Warrior: The Forging of a Champion

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My opponent leans back on his heels. I attack. He's on the balls of his feet, and his legs are bent like he is going to take off running. I get ready to counter, and I must be fast, real fast. The difference between him kicking me in the stomach or me blocking it is a split second.  

There are no ties in Tae Kwon Do. You either win or lose. Some people hate it because it's so violent and the training is so hard. Not me, I love it. I always have. I spend all my free time at it, and that's why I'm in a high school gym in Northern Virginia on a Saturday afternoon. 

It's three o'clock. The gym smells of left-over lunches of half-eaten pizzas and Korean food, old sweat, and touches of Tiger Balm and Ben Gay. Add to that the lack of circulation in a stuffy enclosed space, and you have a cloud of headache-inducing funk. I take a deep breath and suck it all in. This is my favorite way to spend a day. The competition, fighting and winning is all such a rush. 

A loud yell goes over the crowd, "Black Belts fourteen to seventeen years old light and heavyweights line up."  

I walk over, stand outside my line for a few minutes, let everyone else go ahead of me, and note with satisfaction that there are an odd number of competitors. A tournament official will go down the line and count the people off. The last person will get a bye and skip a round of fighting. I wait and hang around the end of the line until the last second and then hook onto the last place. 

The referee wearing the official full body yellow uniform suit--a yellow shirt, tie, sports jacket and pants--starts down the line. He's about 5'5 so he's seven inches shorter than me and is bald with over-grown hair on the side of his head. His belly sticks out of his yellow shirt with his yellow tie lying on top of it. This guy looks just like Mr. Sherman, the music teacher at my school, who has gross hair sticking out of his ears. He counts down the line: "You're one, you're two, you're one, you're two." He continues on until he gets to me. A cloud of BO disguised with some cologne on top hangs over him.  

"Are you the last?" the referee asks. 

I nod. "Okay, then you get the bye."  

Works every time.  

I go to the side of the ring and start to put my pads on. 

"Doug, did you drink any coffee?" I hear from behind me. 

"Mom, that will bother my stomach." 

"I know, it's just that I read some athletes drink caffeine before they perform." The strong smell of the coffee goes right up my nose. 

My parents stand in front of me. My mother is thin like me but is short. Her hair is brown, and mine is almost black. My father's a little bit bigger, but not as tall as me, still holding onto some of the muscle he had when he played football in college. His hair has turned gray, but from the pictures I've seen, it was more like mine, a shade darker than my Mom's. The one thing my father and I have in common is our eyes. Deep set and black all the way through.  

"Fine." I take a sip of the harsh strong, black coffee. It has been sitting in the thermos all day and is now luke warm and stale. I wince and almost spit it out onto the floor as I hand it back to her. 

"You barely drank any of it." 

"Douglas, stand over there so I can get a picture of both of you," my father says, pulling up his huge digital camera. He loves getting photos of every event in my life. 

"Dad, I can't take a picture right now," I say softly so the other competitors don't hear me. 

"Come on, just one," he says.