Vance looked at it for a long moment. Weights too far forward, he said. Dawson adjusted. There, Vance said. That was all they began.
The next six weeks were different from the first four. Vance began teaching combinations, not striking combinations, not in the way Dawson understood combinations, movement combinations, sequences of position and angle and weight transfer that produced outcomes. Takedowns control separations without requiring the inputs of strength or speed that those outcomes normally required. He taught them in pieces and each piece had to be correct before the next one was added. And correct meant something more precise than Dawson had encountered before.
It meant the mechanics were right at a level below conscious control, below the kind of right that requires you to think about it. Dawson made mistakes. He made the same mistakes multiple times. Vance was not impatient about the repetition, but he was exact about the standard, and the standard did not move. The thing was correct or it was not, and if it was not, they did it again.
In the fifth week, Vance introduced resistance, not hard resistance. He would place a hand, a forearm, a shoulder in Dawson's path and let Dawson work against the obstacle. The obstacle was consistent, and the obstacle was honest. And it told Dawson things about his mechanics that open air drilling could not tell him where he was generating force correctly and where he was compensating with effort for something that should have been structure. Dawson found that he was compensating in more places than he had realized.
He worked on not compensating. Outside the backmat, his regular training continued. He sparred three times a week. He did conditioning six days a week. He worked with Slade on the specific defensive adjustments needed for Gunner Cross's right hand and his clinch game.
He watched tape for two hours every other evening. He ran his camp the way a professional runs a camp in the eight weeks before a major fight. But the three mornings on the back mat with Vance were the part of the day he thought about most. It was not the techniques exactly. It was something the techniques were pointing toward.
Something about the relationship between stillness and force. Something about the difference between reacting and being ready. Something about how a body that is organized correctly does not need to hurry because it is already in the right place. He thought about this one morning in the fifth week of the revised sessions during a rest break sitting on the mat while Vance sat on the bench. Can I ask you something?
He said. Vance looked up. What is this? What do you call it? What system is this?
Vance considered for a moment. Doesn't have a name I use, he said. Pieces of things that work, things I was taught, things I figured out. He paused. The name would matter to someone who needed to sell it.
I was never selling it. How long did it take you to put it together? Vance was quiet. I put it together the first time in about 45 seconds, he said. On a hillside when I was 22, he picked up the water bottle.
The rest of the years were just understanding what I'd done. Dawson did not ask about the hillside. He understood that the door was closed and that the closed door was not an invitation. In the sixth week, EMTT stayed late one evening after the gym closed and sat with Vance while Dawson finished cooling down. The three of them sat on the benches in the back corner.
The lights dimmed to the overnight setting the gym quiet and large around them. EMTT looked at Dawson. You know what the last person was that Vance trained one-on-one? Dawson did not. Neither do I, Emtt said.
I asked him. He said it was classified. He smiled just a little. I think that was a joke, but with Vance, you can never entirely tell. Vance said nothing.
He was working on the knee brace. 41 years in Iron Piston, EMTT said to no one in particular. Not a lot of guys in that life end up sitting on a back mat teaching a welterweight how to stand. I want you to think about what that means. Dawson looked at Vance.
Why? He said, not in a bad way. I just mean, why me? Why start now? Vance finished with the brace.
He sat with the cane across his knees. He was quiet for a moment. "I watched you for two weeks before you came over to the bench," he said. "Before you pointed across the gym, I watched you train. The way you hit the bag, the way you move, the way you breathe at the end of a hard round," he paused.
"There is a particular quality in certain fighters. It's not the talent. You can see the talent in a 100 fighters. It's something underneath the talent, a kind of seriousness about the whole enterprise, like the fighting matters to them, not just as a thing they're good at, but as a thing they are. He looked at Dawson.
You have that. You had it even when you were walking across the gym being an idiot. Dawson almost smiled. And I'm 68 years old, Vance said simply. The window for doing this kind of thing doesn't stay open forever.
At some point, you look at what you know, and you think about whether anyone else should know it before you're gone. And either there's someone sitting in the gym who has the right foundation or there isn't. He stood up. You were sitting in the gym. He walked out.
EMTT sat for a moment after the door closed. Then he looked at Dawson. Go home, he said. Sleep. You've got a week and a half.
Do your work and then get on the plane and go do what you do. Dawson nodded. He stood. He picked up his bag. At the door, he stopped.