Six Weeks

The four trained at five, six days a week, for six weeks, in a building with no heating in a city that gets down to four degrees in November, and Rosa was on the floor at ten to five every one of those mornings including the two when she had flu.

What she taught them was not what people expect. There was almost no work on punching. Chuy Bahena had six years of bag work and could hit; Marisol Ocampo had eight years of sparring and could hit and slip and had the best left hand in the building; Ivet Solano-Reyes could do neither, particularly, and was not going to learn to in six weeks.

What Rosa worked on, for six weeks, four hours a morning, was what happens to a person in the first ninety seconds of a fight they have never had before.

"Everything you know goes," she told them on the first morning. "All of it. Six years, eight years, it goes in the first ten seconds and it comes back somewhere around ninety, and what I am going to spend six weeks doing is making the gap shorter and making sure that what you do inside the gap does not lose you the fight."

So they did the gap. Over and over, in every way she could construct: cold starts with no warm-up; a round begun after being made to stand in a corner for four minutes doing nothing; sparring with a stranger she brought in from another gym so that the face across the ring was not a face they knew; a round begun immediately after being shouted at; a round begun in silence.

By the fourth week Marisol Ocampo's gap was about eleven seconds, which Rosa said was as good as she had seen. Chuy Bahena's was about forty and stayed at about forty and Rosa built the whole plan around it, on the basis that a man who is going to lose the first forty seconds of a fight should be told to lose them on purpose, standing up, behind a guard, and to start boxing at the minute.

Ivet Solano-Reyes's gap, in the fourth week, was still the whole round. In the fifth week Rosa took her off the card, in the office, with the door shut, and Ivet said no, and they argued for forty minutes, and Ivet Solano-Reyes — who two years earlier could not be in a room where people looked at her — won the argument by saying: "You are not protecting me. You are protecting yourself from having to watch it. If I am in the gap for three rounds then I am in the gap for three rounds and I will still have been in it."

Condition two said Rosa picks the opponents, and it is the condition that mattered most and the one nobody at the meeting understood at the time.

A promoter matching four debutants from a community gym has an obvious commercial interest and it is not a sinister one: he wants them to win, because four wins in front of a hall full of their own neighbours sells the next card. The way you arrange that is by matching them against people who are worse.

Rosa refused. She spent four weeks on the phone to nine gyms in three cities and she matched all four of them level, and in Marisol Ocampo's case slightly above, and she did it with the fights in front of her on paper and Amador Quintanilla-Ross sitting across the desk telling her she was making a mistake.

"You have got a hall full of people who love these four," he said. "They have never seen a fight. If your paramedic loses her debut on that card, that room does not come back."

"If my paramedic wins her debut against somebody I chose because they were worse than her," said Rosa, "then she has not won anything, and she will know it within about four days, and she has waited eight years." She turned the paper round. "You said you had never seen a gym anybody loved. This is why. I do not lie to them about what they are. Not about the roof, not about the money and not about a fight."

He argued for eleven more minutes and then gave up, and then did something that Rosa did not find out about for six weeks, which was to ring all four opponent gyms himself and tell them what she had done and ask them to bring their people properly, and every one of them did, and one of them — a coach from Puerto Nueve — brought forty supporters on a bus at his own cost.

The four opponents were: a twenty-nine-year-old from a police gym with two fights; a woman of thirty-one out of Puerto Nueve with four; a twenty-six-year-old with one; and, for Marisol Ocampo, a thirty-four-year-old called Delfina Arruza with nine fights and six wins, who is the best boxer on the card and who Rosa picked deliberately and told Marisol so, out loud, on the day she picked her.

What Marisol Ocampo said, according to three people who were in the room, was: "Thank you." And then she went and hit the bag for forty minutes and did not talk to anybody.

The person the six weeks was hardest on was the one who was not on the card, and Rosa did not see it for four weeks, which she has described as the worst piece of coaching she has done in nineteen years.

Toña Mérida ran the six o'clock three nights a week and did it well. She was also seventeen, the best natural boxer the building had ever produced, four weeks from a card she was not allowed on, watching a bus driver with a bad back and a paramedic get four hours a morning of the coaching she had been asking for since she was fourteen.

She did not complain, which is the problem. She turned up, ran the class, did her own work afterwards on her own at half past nine, and was completely reliable and slightly less present every week, and it took Chuy Bahena, forty-one, who is not subtle, to walk into the office in the fifth week and say: "You have lost her. You know that, don't you. She is going to go to Puerto Nueve in January and she is not going to tell you until it is done."

Rosa found her at ten to ten that night on the end bag. What she said, and Toña has repeated it since with the tape running, was: "I am going to say four things and you are not going to like the order. One: you are better at seventeen than I was at twenty-two. Two: you cannot be on this card and I will not move on it and I will not apologise for it. Three: I have known since you were fourteen that this building cannot hold you and I have not said it because I did not want to lose you, and that was for me and not for you and I am ashamed of it."

Toña, still hitting the bag, said, "What is four?"

"Four is that in January, whatever happens on the seventh, I am taking you to Puerto Nueve myself, and I am going to sit in that gym and tell Ignacio Berrondo exactly what you are, and then I am going to come home." Rosa put her hand on the bag to stop it. "And you can come back here whenever you like, to see people, and you cannot train here, and that is the rule, and it is going to hurt me a great deal more than it hurts you and I do not want to hear about it."

Toña Mérida, seventeen, took her gloves off and stood in the middle of a gym on Calle Mirador at ten past ten at night and cried for about ninety seconds, furiously, the way you do when you have been holding something for four weeks, and then said, "Fine. But I am cornering. On the seventh. All four of them. Not the bucket — properly, in the corner, with you." And Rosa said, "Obviously," as though it had never been in question, which it had not been, and neither of them mentioned any of it again for two months.

In the last week they did almost nothing, which every one of the four found unbearable and which is the correct way to run a last week.

Rosa took the mornings down to ninety minutes and then to an hour. She stopped the sparring on the Tuesday. On the Thursday she made all four of them sit in the main room during the six o'clock class and watch forty other people train, which sounds like a coach making a point and was in fact her getting them into a room full of the people they were about to walk out in front of.

Tickets: four hundred were allocated to the gym under the deal and they went in nine days, and Amador released two hundred more, and those went in four, and by the last week the old market hall was sold out for the first time in eleven years and there were about nine hundred people going who had never been to a boxing match.

The number nine bus route, which Chuy Bahena has driven for fourteen years, organised itself. Rosa found out about it on the Wednesday when a man she had never met came into the gym and asked whether it would be a problem if the drivers wore something, and she said what did he mean, and he said that there were about a hundred and forty of them coming and they had had shirts made.

Ivet Solano-Reyes told her family on the Friday, four days before, which is later than she had promised herself and earlier than she had feared. Her mother did not speak for about eleven seconds and then asked one question, which was whether the woman who taught her would be in the corner, and Ivet said yes, and her mother said, "Then all right," and got her coat and went and bought four tickets from a jar on a desk on Calle Mirador.

Marisol Ocampo worked two shifts as a paramedic in the last week because she would not swap them, and on the second of them attended a road traffic collision at four in the morning and did not sleep afterwards, and told nobody at the gym until January.

And on the Sunday, two days out, Rosa Villalpando-Ferrer went upstairs at nine in the evening and got a box down from the top of a wardrobe, and took out a pair of gloves that are nineteen years old, and sat on the end of her bed with them in her lap for about forty minutes, and then put them back, and went to bed, and told nobody at all.