Pound for Pound Read Online Free PDF Page A

force.
    Dan, as always with a new fighter, and just as often with an experienced fighter, began with the floor, with the feet, with balance. He would also make proper breathing part of the formula. Tim Pat learned that he could move
and
punch. He also learned that he didn’t have to move excessively, learned that a quarter of an inch could be enough to slip a punch. Boxing was hard to learn, regardless of age, but once the fighter finds ways to mine boxing’s secret treasures, the pain of learning is worth it, and good fighters keep panning for more—especially when that “click”travels up from the fist to the shoulders, and the opponent hits the canvas like a lead bar.
    Once Tim Pat developed stamina on the big bag, and learned the mechanics of punching, Dan bought a set of casters and attached them to an old chair. Dan or Earl would sit in the chair to be at Tim Pat’s level, using their feet to propel themselves around the hardwood floor while they called combinations and held the punch mitts for him. The boy developed a first-class jab and a cracking right, could go to the belly with it, or to the jaw. There wasn’t time to teach Tim Pat more moves. But he wouldn’t need them, not in a street fight, not if he stuck with what he was learning, and landed with power. On Saturday mornings, they took Tim Pat to a downtown gym, had him box with other beginners his own size so he would know what it was like to get popped. The little guys wore headgear and sixteen-ounce gloves that looked like leather balloons on them. Soon he and the Mexican kids became pals. They began calling Tim Pat “el Zorro Blanco,” the White Fox. His first bloody nose didn’t bother the White Fox one bit. Dan saw Brigid in his little face.
    Earl had Tim Pat going three-minute rounds. Little guys his age only go one minute in competition. Earl was as tickled with Tim Pat as if the kid was his own.
    Earl said, “We gone get respect, boy.”
    Dan and Earl put more pressure on the kid, tried to rattle him, popped him with the flat side of punch mitts upside his ear to see if noise would shake him, to see if he’d back down. Tim Pat kept coming.
    Tim Pat was in his fourth week of training. His grandfather had been driving him to school every day. Dan sat him down.
    “You’re lookin good,” Dan said, “but this deal with Tiger won’t be easy, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    “If he knocks you down somehow,” Dan told him, “you got to get up quick so he can’t kick you. Understand?”
    “Yes.”
    “If you knock him down, don’t kick him, but if he tries to get up, knock him down with your fists again before he’s all the way up, and keep doin it until he doesn’t want to get up.”
    “That’s dirty fightin, Grampa.”
    “It’s the way he’ll fight you if he gets the chance, that’s the way it is. Remember what I said about fightin by the rules of the aggressor?”
    “But this is against the rules of boxing that you taught me.”
    “Fightin Tiger is not about boxing, okay?”
    “Okay. But when are you going to stop driving me to school?”
    “When I think you’re ready.”
    A week later, Dan said, “Now you teach me.”
    “Huh?”
    “You explain the jab to me.”
    Tim Pat made a face. “Well, first, see, you gotta stand like this with your dukes up and your chin down behind your left shoulder. Then you push hard with your right foot, off the ball, like this, and let the jab go quick, not hard. At the same time that you move in off the back toe, you make a quarter turn to the left; that lines you up again and makes him miss.”
    “If you do it right.”
    “If I do it right.”
    Dan said, “What if the other guy’s moving, too?”
    “You got to move with him,” said Tim Pat. “You can’t always throw a perfect punch, but if you got your balance, you can always throw a good one.”
    “Attaboy,” said Dan. “What about the right hand?”
    Tim Pat described it and did it. Dan held up his right punch mitt. He said,