When does Jose know he has Daniel Franco? The first round, when he hits Franco with a hook and feels him sag a little bit. From then on, the fight is a culmination and a consummation, a story he tells himself, blow by blow, all the way to its inevitable end. He tells himself to be patient; he tells himself to be careful; he tells himself to pick his shots, because he hates to miss. And when he goes to the corner at the end of the round, he tells himself a secret: Pepito, he's hungry -- but not in the same way you are. He doesn't have the same responsibilities you do. He doesn't have five kids. You are a man next to him.

Franco fights back in flurries. He hits hard, with a long reach and a stiff jab. But Jose is faster, and without apparent haste, he gets inside and goes to work. He seems in his natural element and keeps straightening Franco with uppercuts and then hitting him in the body. The sound that he made putting punches together in the little dressing room for ring girls is the sound that he continues to make in the ring, and in the third round Eric hears Franco saying "Yes sir! Yes sir!" as he fights, and it takes him a moment to understand what is happening. And when he does -- when he realizes Franco's father is shouting instructions from the corner and his son is answering them, even as Jose advances upon him on his small, swift, scarred feet -- well, that's when Eric knows that Jose has him too.

Jose Haro is in a hospital bed with holes in both feet. Now, this is when the inspirational soundtrack should start. His doctor is telling him he'll be able to walk again but might limp for the rest of his life. As for boxing -- "he's back to zero" is how Whit Haydon, his agent, puts it. At the time of the shooting, which sent Cole Shields to prison for nine to 15 years, Jose was negotiating a contract with Thompson Boxing in Los Angeles, but he never hears from the company again. It's not simply that he's wounded, it's that he's tainted -- or as his brother says, "Only bad guys get shot, right?" He's never been anything but ambivalent about boxing; he's never been able to say "I love it" without saying "I hate it" in the next breath, and he has always measured success in terms of being successful enough to get out. Well, now he not only has a chance to get out, he has a chance to get out without anyone remembering that he was in.

He doesn't get out. Indeed, in the hospital, he begins to realize it doesn't matter if he loves boxing or hates it -- he needs it, in order to show the world he's not just a victim and to give his children someone to admire. And so when he goes home, he begins shadowboxing in his wheelchair. Then he begins working mitts with Eric in his wheelchair. Then, about four months after the shooting, he limps into the gym, and six months after the shooting he has his first fight, a six-rounder in front of a packed house outside Salt Lake, during which Eric thinks his brother is not only as good as he was before he was shot, he might be better, because of his concentration -- how he thinks.

And that's just the beginning. He wins another fight, scoring a knockout on a body shot, and Whit Haydon receives a call from Daniel Franco's promoter. Jose signs for a fight scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 11, 2016, and begins to train. But one afternoon he's running with Eric, and when he pivots into a turn, he hears a snap from his left foot. Eric knows it's bad right away because Jose wants to throw up. He also wants to cry -- and he does cry, even more profusely than he cried after the shooting, because he's broken his foot, and he has to cancel the fight with Franco. He goes back to the hospital for the installation of a surgical screw, and he eventually begins training again. But he can't get any fights, he might as well be back to zero, until Haydon calls with the news that Franco wants to fight him for the USBA featherweight title in June.

The inspirational soundtrack should be at full blare now, with trumpets. But it's not. There is only respectful silence, because the story of a prizefight is never the story of one man but two. There is the story of a man who proves himself healed from his wounds and there is the story of another who is about to get very badly hurt -- and because this is boxing, it's the same story.

He feels it in his fingertips. Jose comes back to his corner and listens to Eric tell him, again and again: "Give him a reason to quit! Give him a reason to quit!" But part of him keeps his own counsel, telling himself, Pepito, this is what you've been working for. Don't let it slip away. You might never have this opportunity again. What he cautions himself against is getting careless, and getting caught. But what he fears most is leaving the fight to the judges. Daniel Franco is a Roc Nation fighter. The fight is a Roc Nation fight. Jose has to knock him out, and his awareness of that necessity expresses itself as an almost physical yearning.

He has spent the first seven rounds laying siege to Daniel Franco, and when the eighth round begins, he sees a Franco who has changed since the beginning of the fight. He moves differently. He responds to punches differently. He turns his body differently when he's hit. Now it is a matter of execution, of doing what he and Eric worked on in the gym. Franco keeps moving, keeps jabbing, keeps trying to hurt him with hooks, but every time he does, Jose is able to duck and throw a right hand from a crouch. He is not a one-punch knockout artist, but then he's not throwing single punches; he's throwing punches amplified by accumulation, and such is their impact that Franco might as well be walking into them. At about a minute into the round, Jose hits him with a chopping right. Franco takes a few steps back, and then his long, skinny legs collapse upon each other. He gets up, bleeding from the nose, and then continues to fight, with Jose now applying pressure but also taking his time, throwing every punch he has: jabs, hooks, uppercuts and right hands, always the right hand. And when Franco misses high with a jab, Jose wheels up from under it with a right that travels a tight arc and lands with a centrifugal fury. Jose feels the end of the fight in his knuckles and watches Franco's knees cave in and his ankles splay out and his shoulders fall forward, until he rolls over with his back flat on the canvas. Amazingly, he tries to get up, but the ref presses him back down, waving, and Franco slams his right fist and says "F---!" with blood streaming from his nose.

Jose walks into Eric's arms, he raises his championship belt over his head and he is hoisted aloft even as Franco is lifted to his stool by his father and two other seconds. He slumps, and then as Jose gives an interview, Franco lies down on the canvas as though he needs a rest.

Jose calls Eric to help him at the last store on his route, a Wal-Mart. Eric works for him, and because after a long day Jose still has to unload a fresh delivery piled high in the Wal-Mart back room, he makes sure Eric joins him. Eric has a few snaggly teeth in his smile and a long ponytail that he tucks under his cap when he's working for Pepsi and braids when he's working in Jose's corner. He does what Jose won't do -- he studies video footage of Jose's opponents for flaws and vulnerabilities -- and sometimes he says what Jose won't say. Ever since Jose saw the photo early this morning of Daniel Franco about to undergo surgery for the restoration of his skull, he's been talking to me about his role in putting Franco in the hospital. He knew that he'd hurt Franco badly in the sixth and that Franco had returned to his corner saying that his head hurt. "Maybe I should have been a man and said, 'Stop the fight! Stop the fight!' But you know, he was fighting back to the very end. He was flurrying, and I think they thought that if it went to a decision, he could still have won."

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He is as ambivalent about his fight with Daniel Franco as he is about boxing itself -- proud of what he put into it, dismayed by what he got out of it. It is not so with Eric, because Eric brings an almost aesthetic appreciation to his brother's fights, even the fight with Franco. When I ask him about the right hand that ended the fight, he smiles his jagged smile and says, "I knew that punch was going to come. I spotted Daniel's flaws, and I knew that it would come if Jose threw it from here" -- and now, in the soda aisle, he assumes a boxing stance, drops into a crouch and throws the same short right Jose did. "You know, both Jose and I put posts on social media celebrating the victory. And the next morning, there were people calling us animals -- 'How can you be celebrating when Daniel is fighting for his life?' We didn't know he was fighting for his life. We just knew he'd been knocked out and had gone to the hospital to get checked out. But that's boxing. We didn't cheat. We won that fight clean. We weren't supposed to win it. He was Daniel Franco. Jose was just a guy from Utah who got shot in both feet. But as the fight went on, I knew that we were chopping Daniel Franco down. I just wanted Jose to add the exclamation point."

Franco goes out of the ring on a stretcher, and when Jose and the rest of Team Haro gather back in their dressing room, they say a prayer for him. Then they open a bottle of water and pretend it's champagne, and that's Jose's celebration. He sleeps that night with his USBA championship belt, and in the morning he receives a text from Whit Haydon informing him that Daniel Franco's brain is bleeding in two places, that he's already been in surgery, that surgeons removed a portion of his skull in order to relieve the pressure caused by the hemorrhage, that he's in an induced coma and may die. Suddenly, Jose goes from an athlete who has completed a lonely, unlikely comeback to a man who has very nearly beaten another man to death, and once again he feels as though he's back to zero.

He goes home to West Jordan, to Yesenia and his children. When he was shot, he waited to tell the kids what happened; they thought he was in the hospital because a 12-pack broke his foot. He doesn't tell the kids what happened in Iowa either. They know that he knocked Daniel Franco out and that a knockout is in itself an injury. But they don't know the extent of it -- the terrible totality of his victory. They are so young, so how can they possibly understand the significance of the championship belt he brought home, much less what it cost him to get it? They can't, and one afternoon he can't even find the belt. It's disappeared, and when he goes looking for it, he finds it in the possession of his rambunctious 3-year-old boy, Riley, who is scribbling all over it with a black Sharpie.

When I have lunch with Jose and Eric after they finish their route, I have two questions, the first about taking a punch and the other about throwing one. Jose Haro has never been knocked out as a fighter. He has never even been knocked down. He has told me that nothing frightens him more than the idea of waking up in the middle of a boxing ring with no memory of what just happened to him. Will he be able to get up if he gets knocked down? Will he be able to prevail while taking punishment? Will he be able to win a war? And if he were in a war -- well, boxing history is not only full of fighters who took beatings and were never the same; it is full of fighters who delivered beatings and were never the same, who finished not only a fight but a man with a decisive blow and could never throw such a pitiless and ferocious punch again. Will Jose be able to get up the way Daniel Franco did after the first knockdown in the eighth round of their fight? And will Jose be able to find it within himself to throw the same kind of punch that put Franco down for good?

He does not know the answer to the first question because he doesn't know what it's like to have to get up after being knocked down, at least in the ring. He does know what it's like to face such a situation in life, however, and so he thinks he can do it, if he has to -- if he is fighting to secure a future for his family. He has earned so little money in boxing, fighting at times for only a few hundred dollars and never for more than a few thousand. And yet he still holds out the hope that a big payday will enable him to build a house instead of waking up in the middle of the night worrying about losing one, even though he knows full well that a payday will strip him of some of the protections he's been at pains to devise. "If I'm taking a beating, stop it," he's instructed his brother. But it's one thing to say that at the WinnaVegas in a cornfield in Iowa. It's another at the MGM Grand.

As for his being able to throw that punch: Yes, he thinks he can, because he already has. He worked tirelessly with Eric to set up that punch against Daniel Franco, and then there it was, the fulfillment of all his work and the answer to all his dreams. How could he not throw it?

I ask what else Eric said to him between rounds, other than "Give him a reason to quit." "He was like, 'You got this, Pepito. You got this!' I was like, 'You think this is so easy? You go out there and fight him.'"

And then I ask what's the most important thing Eric has ever said to him in the corner. Eric is about to answer, but Jose interrupts him and, relaxing into a sudden smile, he says: "'Knock this motherf---er out.'"