crowd. By the time I get to the circle in the middle, Furyk’s already there waiting for me. It looks like he brought some friends, too, because there are six or seven guys around the front of the crowd wearing “Mitch’s Bitches” t-shirts.
It bodes well for me that he’s the cocky type. It bodes less well for me that he can back it up.
He’s not much to look at; if anything, he looks a little doughy, but I’m not going to let that lead me into underestimating him. Hearing about anyone in the underground scene who’s not in your pit is rare. It only happens if someone’s either really humiliated themselves, or built up such a reputation that even the usual codes of secrecy can’t keep people from talking about it.
“All right, you guys know the rules,” the unofficial official starts. “I tell you to stop, you stop; now let’s do this!”
He claps his hands and we touch gloves.
The match starts and Furyk hits me with a quick jab to the chest. It’s a psychological move than a blow meant to cause damage. He’s telling me I can’t stop him.
I counter with a shin kick to his thigh and he backs off a bit. We circle each other.
He comes back in with a left hook, but I deflect it with my forearm, countering again with the same shin kick to his thigh.
Now he knows he can’t stop me, either.
His first real punch catches me just below the rib cage, and it’s a lot more than I was expecting. I wince and push him just far enough away from me to throw a counter punch, but he ducks it easily.
He comes at me with a knee, glancing against my left side, but I counter before he’s returned the leg, my shin going hard into his stationary calf.