![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/biglow.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
June 27, 2000 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d The waiting is the hardest part.<\/p>\n
It’s not the weeks of intense training that lead up to the fight \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the ropes jumped, the heavy bags hit, the countless sessions spent sparring. No, it’s not all that.<\/p>\n
It’s the empty, idle minutes and hours spent waiting for the opening bell to sound that can drive a kickboxer crazy.<\/p>\n
Mike Biglow, Hall County’s chief assistant solicitor, sat in his dressing room wondering what to do next. His hands were already wrapped, his foot and shin pads already strapped on. He decided to get up and throw some punches in front of the mirror, but before doing so he entered the bathroom and urinated for the fourth time in the past hour.<\/p>\n
Biglow’s bout, a three-rounder against Flowery Branch’s Richard Barnes, was the second of 20 fights on the card for Saturday’s Battle Brigade 9 at the Georgia Mountains Center in Gainesville.<\/p>\n
Seemingly every possible way to pummel an opponent into submission was featured. Comprising the second half of the card \u00e2\u20ac\u201d before the bikini contest, but after a man broke slabs of concrete with his head \u00e2\u20ac\u201d were fights where the only tactics not allowed were eye gouging, biting, hair pulling, groin shots and something called small-joint manipulation. Everything else goes. Kickboxing seemed relatively genteel by comparison.<\/p>\n
Biglow was the only lawyer fighting on Saturday \u00e2\u20ac\u201d I checked \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and his fight wasn’t going to start on time. They never do. So when to start stretching, when to start warming up becomes a guessing game.<\/p>\n
“This is the part that I hate, and I’m not even fighting,” said Biglow’s cornerman George Allen, pacing around the dressing room.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/biglow2.jpg\")
It was after 6 p.m. \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the card’s scheduled start time \u00e2\u20ac\u201d when Biglow learned that fight No. 1 was a forfeit and that he would be called to the ring shortly.<\/p>\n
It was then that Biglow began final preparations for the second official kickboxing bout of his life.<\/p>\n
I first met Biglow two days earlier. He was standing in front of the Hall County Courthouse wearing a suit and tie. Biglow, 31, appeared to be the all-American boy. Clean-cut and polite. No visible scars or bruises. No missing teeth.<\/p>\n
We headed down to Lawrenceville to Eagle Boxing & Kickboxing, where Biglow has trained for the past two years and where I got a firsthand feel for what training for a fight is really like.<\/p>\n
“If I haven’t gotten enough training in by now, it’s too late,” said Biglow, who lives in Duluth.<\/p>\n
With the fight only two days away, this would be a relatively light practice. We began by running a mile. Then we jumped rope. Two minutes on. One minute off. For five rounds: Two minutes never seemed so long, one minute never seemed so short.<\/p>\n
After five more rounds spent punching and kicking the heavy bags, I was soaked. Gym owner Gary Brown doesn’t believe in air conditioning.<\/p>\n
And then the fun part. I donned a thick chest protector, forearm pads and gloves and entered the ring for three rounds with Biglow. I was the Michelin Man, a human heavy bag.<\/p>\n
We finished with several hundred sit-ups. Silhouettes of sweat remained on the mat after we got up.<\/p>\n
It was while watching Biglow warm up in the dressing room on Saturday that I realized how easy he took it on me in the ring Thursday. He unloaded a series of booming round kicks into a pad held by his coach Yves Samake. My side hurt just watching.<\/p>\n
Biglow’s usual smile was now a scowl. No longer the all-American boy, Biglow was focused and ready. The wait was almost over. Fight time was near.<\/p>\n
And oddly that was a relief to Biglow. The fight \u00e2\u20ac\u201d his preoccupation for so many days now \u00e2\u20ac\u201d would soon be over.<\/p>\n
Biglow woke up earlier than he wanted to Saturday morning and he couldn’t get back to sleep. We met at 2 p.m. for the weigh-in and then headed to the Monkey Barrel for a pre-fight plate of lasagna. Biglow’s body was there, but his mind was in the ring.<\/p>\n
During one 20-minute span, he asked me the same question three times.<\/p>\n
“I’m just a little distracted,” he said, catching himself the third time. “It’s not too many blows to the head, trust me.”<\/p>\n
At 6:22, I followed Biglow into the ring as part of his entourage. I had butterflies; Biglow appeared calm.<\/p>\n
Finally, the opening bell sounded. Barnes, a veteran of several tough-man competitions, came at Biglow with several wild, looping right hooks. Some of them connected.<\/p>\n
But then Biglow the tactician took over. Through two rounds he fed Barnes a balanced diet of jabs and front kicks to the face. Primarily a boxer, Barnes relied on lunging hooks that left his body open. Biglow picked his shots.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/biglow3.jpg\")
“You’ve got the fight so far,” Samake said after Round 2. “Let him come to you, then boom! Front kick to the face.”<\/p>\n
Biglow obliged. Barnes staggered around the ring. He took a standing eight-count. But he wouldn’t go down. He didn’t have to.<\/p>\n
Biglow won a unanimous decision on points.<\/p>\n
“I think I’ll be able to negotiate pleas a little easier now,” said Biglow, who improved to 1-1 in his amateur fighting career, the smile back on his face.<\/p>\n
“I’m going to keep my distance from him now,” joked Judge David Burroughs, who attended the fight. “He’s aggressive in the courtroom and aggressive in the ring.”<\/p>\n
For now, the waiting is over for Biglow. But it will no doubt begin again soon. The sport is hard to walk away from \u00e2\u20ac\u201d even for an accomplished lawyer.<\/p>\n
“If you like to fight, you like to fight,” explained Allen. “I don’t care what you do to make your living.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
June 27, 2000 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d The waiting is the hardest part. It’s not the weeks of intense training that lead up to the fight \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the ropes jumped, the heavy bags hit, the countless sessions spent sparring. No, it’s not all that. It’s the empty, idle minutes and hours spent waiting …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,28],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":239,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danwashburn.com\/sportinglife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}