There's blood on my notebook

Last night I covered boxing for the second time (the first) in my life. For the first time it was professional boxing in a real arena with rabid fans and a really big belt on the line.

The folks at the Erwin Center at UT set me up with a ridiculously good seat ringside, at a table mere feet from the ropes. Midway through the fifth fight on the undercard one boxer worked another into the ropes directly in front of me and went to work, carefully mixing in shots to the body with those to the head, working with the precision and focus of an ice sculptor.

Rather than flakes of ice, however, it was droplets of blood, spit and sweat that flew from the boxer. I got wet, and one page of my notebook is specked with two dots of crimson.

I always go to a baseball game desperately hoping that it will be the one at which I will catch my first foul ball. Well, Saturday night I guess I got the boxing equivalent of a foul ball.

Deadline for first edition was 10:20 p.m., and the main event fight--which was the bout I was primarily there to cover--didn't start until 10:40, so I had to turn in a brief feature on one of the undercard fighters for early edition. But the story on the super featherweight title bout made late deadline by about 10 minutes.

Considering I was pounding out the story as workers tore down the ring and tried to move my table, I'm pretty happy with how the story turned out. Besides, it's not every day you get to make farm-animal references in the ledes of sports stories.

Also, be sure to look at the picture Xavier took to go along with that story and the spit coming off the fighter's lower lip. Good stuff.