That is the problem I am describing. Eddie let another combination land. I have watched the clip maybe ninety times, Blake. Not the seven seconds. Everybody watches the seven seconds. I watch the two seconds before them. I watch her feet when she is supposedly just standing there letting you grandstand. I watch where her weight is when you reach. Son, that throw was not a fluke and it was not a trick and it was not an old woman getting lucky with a champion's collar. That was the end of a technique she has probably done fifty thousand times, and the reason it looked like nothing is that fifty thousand repetitions is exactly what nothing looks like when a master does it. You go in Saturday planning to finish early, you will give her your momentum gift wrapped. She does not need to be faster than you. She needs you to be exactly as fast as you are proud of being, in exactly the direction she has already chosen.
The bag swung. Blake caught it against his chest and stood breathing, his forehead against the leather, and for a moment Eddie saw what the cameras never stayed long enough to see, which was fear in its working clothes, not fear of a woman or of losing, but fear of the arithmetic failing, of the story he had told about himself since he was seventeen turning out to have a second page.
So what do I do, he said, at last, to the bag.
You fight her like she is what she is, Eddie said. A former national judoka with nothing to prove and all night to prove it. You keep your elbows and your opinions to yourself. You do not reach. You do not rush the first exchange to feed a headline. And if Saturday takes the whole time on the clock, then it takes the whole time on the clock, and you will survive the indignity of a long evening, I promise you, because the alternative is a short one. He pushed off the post and picked up Blake's towel and held it out. Also you will apologize for laughing. Not on camera. To her. Before or after, I do not care, that is between you and your conscience. But a man who cannot say a small true thing in a corridor will not do the big true things on a mat when it costs him.
Blake took the towel. He did not answer, and Eddie, who had known him since he was nineteen and all appetite, accepted the silence for what it was, which was not refusal. It was a young man carrying a sentence around the building looking for the right door to say it through.
Training, in that final week, was a quiet country compared with the noise around it, and Dee guarded its borders jealously. She trained at dawn, before the cameras learned to come early, in the hall with the high windows grey and then gold, and she trained the way she had trained all winter, which was to say without witnesses and without music and without any of the theatre that younger fighters needed to feel the work counting. Jenna came at six each morning with two coffees and her own bruises from the undercard preparations and her own opinions, which she delivered while taping her wrists. Jenna was twenty six, a firefighter's daughter, a convert from wrestling who had found in judo the first sport that rewarded her stubbornness more than her reach, and she had become, over the season, the only person besides Yusuf whose corrections Dee accepted without first arguing in her head.
You are dropping your left shoulder in the second entry, Jenna said on Friday, demonstrating with the merciless accuracy of the young. Not much. A centimetre. Against anyone else it is nothing. Against him, it is the whole conversation.
Show me, Dee said, and Jenna showed her, and they drilled the entry forty times at half speed and forty more at the speed of an ordinary day, and Dee's shoulder learned, and her body, which was forty eight years old and had opinions of its own about mornings, filed its complaints and did the work anyway. Afterwards they sat on the mat with their backs against the wall and shared the second coffee, which had gone the way of all second coffees, and Jenna said, without looking at her, that the night staff from the east side facility had sent a card. It was in Dee's locker. Fourteen signatures. Most of the women had written the same sentence in different handwriting, and Jenna would not tell her what it was, because, she said, you will cry and then you will say you are not crying and we do not have time in this schedule for your lying.