Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  The fires continued to fill up the southern part of the world, and the smoke drifted far out to sea in a hazy, dirty layer. The sunsets as we drove back to Rosarito were incandescent.

  The film had bought both Robbie and Rory return airfare, so in the end, I wasn’t going to have to take either one of them with me. I thought I had concealed my desire to be alone well, but Rory laughed and said, “This is good. I know Sam was going to leave me at a truck stop in Texas.”

  We watched the UFC that night. Pat had three guys fighting and they all won, and Paul sat next to me for a while. I liked Paul, although we weren’t close; I think he is an honest guy, the real deal. Whenever he got a film, a circle of friends from his youth who worked in movies (stunts, effects, producing) would drop what they were doing and go with him; they kept him grounded—they would tell him when he was doing something stupid. He knew that some of the movies he’d made were cheesy, and he wanted to make good films, cool films. He was capable of it.

  Paul had read the article I’d written about Thailand and said he might want to go and train there. He asked me, “Do you think you’ll ever get this out of your system? You won’t, will you? . . . It will always be there.” He had the bug, a little bit: He wanted to train more, he wanted to fight.

  I thought about his question. Maybe it was out of my system, I realized. I still wanted to train, to get better, to roll and spar—but I didn’t need to fight, I didn’t want to hurt anybody. Did I?

  There is a question, an endless debate, over whether fighting makes you more aggressive and prone to violence, or less. In my case, it was definitely more. For the first time, I kind of, secretly, wanted to hurt someone. Before, I had been forcing myself to do it because I could, because I enjoyed the training, because I wanted never to be afraid.

  I had looked deep into my heart for any sign of fear; what I found instead was boredom. I like getting hit in the head—I’m not afraid of it. It gets me psyched. I hate getting hit in the body, but that’s because I get hurt and then can’t do things for five weeks or whatever. Climbing into the ring or cage didn’t seem like such a big deal. Staying in shape was boring; training all the time was boring. I was never going to be a great fighter, so maybe it was time to move on to other fears. I could walk away from it, I thought. I can walk away from anything or anybody, I’ve proved that, not that it’s something to be proud of.

  Suddenly, it was all over—at least the Mexico part was. Pat’s role was finished, and the fight scenes were all done. The crew was packing up and getting ready to return to L.A., take a week for Thanksgiving and then two weeks to finish the shoot in the United States. I got up one morning at three-thirty and set off on the three-day marathon, driving diagonally across the country back to Massachusetts. I wanted to hit the border early, to get across before the commuter traffic began, but it didn’t work. My eighth time driving across the country and the sixth time by myself. The magic was long gone.

  I was surprised to see a few columns in Arizona, big fires pushing up smoke. It was late in the season, November, way late for Arizona to be burning.

  9

  A FIGHTER’S HEART

  In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into the air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which there is no one to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again—that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can.

  —Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

  There comes a moment when we stop creating ourselves.

  —John Updike

  I was back in western Massachusetts, at Amherst Athletic, training for another MMA fight and on a deadline to finish this book. MMA still hooked me on a personal level, because of the added complexity of the ground game. Not that I had mastered stand-up, by any means—that is another endless quest. But with the ground element, MMA allows the thinking fighter more options, which takes away from some of the sheer athleticism and reflexes that win boxing fights. I don’t have the reflexes, so I’m working on the thinking. Also, getting hit in the head is bad for you, and that’s the main work of boxing.

  I was working with my old friend Kirik Jenness, who had been involved with this project from the start, more or less. Kirik had taken me under his wing and refused all payment. “I don’t take money from fighters,” he said, even though he was privately training me every day for an hour or more. Kirik coached, refereed, and cornered for fighters at all levels, from the UFC on down to the lowliest shows. He had a genuine love for the sport, and he ran the largest MMA Web site (www.mma.tv), but he wasn’t trying to get rich. I was back in the amateur atmosphere, a small college town; for kids and men who fight in these amateur MMA shows, it wasn’t about money, either. So what was it about?

  Kirik and I did light MMA, we put on the little gloves and worked for position, and I came hard with knees and the clinch. “You’ve got a lot of aggression, which is good,” he said. “You’re relentless, and you’re almost in shape.” I had learned what fighting has to be—I understood the urgency of it. Aggression plays a big role.

  The brain science, the “neuropyschology,” of aggression (as my friend Michelle Ward, who has a PhD in clinical neuroscience, attempted to explain to me), places aggression in two regions of the brain: in the limbic system, which is in the core, and in the prefrontal cortex, which is behind the forehead. The basic thinking in the scientific community says that the impulses for aggression come from the core, and control of the impulses happens in the prefrontal cortex. So any damage to the prefrontal cortex can change things, Michelle said—“even slight brain trauma, often so light it is unnoticed, from head injuries can lead to more aggressive and impulsive behavior.” Then what comes first for fighters, the chicken or the egg? They get hit in the head, which makes them more aggressive and more prone to get hit in the head.

  It does mess you up—there’s no question. All fighters joke about forgetting things, and all of us have gone home with a headache from sparring and not slept well and not been right for a few days. More than once. That’s the long, slow road to punchiness—don’t fool yourself, those are mild concussions.

  There’s a psychiatric tool called the Sensation Seeking Scale. You answer a bunch of questions, and the scale determines whether you are a “sensation seeker” or not, the idea being that the serotonin levels of certain people are lower than average, so in order for those people to feel anything—excitement or anxiety—they need greater than normal stimulus. This is a common thought—the idea of “adrenaline junkies” has been around for a while. I scored pretty high on the SSS, but I’m not an adrenaline junkie—I can stop anytime I want. Sure.

  Michael Kimmel, in his book Manhood in America, talks about the “homosociality” of the manly arenas (sports, business); for a man, the most important thing is “his reputation as a man among men.” Men need to prove their masculinity to one another. I thought of the lack of women in all the gyms I’d been in; fighting is essentially a man’s world. Of course, there are exceptions, but a woman fighter isn’t important in a man’s world.

  Konrad Lorenz, the author of On Aggression, understands where this “homosociality” comes from. Lorenz studied tropical reef fish and geese, and used the observed behaviors to draw inferences about all vertebrates and thus ourselves. He first noticed that, on the reef, “fish are far more aggressive towards their own species than any other” (outside of eating and being eaten, of course). The male fish viciously attack other male fish of the same species, the females the females, while allowing the myriad others to coexist peacefully.

  Lorenz papaphrases Charles Darwin when he says that “the strength of the father directly affects the welfare of the children” and goes on to say that in herds (and any family unit), the rival male fights lead to stronger males and greater evolutionary success. There is a “survival value
” in herd or family defense that strong males contribute directly to.

  So the strong homosocial element of masculinity makes perfect sense, in evolutionary terms. Those that fight each other harder do better. Lorenz takes interspecies aggression several steps further. He talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intraspecies aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behavior-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel toward others of their species into something else when they mate. The same thing, albeit in a more complex way, takes place among men and women of the same tribe or family unit, bound together for increased success against the outside world. Lorenz writes that friendship is found only in animals with “highly developed intra-specific aggression,” and goes on to say that the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship. The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression. Men and women who form these deep bonds—who evolved ways to mitigate interspecies aggression—have greater sucess in passing along their genes.

  That’s the secret: It’s all about love.

  Kirik and I sat around and talked about fighting, why Greco-Roman wrestlers are better at MMA than freestyle wrestlers. (Kirik thinks it’s the higher base, which is more like a boxing or kickboxing stance, and the proclivity for hand fighting.) Kirik has refereed hundreds of these matches at the amateur level, and has seen it all. He talked about how the range for punching in MMA is different from that in boxing. You can’t stand in and trade with four-ounce gloves on—you’ll get sliced to bits—so you stand back and come in hard. The jab is more of a straight hard left than a light jab. I was reminded of the old bare-fisted fighters, who would throw two or three punches a minute, probably because bare-fisted would slice you up even worse. Zé Mario had said that about the old vale tudo fights without gloves, that they were bloodbaths.

  We gossiped a lot about fighters we knew, as Kirik knew everybody, and one day I said, “Tim Sylvia has badder intentions than most big men—it gives him an edge.” That train of thought led me right back to myself—I don’t really have the bad intentions. I haven’t been damaged. My father didn’t beat me or leave—my childhood was great.

  I could feel that changing a little, though: All the fighting had made me a little more receptive to the idea of hurting someone. I could do it easily now. But still, I didn’t have the basic rage that you need to fight, and I said as much to Kirik. And then I thought, Doth the lady protest too much? I had endless dreams of fighting, and “knee-on-belly” was my new favorite thing, a position from which you could hit a guy but he couldn’t hit you, and I would love to get there in a fight. Which meant I wanted to hurt somebody.

  I went to the only shrink I knew, a nice guy named Stuart Bicknell; I’d gone to high school with his daughter. I asked for his help, and we had two sessions (which he said wasn’t really enough). I wanted to know what he thought of me, what was the psychiatric evaluation of this whole quest?

  Stuart told me that “when one hears about kick-boxing and ‘cage-fighting,’ the response is often revulsion and contempt tinged with curiosity. ‘Who would do such a thing? You’d have to have a death wish—or at least be a little unhinged—to put yourself in that arena.’” He looked at me for psychopathology and, in his own words, “found none.” Stuart gave me a big-picture look at the diffent theories on aggression:

  Instinctual, catharsis theory argues that aggression is the self-destructive (death) instinct turned outward, away from the self and toward others. In so doing, in discharging this instinctual aggression, a basic human need is satisfied. The frustration-aggression hypothesis proposes that aggression is simply a generic response to frustration, a response to provocation. Social learning theory argues that aggression is learned behavior, which is reinforced. Reinforcement comes from praise (for being aggressive) or from the discovery that it reduces tension. And, of course, the nature/nurture debate becomes part of the discussion. It’s nature; the interaction between high whole blood serotonin, testosterone, and chemical activity in the frontal lobe—not to mention the concept of an “aggression gene”—plays a key role in determining one’s degree of aggressive behavior. Those in the nurture camp argue for the influence of family, neighborhood, and peers. Environment is the determining factor. . . . Any explanation of aggression relies as much on interpretation and soft speculation as it does on hard science.

  Confused yet?

  Stuart’s thought was that while my environment didn’t have any red flags or smoking guns, the fact that my father was a Navy SEAL was probably significant, if only from a genetic viewpoint. The Freudian thought would be that I was still in competition with my father—although I have a great relationship with him, and we haven’t competed for years and years, and we never did except in friendly play. But when I graduated from college, my dad did say, “The one thing I regret is not being able to make you into a world-class sailor,” and what was the first thing I did? Sail around the world. So there.

  I think Stuart was closer when we talked about my discovering boxing in college. “Love at first punch” was how he described it, and then, “For you, whose modus operandi has been to take it to the limit, the journey from boxing at Harvard to fighting in a cage was, with a few detours, a predictable one.”

  I thought of what Dan Goossen had said to Gabriel Ruelas: “You can’t make fighting come out of you. It has to be in you.”

  We rolled a lot, and I was finally starting to pick up on the ground game—although I was a long way from having one. Kirik maintained that the ground game needed a two-pronged attack, as one attack would be easily countered by a halfway skilled guy. You had to distract him, keep him from thinking, and have two separate but related attacks going on at once and be able to flow from one to the other. I could grasp that conceptually, if not in practice. I started to learn to control the hips, using direct pressure as well as pressure on the head, shoulders, arms, or legs, all to limit his hips. If you shut down a guy’s hips, he’s halfway beat.

  Kirik’s other main focus was on the transition, “the scramble,” the time between things in a fight. These were the times, going from standing to the ground, or in reverse, that a fighter might be vulnerable, and in MMA you needed a relentless attack, so that in the scramble you were always coming, because it might be the only chance you got at a clean shot for the whole fight.

  Kirik was an interesting guy, tall and rangy. His dad was working in Ghana, and Kirik had been named after the noise that a bird in Alaska made, a gray jay, when his father was doing his anthropology study (with his young family along) in a small Inuit town. I considered him as we rolled.

  Kirik had been in martial arts and fighting for a long time, around thirty years; he still trained all the time and was toying with the idea of fighting again. Yet he was one of the sunniest guys I’d ever met, smiling, relaxed, and happy. He claimed to be a happy drunk, not a mean one; and I bet most of the girls he knew thought he was just the sweetest, nicest guy in the world. They would be horrified, perhaps, by his knowledge of and attitude about fighting. I have a friend who said that older guys who were still really into fighting had “missed something,” that their development wasn’t quite there. I didn’t think that was the case with Kirik, or some of the other guys I knew, who’d let the tough-guy stuff fall by the wayside but had become involved in the craft of fighting, in the expertise of it.

  I wondered if it all was just a smokescreen for a manhood rite. Kimmel writes that for men, one of the deepest fears is that “others will see us as less than manly, as weak, timid, frightened.” In American manhood, there is an incessant fear of failure—you aren’t a man without constant, endless success. The point he keeps harping on is that in America, manhood is never something that is over and done with—it needs to be constantly proved, a “
relentless test.” Was this all MMA was, Brandon Adamson’s idea of “clout,” a new manhood initiation rite? People will always point to Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, which is a terrific book and was made into an even better film, but it was essentially a middle-class nihilist fantasy, which is revealed when the narrator claims that “fight club isn’t about winning,” because it would be, especially when the blue-collar kids got involved. The issue is more complicated. The real fight clubs aren’t proving grounds where guys look for beatings just to feel alive, although that may be a part of it. Kirik and I had laughed about how fighters, almost without fail, sit backstage before a fight—in the moments before the bell, when the absurdity of the situation becomes clear—and wonder why the hell they do this. But I think I know: They train hard to win fights, so that no one will be able to dominate them, to damage them where they have been damaged—but in the end, they train hard to make themselves better. The test is necessary. It completes the training, and it changes you.

  Fighting is not just a manhood test; that is the surface. The depths are about knowledge and self-knowledge, a method of examining one’s own life and motives. For most people who take it seriously, fighting is much more about the self than the other.

  Leah Hager Cohen, who wrote Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight, noticed that boxers always embrace after fighting, and she wondered at it. She eventually realized that it was genuine, that afterward the fighters saw each other in a grateful light—“the happy eventuality that permitted them to take their own measure.” She saw what the fighters were providing for each other.

  The person agreeing to fight you is doing you a great service, allowing you to test yourself against him or her; they agree to abide by the same rules, to meet you on an exact date in a specified location. The opponent allows you to strive fully, without reservation, and you do the same for him (or her). When you think about it, fighting in a ring is incredibly civilized. We’ll try to kill each other, but we agree to stop the instant the other wants to, or is hurt, we’ll shut down all the killer instincts inside us the moment we feel a tap on the leg. The embrace after a fight is not false, or forced, it’s respect and gratitude. Usually, the issue of dominance and mutual respect has been decided one way or the other. It’s why I had to train with these guys to get to know them, because men before they fight are filled with contradictory impulses of hierarchy, while afterward things are decided: I am the student, you are the teacher. But not just that; someone who has agreed to fight you has agreed to serve as part of your test, your struggle for knowledge, your quest to make yourself better.