Rotella again in Cut Time:Hurt changes you . . . hurt carries meaning, it can educate you . . . But it can also rob you of your capacity to learn or feel, or even to think. A fighter who gets hit too often can descend into dementia pugilistica; a heavy hitter can go blood simple; a jaded spectator can fall entirely out of the habit of compassion . . . the meaning can drain out of hurt, leaving only the nakedness of it.
We have to be on guard, to make sure that we never drain the meaning from our hurt. It requires vigilance and understanding, particularly in fight writers, those who study so much and watch so much, without personal investment, with a connoisseur’s eye. The good fight writers and TV commentators never lose sight, entirely, of what this is all about, they never lose respect for the men fighting. The same can be said for any fan; never lose sight of what is happening when you cheer a bloody war.
Professional fighting is an awkward, uneasy thing. It falls in a strange place in society. It’s entertainment, yet it serves the participants and the audience with an intrinsic need, scratches a primal itch. It’s the manufacture of life-and-death situations for public consumption. The promoters and participants have to walk the line of entertainment and performance. There is some moral corrosion that happens, for the fans, for the fighters, for the promoters if they walk that line too fine.
One of the more interesting problems any trainer has to deal with is the difficulty of reconciling winning and entertaining. Mark DellaGrotte was the first guy I really talked to about it, in Boston. He has learned the lessons the hard way.
“I remember when Jorge Rivera fought Dennis Hallman, and Jorge survived and ground out a win. I kept telling Jorge, ‘be careful, he’s still dangerous.’ When I ran into the UFC match-maker, Joe Silva, later he was pissed off. He said, ‘That fight sucked, Jorge coulda knocked him out.’ I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t. And I had to learn the same lesson with Patrick Cote. I realized that the fights gotta be exciting, or else everyone loses, we turn this back into boxing. You have to fight strategically, to win, but not overcautious, because you’re an entertainer. If people are turning off the TV, where are we going? Nobody makes money. Now the fighters themselves, the referees are slowly changing the formats, the ‘standups’ are getting faster and faster. It’s not always about winning, it’s about putting on a show, too.”
The history of modern prizefighting traces back to the 1700s and James Figg’s School of Arms and Self-Defense in England. It was an era of near-constant warfare, unbreakable class divisions, and personal violence. Europe was emerging from medieval darkness and practices such as dueling were gradually being outlawed because they were costing the Crown its best officers. Gentlemen of “the Fancy”—the gaming fans who went to prizefights, bull and bear baitings, rattings, and so forth—began to get involved in actually training and fighting. Their lives had value as members of the aristocracy. Gentlemen couldn’t fight bare-fisted, like common ruffians. The life of the fighter began to acquire a different value, and the rules began to trickle in, culminating with the 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules.
In boxing, because of its long professional history, performance and entertainment have become very close—the fans and aficionados, well versed in fine detail, want to see the very best in boxing compete, even if they never get a knockout. Skilled defensive work is appreciated. Andre Ward, criticized for being “protected,” is picking his fights; he’s trying to win a losing game, make a career in boxing without getting his brain shook or his money took. He’ll take his risks when he has to—he’ll fight for titles against the tough guys when the money is there—but he won’t brawl for our thrill. And he is respected for it by anyone who knows anything.
MMA, with the dominance of one single promotion (the UFC) and an extremely varied fan base in terms of education in the nuances of the sport, features a bigger dichotomy between entertainment and winning. It’s something that promoters, fighters, and trainers struggle with. For the promoter, fighting is about “asses in seats.” For the top fighters, it’s about winning and taking as little damage as possible while inflicting the most.
There are extremely boring ways to win in MMA, and the UFC has tried to eliminate those—either directly, through rule changes (like gloves and standups), or indirectly, letting fighters who “win boring” go. The strategy works; exciting slugfests draw in raw fans. But fighters in modern MMA have an incredible line to walk, a line of self-sacrifice and damage, where it’s better to lose in an exciting fashion than to win. Promoters will actually tell that to the fighters. No one finds it disheartening—basically, take damage for our entertainment. Bleed for us. Wrestlers and ground fighters increasingly stand and brawl, hoping to be fan favorites or for the extra cash of a “fight of the night” prize.
The UFC uses images of a gladiator in its promotional videos, making the point that these are the modern-day versions. Of course, no one fights to the death. Still, death is a part of what they are doing.
While boxing has evolved to allow for top fighters to reap the rewards, the UFC has not. Fighter payouts are still an egregiously small portion of total profits. I hope MMA continues to grow and the fighters can be the ones making the money from people paying to see them fight. It’s a simple thing. If the UFC is doing the numbers it claims to be doing, then someone is getting very rich. And it’s not the fighters.
Clara de la Torre is a professional boxer in New Mexico and a great friend of mine, and when she went on a six-fight losing streak she said the feeling was like “surfing the apocalypse.” She was in danger of turning into an opponent, even though some of her losses had been obvious robberies by hometown judges. But she was still game. Clara is educated, finished college, had been a firefighter who managed helicopters and a yoga instructor. Boxing gave her things that nothing else did. What things? you ask. Ahh . . .
A lot of the best guys in the world will claim fighting is merely a sport, but that is just the way they see it. In order to control fear, they take emotion out of the fight. But a fight is personal, it can’t help itself; it’s about you and me. Randy Couture is not just a competitor, as the pundits are fond of saying. He’s a sportsman and a gentleman, but he’s also a rough dude who plays rough and loves, in the fiber of his being, to break tough guys. It satisfies him in a way that nothing else does. If it didn’t, he’d be coaching wrestling at OSU. There are mysteries left in the world, especially when it comes to the “arena of tough guys.”
Man on Wire is a wonderful documentary about the French-man Philippe Petit, who walked a tightrope between the Twin Towers in New York City and was arrested after doing it. The reporters kept shoving microphones in his face, asking, “Why do you do it? Why?” He laughed, surprised, and answered simply in his light voice, his heavy French accent, “There is no why.” He found the media’s need to know why melancholy, bitterly amusing. He regretted that you needed to ask.
On the The Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked me why I went to Thailand to fight, and I answered, “It seems funny now, but at the time it seemed . . . normal.” You’d think I would have prepared a better answer for that one. My why.
When I spoke to the army psychologists at Fort Bragg, I asked about teaching mental toughness—if that was part of the Special Forces training. The answer was an amused, “No.” The men who were there had learned it already, somewhere else. They battled their way through training on their own. Their mental toughness skills had to be proved before they even got to this point—not taught to them now. It made me think of Tom Brands, how he talked about the “mysteries of tough guys, what makes them tick,” and of an old friend in the dogfighting business, who said, “The right one is the right one,” when asked about picking a dog to train and cultivate. There is no way of knowing, but you try and hope that you got the right one—only the result is the final proof.
Fighting plays to the instinctual nihilism in some men, the part that when faced with impossible odds, or certain destruction, says “Fuck it” and charges. It’s not something e
asily understood, and here I think the sexes often diverge—not many women can be satisfied with “fuck it” as a real reason, but most men will understand it. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the great Russian novelist, understood the value of such sentiment. He wrote, in Notes from the Underground, “What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness . . . And what if it happens that a man’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in his desiring in certain cases what is harmful to himself?”
We choose things that are against our own best interests because the freedom to make that choice is more important than those interests.
How many times do you hear fighters say, “I don’t care who they put in front of me, I’ll fight anyone”? Therein lies the appeal. Fighters will say, “I’m willing to die in the ring,” and they are admired for it, for the commitment. In fact, that’s an absurd statement. You’re willing to die, in a fight with some guy you don’t really know, for money to entertain people?
What is important is the principle of the thing. The fighter is saying he’s willing to die rather than be dominated. He’s valuing his free will over his life, something that we all admire. Fighting at its center is about making someone do what they don’t want to do. Enforcing your will. We come to the fights to see that struggle as much as great technique—we want to see heart on display, we want a chance to see real courage—and it can be a costly show.
When I wrote my first book, I had to do “press,” interviews and radio shows, things like that. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but then my agent told me to start acting like a politician—have some points you want to make, and make them regardless of what questions get asked. One of the things I picked was that fighting is about identity, you are forced to learn who you are. The research for this book has convinced me even more of that truth. All the talk of game plans seems to play to it. Josh Waitzkin said, “I think organic game plans work the best,” and what he meant by organic was natural—natural to you. The game plan has to come from who you are. When Jongsanan talked about being the “wooden man,” when he spoke of de la Hoya being the Golden Boy, he was talking about the duality of the game plan and the fighter—you come to resemble who you have to be. You have to fight like who you are. In other walks of life, maybe you can get away with pretending, but not in fighting. You have to honor your true nature. Fighting forces honesty down your throat. You can and should deceive your opponent, but not yourself. It’s why fighters are so forthcoming (although elusive), and trainers can see right through them. That journey of self-discovery is a major reason to why a lot of young men are drawn to the fight world.
Greg Jackson said, almost in passing, “I have guys here who are marginally functional. They wouldn’t be respected anywhere else but in here, they work hard and get respect.” F. X. Toole, the pen name for twenty-year cut man Jerry Boyd, wrote in Rope Burns, “The fight game isn’t about being tough, it’s about getting respect.” One of Boyd’s memorable characters is Danger Barch, so tragicomic in the movie Million Dollar Baby with his absurd refrain, “I challenge the Motor City Cobra, Tommy Hearns.” Danger is a familiar figure if you hang around the fight game—every gym in the entire world has a nut job like that, some marginal character. It’s a place where you can belong if you put in the work. Nobody fucks with the crazy people who come to the gym, as long as they work. As Renzo said, the least physically gifted can become champions with enough grit. Or at least get respected. In Thailand, there was a badly crippled ex-fighter who was a human ring clock, hooting at the end of the rounds. He got respect, even though he could barely move. Freddie Roach’s brother Pepper is a former drug addict. He’s been in and out of jail, he’ll laugh and show you his white power tattoos, ’bolts and swastikas, while he’s giving fist bumps to all the black and Hispanic fighters that come through the door. Pepper’s laugh is truly a joyous thing. He finds the world hilarious but, even more so, himself and his place in it. He’s told me some of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard, and he belongs in the gym, and not only because of his brother. Pepper isn’t even close to the craziest cat that comes in there.
When I spoke to Carlo Rotella about this issue over the phone, he said, “One of the things that always impressed me about the fight world, people want to feel like things they do in their life are meaningful and important. Fateful.” That was a word Carlo would come back to often, fateful. People wanted to feel like the things they did mattered. He had written: The primacy of hurt supercharges even the smallest detail.
“It seems like the fight world is well set up to turn everything you do into something fateful and important. Every sit-up, staring at yourself in the mirror, every little detail of your day, whether you slept well, ate well, blinked, or not, standing face to face with that guy, is the most fateful, and important details matter in the epic that is your life. There is a whyness to that.”
Carlo laughed and continued, “It helps explain why there is no money, because you get paid in satisfaction. It’s not just spectacle. Fighters and trainers get addicted to big fights meaning something. Same for fight fans, and corners—corner men in the gym spend hours watching people do the same old damn things they do all the time.”
Carlo thought a moment, and then continued, talking about opponents, guys with losing records who keep fighting. “A guy with a thirteen and twenty-seven record, is he there for the cheering? No. He thinks, ‘I’m the guy who goes in there and mixes it up and doesn’t get hurt, and this is my craft. I get through it, I’m a tough guy.’”
This brings me to the final note of a fighter’s mind: what fighting is for, personally. It’s always there, in the room with fighters, but never discussed, hard to understand.
I talked to Pat Miletich a lot about it. Pat himself had plenty of fuel, an abusive father who died young of cancer, and a lot of tragedy, brothers dying, going to jail, committing suicide.
“There are some guys out there that are from normal families, that are still animals and smash people, but usually it helps if you’ve had a shitty life. If somebody’s starving, then somebody else is getting their ass kicked.”
Many, many fighters come from damage. It is their why. I sometimes think of Rory and his friend who leaped to his death right in front him.
Rory’s story, though unique, is by no means shocking. Most fighters are men who have come to the profession from fighting elsewhere, from fighting to feel good. After Ed’s death, Rory went on a two-year jag of street fighting, where he religiously went out Friday and Saturday nights and got in a fight, every night. Which means (and he’ll admit it) he was a raving asshole. But like all pro fighters, when they start fighting for money, they stop street fighting. They have nothing to prove to strangers on the street anymore. They have a sense of self-worth, they know what it is to be loved, to have responsibility. Their trainer needs them healthy.
Fighting provides, eventually, what you are looking for. (It could be anything—tennis, chess, ultrarunning—but you will bring that same intensity and need and make it into a fight. It’s a fight you want, however you manifest it.) It can make you whole. People ask me, “Why fighting?” and I tell them, “There are a million different reasons, but they’re all versions of the same reason.” My attempt at a Zen koan. Why Clara de la Torre is still surfing the apocalypse. Boyd’s line about respect is probably as close as anything.
The gym, where a fighter truly lives and is made, takes everything from you. It will take your mental pain away. Struggling and fighting you burn away all those hurtful emotions and emerge like an asteroid torched clean in the atmosphere and streaking toward the Earth. The world is made of fire.
I asked F
reddie Roach. His Parkinson’s (brought on by the wars in the ring) is descending on him without remorse, increasing the shake, and you see him fold his arms sometimes to hide his trembling hands. “I know you struggle with Parkinson’s,” I said hesitantly, looking for a way to proceed. I wanted to ask him about the price he was paying.
“I don’t struggle,” he laughed. For Freddie, it was worth it. “Maybe for guys who didn’t do as well, who didn’t have the same ride . . .” He shrugged and smiled. Freddie knows people outside of boxing want him to condemn it, to cry “look what it did to me,” but Freddie has no regrets about boxing. It’s mysterious to outsiders but not to me.
Why do we do anything? My first serious art teacher used to say, in his sad voice, “We draw because we want to be loved” (he was a dapper man, a quiet alcoholic with cold talent). Those kids from the broken place, from the howling wilderness of a childhood unloved, unvalued, they find something in fighting, they can take that love. The feeling of worth that the missing father never provided—you can force the issue, for one night, for one moment.
Training is a recurring habit, you get drawn to the savage joy again and again. I heard Rory Markham say to an interviewer, “I’m on the path, you know?” and what he meant, perhaps without fully understanding it, was the path to enlightenment, to self-understanding. Fighting is a way for the unwise, the damaged, and the angry men and women to find wisdom. It makes you a better person. When Munenori wrote that the sword could be “life giving,” he meant many things, one of which was that proper study of the sword would lead a student to the Way.
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