Chapter 4

The first round of bouts would take place on Saturday afternoon. Each bout would consist of four rounds; each round would be three minutes with a minute in between rounds and would be scored by three judges on a round basis, with the referee's scorecard being used only to break a tie. We would be fighting with ten ounce gloves this year, primarily to help protect the fighters. I have no doubt that the four broken noses that Lisa had given to her opponents last year had something to do with that change.

Saturday morning, I woke up early, ran a little to help clear my head and lay out my strategy for my first fight. I called Lisa; and we arranged to meet at the coffee shop before heading to the gym. As the reigning champion, Lisa was the scheduled to fight first; I was next to last.

I had a ringside seat. I watched her opponent warming up in his corner, he looked pretty tough, but I could tell he had no formal boxing training. He would be dead meat by the end of the first round. Lisa made her entrance moments later, Karen was her second. As she entered the ring, she glanced over in my direction and blew me a kiss; which I returned with a kiss of my own and an "I love you."

She removed her robe and flexed her muscles to the sounds of applause from the crowd, almost fifty percent were women. There were some boos as well, some from males in the crowd that remembered what she had done last year, and some from those who were hoping to get a look at her tits. They were only slightly disappointed, however, because the sports bra that she was wearing was white, stretched to its limit and was already soaked with sweat, making it almost see through.

After the instructions from the ref, the fighters returned to their corners and waited for the bell. At the sound of the bell, both fighters advanced to the center of the ring, touched gloves and circled each other looking for an opening. Lisa started throwing jabs, which I don't think her opponent ever saw. His head kept bouncing backward, and then returning to its normal position only to get hit with another hard jab. Lisa must have hit him twenty times, before he threw his first punch, which she blocked easily with her glove. She stepped back a little; it seemed to me that she was letting him regain his composure. Then she came back in, with his hands high to protect his face, he provided the perfect target for her deadly body shots. She dug a left and a right hook into his rib cage. You could hear the thuds of the punches landing. Down he fell on one knee gasping for breath. He took an eight count then managed to get to his feet, the ref, cleaned his gloves and asked if he wanted to continue; he shook his head indicating that he had had enough. The ref stopped the fight at the one minute mark of the first round. Lisa had her first win.

I watched the big mouth's fight. He too was unskilled, but he was so much bigger and stronger than his opponent, he had little trouble knocking out the poor overmatched kid by the end of the first round.

I went into the locker room after that, and as I dressed and warmed up for my fight, I could hear big mouth bragging that he was going to win the championship. He shouted to me over the lockers,