Too bad I didn’t hear about the lawyer deal until we was already into the far turn with Coyle. By the time I did, I already knew Kenny was too big for his britches, and that he was a liar no different from my cousin Royal. If it was four o’clock, old Royal’d say it was four-thirty. Couldn’t help himself.
Coyle’s problem as a fighter was he’d not been trained right, but he was smart enough to know it. His other trainers depended on his reach and power, and that he could take a shot. The problem with that is that you end up fighting with your face. What I worked on with him was the angles of the game, distance, and how to get in and out of range with the least amount of work. The big fellows got to be careful not to waste gas. But where I started Coyle first was with the bitch. See, the bitch is what I call the jab, that’s the one’ll get a crowd up and cheering, you do it pretty. Bing! Bing! Man, there ain’t nothing like the bitch. And Coyle took to it good, him being fed up with getting hit. With the bitch, you automatic got angles. You got the angle, you got the opening. Bang! Everything comes off the bitch. I got him to moving on the balls of his feet, and soon he was coming off that right toe behind the bitch like he was a great white going for a seal pup. Whooom!
See, when you got the bitch working for you is when you got the other guy blinking, and on his heels going backward, and you can knock a man down with the bitch, even knock him out if you can throw a one-two-one combination right. Coyle picking up the bitch like he did is what got me to think serious on him, ’specially when I saw how hard he worked day in, day out. On time every day, nary a balk. Dee-Cee and me both started counting fun-tickets in our sleep but both of us agreed to pass on the ten-round Mississippi fight until I could get Coyle’s feet right.
Moving with Coyle, like with the other heavies, is easy for me even now. ’Cause of their weight, they get their feet tangled when they ain’t trained right, and I know how to back them to the ropes or into a corner. I don’t kid myself, they could knock me out with the bitch alone if we was fighting, but what we’re up to ain’t fighting. What we’re up to is what makes fighting boxing.
Billy Clancy got wind of Coyle and called me in, wanted to know why I was keeping my white boy secret. I told him Coyle wasn’t no secret, said it was too soon.
“Who’s feedin’ him?”
“Me and Dee-Cee.”
Billy peeled off some hundreds. I’d later split the six hundred with Dee-Cee.
Billy said, “Tell him to start eatin’ at one of my joints, as much as he wants. But no drinks and no partyin’ in the place. When’ll Coyle be ready?”
“Gimme six weeks. If he can stand up to what I put on him, then we’ll see.”
“Will he fight?”
“He better.”
Once I got Coyle’s feet slick, damn if he didn’t come along as if he was champion already. When I told Billy, he put a eight-round fight together at one of the Indian reservations on the Mississippi. We went for eight so’s not to put too much pressure on Coyle, what with me being a new trainer to him. We fought for only seventy-five hundred — took the fight just to get Coyle on the card. When I told Coyle about it, he said book it, didn’t even ask who’s the opponent. See, Coyle was broke and living in dark town with Dee-Cee, and hoping to impress Billy ’cause Dee-Cee’d told him about Billy Clancy having money.
Well, sir, halfway through the fifth round with Marcellus Ellis, Coyle got himself head-butted in the same eye where he’d been cut up in Vancouver. Ellis was a six-foot-seven colored boy weighing two-seventy, but he couldn’t do nothing with Coyle, ’cause of the bitch. So Ellis hoped to save his big ass with a head-butt. Referee didn’t see the butt, and wouldn’t take our word it was intentional, so the butt wasn’t counted. Cut was so bad I skipped adrenaline and went direct to Thrombin, the ten-thousand-unit bovine coagulant deal. Thrombin stopped the blood quicker’n morphine’ll stop the runs, but the cut was in the eyelid, and the fight shoulda been stopped in truth. But we was in Mississippi and the casino wanted happy gamblers, so the reflet it go on with a warning that he’d stop the fight in the next round if the cut got worse.
Dee-Cee got gray-looking, said he was ready to go over and whip on Ellis’s nappy head with his cane.
I told Coyle the only thing I could tell him. “They’ll stop this fight on us and we could lose, so you got to get into Ellis’s ass with the bitch and then drop your right hand on him and get respect!”
All Coyle did was to nod. He went out there serious as a diamondback. Six hard jabs busted up Ellis so bad that he couldn’t think nothing but the bitch. That’s when Coyle got the angle and, Bang! he hit Ellis with a straight right that was like the right hand of God. Lordy, Ellis was out for five minutes. He went down stiff like a tree and bounced on his face, and then one leg went all jerk and twitchy. We went to whooping and hugging. That right hand was lightning in human form. But what it was that did it for me wasn’t Coyle’s big right hand, it was the way he stuck the bitch, and the way Coyle listened to me in the corner.
Billy wanted to sign him right then, but I said wait, even though I knew Coyle was antsy to get him a place of his own. Besides, we had to wait a month and more to see if the eye’d heal complete. It took longer than we thought, so Billy started paying the boy three hundred a week walking-around money. Folks at the casino was so wild about that right hand coming outta a white boy that Billy was able to get twenty-five thousand for Coyle’s next fight soon’s a doctor’d clear his eye. And sure enough, Coyle was right back in the gym when the doctor gave him the okay. But he had some kind of funny look to him, so I told him to go home and rest. But no, Coyle kept showing up saying he wanted to get back to that casino. How do you reach the brain of a pure-strain male hormone when he’s eighteen and one, with sixteen KOs? But one morning when me and Dee-Cee was out with him doing his road work, we got a surprise. Coyle started pressing his chest and had to stop running. Damn if he didn’t look half-blue and ready to go down. Me and Dee-Cee walked him back to the car, both holding him by a arm. I thought maybe it was a heart attack. We hauled ass over to Emergency. They checked him all over, hooked him up to all the machines, checked his blood for enzymes. Said it wasn’t no heart attack, said it was maybe some kind of quick virus going around that could knock folks down. Coyle wanted to know when he’d be able to fight again in Mississippi, and I told him to forget Mississippi till he was well. On our way out, the doctor got me to the side to tell me he wasn’t positive Coyle was sick.