The Eadys owned a big old house in Virginia horse country about sixty miles west of DC. Standing on the grassy banks of his trout pond, Eady had handed Klay a fly rod and a Bible. “Hold the book tight in your armpit. Keep your movement ten and one. Wrist straight, hard stops.” Klay followed Eady’s instructions while Eady went on about tippets and dry flies. He was finally getting the hang of it when Eady deftly turned the conversation to a topic Klay knew well: old-school boxing—Jack Johnson, Harry Greb, Ali, the Hitman, Marvelous Marvin. All of it a fishing expedition, Klay realized later. Eady letting out line, biding his time, monitoring Klay’s response to each upstream twitch.

“You used to be pretty good in the ring yourself, they tell me,” Eady said casually as he packed up their gear. Ruth Eady was standing at the top of the hill, calling them to supper.

“Who tells you?” Klay asked.

“People.”

Klay shrugged. “I was South Broad good. Not North Broad good. There’s a big difference in Philadelphia.”

Klay told Eady what it had been like boxing as a teenager, working the bag in a rowhouse basement gym off Ninth Street in the Italian Market, the soppressata and capocollo drying on strings, swinging to the beat. Bap. Bap. Bap. Klay dreaming of winning those Golden Gloves. Getting told his feet were buckets of cement. “You no Primo Carnera,” the old Sicilian barked at him. “You gotta mean. You gotta quick. You gotta fast.” But the bodies stacking up said maybe his coach had it wrong. Maybe Klay was fast enough already. Maybe his feet moved so fast nobody could see them.

Then came the Fight.

His opponent was out of Joe Frazier’s Gym on North Broad. Bryant “Lump” Sanders had the look of a heavyweight and a sledgehammer right hand. Klay had fought bigger men who hit harder, but in the fourth round, when Klay wasn’t looking, Sanders’s brothers had climbed into the ring with him. Maybe his sister, too. How else to explain that many gloves landing on him at once. Klay learned the meaning of the word “speed” that night. The doctor inspecting Klay’s eye afterwards told him sure, he could keep fighting, but he was laughing. “We’ll call you Helen ‘the Keller’ Klay.”

“But you liked it?” Eady pressed, studying Klay’s eyes.

Klay sensed he was entering a life moment. Here he was, a Philadelphia mortician’s kid, standing in a Virginia country mansion, talking to the editor in chief of The Sovereign, a man who rarely spoke to writers directly and never invited them to his home. It all felt so unreal, so completely foreign, he decided to act against his instincts. He told Eady the truth. He didn’t like boxing; he loved it. “No better feeling in the world than dropping a guy with a clean shot.”