Knockout

“What are you telling them?” she asked.

“You ever study spelling words or anything in school?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, you study words to learn how to spell. I study boxing films to make Terry a better boxer.”

“What do you mean? Like you go to the movies?”

“Kind of. Now, the best boxer who ever lived, probably, was Muhammad Ali. Graziano, now he had a punch that could knock a man from here to Kansas. But Ali was the whole package—footwork, strong punch, tireless, and with so much charisma, honey, he could light up a room. And do you know what he called himself? What his nickname was?”

“No.”

“The Greatest. As in the greatest fighter…ever.”

“Wow!”

“Right. So back in the den, we have hundreds of videos of fights and matches, of the most brutal, most grueling fights, of the fights that were over in twenty-seven seconds…”

“Twenty-seven seconds?”

“Yeah. There was a time when Iron Mike Tyson had the world fooled that he was invincible. And he took down everybody with these shots that just—boom—brought them down quickly. So we study him. We study all of them. And then we have to figure out what Terry and Miguel are doing wrong and what they’re doing right. And we build on that.”

“I don’t think I’d want to be a boxer. It would hurt.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes it does hurt.”

I looked at her and memories flooded back of the first time I saw my father badly beaten.

“Hey, Princess,” he whispered, his voice barely a rasp. He was in a hospital bed, and Uncle Deacon used his status as reigning champ to bend the hospital rules so that I could go to my father’s bedside. I was seven years old.

“Oh, Daddy.” I rushed over to him and flung my head on his belly and hugged him. He winced.

“You probably shouldn’t hug Daddy right now,” Deacon said, coming over to me and patting my back.

I lifted my head and took a small step backward, tears blurring my vision. “You look terrible, Daddy.” His head was bandaged where he had sustained a deep gash over his left eye. He had a concussion. His face was swollen and bruised. It almost wasn’t recognizable as a human face in spots. Oxygen tubes were inserted in his nose, and he had two different IV lines flowing into his veins.