Today at noon I meet three men for sparring.

My primary focus is Oliver, as he has a fight scheduled for august, a kickboxing bout in which he will be simply a boxer. Bringing Sean in is very important as he will actually be able to throw kicks at Oliver, where I am limited to push jabs with my foot just above hip level.

My secondary focus is making sure this all pays off for Sean, as he will be in the car for a couple hours and is the sparring "talent" that a coach needs to bring in to help a fighter who is not working out of a well-stocked gym. Sean is looking to be a complete fighter and coach: ground, standup, weapons. So we will start the session with him and I weapon sparring.

My third priority is getting Mescaline into the mix. He was scheduled to come into town for his normal training with me, so I will use him to the benefit of the other fighters, which should serve his needs, which are purely survival oriented. As a former member of Mat Serra's jiu jitsu school he does bring a ground game, so will provide Sean with a grappling partner. He is not far enough along in boxing to spar in a relaxed manner and learn, so I will use him to throw punches at Oliver and try to learn how to relax doing that, which is not as easy as it sounds. He will be surrendering a lot of ego by not getting hit back. In terms of weapon sparring, Mescaline is about the same size as Sean's regular sparring partner, so should get in there with the sticks so I can coach them both against their nemesis body type.

The sticky aspect of the sessions will be the fact that Sean presents a body type to Mescaline and Oliver that is basically the nemesis version: Hearns versus Hagler. These two body types naturally frustrate each other and Oliver and Sean have had difficulty keeping contact light and they both have the ability to serious hurt each other. So, I don't want this session videoed, because that further ratchets up the competitive aspect.

If they want to shoot any video, we will do instructional segments.

If Charles shows up I will step out of the sparring role and feed Sean and Mescaline to his pitiless stick.