*Voice note, 00:43 AM, driving, windows down*
*[Portuguese slips in and out. Traffic in the background. She is speaking fast, not yelling, the cadence of someone who is not recording for an audience but for herself — and maybe, if it gets leaked, for him.]*
Okay. Okay. So the Doctrine.
Evan Morse. Princeton New Jersey. Kinesiology and psychology degree. Mommy is a lawyer, daddy is a professor, and little Evan was allowed to take wrestling classes on the weekends because it was good cardio and it kept him out of the finished basement. You know what I mean? This is who this man is. This is the whole story. He puts on glasses at the ring and takes them off like he's opening a courtroom. He reads from a folder. A folder. At a fight.
And now I hear he has made a recording about me. Long one, apparently. Names my mistakes. Catalogs my errors. Calls me by my real name twice like it's a spell. Camila Ferreira. Camila Ferreira. Listen to me, professor — you did not discover my name. It has been on my birth certificate since before you figured out which fork to use.
Here is what I want to say. And I want to say it clean because people are going to ask me afterward what I thought going in.
I thought about my strikes being called reactive. And I want to be fair. He's not wrong. I do commit to the strike first. I do. That's how I learned to fight, because where I learned to fight the other option was waiting to see what the other person did, and waiting to see what the other person did is how you get your teeth kicked in on the way home from the corner store. I do not have the luxury of his position-first philosophy. I never had it. You think I don't know that? I know that.
Here is what he missed.
A reactive striker in a cage has an advantage he does not understand, because a reactive striker does not telegraph. He is waiting for me to commit first so he can counter. Fine. I'm going to commit first. I'm going to commit first forty times in a row. I'm going to throw until my shoulders are dead, and he is going to catch some of them and he is going to miss some of them, and the ones he misses are going to land on the parts of him he has been protecting his whole life. His jaw. His ribs. The side of his neck where the kinesiology degree does not help.
He wants to take me off my tempo? Sure. He can try. Kuramoto might could do it. Wone might could do it. The Doctrine? The Doctrine is a man who has practiced one thing for fifteen years against opponents who agreed to practice with him. I did not agree. I don't agree. I'm not in his study group.
The Crucible thing — he thinks I haven't prepared for the hex. He thinks my corner splash is going to miss the corner. Listen. I have been in that cage. I have been in that cage every afternoon for three weeks. I know where the six corners are. I know where the LED plates are. I know exactly how far the door is from every point on the hex and I know what it sounds like when the walls take a strike. He made an assumption in public. That's a gift. I'm going to cash it.
What I'm going to do is this.
Early on I'm going to let him lockup. I'm going to let him chain. I'm going to let him feel like the match is going according to his little folder. And then I'm going to break his nose with my forehead and he's going to discover what a real Brazilian entry looks like, because the ones he studied were in a book, and the one I'm giving him is not.
Skull Crusher. On the LED corner. Red shift. Three count.
He's going to have a lot to write about afterward.
Tenho toda a noite.