I had my hands in the pocket of the hoodie. They were shaking. That's on video too.
"I just answered the question."
"You knew what you were doing."
"I didn't."
And then he stepped in close, and I could smell mint gum, and he said it loud enough for the back of the circle.
"Kneel down. And apologize."
Somebody laughed. Not everybody. Maybe eleven people.
I looked at the floor. There is a full second on the video where I look at the floor and about forty people believed I was going to do it.
I wasn't looking at the floor because I'd broken. I was looking at the floor because Ruben Sifuentes spent six years teaching me that you look at the chest, never the eyes and never the hands, and I was making myself not do it.
I said, "Please move."
He said, "What?"
I said it again.
And then he laughed and dropped his shoulder into me — not a punch, a shove, the kind of thing that ends with a small girl on the floor and everybody laughing and a story that gets told for the rest of the year.
I want you to understand that I had about two-tenths of a second and that I did not decide anything.
Six years, five days a week, two hours a day.
I stepped off the line. That's all a slip is — you're not there anymore when the thing arrives.
And I put a left hook into his liver.
👉 Comment NORTH BROADWAY and I'll tell you about the second punch, which is the one that cost me eleven months. 🥊
PART 2
Here's what a body shot does, for anybody who's only seen it in movies.
There's no drama. He didn't fly backward. He made a sound like a door closing and folded straight down at the waist, and his knees hit the gym floor, and both his hands went to his side.
That punch was self-defense. I have been told that by two lawyers and a hearing officer and I believe it.
He initiated physical contact. I responded with proportional force to stop it. Every single frame of that is defensible and if I had walked away right then, this would be a three-paragraph story and nobody would ever have heard of me.
But he started to come back up.
He got a hand on the floor and pushed, and his face came up, and his face was not scared, it was furious, and I have replayed that half-second more times than I have replayed anything in my life.
And I hit him in the jaw.
Short right hand. Not full weight — I did pull it, and Ruben would tell you he could see I pulled it, and it does not matter even a little bit.
He went down flat.
The gym went completely silent. That part of the story is true and it is the only part everybody got right. Sixty people and you could hear the heater.
He was out for maybe two seconds. Not knocked cold — that dazed thing where a person's eyes are open and they're looking at the ceiling and there's nobody home yet.
I said, "I quit because of an injury. The rest of it didn't go anywhere."
I did not say it calmly and coolly like the videos make it sound. My voice was up about an octave and it cracked on the word injury.
Then I walked out.
Ms. Prather came out of the equipment room about nine seconds later.
I sat on the bench outside the counselor's office for forty minutes. Nobody came. I remember that specifically — nobody came for forty minutes, and in those forty minutes I understood exactly what I had done.
Here is what I had done.
I am a trained combat athlete. That is not a compliment, it is a legal category, and it changes everything about how the next eleven months went.