He had thought about it in the car on the way home and in the dark of his apartment and for the 20 minutes sitting on the mat before Vance arrived. He had gone through the things he could say. He had considered his record, his upcoming fight, the opportunity, the stakes. He had thrown all of it out. I don't have a good answer for that, he said.
I just know that I've been in this sport for 12 years, and yesterday was the first time I had no idea what was happening. And I'd like to understand what that was. Vance was quiet for a while. The gym was still early morning sparse. Two fighters on bikes at the far end.
A trainer running footwork with a young kid near the cage. The sounds of the beginning of the day. Three days a week, Vance said finally. After your regular training, you bring water and you bring patience. I don't teach the way these gyms teach.
We start with how to stand. We don't move on until you can stand right. How long does standing take? Dawson asked. Vance looked at him.
The closest thing to a half smile crossed the lower part of his face, barely visible under the beard. Depends on you, Dawson nodded. All right, he said. He picked up his water bottle. He stood up.
He went to begin his regular training. Outside the windows of Desert Iron Mm. My Tucson was warming into the morning. The light was the flat clean light of the desert southwest in October. Hard and honest and without shadow.
A pair of Harleyies rumbled past on the street heading west. Their sound filling the air for a moment and then fading. Dawson did not hear them. He was already working. Vance did not start with strikes.
He did not start with grappling with positioning with any of the vocabulary that Dawson had spent 12 years learning. He started with standing three days a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday after Dawson had finished his regular training with Slade and the other fighters after the main session was over and most of the gym had cleared out. Dawson would go to the back mat and Vance would be there sitting on the bench, water bottle, sometimes the cane, sometimes not, depending on the day and the knee. He would stand up when Dawson arrived. He would walk to the center of the mat.
And for the first two weeks, they did nothing except stand. Vance would adjust Dawson's position, not with instruction at first, with his hands. A touch on the hip to shift weight. A hand on the shoulder to roll it back a/4 in. Two fingers on the chin to bring the head to a specific angle.
A foot sliding Dawson's left foot 4 in backward. He would make these adjustments in silence, study the result, make a small sound that was not quite approval, but was acknowledgment, and then do it again. By the end of the first session, Dawson's stance looked almost identical to what it had before. That was the unsettling part. It looked the same, but it felt completely different.
He could not have explained the difference to anyone. He could only feel it. Something in the base of his spine. Something in the distribution of his weight through his feet. Something that had to do with the angle of his hips and the relationship between his shoulders and his center of gravity that he had never paid attention to before because nobody had ever asked him to.
Vance said very little during these sessions. When he did speak, it was in short declarative sentences that told Dawson what a thing was without explaining why it was that. He seemed to believe or to operate as though he believed that understanding came from doing and not from being told. He had been taught this way. He had taught this way for 6 years when he was doing it professionally.
He had not changed the approach. Dawson found it difficult. Not the physical work. The physical work he understood. He was good at physical work.
What he found difficult was the patience requirement. He had been training for 12 years. He had a Vegas fight in 9 weeks. He was sitting on a mat adjusting his foot position by fractions of an inch while the clock ran. He did not say this to Vance.
He had decided after the morning on the mat in the conversation with Slate in the parking lot that he was going to commit to this the way he committed to everything else. He was going to be quiet and he was going to do the work and he was going to trust that the work was going somewhere. So he stood. He stood and had his position corrected and stood again and had it corrected again. He stood until the corrections stopped coming as often.
He stood until the adjustments became smaller. He stood until one evening in the third week when he stepped onto the mat and set his stance without thinking about it. And Vance looked at him for a moment and said, "There. " And that was it for that session. They went home. 3 days later, they moved to weight shift.
The rest of the gym had quietly taken notice of what was happening on the back mat. None of them said anything about it, at least not where Dawson could hear, but he could feel the change in the air when he and Vance were working. The way conversations near the back would dim slightly, the way a glance would come more often from fighters who were supposed to be focused on their own rounds. Slade watched without comment. He had adjusted Dawson's regular training to complement whatever Vance was teaching, though he had no direct knowledge of Vance's curriculum.
He worked from observation. He had spent 19 years developing the ability to see what was happening in a fighter's body and adjust his coaching accordingly. He could see the changes beginning to accumulate in Dawson's stance and movement. Small changes, the kind that do not announce themselves, but that a trained eye can find. He did not talk to Vance.
He nodded when their paths crossed in the gym. Vance nodded back. That was enough. In the third week of the sessions, Vance began talking more. Not much more, but more than before.
He would finish a correction and then stay still for a moment and say something that was not instruction exactly, not guidance, but more like thinking out loud in the presence of another person. The problem with sport fighting, Vance said one morning during a water break, is that it's a sport. The rules keep both men honest. The cage keeps both men in. The rounds keep both men available.
So the whole system is set up to produce an answer to the question, which of these two men is better in this context under these rules on this night? He drank. That's a fine question, but it's not the original question. What's the original question? Dawson asked.