BEFORE PART I
A WAITING room in all but name, what the room waits for on fight night is context. That, and a boxer.
It is the boxer, in fact, who will provide the room with both its context and its story. It is they, the boxer, who will, in time, recall this place, this changing room, as either the scene of triumph or, conversely, tragedy. As in a waiting room, its context will soon be delivered by the very thing for which the boxer waits: their result. Either it’s the all-clear and therefore, when leaving the room, the air outside will have never smelled better, or it is something far worse. Something terminal. Something that will ensure the details of this room remain a blur and the time spent inside it will be difficult to remember, no matter how hard they try.
At 8.20pm, nobody knows whether to expect triumph or tragedy, least of all George Groves, the boxer. Entering the room with all the calm and certainty of a conqueror, the first person he meets is Howard Foster, a referee who means one thing to Groves now but will come to mean something else to him later. Indeed, not unlike the room itself, Foster, dressed for the occasion, is for now a face and voice without context. He merely represents authority; a man whose words must be obeyed.
“Don’t hit him while he’s down,” Foster says, “go to the furthest neutral corner and stay there. If you come out of that corner, I’ll stop the count, okay? When you’re in close, watch your head. No holding. When I say break, you break. Again, if you’re holding and I tell you to stop, that’s when you stop holding. You can work inside or you can step back; whatever you want to do. No hitting the back of the head, keep your punches up, have a good fight, and good luck.”
After that, Foster shakes the boxer’s hand and heads for the door. His exit, however, is waylaid by Paddy Fitzpatrick, Groves’ trainer, who lurks nearby. “I know yer in a hurry, so I’ll keep it brief,” the Irishman says. “I jus’ want to remind you o’ somethin’ Froch actually said…”
“Look –” interrupts Foster, eyes rolling, exasperated.
“No, please, listen to me. If he does get caught accidentally, he said he will deliberately foul back.”
“I’ve spoken to Carl just as I’ve spoken to George. No fouls. A nice, clean fight – that’s all I want.”
“I understand. An’ the other thing is, please let dem work inside, jus’ as you said.”
“Absolutely,” says Foster, offering his hand to Fitzpatrick before escaping.
With authority removed from the room, the boxer and trainer now begin to rearrange it, doing so with all the paranoia of a panopticon prisoner. They start by pushing chairs and a sofa towards the wall, creating a greater floor space on which to nervously pace, as well as reapply to the same wall a picture of Groves knocking out Noé González Alcoba. (That had been hung up earlier in order for Groves to see it upon entering the changing room, yet had during the course of the afternoon fallen down.)
“When do you want to bandage?” Fitzpatrick asks.
“About an hour before,” Groves says, “so that we’re finished by 9.30.”
“Okay, so we’ll start at, say, 10past nine.”
The Board inspector, the one remaining authority figure in the room, then makes his presence known. “Right,” he says, “you want to do it at 10 past nine. That’s fine. So if I get here for five past nine…”
“No,” says Fitzpatrick, “you can get ‘ere for 10 past nine.”
“Well, five minutes won’t make much difference.”
“I’m jus’ sayin’, we’ve already made it clear dat we want dis place empty for as long as possible. We don’t want people comin’ in an’ out. So if you come in wit’ de guy at 10 past nine, it’s only one entrance rather than two. If you can let someone from de Froch camp know dat the time is 10 past nine we’ll send someone over from our camp to watch dem do der thing.”
“No problem whatsoever,” says the inspector.
“Great. Thank you. We’ll let you back in at 10 past nine.”
Groves, listening but trying not to care, moves towards a long table and begins to unload a sports bag. Soon finding their way out of it and on to the table is a large, round clock, something the boxer brings with him to every fight, an espresso shot covered by a tin foil lid, as well as his laptop and a Beats
