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.If I’d wanted to be average, I could have worked at an insurance agency or driven a truck.If you’re a professional fighter, average can get you killed.What I had was not a lack of passion.It was an abundance of human frailty.You want to tag me with that, go right ahead.Guilty.But don’t say I didn’t have heart.43I thought for sure I’d died.I kicked myself awake, and the moment was gone.I couldn’t even catch a little tendril of it, just a vague memory of feeling like I was going to perish, and my arms and legs kicking straight up in the bed and my heart pounding and my breathing heavy and Lainie asleep next to me, as if nothing had happened.In a way, that was true.I was in our house, our bed.But I was rattled pretty deep.I sat up and dropped my legs over the edge of the bed, and I tried to chase down the pieces of my dream, but it was no use.It was gone, a vision dispelled by my waking consciousness.The house had been silent when I arrived home, with Lainie well off to dreamland, and I’d wound down by rearranging her office—my office, now that this was as much my home as hers.It seemed a foolish errand.We had a baby on the way, and the space would soon become a nursery, but the activity filled the hour between the end of work and the beginning of sleep.My thoughts took root in a common lament, one that revisited me when I found myself at loose ends where Hugo was concerned.It was an unfair thought, not to mention an unreasonable one.It was a wish that Aurelia had found a way to live forever.The most maddening moments with Hugo had come in the void left by her passing.The addiction and the missed opportunities with Montrose and Qwai had left marks on us all, but Hugo’s perpetual inability to sustain himself had emerged only in the years she’d been gone.Maybe it was too much to put on her, that she’d have somehow kept him locked in and on task.But that’s where I was, and I knew it was the same for Frank.She had a way nobody else could manage with Hugo.I wouldn’t say he feared her so much as he feared disappointing her.That hadn’t been enough, of course.Disappointment made regular visitations, but when Aurelia was alive, the prospect of recovery seemed viable.Hugo never had a meaningful fight after the loss to Qwai in 2005.Frank knew that was the last shot at a title, and he got out, bought his bar, became an ex-manager.Squeaky offered to keep going with Hugo—all he had was the South Side gym his daddy used to run—but Hugo didn’t want that.In a real way, that night in Vegas severed everything for everybody.I never went on the road with Hugo again.Frank never saw another fight from the corner.Squeaky never worked with another world-class pro.But Hugo wasn’t done.He became his own manager, and he cut his own deals with the promoters who’d helped him make a name through the first ten years of his career.He hired mercenary corner men for the fights that followed.What he never figured out, or never seemed to acknowledge, is that he was on the wrong end of those deals.When Hugo was eighteen, nineteen years old, promoters served up opponents who would build his record.Not bums, necessarily—just decent fighters whose careers were on a downslope, who would look good under the W column on Hugo’s ledger.After Qwai, Hugo was the fodder, the good but spent fighter with credibility that any ascendant boxer needs to beat as he builds his own reputation.With this downgraded status came three losses, in succession, each distinctly devastating.Hugo got fed first to Julius McGinley, the best of a bad lot of US Olympic team fighters from the 2004 Games.What McGinley lacked in grace and discipline he made up for with a hard head and the most vicious right hand you’ll ever see.They fought in Reno, a doozy of a step down from a headlining Vegas show, and I listened in on a radio station’s webcast from my office cube in Billings, thankful I wasn’t having to witness it.Every time Hugo managed to get a punch off, McGinley would smother him on the ropes, then back off and unload that right hand.At some point, it no longer mattered whether the damned thing landed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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