Chris dragged his wife, Sandy, to the grand opening of the Mixed Martial Arts Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, Nevada. In reality, Chris would have been fine going on his own, but he believed the induction of his favorite fighter of all time, Marvin “Battle Ready” Berryman, into the Hall of Fame’s inaugural class was too important to not be experienced by as many people as possible. 

Sandy wasn’t surprised her husband flocked to each exhibit of sweat-stained shorts, bloody hand wraps, and championship belts like a moth to a porch light. However, Chris’s reaction during Berryman’s speech was eye-opening, to say the least, for Sandy.

She was well aware of her husband’s passion to follow the sport—Saturdays packed with fisticuffs on the screen, ordering merchandise, subscribing to sites for more access to events and information—but it was written on the body language of Chris—actually many men with hardened exteriors inside the Hall of Fame Convention Center either slumped their shoulders or began pawing at their eyes—how he was losing a piece of himself with the closing of a modern-day gladiator’s career whom he had followed for the past two decades.

The words of Berryman walked the audience through his many perils as a prizefighter, closing with the memory of his toughest title defense to date, “In the end, we were just a moment.”

Prompted from the Six Sentence Story Word Prompt at: https://girlieontheedge1.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/sundays-six-sentence-story-word-prompt-124/.

Prompted from the Tuesday Writing Prompt Challenge at: https://godoggocafe.com/2020/09/08/tuesday-writing-prompt-challenge-tuesday-september-8-2020/.