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confidence seemed boundless; I couldn’t really imagine a bad outcome. But the fight drew closer and closer, and I began to feel that maybe I was overtraining, or getting sick, and the fears would plague me like a swarm of gnats.
    I stayed at it, training hard, and the days crept by until suddenly I was a week away. When gearing up for a fight, the fighter takes two or three days off from training immediately before the event, to allow his now rapacious stamina to rebuild and his body to heal. There were always little things: blisters, cuts, bruises. For my last morning run, I went out with Johann, a bald Belgian fighter with a scorpion tattooed on his ribs (clearly scorpions were a popular motif with the muay Thai crowd), and we went farther than usual. We turned around after five miles and noticed that a dark and dirty monsoon had been sneaking up on us the whole time. Big drops began to sizzle and splatter on the pavement like bleeding flies. In Thailand, for a fighter, the rain is death. The added stress of cold water on a fighter’s already maxed-out immune system almost guarantees sickness, and a sick fighter in a fight has about a third of his normal stamina, sometimes less.
    The rain was coming down so hard it misted off the ground up past my knees—a real tropical deluge—and it stripped the humidity out of the air, leaving a chill. About halfway back, Johann stopped to relieve himself; I decided to push on through the red mud and deepening puddles. My socks turned crimson and my calves were coated. When I finally got back to the camp, Apidej was worried, warming up the van to come find me. He hustled me into the hot tub and we skipped training that morning. Luckily, I didn’t get sick.
    The next day, Anthony and I received a startling fax from the Japanese promoter of my fight. The other fighter was going to try to make 203 pounds but would probably be over; he was thirty-eight years old; and here was the kicker: He was the 1994 Western Osaka heavyweight karate champion. It was my first fight ever and I weighed 187 pounds. Sometimes a professional fighter gives up two or three pounds. Sixteen pounds would be considered suicide. A larger man hits harder with more weight behind his blows. He also just takes up more space; he can do so much more, he can control the ring. When I sparred with Johnny, who weighs about 140 pounds, we were both surprised; he had better technique and moved well, but I was so much bigger, I could dominate him. I stumbled back to my room, thinking, How many fights did my opponent have to fight to become a champion? Fifteen? Twenty? Full-contact karate wasn’t muay Thai, but it was definitely full contact.
    A German guy named Bippo, who at twenty-eight had spent a lot of time in Thailand studying muay Thai, had helped me during my training. When I told him about the fax, he looked worried and made no effort to hide it. “You should cancel the fight,” he said. “This is a setup.” He talked about ax-kicks and other bone-breaking karate techniques that I would be completely unprepared for and might walk into blindly. Mostly, though, he talked about experience. “In my first fight, I was so nervous I couldn’t punch,” he told me.
    I left Bippo and went upstairs to my room. I thought about his advice. I could quit. I could get out of this! I felt the lure of escape, of dodging responsibility. When I was in junior high school, I loathed the pressure of football games and had a few times faked illness to get out of practice, though I always went to the games. Here was an excuse, an escape hatch. I sat on my dingy bed and stared at the fax. I realized that the guy was trying to psych me out. It enraged me, the idea that this guy thought he could play mind games with me.
    I turned it over in my mind. I was a long way from junior high. I was a lot stronger, and I was a better fighter than I’d been an offensive tackle. I was never going to be here again, and I had invested so much. To not