Mick Shaw's awakening

Fighter profile of Kim Shaw by Alika Webb

Dear martial arts fans, my name is Mick Shaw and I think I have a story worth telling, so I hope you'll like it.

As a kid I didn't really do anything to be honest, I just hung around most of the time. I studied enough not to fail and I didn't commit myself to anything. I was basically bored for years doing absolutely nothing, until that day. Me and my friends were on our way home after school when we saw a poster of a boxing event the next day. We bought ourselves some tickets as a joke, we really just wanted to hang around, maybe ridicule some of the boxers and just waste another night like always.

It was a small boxing event featuring local fighters nobody's heard of with only twenty people or so in attendance. Most of the fights were really bad, pretty much all the fighters looked like complete amateurs. There was one guy who was basically just slapping his opponent until he got knocked out. When the main event started I had no hopes whatsoever that I was going to get my money's worth.

The main event was between a  bodybuilder who had a stupid grin on his face before the fight, just another bully who wanted to hurt people and get paid to do it and a bulky kid who really looked out of place. The first round was as I expected, the kid just got bullied the entire round. The kid managed to avoid any real damage by covering up and slipping out of the way when the bodybuilder went for a power punch, but he didn't show any offense whatsoever.

In between rounds one of the corner men started giving the kid a speech, surely to lit a fire under his ass. It's not that the corner man spoke loudly, but the arena was almost empty so basically everyone heard it. I didn't really care, the kid was going to get beaten up no matter what, the way things looked he had no chance to win this fight anyway.  I don't remember everything he said but I do remember this part really well: "I don't care whether you win or lose right now, but if you never try you'll never amount to anything. I can give you the tools you need but it's up to you to do something with them."

The kid changed after that speech, he still got beat up most of the second round but he started throwing some offense of his own and he continued to avoid any real damage . When the second round ended, the corner men of the bully were really vocal about the inability of the bully to finish his opponent, while on the side of the ring the corner men didn't say anything to the kid who started to look more confident.

The bully stormed out of his corner when round three started, looking for the finish like his corner men told him to do. But after about twenty seconds of hitting nothing but air, he ate a short  left hook. It happened so fast, I barely realized that it hit but the damage was clear: the bully's nose was smashed and started bleeding really badly. The referee called for a doctor and during the short break I heard a guy in the crow talking to his friend that the bully's offensive was pretty repetitive. When the fight continued I began to notice that the bully's offense was indeed really repetitive and the kid kept dodging everything he threw. The kid kept looking for counter opportunities and halfway in the third round he managed to hurt the bully with a wicked uppercut that made him stagger backwards into the ropes. The crowd came alive after that uppercut, even I who never had any interest in anything whatsoever stood up and started shouting excitingly, still in disbelief of what was happening in front of me. The kid rushed to his wounded opponent, the bully covered up his head immediately but the kid smelled blood and launched a barrage of punches to the body of his opponent until he was gasping for air. The bully's hands dropped and the kid finished him off with a brutal right hook that planted the bully face first on the canvas.

The bell rung, the kid's corner men came into the ring and hoisted him up on their shoulders. The kid starting crying from happiness, something I thought would lead to my friends mocking him but they didn't. The kid became a star to everyone in that arena. After years of sleeping my life away I finally awoke. After that fight, I knew I wanted to become a fighter too.

Article views: 118
» Donate to this author