Kid Dynamite slipped on his bag gloves. It was early March and the wind was blowing hard. It had been raining off and on. Three of the garage windows were broken and the roof leaked, but the floor was made of smooth wooden planks. As Kid Dynamite did some side twists to limber up, he looked through the window again and saw his mother finally get out of the Chevy and walk into the house where there were bigger mirrors. He wondered what she had been thinking looking in that rearview. “How did I go over today?” No doubt.

Kid Dynamite spent a lot of time in front of a mirror himself, but only to examine his body alignment and his punching form. He was himself a good-looking young man but a realigned nose, a little scar tissue beneath the brows, and a cauliflower ear were beginning to make any comparisons with the Greek gods unlikely. Poker-faced, he threw a jab at the double-ended bolo bag and gave it a quick head slip when it bounced back. Slipping punches was the most accomplished means a boxer could employ to protect his face but also the riskiest. Kid Dynamite tattooed the bag and continued slipping punches until he began to sweat. Then he started moving in and out on the bag—started using his legs. In another few moments he was gliding around the greasy floor planks, the air so cold he could see his breath. Shadowboxing, he worked his legs, moving about the floor in a bob-and-weave style, watching himself in variously positioned mirrors. His Sunday afternoon workouts belonged to him alone and he used them to cover contingencies that had been skipped over in his regular gymnasium workouts. The old man once told him, “There are at least a thousand things that can go wrong in a fight, and how many of them can you think of—fifty?” As with most fighters, Kid Dynamite’s things going wrong invariably involved the problem of fear. As the old man had said, “Control your fear and you are cooking with gas, baby.”