All the same people indoors. I'm taking it seriously, he said. Then maybe show them that. Maybe we make some adjustments that make the story look different. Dawson understood what adjustments meant.
It meant bringing in someone with a national profile to serve as lead trainer for the Vegas camp. It meant press photos. It meant posting the right sessions. It meant managing the narrative. It did not mean old man on a back mat adjusting foot position.
I'll think about it, Dawson said and ended the call. He went to Desert Iron for his regular session. He went through the session with Slade. He did his work with the particular focused attention that comes when a man is proving something to himself rather than to anyone watching. He sparred two rounds with Reed Carver and worked the mits with a junior trainer and ran the footwork patterns that Slate had laid out for the week.
All of it was good. All of it was the kind of good that his body had been built to do over 12 years of training and competition. He was a professional and the professionalism was real and it showed in every movement. And yet when he was doing it, part of him kept going back to the back mat. Part of him kept looking at the bench in the corner and thinking about the specific weight of what was sitting there.
Not the man exactly, but what the man represented, the door that had been open and the question of whether it was still open. He thought about Pearl Weaver's hands flat on the table. The specificity of what she had said, what you walked away from this week. He went through the session with Slade. He did his work.
When the regular session was over and it was time for the back mat, he walked past the bench where Vance was sitting. Vance looked up. Dawson kept walking past the mat to the front door. He picked up his bag and left. He told himself it was just for the night.
He drove home with his radio on something uptempo that he did not hear. He ate dinner without tasting it. He sat with the phone and looked at the clip again because apparently he had not learned anything from watching it the first three times. 240,000 views by midnight. The comments had the shape that comments on this kind of thing always have.
The people who were genuinely interested in the fight game and who had real things to say about preparation methods and training philosophy. The people who were not interested in the fight game and who were interested only in the performance of mockery. The people somewhere in between who were putting in their time on both sides of the argument without much investment in the outcome. He put the phone down. He sat in the kitchen.
He thought about something Vance had said in the second week of their sessions. They had been going through a weight shift drill, something slow and deliberate, and Dawson had made a mistake and corrected it immediately. And Vance had watched the correction and said without drama, most of the mistakes men make are not about the technique. They are about the moment before the technique. They are about what they decided the situation was before the situation showed them what it actually was.
He had not understood it entirely at the time. He understood it now. He had decided what the clip meant before it showed him what it actually was. He told himself he needed to think. By the third day, he had managed to construct a fairly convincing internal argument that what he was doing with Vance was supplementary at best and a distraction at worst.
And that with the Vegas fight 8 weeks out, he needed to be running his camp the way a serious professional runs a camp. He did not go to the backmat for 4 days. On the fifth day, a woman walked into desert iron that nobody had seen before. She was around 40, though she carried herself in the specific way of someone who has done hard physical work and has a comfort in their body that comes from that. She was tall, medium build, brown hair, pulled back, wearing scrubs under an open flannel.
She had the easy authority of someone who spends her professional life in situations that require calm under pressure. She asked for Dawson Briggs at the front desk. EMTT was behind the desk. He looked at her for a moment. I can tell him you're here.
Who are you? Pearl Weaver, she said. I'm Vance Holden's daughter. EMTT looked at her for one more moment. Then he called Dawson.
Dawson came from the locker room. He had just finished his morning session. He was still in his workout clothes towel over one shoulder. He looked at Pearl. She looked at him.
You don't know me, she said. My father doesn't know I'm here. He would not appreciate it if he did. So, I'm going to ask you to keep this between us. She paused.
Can we sit somewhere? They sat at the table near the front window. The gym noise was low at this hour. EMTT had found something that required his complete attention at the back of his desk. Pearl put her hands flat on the table.
She had the hands of someone who works with their hands strong and clean and competent. She looked at Dawson directly in the way of a person who has decided to be honest and is not going to back off from it. My father was diagnosed with prostate cancer 14 months ago. She said stage two. He's been in treatment.
The prognosis is good good odds with what they're doing, but he has good weeks and bad weeks, and the bad weeks are harder than he lets on. Dawson held still. He doesn't talk about it. Pearl said, "He doesn't talk about almost anything that matters to him. That is a characteristic of my father that I have spent 40 years learning to work with. " She paused.
But he talks about you, me. He came home after the first session, the one where he sparred you, and he said, and I am quoting this as accurately as I can because it was notable enough that I wrote it down. There's a kid at the gym who has the right engine. He just doesn't know what car he's supposed to be driving. She looked at Dawson.
That's a compliment from my father. That is a significant compliment. Dawson said nothing. He agreed to teach you, Pearl said. I don't know what you two have been doing in there, but I know that my father has been getting up before 6:00 on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings for the last month and going to that gym and coming home in better spirits than he has had since before the diagnosis.
The thing about my father is that he has been the person everyone else leaned on his entire life. Marines Club family, he does not lean. She stopped. Teaching you has given him something to push against, something forward at a time when a lot of what he is dealing with is about things ending. The gym was quiet enough that Dawson could hear the traffic on the street outside.