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hush passed over us.
    The fight was about to begin.
    Up above the ring, a loud bell rang a single time. The referee dropped his hand down in a chopping motion, as if swinging a flag. The fighters both leapt up, bouncing on the balls of their feet.
    The fight was on.

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    As the crowd cheered, both men began slinking into motion, slowly stepping to the side to circle around each other in the ring. Neither man advanced forward, towards the center; they were both wary, neither willing to open up their guard and risk an early knock-out. Instead, they seemed to be almost doing a dance in which they were both equal partners, moving around in circles and watching like hawks for any opening in their opponent's armor.
    This continued for at least a couple minutes, as the crowd cheered and booed and called out indecipherable cries. Around me, I could feel the surge of anticipation in the upper crust. They wanted to see action, attack, pure vicious energy.
    Finally, Lamar was the first one to make a move. He slowly took a half-step forward into the center of the ring, and then burst into a lightning-fast lunge. I gasped, feeling my heart leap up into my throat as his gloved fists jabbed out. The blows were so fast, I swore that they blurred.
    But as fast as the man was in his attack, Rhodes was faster - or perhaps he was waiting, knowing that this was coming.
    Rhode dodged lightly aside, and Lamar's fast attacks merely struck at the empty air. And that lunge, that vicious attack, also meant that the man was compromising his defense. And Rhodes was quick to capitalize on that opening.
    As Rhodes dodged off to one side, his own fists, hovering in front of his chest, went jabbing out. He wasn't putting the full weight of his body behind the blows, and they were offset by his moving away, getting out of the way of Lamar's swings first and foremost. But Rhodes still had at least two hundred pounds of mass, and that wasn't anything to write off.
    His first punch missed, but Rhodes' second punch connected on Lamar's lower ribs, swinging down under his guard to land on the man's black chest. Again, it wasn't the most powerful attack, but I still saw Lamar briefly wince, and he cut off his own flurry of punches to dodge out of the way. Clearly, he didn't want to experience that again.
    It wasn't a knockout blow by any means, but the crowd roared, and it was unmistakable. Rhodes had drawn first blood. He had landed the first blow, and this match was now his to either win or lose.
    The fight continued, and we watched with bated breath. It soon settled into a rhythm; the two fighters would begin slowly, dancing around each other and searching for an opening. At some point, one of the two fighters would see a chance, and he would go lunging forward, fists up and ready to strike. Sometimes he would connect, sometimes he would miss, and sometimes he wouldn't be quite fast enough to dodge the counter-attack that was almost always right on his heels.
    Both of the fighters got in blows, and they were both beginning to tire. Even though they both kept up their fronts of stone faces and eagle-eyed glares, I could see that neither was quite as fast, as agile, as they had been at the beginning. Both men were seeking to tire out the other.
    It was a battle of attrition - the only question was who would tire first.
    I might be injecting my own bias, but I thought that Rhodes was still winning, if narrowly. He had gotten a few more hits in on Lamar, and especially in the last couple exchanges, he seemed to be a little faster to dodge than the other man was with his blows. On the other hand, he was panting hard - and one hit, on his upper thigh, seemed to be causing him a great deal of pain. He wasn't quite limping, but he definitely was favoring his other leg. I was new to this whole boxing thing, but I was certain that this injury could spell trouble.
    Lamar knew it too. The other man's eyes would occasionally dip down to that leg, and he