It was when the lights went out and hundreds of people went home, after the last punches were thrown, the shouting had faded and the ring was disassembled, screw by tiny screw.
That’s when the real impact of Fight For The Cure 2010 hit home for me.
It had all seemed so abstract when organizer Matt Whitteker asked me to participate last fall. Even when hard sparring sessions began and I developed what seemed to be a perma-black eye for a month – I tend to mark up fairly easily – it still didn’t seem all that real.
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“There’s plenty of time left,” I repeated to myself almost daily, pushing the butterflies in my gut relentlessly downward.
“I’m not nervous,” I’d mumble. “Everything’s fine.”
But everything wasn’t fine, because we were about to get up in front of around 500 people and beat the crap out of each other. And though I eventually won the fight in a split decision, my body is still aching from the blows I absorbed.
Regardless, it was with these thoughts in mind that a few pairs of amateur fighters and our group of white-collar gladiators – my opponent Shawn Mountain of The Mergis Group, Tactix Consulting’s Walter Robinson, Castor Heating and Cooling’s George Boszormeny, Subway’s Marwan Abdalla, Upside Wave’s Wayne Shimoon and myself – stepped into the ring, ready to give all we had.
But the real backbone of this event wasn’t the participants, despite the blood and sweat provided by everyone involved.
No, the real givers were all of you who bought tables, tickets, auction items and other goodies in the name of fighting a horrible disease. It was thanks to all of you that the event grossed more than $200,000 in donations for the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation.
So give yourselves a hand, folks. You deserve it.
