Let’s Get It On!

by McCarthy, Big John; Loretta Hunt, Bas Rutten; Bas Rutten

  Ironically, the vaunted boxer knew little about mixed martial arts. “They kick people in the groin, right?” he asked.

  From SWAT ride-alongs to garage battles to boxing events, I was raised differently than other kids, but I don’t think I’d change any of it if I could. I’m sure there were people who looked at my dad like he was Attila the Hun, but I’m also sure most adults saw him as a good guy.

  I’ve thought about how easy others may have had it because their parents weren’t as strict as mine, but I wouldn’t change it. As a father myself, I now believe it was a good way to be raised because life isn’t easy. It’s full of good and bad people, and you need to be able to deal with all of them, to treat the good people right and to let the bad people know bad things will happen to them if they screw with you.

  I raised my kids softer than my dad raised me, no doubt about it. It’s a different world. What’s allowed and what’s acceptable in today’s society is nothing like it was in past generations. When I was a kid, there were no video games or Wiis or Internet or 300-plus channels to choose from on your flat-screen, high-definition TV. Everybody played outside, and not everybody made the Little League team. You learned to deal with disappointment.

  My dad grew up in much harsher times, which is why I appreciate what he taught me in my childhood. The lessons I learned from him made me the man, the police officer, and the referee I would be in years to come.

  Being a gentleman and helping Mom put on her water ski

  What family vacations were like for the McCarthys: water skiing on Lake Havasu, Arizona

  WATER BRLLET

  AND BLOODY NOSES

  Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

  —George Orwell

  I was going to be the greatest lineman ever to play in the NFL. At least that’s what I thought when I was nine years old. Pro football players like Los Angeles Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel and defensive tackle Merlin Olsen were my heroes.

  My dad, who had every expectation that I’d play sports, must have been encouraged by my size. Though I was never the biggest kid, I was always above average, a definite plus for any aspiring pigskin practitioner. At age eight, I even tried out for the Junior All-American team a year early alongside about 200 kids ranging from nine to eleven years old. There were thirty-three spots, and I was the last kid to be cut during hell week after my dad had given me a crash course in tackling to help me hit with power.

  When I made the team the next year, the coach wanted to put me at tight end because I could catch any ball thrown to me. But there was one problem: I was as slow as a friggin’ turtle. So he started putting me on the offensive and defensive lines instead. They couldn’t let this big guy go to waste, could they?

  For my first few years of football, I had to diet to make the eighty-five-pound cutoff. I ate a lot of steak and stewed tomatoes, then salivated as the other kids scarfed down potato chips and candy. It didn’t make me the happiest camper.

  Honestly, I never thought about my size. I wasn’t the biggest or the tallest kid out there. I fell somewhere in between.

  From the age of six and into high school, I also played baseball, though I wasn’t what you would call an all-star. I was assigned to pitching and first base because I had a really strong arm, which was both good and bad. I could hum a ball, and it mostly went over the plate. The rest of the time, I had no control over it, which meant it sailed past the batter or beamed him. It happened just enough that kids would take to the plate with their feet slightly turned outward, poised to make a quick getaway. My mom and dad watched from the stands and laughed.

  As I got older, my issues with my speed, or should I say lack of speed, became more prominent. I walked with a bounce, and my heels were always sore. I don’t know if this was because of growth spurts or what, but the doctor said my Achilles tendons became too short and began to pull away from their attachments.

  Between my freshman and sophomore years, I had surgery on both of my Achilles tendons. The surgery left me immobile for months, and the doctor told me I couldn’t play football. The one activity he did recommend for my rehabilitation was swimming.

  In California, almost all of the high schools have swimming pools, so I headed off to mine to find the coach, Scott Massey.

  “Okay,” he said, looking me up and down, “but instead of just swimming, why don’t you play water polo?”

  I couldn’t even describe what water polo was, but summer was coming and it was something to do. I couldn’t go back to football in the fall, and I definitely couldn’t run cross-country, so I thought I might as well find something to keep me in shape. Water polo it would be.

  If you’re picturing me in tight briefs, a cap pasted around my melon, you’re not far off, though I’d recommend keeping that image to yourself. One of the immediate benefits of water polo was that it helped tame my asthma. Something about the humidity allowed me to breathe easier, which meant I didn’t get tired as fast. I was able to go and go and go.

  The season came and went, and although my plan had always been to return to football come next season, Coach Massey approached me with another idea. “If you want to go back and play football, I understand that,” he said. “But I’m telling you, if you stay with this, you’ll get a college scholarship. Can you say that about football?”

  I couldn’t answer him, which tells you the decision I made.

  In the beginning, my dad didn’t like water polo because he didn’t understand it. My entire first year, he didn’t watch me play. He rationalized that I was doing it as a part-time gig that would pass once I could get back on the football field the next year.

  When I did start running again, I wasn’t slow anymore. I was catching people, even passing them. All signs pointed to me returning to football and, believe me, I thought about it. But there seemed to be more opportunity for me in the pool.

  My dad wasn’t thrilled with my decision to stick with water polo until I got him to come to a tournament at the LA Watts Summer Games.

  Water polo is hard for a new spectator to follow. There are whistles and flags and referees kicking players out when they foul. I’d equate it most with basketball, with its strategic passing and scoring setups, except water polo allows you an extra man and a goalie covering the net.

  Water polo can be played on two plains: above and below the water. What you see above the surface can be quite athletic, orchestrated like a water ballet as players stretch their torsos and arch their arms to launch the ball the length of the pool to their teammates.

  It’s what you don’t see that’s the best part. Most of the real action is taking place underneath the water, where players can control position by grabbing, kicking, or colliding into their opponents’ legs and bodies. It’s all absolutely illegal, but players can make it look like they aren’t doing anything wrong.

  When my coach had first sized me up, he hadn’t seen a swimmer. I couldn’t swim with these guys—they were rockets compared to me. In a line of speedboats, I was a tugboat. What he’d seen was an enforcer, a player who wouldn’t be afraid of dishing out or taking a few shots in order to score. My coach thought if I could just be kept under control, I could benefit the team. He was right.

  I compensated for my average swimming abilities by playing dirty. I played the position of two-meter man, or the hole man, which is like the center in basketball. You take an ass-whipping because the ball is always coming to you and, like a football quarterback, you have to toss it to someone or take it to the net to score.

  I didn’t shy away if I got hit. In fact, I went after the person to get back at him. Obviously, I knew what cheap shots and clean shots were, so I could usually weave my way in and out of the system without getting caught. When someone would cheap-shot me, I would try and be smart with my retaliation, but subtlety sometimes went out the window and I’d grab them and just start punching.

  The pool we played in had an underwater viewing tank for spectators, and in the crowd my dad could see the guy
s getting hit and kicked under the water with elbows and knees flying everywhere. Water polo wasn’t only the hardest game I ever played; it was also the most violent, even more than my beloved football. Suddenly my dad didn’t have a problem with water polo anymore.

  In fact, he started coming to all of my games, and it was hysterical to watch him in the stands.

  In the summer league tournament finals one year, I had a problem staying in the game. When I was hit, I would start fighting. I got smacked one time too many and snapped, grabbing the guy’s cap and punching him in the face. I was swiftly ejected from the game.

  On the sidelines, my coach ripped into me. “You won’t become anything. You can’t control your temper. You’re useless to me.”

  All I could hear was my dad: “That’s awesome. Way to go, John!”

  Meanwhile, the other parents stared at him like he was an escapee who’d forgotten to take off his straitjacket.

  My dad wasn’t the typical parent, and I wasn’t the typical water polo player. A lot of these kids had grown up swimming competitively, which must have been nice for little Stevie with all his 100-meter butterfly medals. There was never any contact for these kids, however, and when little Stevie got hit and his nose started bleeding, his parents thought he would die.

  With that kind of player out there, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I probably hold the distinction of being the first water polo player ever kicked out of the Junior Olympics. I wanted everyone to be afraid to come near me so I’d have more room to hustle my ass up and down the pool.

  At Glen A. Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights, the football team during my junior year was the strongest squad my school had ever produced. Most of my friends were on the team and questioned my choice of surf over turf. They even started bashing the water polo team, so I made a challenge to them.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go on the football field and do any drill you want against anyone you want; then you can come into the pool and drill against any of us. We’ll see how you do.”

  I knew I could handle any defensive or offensive football drill, but if they got in the pool, they would probably drown. Nobody took me up on the offer.

  When I got behind a cause, I pushed it to the hilt. I had a T-shirt printed up with balls stuffed inside two nets dangling side by side. I think you get the visual. It read, “It takes balls to play water polo.” I was suspended a day for wearing it to school, but my dad was proud of me for standing up for what I believed in.

  In high school, I was proud, confident, and considered a jock. I didn’t do clubs because they weren’t the cool thing to do. I was one of the guys pranking teammates by rubbing Icy Hot in their straps. Sports and friends—that’s what it was all about.

  From the age of sixteen on, I always had a girlfriend and was never home. I was into dirt bikes, and when I was old enough, I graduated to street bikes. I saved enough money from my summer job as a pool lifeguard to buy my first bike, a black Yamaha XS850. The one thing I didn’t do was drugs—no pot, acid, mushrooms, or any other illegal substances.

  My dad was scared to death of his kids doing drugs and wouldn’t have a user under his roof. He brought home pictures of overdose victims to show us more than a few times. In the pictures, we’d see people with stuff coming out of them that wasn’t supposed to or corpses bent in unnatural positions and staring vacantly at us with flies on their eyes.

  It worked. I’ve never taken any kind of recreational drugs to this day. I can’t say it was entirely the pictures, though, because I think I was more scared of my dad and what he’d do if I touched them.

  Alcohol was another story entirely. From the age of five, I’d been allowed to drink. If my dad was hanging out with friends and I wanted a drink, I could get a sip from my old man’s beer can or even have one of my own.

  I drank with my friends throughout high school. One time I got so inebriated that I crushed my friend’s nose with a headbutt and didn’t even remember doing it. I didn’t like being out of control like that and not being able to remember anything, so at age twenty I cut back on drinking.

  Genetics and economics took care of that for me eventually anyway. By the time I’d reached adult size, it would take twelve beers to give me a buzz and a case of beer to make me really feel it. Who wants to go through that, bathroom runs and all, to get a quick high? Not to sound cliché, but I don’t need a drink that bad to have a good time. Even today, I have only the occasional drink or two but nothing more than that.

  My dad’s view on drugs was fairly predictable if you knew him, but there were some things from my teenage years that I could never anticipate.

  My parents’ separation during the summer between my junior and senior years was totally unexpected. No one would have ever known it was coming. It wasn’t like they fought or anything like that. In the open, my dad always seemed loving toward my mom.

  I’d noticed that my dad seemed a lot more miserable the last couple of years, and it had caused some friction between us. I hadn’t liked being around him. I thought he was a pain in the ass, always pissed off. Whatever I did, it wasn’t good enough. If I scored four goals, there were still those two I missed. So I started drifting my own way and doing things completely the opposite of what he wanted.

  When my dad asked me not to remove the roll bar off the truck he’d bought for me, I did it anyway. When he confronted me, I turned my back on him to walk away. He threw me over the rail onto the living room staircase for disrespecting him.

  On the surface, the disagreement was about a rebellious adolescent trying to challenge his father. But there was more going on with my dad.

  Of course, you find out those things later in life. People get married and believe someone is a certain way, and things turn out differently. Some people are compatible; some are not. Over time, some grow together, and some drift apart.

  According to both my parents, my dad’s exit wasn’t particularly dramatic.

  “You’re not happy,” Mom pointed out as they lay awake in bed one night.

  “No, I’m not,” he answered.

  “Then just leave,” she said.

  My dad complied, stuffing some belongings into a garbage bag, then walked out the door while my sister and I slept.

  When I found out the next day, I was angry he’d hurt my mother’s feelings. I’m embarrassed to admit I punched a hole through the front door. When he came back to the house a few days later, I confronted him. Most importantly, I wanted to know why.

  He explained it all to me. He’d been unhappy for quite a while and had been trying to figure out how to take care of it. I think he’d thought of leaving when I was much younger, but he didn’t want me to grow up without him. He was just waiting for the right day, and to him this was it.

  For the first time in my life, I didn’t look up to my dad quite as much. He seemed much happier, though, and gradually we would spend more time together again.

  In the meantime, I took my frustration out in the pool. Coach Massey had been right on the money with me. In my junior year, the water polo team finished in second place in our league, and we qualified for the California Interscholastic Federation finals. In my senior year, I earned Sierra League first-team honors, was named the league’s player of the year, made all-CIF, and was an all-American honorable mention. Even without glowing SAT scores, I got a college scholarship.

  I chose California State University Long Beach because the water polo coach, Ken Lindgren, was also the assistant coach of the Olympic team. Even though CSULB was thirty miles from my house, I had to live on campus. I’d become friends with a rival player from Los Altos, and we’d decided to room together.

  At the age of seventeen, I set off for my first year of college in the fall of 1980. It was a rude awakening. At six feet three and 210 pounds, I was perfect for college water polo. But I was all wrong for college. I was young and free but didn’t have the right mind-set or the discipline for it.

  The professors
didn’t give a shit if we went to class, and who was I to argue with them? Still, it certainly made a difference come exam time.

  I did excel in one way: I partied like a champion, and I was a shoo-in for any get-together because I never got carded. On every other dorm floor, an unlimited supply of girls pranced in and out while parties raged. I still have scars from getting drunk and falling off my bunk bed onto the furniture.

  Things really hit the fan in the pool, though. My technique wasn’t even close to the other swimmers’, and there was a world of difference between the twenty-five-yard pool I’d plundered in high school and the fifty-meter pool in college.

  On some level, I’d known this going in. I have to admit I was petrified the first day of practice. While the coach timed us, the team swam 16,000 yards—that’s ten miles of hell—with our shoes on for part of it. With each waning stroke, the thought ran through my mind that they were going to kill me. By the time the ball hit the water, I didn’t have the strength to pick it up.

  I hadn’t come to college to swim; I’d come to play water polo my way. That wasn’t really an option here.

  Since it turned out that I majored in failing and minored in partying, by the end of the first year I was on academic probation. This made it easier for my coach to approach me about redshirting the next year, meaning I would train but not compete.

  I had a friend who’d redshirted the year before, and he told me it sucked. Being the levelheaded, rational guy I was, I said, “Shove your red shirt,” and walked out the door.

  I try not to have regrets, but being a dummy during my abbreviated college career would probably be one of them. When I dropped out, my dad blamed himself for not being around enough. I moved in with my mom, who was now living in Irvine, and enrolled at Orange Coast College, a two-year junior college. But like CSULB, that wouldn’t last long.