One more!” I growl in the back of my throat as my muscles convulse under the weight of the bar on my chest. It’s two hundred and twenty-five pounds of steel weighing down on me. The same weight they had at the Draft that I wasn’t asked to lift. The same weight I pushed here at UCLA on Pro Day. Ten was as many as I could manage before my body gave out. I won’t be happy with anything less than eleven today. Tomorrow it will be twelve. “Come on, come, come on,” Folk chants, wiggling his fingers eagerly under the bar as it slowly starts to rise. “Do it, bitch! Do it!” Sweat streams down my face, dripping onto the floor. I yell from between my gritted teeth. I give it everything I have. I see stars in my vision. I feel myself getting faded, my peripheral going dark. I’m worried I’ll pass out or shit myself on the bench the way Defoe did last month. And yet still I push. Still I strive.
