Falling

Hank Bellakoff felt sick to his stomach as he reeled backwards, his swollen face barely recognizable through the blood and sweat. He heard his head thud on the canvas floor, and his eyes, although more than half closed, were watching the swirling merry-go-round world of the Boston Arena spinning by.
He became aware of two legs near his head, legs in black pants, grey socks, and very well-shined black Italian leather shoes.
“Four," the owner of the legs called out. “Five…Six…Seven."
At “Seven," Hank’s head and vision had cleared just enough for him to make his re-entry into the Middleweight fight, now in the eighth round, that he had been in until being rudely interrupted by a leathery black blob that had mashed the left side of his nose, probably breaking it.
"Watch out for his fuckin’ right hand,” he had been warned, just two minutes earlier by Bubba, his manager, in his brief respite before Round 8, and yes, it was the right that smashed into his face hard enough to produce a heavy flow of disgusting metallic-tasting blood.
Hank took two wobbly steps toward the referee while clumsily trying to wipe the blood away with his gloved right hand and lifting his left enough to show he was ready to fight on.
“I'm good…I'm good,” he said when the ref asked if he wanted to continue.The referee grabbed both of Hank’s gloved hands, shook them enough to be able to tell whether or not he had enough strength and looking into his eyes to see if he was sufficiently functional to continue, and then backed off as the hard-charging Archie Sanborn came in for the kill. He swung wildly at Hank’s head and missed. Hank lunged forward and grabbed onto the fighter, wrapping his arms around him at elbow level, nullifying all of Archie’s bad intentions for almost twenty seconds…just thirty seconds more to get out of the eighth round.
By doing lots of backing up, Hank got to that rescuing clang that followed the predictable canvas thumping by twelve seconds.The thumping was always supposed to be a ten second warning that the round was almost over, but Harry Goodson, a long time Arena employee was always purposely early. Harry believed doing that was giving an edge to any home town fighter who knew about it over an out-of -towner who didn’t. In this case, Hank just clinched a little longer until the bell.
In his corner, Hank learned from Bubba that as usual he hadn’t listened, was not using his hands enough, and was “sleep-walking" his way through this bout… and that he was about to lose to that "old dumb fuck" Archie, who was actually two months younger than Hank, both men being an almost over the hill thirty-six.
When the bell rang for the ninth round, Bubba just about pushed Hank off the stool. Hank's face had smudges of Vaseline all over it, especially around his nose, which was still oozing a little blood. The ring doctor jumped in front of Hank with a flashlight, shined it in Hank’s eyes as a cursory concussion check, looked closely at his nose and asked him if he really wanted to continue.