The Savage Sinner by Harlan Christopher

Author:Harlan, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

16

Damien

Today was a grappling day.

Don’t get it twisted—I’m a striker—I enjoy punching people in the face if they agree to get in the cage with me, but I’m no slouch on the ground. There are lots of people better than me, but I can hang with any of them. Lucas is back in Vegas shooting some press videos for his upcoming UFC debut. He’s really the training partner I want, especially as I get closer to my fight, but I’ll settle for the guys here today.

After training, I take a shower in the back and meet Matt in his office.

“You called Master Splinter?”

I love starting these conversations with Matt agitated. He makes this expression like he wants to reach over and grab us when we call him that, and it’s taking everything in his being to not do it.

He doesn’t even address the name, he just gets right down to business. “I wanted to game plan about your fight.”

“Isn’t game planning more your thing? I like to just go out there and fight—read my opponent, react to him, let it flow. I’m not into watching old fights over and over looking for some weird tendency he has that no one has caught yet — I like focusing on myself.”

After my little anti-game planning speech, Matt just looks at me like he’s the teacher and I’m that kid in class who just let something supremely stupid fly out of his mouth. It goes on for so long that I finally say something to break the silence.

“What? I take it you don’t like my analysis?”

“Analysis? Damien, I know it’s been a while since we’ve worked together in this capacity, but ‘letting it flow’ isn’t a game plan. Lots of guys let it flow right before they get knocked out. You need to know your opponent—this one in particular. You need to know what you’re going to do when he does what he’s going to do. That’s the only way to win.”

I respectfully disagree, but Matt is the boss. I’m not going to argue with him, but I’m still going to try and do things my way. It’s just the way I operate. I can listen to authority figures but only so much. I respect Matt, and that respect means that I’ll always give what he tells me a try, but at the end of the day—or the end of the training session—it’s me and me alone in that cage. It’s my brain that gets rattled around, my body taking the blows. I have to go with my gut.

“Yeah, okay, we’ll game plan. But I’ll leave that up to you. You can be the field general—I’ll be the soldier. How does that sound?”

“It sounds like you think game planning is bullshit.”

“I’m not going to lie to you Matt—I think that a little bit. Maybe ‘bullshit’ is the wrong word—I think sometimes this thing we do has evolved so far that we’ve forgotten that we’re fighting another man in our underwear in front of thousands of people.

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