And nobody in that room understood yet why. Sherman Adwater sat at the far table in a plain jacket with his hands folded next to Celeste, next to Maybel Kitridge, who had put on a church dress. Dracott started with the video, not the 11 seconds. All four masters synchronized projected on a wall with the time code running. The room watched Braxton Winthrop cross a ring after the bell and swing at the back of a man's head from four different angles in order.
Then Dracott played the whole 3 minutes again with a use of force analyst from the state academy narrating it and she stopped it 11 times. And at the end she gave the number that ran on every broadcast in the country by that night. In 180 seconds of contact, Sherman Atwater closed his fist zero times. Dracott then read the official weigh-in sheet out loud because he wanted it in the record. Braxton Winthrop 5' 105 lbs.
Sherman Atwater, 6'4", 235 lb, 6 in and 70 lb. In a ring for 3 minutes with an open hand every single time, Corine Tillitson objected. Dracott said this was not a courtroom and she was welcome to leave. Then he put up the radiology header. The study on Braxton Winthrop's left orbital bone was acquired at 4:11 in the afternoon.
The first bell that night rang at 8:05. The fracture that Sherman Atwater was arrested for causing had been photographed by a machine 4 hours before the two men were in the same building. Braxton had taken it two days earlier from Presley Swearing's elbow in an unsupervised sparring session, gotten it imaged quietly, and walked into a sanctioned bout with a broken face because his father had already sold 420 tickets. The room made a sound. Dracott was not finished.
The event insurance writer submitted by Truet Lommax was filed 6 days before Sherman Atwater agreed to anything and it named him spelled correctly as the opponent. The gym's promotion log showed Braxton graded from white belt to black belt in 22 months and the audit of his record 12 and zero. The record on the poster. The record on every video Payton ever posted produced a number that Dracott read twice because the room did not believe it the first time. Sanctioned bouts on file with the state zero.
11 of the 12 opponents had been paid an appearance fee out of a Winthrop Ridge development account. The 12th was Presley Swearing who was on the gym's payroll and had been since he was 19. Truit Lomax broke on the stand in under nine minutes. He said Sheldon co-signed his mortgage. He said he had been told which way the fights went before they went that way.
He said the words, "I needed the gym. " And then he cried in front of 90 people and it did not help him at all. Then Pton Blakemore was sworn. She was 20 years old. She had a written statement she had given the commission 4 days earlier and she read it in a voice that kept sliding. She said that on the Saturday of the move, Braxton had told her, "Get the phone up.