That was completely false.
Someone else swore on their life that she had executed a suplex so violently that she literally threw him through the chain-link door of the cage.
That was definitively false.
One evening, a brave seventeen-year-old kid asked Derek directly while he was wiping down the mats with disinfectant. The teenager insisted that the older guys told him the entire legendary round lasted exactly two seconds.
Derek paused, holding the spray bottle, and corrected the kid with a perfectly straight face. "It was seven seconds."
The kid’s eyes went wide. "Seven? You actually timed it?"
"Unfortunately, the clock on the wall timed it for me," Derek said, going back to scrubbing the vinyl.
The kid laughed nervously. "So, what did she hit you with, Coach? An uppercut?"
"She didn't hit me with anything," Derek replied.
"What do you mean?"
"She didn't strike me. She threw me."
"What kind of throw?"
Derek smiled, a warm, nostalgic expression, and gave the exact same answer Claire Bennett had given him a lifetime ago. "Just a little bit of judo."
Usually, the kids would laugh at the understatement, shaking their heads in disbelief. But then, Derek would stop scrubbing the mat. He would stand up straight, gather the teenagers around him, and tell them the true moral of the story—the only part of the legend that actually mattered to him.
"Listen to me," Derek would say, his voice dropping into the serious, commanding register of a head coach. "I didn’t lose that round because she possessed some secret, ancient, unblockable technique. She was a master, yes. But that's not why I ended up flat on my back."
The room of young fighters would immediately settle down, hanging on his every word.
"I lost," Derek explained softly, pointing a finger at his own head, "because I looked at another human being standing across from me, and my ego decided that I already knew exactly how the story was going to end."
He would turn and point a sweeping finger across the entire crowded training floor.
"Do not ever do that," Derek commanded. "Not in this gym, and not out in the real world."
He looked at each of them in the eyes. "Don't do it with smaller training partners. Don't do it with the older guys who move a little slower. Don't do it with the nervous beginners walking in off the street. Don't do it with the women on the team. Don't do it with anyone."
He tapped his own faded black belt. "Because the color of a belt can tell you something about a person's dedication. A fight record on the internet can tell you something about their history. The size of their muscles, the scars on their face, their age, their speed, their weight—all of those physical data points can tell you *something*."
Derek paused, letting the silence build.
"But none of those things will ever tell you the whole story. And the absolute second you arrogantly convince yourself that they do, you stop seeing the actual human being standing right in front of you. And the universe has a very painful way of correcting that kind of blindness."
Derek Sloan had once, as a young, arrogant man, truly believed that the most agonizing, humiliating part of that Thursday evening was the physical act of being thrown by Claire Bennett in front of his friends and his coach.
Years later, a wiser, broken, and rebuilt man, he understood the truth differently.
The embarrassing part wasn't the fall. The embarrassing part was absolutely everything he believed about himself and the world in the twenty minutes before she ever laid a hand on him.
The throw itself had merely been the catalyst. It had just made those ugly, toxic beliefs utterly impossible to hide from anymore.
One arrogant step forward.
One perfectly timed turn of the hips.
Seven seconds on the clock.
That was all it took to permanently wipe the smirk from his face, shatter his ego into a thousand unrecoverable pieces, and drive the air from his lungs.
Learning exactly why it had to happen, however, took the rest of his life.