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“Are you sure you want this fight?” Bruce asked.
“Ya, ya, ya.”
Bruce turned so that the witnesses in the room would hear what Nakachi’s answer to his next question would be.
“And you are the one who pushed to have this fight, right?”
Nakachi repeated his previous reply.
Bruce smiled. “All right, then.”
Nakachi now settled into a wide front stance — his left leg forward and his right fist clenched and at his hip, ready to strike. He extended his left arm toward Bruce with the palm open.
Ed Hart, serving as timekeeper, looked down at his wristwatch and waited for the second hand to hit twelve. He held up his left arm and said, “Ready … Begin!”
Nakachi fired a front kick toward Bruce’s chest, which Bruce deflected with his right arm. Before Nakachi could reset, Bruce struck him flush in the face with a left-hand vertical fist and then reeled off a series of rapid-fire chain punches. Each punch landed in Nakachi’s face and drove him across the length of the racquetball court until his back slammed hard into the far wall. Nakachi had attempted to punch back during the initial onslaught, but all of his strikes had been easily deflected. With his opponent now momentarily trapped, Bruce unleashed several more punches to Nakachi’s face.
The Karate man, in a move of desperation, now attempted to grab hold of Bruce’s arms. But at that very moment Bruce pivoted and delivered a double fist punch, one fist striking Nakachi’s face, the other his chest. Because he threw the double punch while twisting, both strikes landed with considerable power. He sent Nakachi, by Jesse’s account, “flying six feet through the air.” When he landed, Nakachi came down on both knees — and was instantly met with a full-force front kick to his face. Blood exploded from the man’s nose, and the force of Bruce’s kick flipped Nakachi over onto his back. According to Jesse:
I hollered “Stop!” because that was one of the rules; if you hit the floor, that was it. But then the guy just went out. He looked like he was dead. I was afraid. I thought, “Damn, I hope this guy’s not dead.”
Ed and Jesse looked at each other in muted shock. Nakachi’s friends were frozen in disbelief.
Ed and Jesse dragged the fallen fighter across the floor to the nearest wall and propped him up against it.
As Nakachi regained consciousness, his eyes blinked, and, recognizing Ed as the timekeeper, he struggled to articulate a question.
“How long [did] it take him to defeat me?”
“The total time of the match was only eleven seconds,” Ed recalled. “But I felt sorry for the guy, so I doubled it, telling him, ‘ah, twenty-two seconds.’ And the guy said, ‘Oooohhh!’ and collapsed back against the wall. That he should lose so quickly was disgraceful to him. Shit, if I had told him the match was only eleven seconds.”
