Dawson had read it three times. Then he put the phone face down on the nightstand and did not pick it up again until after the fight. He went through what Slade had given him for the last few days. Light movement in the morning, afternoon rest, pre-fight meal at 6:00. Weigh-in was already done yesterday morning, and he had come in clean at 170 without any drama.
He had eaten and rehydrated and his body felt close to right. He thought about Gunner Cross. He thought about the right hand and the left shoulder drop that preceded it. He thought about the clinch work and the dragon release pattern and the 22 fights worth of tape he had studied. He thought about what Vance had said about tape.
Stop analyzing him and just fight him. He fell asleep before he meant to and woke up 3 hours later in the dark. The hotel room still dark. Vegas outside the window doing what Vegas does. He lay still for a moment.
Then he got up and drank water and sat by the window and looked at the lights below. He thought about the back mat. He thought about standing. He thought about a 22-year-old man on a hillside in 1971 who had four choices and chose the hardest one and walked out. He went back to sleep.
The morning of the fight, he did something he had not planned to do. He called Pearl Weaver. Not Vance, Pearl. He did not entirely know why he called her rather than her father. He knew her number because she had given it to him the day she came to the gym a small rectangle of business card R and printed under her name a phone number a hospital name.
He had put it in his phone and thought he would never use it. He used it at 7:30 in the morning on fight day. She answered on the third ring sounding already awake and already in motion. The background of the call full of the sounds of a morning that had started earlier than his. Dawson Briggs, she said, not a question.
She had his number, too. I just wanted to say thank you, he said, for what you told me in the gym about your father. He paused. If you hadn't come in that day, I might not have gone back. Pearl was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, "He's going to be watching tonight. " "I know. Don't do it for that. Don't do it for him or for me or for anybody. Do it for what it is. " "I know," Dawson said. Another pause.
He told me last night Pearl said that you have a good foundation. She paused again and he could hear the slight catch in her voice that someone who was not listening for it would miss. He doesn't say that about many things or many people. Dawson held the phone. I know.
He said, "Good luck tonight," she said and ended the call. He sat with the phone in his hand for a moment, the Vegas hotel room around him, the sounds of the city beginning to build outside. Then he put the phone down and began his fight day. Fight day was the particular kind of slow that fight days always are when you have spent the week building toward them. The hours accumulated.
He moved through them. Morning movement, a light jog, shadow work, food, rest. Slate arriving at 4 to start the pre-fight routine, the hand wraps, the pad work, the loosening, the specific choreography of getting a body ready to perform at high intensity in a controlled environment. In the dressing room an hour out, Slade sat beside him on the bench while the cutman worked on his hands. "How are you feeling? " Slate asked.
Dawson thought about it honestly. "Quiet," he said. Slade looked at him. "Quiet. Not flat, not calm, exactly, just quiet. " Slate nodded slowly.
He had been a trainer for 19 years. He had heard fighters describe their pre-fight states in many ways. Quiet was not a word he heard often. He held it for a moment, thinking about what it meant. "That's good," he said.
"That's a good word. " One of the organizational representatives came through at some point to go through the standard pre-fight protocol. Glove check, mouthguard check. The rules run down that no one needs because everyone knows the rules, but that everyone goes through anyway because the protocol exists for a reason. The representative looked at Dawson and said, "You good. " Dawson said, "Yeah. " The representative had been doing this for 11 years. He had seen every version of pre-fight demeanor that existed.
He had seen fighters who were visibly scared and fighters who were performing not scared and fighters who were genuinely calm in the way that very good fighters sometimes are. He looked at Dawson and filed something away and went to check the other dressing room. Slade put the last wraps on Dawson's hands and taped them and looked at the result and nodded. He sat on the bench across from Dawson. "Talk me through the game plan one more time," Slate said.
Dawson looked at him. "Don't run," he said. "Move laterally. Make him load the right by giving him angles he wants. When he loads, go outside.
Don't fight him in the clinch unless I've neutralized his posting arm first. Rounds one and two are investment rounds. By three, I know the map. Slate nodded. And if he catches you early, get back on my stance.
Don't rush. The body knows what it knows. Slate looked at the phrase. He had not heard it before. But something in Dawson's face when he said it, the specific quality of conviction that was not performance and not bravado told him that it belonged to someone else and that it was real and that he should leave it alone.
All right, Slate said. They sat in the dressing room for a while and listened to the sound of the arena building. The walk to the cage was the specific tunnel of noise that arena fights generate. The crowd sound rising and building and the lights and the bubin and in the coordinated chaos of a production that has been organized to look like barely controlled energy. Dawson moved through it.
He could hear it. He was not inside it. He was somewhere behind his own eyes in a place that was very still. Gunner Cross came in from the other side of the arena. He was taller than Dawson, longer in the reach with the physique of a man who had been building himself for this kind of fight for his entire adult life.
He had his team around him, four of them, and they were performing the kind of focused intensity that teams perform before big fights, part genuine preparation in part theater. Cross caught Dawson's eye across the cage as they were receiving final instructions from the referee. He looked at Dawson the way a man looks at a thing he has already decided about. Dawson looked back. There was a moment, not hostile, not theatrical, just two men looking at each other, the way men look at each other when they are about to find out something they do not yet know.