'"I am sorry to say that I won't be out to train anymore. I have to work on Sunday's now. When school starts back up that will be even harder. I am grateful for the training and will hopefully be back some day."

-Joey, Text, 6/26/16

Joey works as a life guard and plays lacrosse, football and wrestles for his small catholic school. He is the sun of a single mother and at 17 is essentially the man of the house. When he began lifeguarding he asked for Sunday's off, but has been called in most Sundays to fill in for callouts.

This is the way it goes with fighters, the way it went for me and the way a coach experiences the passage and return of heavily-weighted lives into his training space. Usually, with the kind of fellow who has enough of a screw loose to want to seek out ritual combat in a safety-obsessed society, you don't get this courtesy. A simple alien abduction followed by a sudden return years later is the rule. If I'm still around, Joey will come back after schooling is behind him. Then a career type job will call him away. Eventually a hole will open in the tightly wove fabric of his life and he will seek a nostalgic return to something that he wished he had stuck with as a youth.

This decision of his will always haunt him.

He will always feel a little bit more vital than those around him and will discover upon a look within that it stems from the 12 hours he spent sparring with elite fighters, enduring hits and psychological pressure that few people he will meet can ever fathom.

For the coach, Joey was another body type to study, another coachability quotient to interact with in the weird quest to keep something hated and feared alive and growing in the minds of men.