The next UFC match is huge. I can’t skip the first press conference of the promotional launch, despite that it’s only been a week since I completely lost my shit. I take my seat between the other two challengers, at the opposite end of the long table, and away from the three champs on the other side.
This line up will break records, sell-out more seats than any of the previous, and have sponsors nut-punching each other so their ads run in the right places, and at the right times. Already hotels are selling out around the arena. Sydney, Australia. That’s where it’s at. So who gets the first question from the sea of reporters taking up every square inch of space? Not the president. Not any of the current champs. Not when scandal sells seats and I’m currently the reigning king.
Cameras click and flash as the first reporter flings his question my way. “Hey, Fury. Is it true you suffered an emotional collapse following your fight with Lopez?”
“Yup,” I answer.
There’s a brief pause when the reporter just looks at me. He’s probably shocked I answered him point blank. But he’s also expecting me to say more. I don’t, prompting the president to motion to a reporter with red hair. “Next question,” he says.
“Fury,” the reporter calls out, not that it shocks me. “Was the pressure to win a shot at the title too much for you?”
“No,” I respond.
She waits for more. But when I don’t respond, she quickly asks her next question before she’s cut off. “I find that hard to believe, seeing how your head seemed elsewhere during the fight.”
“That’s because Lopez was trying to knock it from my shoulders,” I offer, earning me a few laughs.
She frowns. She doesn’t want to let it go. And neither does the next reporter who follows. “Then what was the cause of your meltdown?” he challenges. “Tough guys don’t easily break down, but you did that night.”
He didn’t flat-out call me a pussy, but eluded enough that I can’t let his comment slide, even when the president prompts another reporter. I speak over him, answering the idiot who claims I’m not as tough as I appear. “I’ve been dealing with a lot lately. And it all came crashing down the other night.”
“What sort of things have you been dealing with?” some other guy questions at the same time someone else asks, “How do you expect to win your title match if you’re this emotionally unstable?”
The Philly boy in me wants to respond with a, “Fuck you and your mother.”
The fighter in me wants to come out swinging.
Yet it’s the man in me―the one who’s tired of hiding, of slapping on a grin and acting like it’s all good―who’s tired of pretending that he wasn’t lured into a house as a little kid and assaulted―who looks out into the audience where his family and his woman are watching.
I have to make a choice. This isn’t the best arena. I know it’s not. But from deep in my gut I know I have to make this choice: Keep acting, pretending, and hiding, or move forward and be who I’m going to be, damaged but living and maybe finally happy.
My family . . . my woman. Hell, all of them could have walked away and not looked back. They could have screamed and hollered, and sometimes they did―sometimes they were the ones who came out swinging. But no matter how angry they sometimes got, how many times they couldn’t find the right words, how many nights I kept them up, they hung in there. If that’s not love, I swear to Christ I’ll never know what love is.
My stare falls on Killian, the one who first knew, and to his woman Sofia, who’s known her own share of pain. It then travels down the row to each of my brothers, and Wren, too, before it stops on Sol. I don’t meet their eyes for long, but it’s long enough that they realize what I’m about to do.
Like I mentioned, I don’t blame old man Kessler. But as I shift in my seat in front of the press, between Amarato who’s next in line for the super heavy weight belt, and Griffith who’s going to come out swinging for the welter-weight title, I own what I did, and finally put the blame where it belongs.
“I was assaulted as a kid,” I say. I shrug like I’m past it even though the silence overtaking the room affirms that everyone here knows what I know: that I’m not past it, and that the memory still eats me alive.
I’m greeted with dead silence. At first. Then the murmurs begin, slowly building until it seems everyone with a mic is asking questions at the same time. I respond to the heavyset reporter closest to me, the loudest guy there who asks, “When you say you were assaulted, do you mean sexually?”
I wait then answer, “Yes.”
More lights flashing, more cameramen pushing their way forward, and yeah, a lot more questions. “It was a neighbor, someone who lived near me who I mistakenly trusted,” I explain to the reporter who asked me who it was.
“How old were you?” a female reporter yells.