This had been years in the making. As I walked to the ring of the semifinal fight in the Syrian National Championship back in 2014, everything I had gone through to get here flashed in my head. This was a great moment. I knew this fight would be a memorable one. I somehow knew I would win, because if I did not, nothing I had gone through would have made sense to me. Even though I still had the Championship fight to look forward to, I had always felt like an underdog, and I did not feel I was destined to be the champion yet, but I knew I was worthy of at least winning this fight. My opponent was certainly there to prove me wrong.
It all started very hard. The punches landed everywhere or at least it felt that way. I was actually fending off most of them but my opponent took it all out on me from the beginning. It was as if he had always waited for this moment and went after it in a vengeance. For a brief moment, I doubted myself. I wondered if I had been burned out with all the extra hours of training that I felt I had to put in as I prepared for this fight. “Did I sleep too little?” I wondered. “Did I run too hard?”
The second, third and fourth rounds were not much better, except I did manage to sneak in a couple of strikes, at least one of which seemed to rattle my opponent and draw a look of sobering concern on his face. That was my first glimmer of hope at that night that I would eventually be able to prove my intuition that this fight was mine to win.
Things started to turn around in the fifth round. I had taken so much punishment, but I tried extremely hard to keep this under wraps. I did not want my opponent to get any encouragement from any look that may show me to anticipate my own defeat in this fight. Sometimes I would just hide my face behind my fists not to just to protect it but to hide any expression of pain it may intimate to my opponent. At other times, I would put on a fake smile of confidence as if the powerful punch I had just received hardly bothered me.
All of that posturing and bravado seemed to finally pay off. My opponent, it turned out, did not have an infinite amount of patience, and nobody has an infinite amount of energy. He began to lose his cool and I began to take advantage of that. It was my turn to lay down the bare truth for him. It was my turn to shine. I wanted the fight to end quickly: I did not feel I would be able to continue on my feet longer than the sixths or sevenths round, and, so, I went on a striking spree. It turned out my opponent had been fatally weakened by his own overconfidence. It could not have been better for me.
The sixths round was the one I had been hoping for. I was sure I had never boxed and swung my arms as well as I did then. Strike after strike, I felt to get stronger rather than weaker. It was probably the thrill of self-assurance, rather than an actual increase in my physical strengths, that made me feel added energy. I was about to fulfill my destiny and fight in the final championship fight and that was all that mattered.
After knocking my opponent down and out, I felt at the top the world, but it was a brief moment, quickly shattered by the fear that I would be next to be knocked out.
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