Suckerpunch: (2011) (2 page)

After three seconds I felt a tap on my right arm, the only way a guy in Porter’s position can say uncle. The ref was watching for it and yanked on my arm. I released the choke and Porter sagged to the canvas, then flopped onto his back while his cornermen rushed out with towels and water, the two things you need for births and ass kickings.

Everyone from my corner—so, Gil—came in and hugged me. He checked to make sure none of the blood was mine. I have lumps of scar tissue around my eyes and across my forehead tender enough to bust open from a vigorous frown.

“All clear,” he said.

We were both relieved. Surgery was somewhere down the line to get the scars cleaned out, but that would limit my training and keep me out of the cage for months.

The ref held my arm up in victory while the announcer bellowed my record,
“Twenty-four
and three!”

I looked around the place, a few thousand people in the arena attached to the casino, spilling beer on each other and pumping their fists under a dome of smoke, cheering and booing, their night made or ruined because I walked out while Porter limped.

I got paid the same either way.

Back in the locker room Gil got my gloves off and tilted water into my mouth until I could hold the bottle myself, my hands free of all the tape and gauze. I sat on the only training table, a solid thing bolted to the floor with clear packaging tape on the corners to keep the leather from cracking any further.

Gil’s built like a keg and usually has stubble over most of his face and head, the salt starting to overwhelm the pepper. He’s a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. His body shape and short arms and legs make him horrible to grapple with; there aren’t any angles to hook, and once he gets hold of you with his gator-bite grip, it’s only a matter of time before he bends something important the wrong way. He usually wears an expression of mild amusement during the whole thing, which doesn’t help.

Ten years older than me and eons wiser, he’s smart enough to train other MMA fighters instead of getting into the cage himself. He has me on the right track, much better than the downhill straightaway to a cliff I’d been on before he found me.

I’ve been fighting—in one sense of the word or another—pretty much my whole life. The day I took my first step, some jackass asked me to step outside. Trace the scars and dents on my head, you got yourself a pretty good topographical map of Trouble, USA. I moved from playground tussles to brutal street fights to illegal pit fighting before I graduated high school. The pit fighting exposed me to some people with money, and they needed people without it to make sure they kept it. So I did some bodyguard work at clubs and casinos, walking around giving people the stink eye and making paths when I wasn’t even old enough to get through the door. I added some side work here and there, delivering important things to dangerous people and keeping my mouth shut about it.

It didn’t take long for someone to try to make money off me. One of the VIPs I handled sponsored me in a sanctioned cage fight at a strip club, and I made him ten grand in thirty-seven seconds after I broke my opponent’s orbital bone with an elbow. After that I saw an opportunity to make some money doing something I was fairly good at. It wasn’t a tough decision; there’s no 401(k) plan in undocumented close-quarters bodyguard work, unless you count somebody paying for your funeral.

Gil found me when I was twenty-three, strutting around after my fifth cage fight with a two-and-three record. He said my grappling and jiu jitsu sucked and I ought to train with him. He was right, but I was an asshole. My blood was up from another quick KO, and I had some energy to get rid of. He offered a free lesson right then and there and choked me out inside a minute.

I went to his gym the next day and pretty much haven’t left since. Now here we were, still on the undercard at a straight-to-video event. I didn’t want the spotlight in my eyes, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it drop a little brightness into my pockets.

When they brought Porter back, I hopped off the table so they could sit him down. I gave him a half hug. “Good fight.”

“Yeah, right.” He held an ice pack to his forehead where I’d cut him. The bleeding had stopped, but he had a goose egg that looked like a third eye. “Did I even hit you once?”

“Sure,” I said.

“No,” one of his cornermen said.

I looked at him and he shrugged.

Porter groaned as he eased onto his back. “I think that’s it for me.”

“Give it a few days,” I said. “Don’t make any decisions in a locker room.”

“I was gonna call it quits for sure if I won, retire happy. But I think this is better proof I’m done.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I patted him on the shoulder and shook hands with his guys and walked away.

“That’s rough,” Gil said when we were through the open doorway into our prep space, cinder-block walls painted white with a drop ceiling, the yellow water stains on the panels looking like rotten fireworks. There was a droopy green couch along one wall in case you wanted to sit down before a fight or had to lie down after it. If you turned around fast enough, you could smell urine, but the source was elusive. Maybe they mixed it with the paint.

“He shouldn’t have taken the fight. Credit to him for not ducking me, but it was a bad matchup for him.” I sat down on the couch and felt the fight ease out of me. It was a good feeling, knowing the training was worth it and things had come together.

Gil started putting our warm-up gear in his giant duffel bag, which was starting to smell like a bum’s shoe. “I was glad to see you go for the choke at the end. Instead of pounding away until he gave up or you wore yourself out.”

I shrugged. “It works in just about every other area of my life.”

“Idiot,” Gil said.

There was a hubbub outside our room, and I leaned back into the couch to get a better view. Three guys in suits were talking to Porter, who was still on the training table. Porter smiled at something and nodded in my direction. The suit in the middle shook Porter’s hand and turned around.

I said, “Holy shit.”

Banzai Eddie Takanori walked into the room with the two other guys following close behind. One of them was texting with one hand and keeping his suit from touching the wall with the other. Eddie filled the room at five and a half feet of lean Japanese with his hands in the pockets of a black Armani suit, wraparound shades, a neon blue faux hawk, and a chip on his shoulder that caused an eclipse when he stood on his tippy toes. He was about thirty-five but looked five years younger. He was also the president of Warrior Incorporated, the biggest professional mixed martial arts organization in the Western Hemisphere.

The company had been around for ten years but didn’t elbow its way to the top of the food chain until Eddie took over five years ago. Each event got bigger than the previous one, more celebrities were shown in the crowds, and better sponsors showed up on the cage padding and canvas.

And here he was. Eddie in the prep room at this event was like Bill Gates stopping by a RadioShack clearance sale.

Gil stopped packing and stared with a focus mitt held in front of his belly. I considered standing up but didn’t want to cause offense by being tall.

Eddie’s attitude problem mostly came from getting blackballed by the Japanese fighting organizations because he’d grown up in Southern California and could only order Japanese cuisine if the menu had photographs. I say
mostly,
because I’m willing to bet he was an obnoxious prick long before the boys across the Pacific snubbed him.

Eddie looked around the room and stopped halfway through a sniff.

“That smell was already here,” I said.

Eddie pointed at me. “You’re Woodshed, right?”

“Right.”

“And I am?”

“Eddie Takanori,” I said. “Mr. Takanori.” I finally stood up and shook his hand.

“It’s cool, brah. You can call me Eddie. When I’m not around, you can call me Banzai.”

I acted like I’d never heard the word before.

“Great fight out there. Did Porter even hit you?”

It was loud enough for Porter to hear, and I saw him look up. I shrugged. “It all happened pretty fast.”

“Goddamn right it did,” Eddie said.

Porter smiled and shook his head and gave the finger to Eddie’s back.

“Hey, we were talking on the way in here, and we’ve all heard different stories on how you got that nickname. I heard you train in an actual woodshed, throwing logs around and chopping them with axes.”

I was stunned he’d heard anything about me at all. I wanted to tell him he was right, but he wasn’t. “I got it after one of my first fights. The guy was a bleeder and super pale, like baby powder pale, and by the end of the first round he looked like he’d been in a plane crash. I knocked him out in the second, and the way he landed the paramedics rushed in thinking the poor guy was dead. He was fine, looked like hell, but no permanent damage.”

Eddie and the suits seemed to love it. The one with the smartphone watched me past his eyebrows and kept texting.

“So after the fight, the announcer said I took the other guy out to the woodshed and beat him with it.”

“With what?” the texter asked.

“The woodshed. The actual structure.”

“That’s even better than what I heard.” Eddie looked at Gil. “Gil Hobbes, yeah?”

Gil said, “Yeah. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

They shook hands. Eddie said, “The honor’s mine. Anybody who can go down to Brazil and come back with a trophy gets my respect.”

The other two suits nodded.

“That was a while ago,” Gil said.

“Back before it was cool to know BJJ. That makes it even better. I hear you got quite a gym going here in town.”

I thought Gil was going to throw up, but I’d just never seen him flattered before. “Well, we’re coming along.”

Eddie cocked his head at me. “If your boy here is any indication, I’d say you’re doing something right.”

Gil sampled the air and raised an eyebrow at the ceiling stains. “Not right enough.”

“Well,” Eddie said, “let’s see what we can do about that. You guys hungry?”

I showered and got dressed while Gil stowed our stuff in the truck; then we followed Eddie and the suit brothers outside. All I had were my jeans and a warm-up fleece over a T-shirt, but Eddie said it didn’t matter. We stepped out of the mini event center and into the limo. Gil and I rode backward, facing the bench seat with Eddie in the middle.

He pointed at the suit on his left, the one with the smartphone fused to his mitt. “Guys, this is Benjamin Walsh. He’s the head of marketing for Warrior.”

Benjamin was tall and pale and had a dark receding hairline over a face that needed more sleep. I put him in his late thirties.

Eddie turned to his right. “And this guy you might not recognize, but I’m sure you’ve heard the name. Meet Nick MacYoung, Warrior’s official matchmaker. We call him Cupid because he makes the sexiest matchups in the business.”

We shook hands with Nick. I asked him, “Do I have to call you Cupid?”

“Please don’t.” He was close to fifty and had a graying ponytail and a gold canine tooth. His nose had been broken a few times and refused to behave, but he had a genuine smile. I imagined Nick would be a good guy to have a beer with. Benjamin, maybe a root canal, because you wouldn’t have to worry about conversation.

Gil said, “I bet your job is a lot harder than it seems.”

Nick shrugged. “I love going to work every day.”

“Yeah, but with the weight classes you can’t do David vs. Goliath anymore, so you have to keep coming up with contrasting styles, grudge matches, something to keep the interest up.”

“The fighters take care of all that. I just put them together, and the fireworks happen.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Eddie said. “Of course the fighters get the majority of the credit, but we put a lot of work into designing the right events at the right time.”