Wearing Purple

Chapter 25

I had never watched the roadies set up from scratch before. Under Sonny Leonard’s shouted directions — clearly, his Spanish was up to the job — they began in the centre, by raising the ring.

I stood with Jerry Gradi and watched them work. ‘Why does your ring only have three ropes?’ I asked him.

‘Because it always had three ropes,’ he replied. ‘So did boxing rings, until about forty years ago, when a fighter died after being hit back of the head by a whipping bottom rope. After that, their authorities switched to four.

‘The ropes in a boxing ring are tighter than ours too, so that fighters can’t use them to lever more power into their punches. We like ’em loose, to help us build momentum. The other difference is in the turn-buckle padding.’ He pointed to Leonard, up in the ring. ‘In boxing, the steel rings in the corners that turn the ropes are covered by a single pad, from top to bottom.

‘We got separate pads on each turn-buckle, on account of one of our standard moves is to grab the other guy and slam him into the corner, hard. The top pad is the thickest, ’cos that’s where the biggest impact is. It’s the foreman’s job to fix ’em on, to make sure they’re secure.’

As we watched, Sonny Leonard was working on the corner nearest us, fastening on the pads, which were covered in red leather, and looked a lot like boxing gloves. Jerry pointed at him. ‘You make sure those is tight,’ he called out, meaningfully. ‘Daze is going to be tossing me into that corner tomorrow night, and I don’t want to wind up hittin’ no steel.’

‘Check ’em yourself, then,’ Leonard snarled back at him.

‘Okay, okay, okay,’ The Behemoth replied, holding up his hands in a mollifying gesture. ‘Don’t get so touchy. It ain’t your ass gonna get stomped in there — unless you screw up those turn-buckle pads, that is!’

‘I didn’t know you and Daze were on tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I thought you were keeping that for the next pay-per-view event.’

‘We are, really. Tomorrow’s just a warm-up. Rockette and I are taking on Daze in a handicap match.’ He grinned. ‘Tommy’s gonna get stomped again. Ev hasn’t quite forgiven him yet for that guitar stunt.’

I looked at him. ‘You’re looking happy this week. Are things going all right with Sally?’

‘Yeah, great, thanks. Don’t need you to speak for me no more. I’ll need to watch out for looking happy, though. That ain’t The Behemoth’s angle. Gotta do some work on bein’ ferocious again.’