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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: San Diego, CA
Posts: 18
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Please Critique and Advise
Like Pugilists
By Austin Hubert
We watched as they faced each other, their backs, arms and legs spackled in the arena’s red dirt and forming a reddish second skin. They held their weapons like clubs, the tautly strung sticks smashing the air in repetitive succession, blocking and repelling attacks, relieving heavy hearts and vanquishing if only momentarily, the encroaching fear of failure. Angst crept through their veins, and ate at their nerves. Although they refused it facial countenance, we knew what they felt, challenger and champion alike, and admired them their courage.
From our seats we watched and howled; screaming barbarians demanding that they show us their worth. Our hearts filled with the memories of once held childhood fantasies and conjured up champions of old who had fought here before. We changed allegiances as often as the wind, appreciative of the fierce tenacity that once, after a particular successful volley left a fighter in the dirt spitting grit and checking for wounds, the other contender poised in an impermanent albeit historic victory. We began to doubt the odds and wondered if the underdog would rise to the occasion, having climbed from the bowels in defiance, defeating all that stood in his way to get to this point, hungry and eager to destroy the heavily betted on veteran.
We hoped for blood. Demanded it. Felt the paradox of passion and pain when again, and again, blows were exchanged, neither man giving in. Then from fatigue, both men fell, driven into the dirt. We cheered at the champion’s recovery only to fall silent to the buzz of panic overtaking the stadium because his opponent still lay there. The long shot appear injured. He writhed and moaned. Then in a gigantic, unified lions roar, our elation filled the stadium at the sight of this heart driven pugilist pulling himself up, waving to the crowd and shaking off the fall along with the moist red clay. This is what we came for we nodded, looking left and right to our neighbors, still astounded that mere moments before the field had threatened to swallow the rookie whole.
It often seemed that their battleground were the nemesis, a living beast draining them of power, zapping their strength as they swung, revealing the nature of endurance still left inside each of them and dictating how to proceed next. And again the fight ensued, battle-sticks poised, deflecting projectile after projectile, pummeling the attacks of their foe into submission, each contender’s scream sucking our breath away.
We had been there for hours unsure of what more could be expected. Our champions were as individual to us as flowers in an open field. We picked them based on past experiences and memories, enjoying the way they solemnly looked through us or beguiled our participation through elated howls, pumping fist after victorious tradeoffs. We screamed out nicknames, or beckoned for relics. One of us, a particularly obese spectator, separated himself and shocked us all offering a daughter up for marriage with the insurance of further future champions. In the end I suspect our excitement came from our fear of the encroaching final coup de grace, signed and sealed with a stamp of approval and the announcement of the final score. It was something we did not want to hear or witness, yet craved.
It would be over soon and we imagined seeing the victor’s arms raised into the air, the loser a mess of muscle, sweat and bone, dragging himself from the arena. Maimed by the loss, an indelible scar imprinted on his memory of what might have been. We imagined him receiving our pity and perhaps a standing ovation because he had fought well and hard.
When the end came, our hearts calmed and the electric excitement of what happened mere moments before left us. This was the French Open and it was over. For yet another year, I sat in the stands for as long as I could, took it all in while my fellow spectators filed out of the stadium. I looked down into the pit in awe and wondering the level of courage and skill it took for players to travel so many miles, crossing oceans and time zones, to give ones heart for the covenant title of the clay court specialist of the year.
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Austin J. Hubert
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