Faking It(31)

They just had a different gear. Driven, obsessed, and maybe a little bit insane. Three things of which I was maybe, if not the exact opposite, at least very, very different.

Thud. After a particularly fierce blow landed by the impossibly hot Braden Dean, a fine sheet of sweat and blood was knocked off of one fighter’s face onto the people in the front row of the media section, including me, the intrepid spectator known as Alyssa Edwards. I closed her eyes and wiped my face with my forearm. What would it feel like to get hit so hard that this happened? What would it be like to get paid for it?

“Oh my God!” squealed my friend, Chantelle. Unlike me, Chantelle looked like there was nothing she would rather be doing. I think she was even jealous of the ring girls, professional hot chicks who pranced around the ring in between rounds, waving signs advertising the round number, which of course, no one ever noticed.

When the round ended Chantelle still hadn’t wiped the sweat off her face, like she was going to take it home as a stinky memento of a raucous evening. It was her first fight night and she was revving on all cylinders. “I can’t believe you got to grow up around this!”

Sometimes I couldn’t believe it either, but the fact that I was accustomed to the fighters and fighting didn’t make me less nervous. My father was a legendary MMA coach and his gym was highly sought after by pros and up and comers alike. I had always been the cute—or insufferable, depending on which fighter you asked—kid running errands, reading in the corner, emptying spit buckets and mopping (her first job in junior high). It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, or the best.

The legendary Mason Edwards kept his friends close, his enemies closer, and me closest of all.

“Can you tell what his tattoos are?” said Chantelle.

She was talking about Braden. The other guy was that MMA rarity: a fighter without a single visible tattoo. “No, not sure.” Braden had something on his right arm that came down into an ornate chest panel, and something on his right calf. But in the blur of the action there was no way to see the details.

I started biting my nails, a fact I was not aware of until Chantelle slapped my hand. I had told her to do this if she saw me chewing, but it still annoyed me. No one likes to get hit. Except the maniacs in front of us, of course.

“It’s going to fine,” said Chantelle. “You’re going to be great.”

Was it that obvious that I was nervous? Ugh. “I’ve just never interviewed any of these guys,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true. I ran a popular podcast about sports—over one hundred thousand downloads a month, thank you very much—High Impact. It wasn’t just about sports, though, which was part of the hook. I knew a lot more than I let on about athletics, but on the podcast I played a little dumber about it all. It took a “Naive girl enters the world of professional macho men angle.” I’d go in wide-eyed and innocent, make them feel good, and then jab them with the sort of open-ended questions they weren’t used to getting in interviews. It would put them so off guard in the moment that I’d often wind up with serious interview magic.

I would go anywhere for a story, as long as they would let me in. Sometimes even if they wouldn’t. Locker rooms, courtside, press conferences, and I had never been shy about ambushing players in public if I thought I could get a good sound bite out of it. A sprinter from a college in Vermont had yielded a particularly wonderful example. He had been accused of raping another student and had then been acquitted. The entirety of the female population on campus had risen against him, rallying under his bedroom window at night and staring up at it in silence. It had nearly driven him crazy.

As for my part in it all, I bribed his roommate to let me hide in the closet. When the sprinter came home and shut the door, I burst out with my microphone and said that if I could interview him openly and honestly, I would try to talk the mob outside into dispersing. It hadn’t worked out that way—the mob wasn’t about to be appeased, and I was proud of them for it—but I did get an amazing interview.

Barging in where you’re not supposed to be usually provokes people to great heights of quotableness.

“Oh, you’ve interviewed tons of them. You’re just telling yourself it’s different. All these guys are the same guy, way down deep. You’ve got to be a psycho to make it to the top of anything.”

Did that include me? “I just mean, none of the guys that my dad trained. Trains. It’s different.”

The referee signaled for the fighters to stand up as the next round began. Braden Dean, the impossibly hot guy who, yes, was being trained by my father, beat his chest and stomped the mat of the octagon like he had seen the biggest spider on earth. The other looked like he had broken mentally. He took his time getting off of his stool, which was never a good sign. Braden had certainly noticed his reluctance as well. Then they were back at it and I forgot that I was anxious about the interview and became nervous instead about the two men.

It was always a wonder to me when they were conscious after the first ten seconds. How in the world would they feel tomorrow? Even the winner was going to take upwards of a hundred shots to the head. And torso. And body. And and and...ouch. I pictured Braden waking up and mumbling, “Uh....did a train run over me?” Then he would reach over for me and gently stroke my hair, then...oh my God, focus, Alyssa.

“So your interview is right after the fight?” said Chantelle.