10/06/2006: "A New Beating I Have Taken"

Hi All,

Well, it’s all over. Thank the good Lord for that.

What can I say? If you were there, you saw it. If you’re a friend of mine, I’m sure it triggered grisly memories of distant days when I got my ass handed to me on a semi-regular basis. For myself, it was a grisly present-tense flashback to those beatings of yore.

To sample some of my other “beating” stories, please refer to:

www.penguinblogs.ca/davidson/archives/00000018.html
www.penguinblogs.ca/davidson/archives/00000024.html

But really, who wants to read about those hoary old fights, those cobwebby shellackings I took many moons ago? No, if you are here I suspect you want to hear a little bit about the most recent, and to this date most sustained, beating I have absorbed.

I will do my best, though the wounds are still fresh and my memory hazy.

Pre-Fight:

I’m feeling good, feeling real good. Head down to Florida Jack’s with my father and brother, step on the scale, and see I weigh 180. Not good, since last I heard my opponent weighed 195, and we need a 9lb gap, max, to have a sanctioned amateur bout. Michael “Coffin Nail” Knox’s trainer told me to go out and eat—he’s a good enough guy, but he wears one of those earpiece cell-phone thingies that make people look like they’re taking commands from the Mother Ship. So we head down to this Mongolian Barbecue place and I stuff myself full of oxtail and squid and whatever else I can shovel down my gullet, come back, step on the scale—187lbs.

What the hell? I didn’t eat 7 pounds of oxtail.

Mike weighs in at 187, too—which surprises me, as, looking at our physiques, I don’t quite see how that’s possible. He’s all muscle. I am composed of a few tenacious threads of muscle connected by cartilage and Dentyne chewing gum. I must have heavy bones. Or a heart full of feeling (as everyone knows, feelings weigh up to ten pounds, the heaviest feeling being nameless dread, which I had in abundance yesterday).

People trickled in. A lot of buddies, my editor and agent, which was great. Shouts out to all of you; you know who you are. Also met a lot of new people, which was wonderful as well. My brother Graham was tasked with the MC duties and, as always, did a bang-up job. Thank-you, brother. In the end, a whole lot of people—I think the technical term is “a fuckwad”—showed up. I heard anywhere from 75 to 200 people were turned away at the door due to fire code regs. So, my thanks to everyone for the great turnout.

DIESEL DAVID LEONARD vs. STEVE “GHOST DOG” MYERS:

This was the curtain-jerker match. What a great kick-off to the festivities. Both fighters looked mean, full of piss and vinegar. A few minutes before the match, I spied Diesel David biting the head off a pigeon: he was so incensed, so full of fire, it was that pigeon’s pleasure to die at his hands. I saw Ghost Dog pound a ten-penny nail through his own scrotal sac to “summon the spirits of my warrior ancestors,”—or so he said before this aggressive act of self-mutilation.

They brawled like pirates. We’re talking intensity in ten cities. We’re talking men who ate hot lead and pissed carbonite rods. We’re talking—

No, seriously, this was a great fight. I was sort of thinking they might have worked out a pact beforehand, take it easy, but nooooo! They chucked mucho knuckles. David, the shorter pugilist, was a pocket dynamo: his fists cycled like the pistons of a well-oiled engine, more than a few finding his opponent’s face. Ghost Dog fought nobly, and probably landed the best shot of the night, a vicious overhand left that took the starch out of Diesel’s suspenders for a few moments. Diesel retaliated, though, bringing the thunder in copious abundance; afterwards I saw he’d blackened Steve’s eye a bit. A fine scrap, and the crowd was totally into it.

My thanks to everyone at Penguin publicity, especially my own “evil genius” Steve Myers, for putting together such a great show. And it means a lot that you were willing to step into the ring yourself, Steve. I appreciated it.

INTERVIEW:

God bless James Grainger, who put together a fine interview, but the crowd wasn’t there to hear me speak, I was too nervous to say anything that might be useful, and this was mercifully short.

COFFIN NAIL vs THE CRIPPLER:

I’m trying to figure out when, precisely, I realized I was going to get my ass handed to me.

Maybe it was when Mike and I stripped down for the weigh-in and I saw his body basically resembled an anatomy chart—just muscle and tendon and that’s about it. This conflicted in a fairly alarming way with my own.

Maybe it was when we were waiting downstairs before heading up to the ring and he was wearing a kilt and someone made note of this and he said, “When you’re going into war, you better be wearing your battle outfit.” This conflicted in a fairly alarming way with my frayed boxing trunks and poorly-fitting jock support and also with my own outlook, which was more like, “When you’re trying to sell a few books, you better be willing to take a fucking beat-down.”

Maybe it was when Mike stepped into the ring and slammed his gloves together with alacrity, as though he envisioned my head was between them, getting cracked like a walnut. Maybe it was when, a half-beat later, my brother saw me awaiting my entrance and winked—a wink that a spectator might give a condemned man at the gallows: “Hey, man, it’s gonna be okay!”

Maybe it was when that first punch landed and it felt like the bones of my face came apart in about eight different sections and for a moment my unmoored brain hovered in a polar whiteness before they grudgingly decided to knit together.

(I guessed I’ve now passed from realization to the actual beating)

Maybe it was when I looked down groggily and saw blood all over my gloves and on the shoulder of Mike’s shirt and knew, without question, it was all mine.

Maybe it was when I stumbled to my stool at the end of round one, slumped down, and said to myself, Well, you lasted one round at least. My brain felt about two sizes too big for my skull and my coach, a guy I’d met an hour ago, told me to try combinations I had no idea how to do—even though they were fairly simple combos. I remember my gumshield was stuck to my lips with stiff white saliva and when I spat it out the skin of my lips tore.

Maybe it was when, sometime in the second round, I realized there seemed to be no way I could even HIT Knox, even though he was a decent-sized target, but my equilibrium was so screwed I couldn’t really balance and I found myself tied up, my chin on his shoulder, and I said—actually vocalized, not in my head—“Holy fuck,” shocked and a little terrified that, for the first time in my life, my body didn’t seem willing to obey the simple directives of my mind.

Maybe it was when my Dad came up to me just after the fight had ended, hugged me, and I saw the tears in his eyes. Let me tell you, that just about broke my heart. I can’t imagine it was easy, him sitting through that.

There’s more, I guess, but to be honest it’s still pretty recent and raw and my head feels like it’s full of rocks but I wanted to get a little something up regardless.

I’m glad it’s over. My coach in Iowa told me, back when I started training, that, "There doesn't seem much chance of you winning this, but maybe we can help you lose with some dignity." Hopefully I pulled that off. And certainly this was all of my doing—I agreed to the match, posted that provocative blog entry that led to a rash of challenges—and in a lot of ways I received my just deserts.

And while I’m not going to explain my motivations for why I did it all—the people who know me, I think, get a sense of why I do what I do in regards to my writing, and for those who don’t know me...well, it’s not to say I don’t care what you think, but simply to say that you are entitled, obviously, to believe whatever you want on that front. I sometimes feel that I expend far too much energy concerning myself with the perceptions of strangers. If you’re my friend, if you know me, yes, of course it matters. Otherwise, not so much.

So, no motivations, but simply a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who came out, who supported Michael and I, David and Steve. I hope we put on a decent show for you all.

There will be a video of the night coming up sometime soon—keep checking www.thefighter.ca for all the grisly video footage.

Again, my thanks to everyone who came out, to Steve and David, to my brother, everyone else, and to Mike Knox. I got out-worked, out-trained, and out-boxed, so my hat’s off to him.

All best, Craig.