I walked back over to my corner, and from the way Anthony hugged me and the expressions on his and Blue’s faces, I realized they had thought I was going to get creamed. But I still wasn’t ready to leave the ring. I wanted at least three rounds, just for the sake of experience. I couldn’t believe it had ended so quickly. Anthony brought Apidej over for the cameras and I tried to get down on my knees to bow to him, but he caught me and held me fast, laughing. It was my first fight and I got lucky, fighting an older out-of-shape guy. Apidej knew it wasn’t a big deal.
I ran into my opponent afterward, in the showers. I thought, Oh shit, because in here, on the slick tile floor, he could do some karate and really mess me up. But he was a perfect gentleman, polite from start to finish, and he shook my hand as he left the shower. I felt a little bad for him. He’d flown in from Tokyo just for this, but he hadn’t had enough time to acclimate and rest, and then he warmed up too much. He was definitely a better fighter than I was, but muay Thai is a young man’s game. Whoever is in better shape wins. It’s that simple.
I was lucky, but in a sense, so was he. I didn’t follow Yaquit’s advice and wade in throwing elbows; it might have turned into a bloodbath if I had, because I doubt my opponent would have been ready for those, either. And if the fight had gone into the later rounds, he wouldn’t have gotten any less tired.
Afterward, Blue, Anthony, Apidej, a few others, and I walked down the street to a little curbside restaurant and drank Elephant beer and ate salty snacks. I gradually became jubilant and thought I might never be tired again. Apidej told me a story that really stuck with me. He had been in a bar with a bunch of friends as a younger man, when he was the best fighter in Thailand, and a friend of his had become very drunk and tried to pick a fight. Apidej had just quietly gotten up and wai’d respectfully, and high, but his eyes deadly and calm behind his gesture, and backed out. The wai is the gesture of greeting respectfully and also for giving thanks, hands in prayer to the forehead, elbows out, a slight bow—I do it all the time because it engenders politeness. But when Apidej acted out for us the way he had done it, bowing before his aggressive friend, I could see in his eyes the pure and tranquil knowledge of victory. This is a guy who kicked so hard that if you blocked with your arm, he’d break it—and yet he had the utter control to not be baited. That’s what I admired, more than anything. Apidej is a devout Buddhist, and he meditated often, and I was curious about that. Something in that attitude seemed like the real warrior attitude, secure in self-knowledge, aware of things that don’t matter and untroubled by them.
I left Thailand a week later. My visa had run out, and to be honest, I was sick of training, bored of no booze and no girls and the monotony of hitting the pads and pounding the bags. Norman Mailer captured the tedium of training in his book The Fight, an account of the legendary Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”:
Just as a man serving a long sentence in prison will begin to live in despair about the time he recognizes that the effort to keep his sanity is going to leave him less of a man, so a fighter goes through something of the same calculation. The prisoner and the fighter must give up some part of what is best in him (since what is best for any human is no more designed for prison—or training—than an animal for the zoo). Sooner or later the fighter recognizes that something in his psyche is paying too much for the training. Boredom is not only deadening his personality but killing his soul.
A few weeks before I had to leave, my friend Quentin Oram had e-mailed me from Australia and asked if I would help him and his girlfriend (also a great friend of mine), Florence Bel, take his ’38 Hans Christian cutter across the Indian Ocean. We had all met working on a yacht in the Caribbean.
So I flew back to Darwin, and we spent five months crossing the seven thousand miles. Quentin is English and Florence is French, and they refought the Hundred Years’ War during the passage. We touched in Durban, South Africa, and I happily got off the boat and wandered around for four months. It was restful after the long, tedious anxiety of the passage, except for being chased by a young bull elephant near Kruger and stroking the fin of a great white shark off the southern coast. When I was alone and unobserved, I would shadowbox a little, and my unused limbs would flash and spin. I missed fighting, and I thought about how much better I’d be if I were still training and competing. I would sometimes talk about it, but people’s reactions were weird; they didn’t know where to put me, or whether they believed me.
Finally, I flew back to the States and started temping in Boston, a little panicked to be twenty-six years old and without a career. But I felt like I was in disguise wearing a tie on the subway, like I was pretending. I hated my job. I worked at a law firm and found myself turning into a nihilist, an anarchist, hiding files, sleeping in closets; soon I would work half an hour and then take an hour break. I asked my brother-in-law, a computer systems manager, to write me a virus, and he clapped me on the back and laughingly shook his head. I wanted to tear down the financial district. I worked out and found some guys to hit Thai pads with, but I was so far out of fighting shape that it felt like a joke. There was a black guy with a wicked lead-leg kick who had fought in New York, and he was surprised at how good I was for just six months of training. “You might be something if you put in a few years,” he said.
When people asked me about my muay Thai experience, the stories began to feel distant and dreamlike. Friends shook their heads (usually affectionately) or gave me puzzled looks. I guess it was a strange thing to go do, although at the time it didn’t seem that way. I was frequently asked, “Why? Why fight?” I could argue that the fear of fighting drove me to fight, but I’m not afraid of being hurt, and the thought of getting knocked out doesn’t faze me. What I am afraid of is being made a fool of, of dishonoring myself.
But that’s not all of it: I am afraid of confrontation. I don’t like it when anyone gets mad at me, and I try to avoid angering anyone. It’s not big scary men, or women, or anything in particular. I don’t like pissing anyone off. I am afraid of the anger of others.
By doing something repeatedly, though, and understanding it, you can diffuse and defuse the fear. This is true for sailing, riding motorcycles, asking girls out—even getting hit in the face by a man who wants to kill you.
I thought that I could walk away from fighting, having taken the test. But fighting is never over. I hadn’t been tested, I had been given an easy victory without any kind of struggle. I hadn’t learned enough to be done. I had the problem all boxers and fighters have: They never want to quit, they always are looking ahead to the next fight, when they’ll do better. I was broke, though, all the sailing money long spent. I didn’t have the background to be a professional fighter—I started too late and wasn’t a genetic freak who could get away with it—and I wasn’t sure that just training was enough stimulation.
In the summer of ’01, I nearly joined the Marine Corps again, this time to fly helicopters, and I was breaking in my boots for boot camp when, on some desperate whim, I took a job doing construction for Raytheon in Antarctica, at the South Pole. The National Science Foundation pays for the operations there and contracted out to Raytheon; they were building a huge year-round station to hold the large numbers of scientists and visitors that the Pole gets these days—around two hundred in the summer and thirty to fifty people in the winter.
Ahh, Antarctica. You had to be there. It was 70 below zero without windchill the first week down there; with windchill it hit 118 below. That’s brisk. We were working outside for ten hours a day, and even during “summer” it was usually 20 below.
I remember when summer ended and the temperatures began to drop again, one of the crane operators said to me cheerily, “There’s a nip of fall in the air today.” It was 50 below. When I wasn’t working, I lifted weights and ran on a treadmill, and there was a heavy bag in a little gymnasium that I would pound on. I felt like I had just scratched the surface of fighting, and the depths beckoned, but I needed money.
While down i
n Antarctica I met Cheri Dailey, a beautiful, tall, strong girl who was one of the few female smoke jumpers in the world. I thought smoke jumping sounded about right. I asked Cheri how I could be more like her, and she hooked me up with her old hand crew (a twenty-person firefighting team) in Washington State. I couldn’t have had a better recommendation. There is a legend about Cheri Dailey, and it goes like this: One of the fitness tests that smoke jumpers take is humping a hundred-pound pack for three miles. Out of a class of about sixty, Cheri came in first, beating all the men—and these guys are Division 1 football players, total badasses. Cheri smoked them all. She also had a tongue stud.
I left Antarctica in January as winter was settling in, the sun beginning its monthlong set, and traveled around New Zealand for a month before coming back to the States. I bummed around L.A. and New York again, then headed out west in the spring to join a firefighting crew.
The Ahtanum 20 was a state crew where the average age was about twenty-two. I was twenty-seven and made a conscious decision to “out-young-man” the young men on the crew; I would be more enthusiastic, run farther, work harder, race around more. It was the best way I could see to handle the situation of being the old guy who was a rookie. We had a good time, fighting fires and roaming Washington, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful place. I was the weird old dude who hung punching bags in the trees around camp and hit them barefoot. The Ahtanum 20 was a type-2 crew, which meant we couldn’t do certain dangerous jobs that called for type-1 crews, called Hotshots. I remember watching Hotshot crews head into the worst parts of the fires and thinking, Man, I got to get on with those guys.
In the winter I came back east to get my EMT certification, and the following spring I headed out to interview with Hotshot crews. I drove all over the country and was picked up by the Gila Hotshots in New Mexico. It was a considerable honor to be hired by them, as Gila is considered one of the best crews in the country. Up at the camp, high in the Gila National Forest, I found a heavy bag and hung it with some carabiners, to pound on in the afternoons. At the time, I wouldn’t have said I was going to fight again, but the idea still lurked.
Fire, especially big fire, is awesome. Sometimes when we were doing big burnouts on gnarly fires, working in and among acres of flames, seeing clumps of trees torch out fifty or a hundred feet into the sky—there’s a lot of adrenaline there, too. When the heat hits like a wall and drives you back without conscious thought, the straps of your backpack so hot they burn you through the Nomex shirt—we all suffer from a touch of pyromania in the business. Our primary weapon against fire is fire, and burning was my favorite job. Being on big fires at night, watching the behavior of intense heat and flame, can be indescribably beautiful.
After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto “Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,” which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book (A Soldier in the Great War) that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul. No good painting ever came easily to me: The good ones were battles. I got the tattoo so that I would always see it there and be reminded.
Though I had applied to be a smoke jumper (and got hired), somewhere, in the dark wilderness of my heart, I still wanted to fight. I had promised myself when I went to Thailand that I would get ten fights, and then stop; because ten fights would be enough to know what fighting really is. I had quit after one—and I had never been tested. If only I could find a way to get it to pay for itself—that’s how I had done all my traveling before. It’s a part of my philosophy: You can always get it to pay for itself somehow.
Fighting is a way to feel, an anti–video game, a way to force something to happen. That’s what brought me back to it, because when I’ve fought someone, I know something has happened. How many days of your life pass you by that you could take or leave? When nothing really happened?
During college, I had lived and studied at the Slade School in London for a year, and I became involved in the trance club scene—the Fridge, Escape from Samsara, Return to the Source—and what became apparent was that these thousand kids tripping balls on ecstasy just want to feel something. They just want to feel as though everyone in the room understands them, and belongs, and that they belong, and, most important, that something is happening.
All those experiences—sailing around the world, Antarctica, firefighting—I chose them because they were the best options I had going. All I am is persistent, and willing to entertain many ideas. I’ve done drugs; and I used to drink like it was my job. I wasn’t a college athlete; in college, I was a painter who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I’ve done things that maybe I should be ashamed of, but I’m not.
You have a specific responsibility to existence, to God if you like, to taste, touch, and smell what there is to experience. You have to do everything. If given an option between doing something and not doing it, you have to do it; because you’ve already done the “not do it” part. This can be juvenile and dangerous, I realize, and there are a lot of things I have chosen not do, for a million reasons. I was raised polite. I’ve never hurt anyone, except guys I was sparring or fighting with. And I don’t take needless risks. The idea is to make it through intact; “safety” is my middle name. But I feel that you owe it to the world to be curious. Somebody asked me if I was looking for something. I am looking for everything.
Part of my responsibility, while I am strong enough, lies with fighting—not just to get as good as possible, but to understand it, and I maintain that to understand something, you have to do it, and do it more than once. I thought I had closed the door on fighting when I left Thailand, but I hadn’t. Four years later it was still there.
So I set out to explore and explain the world of fighting, to myself and to anyone who would listen—not everywhere in the world, and not everything, because that would never end—to try in some small way, with some logical progression, to understand it.
2
RULE NUMBER SEVEN, FIGHT CLUB
Sam fighting in Springdale, Ohio, May 7, 2004.
It’s not something he can do anything about, being a bleeder, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can do something about not having a set of whiskers.
—F. X. Toole, Rope Burns
It started when I walked into the back room of the Amherst Athletic Club in Amherst, Massachusetts, a little college town in pastoral New England. I was back at home, visiting my mom after a fire season with the Gila Hotshots. December and January in Massachusetts were record-breaking cold, down in the negative 40s at night.
The Amherst Athletic Club had a dark, small room with mats on the floor and rows of gloves and shin pads and various martial arts training gear. The Sheetrock was caved in with human silhouettes where people had been mashed into the wall. I was curious. I asked around, and started training a little bit there, and was shocked to discover how far Mixed Martial Arts had come.
Nearly everyone has heard or seen clips of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), started in the United States in 1993, held in the infamous Octagon, a high-walled, chain-link octagonal cage for the fighters to battle in. Ultimate Fighting was marketed as the answer to the questions that had persisted since the karate boom in the sixties: Which style was more effective? My tiger-crane kung fu is far deadlier than your Okinawan karate. Well, now you could prove it. Who wins when a good boxer meets a good kickboxer? When a wrestler fights a kung-fu expert? We can answer those questions by fighting with “no rules,” evoking old gladiator contests, and satisfying the crowd’s bloodlust. Since then, the UFC has moved through various incarnations and venues, has added some basic rules and the use of a referee, and has come under political fire and had manageme
nt problems. For a while it wasn’t even on cable TV. But the UFC survived due entirely to a grassroots fan base that also trains, and more important, fights.
This is a fan base that fights. It is interested in and drawn to fights, fistfights, action movies, who’s the toughest?–type questions. It is considered “white trash,” and, judging from the crowd shots at the UFC, it is primarily white, male, and tattooed—the disenfranchised, burning to test their manhood, angry at their father or situation or something—in short, my people.
The first UFCs were dominated by a slender Brazilian named Royce Gracie, who won by taking the fight to the ground and using Brazilian jiu-jitsu to control his opponents. Royce and his family’s jiu-jitsu stood the American martial arts world on its head. All these guys who had been doing karate for twenty years, who had their own schools, suddenly realized they had a glaring weakness: the ground. If a fight went to the ground, and they often do, their vaunted kicks and punches were ineffective. People scrambled to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What evolved was a style known as mixed martial arts, or MMA, where practitioners “mix” the various martial arts to make a complete fighter. You mix boxing and kickboxing and muay Thai with freestyle wrestling and jiu-jitsu, maybe a little judo, whatever you want. Just make sure it all works.
Though I knew the UFC was still around—I’d occasionally catch ads for it on television—finding it in my hometown in western Massachusetts was hard to believe. I soon discovered that it was everywhere. There are several hundred all-amateur events a year in the United States. This isn’t like amateur boxing with headgear; this is serious. Your only protection is a mouthpiece, a cup, and some little fingerless gloves so you can punch your opponent in the head and not break your knuckles but still be able to grip and wrestle. This is real fighting, and you can get pounded in there. Although it is sometimes called NHB for “no holds barred,” there are some things you can’t do: head butting, eye gouging, fishhooking (when you hook a guy’s mouth with a finger or two), punching the back of the head. Other than that, it’s pretty much all fair game; you can knee and elbow, you can choke, you can crank his ankle until he submits.
Fighter's Heart, A Page 5