Blood Sport Pt. I
Why I spend most Saturday nights watching people beat each other up on TV
Note to reader: Purchase my first book of stories, Big Head on the Block, at Bear Den Books in Knoxville, order on Amazon, or listen on Spotify and Apple Music. Read the second half of this story about the first and last real fistfight of my life.
I started writing this story two years ago after rewatching a documentary about the most incredible boxing trilogy in history. It took place over 13 months in 2002 and 2003 and was fought between Irish-American punching bag Micky Ward (played by Mark Wahlberg in the 2010 film The Fighter, based largely on Ward’s life) and the once-fearsome, now-dead Arturo Gatti.
I’m not going to talk in detail about that rivalry exactly because HBO Boxing, which aired the three bouts, shut down in 2018, and you can now watch the documentary, Legendary Nights: The Tale of Gatti-Ward, for free on YouTube. What I want to explore instead is fighting and why I love it despite all the evidence that I shouldn’t.
Most Saturday nights, including the most recent and very likely the next, I turn the TV on after the children are in bed, where their innocent minds are safe from being defiled by violence, and stay up way too late watching grown men and women attempt to concuss each other with their fists and elbows. Haley will sit through the first few fights, distracted by her phone. Eventually, she grows exhausted by the sounds of her husband groaning and flinching from the other side of the couch and repeats the same phrase she’s muttered on a hundred other Saturday nights: “I don’t understand how someone as smart as you can enjoy this,” before getting up to scroll through Instagram in bed, unperturbed by my psychosis.
While I do appreciate my wife’s attempt at flattery, I am taken aback by her suggestion that people like me, who claim to spend their lives in the pursuit of greater meaning and purpose, are above watching strangers knee each other in the skull. But I do empathize. I can only imagine it’s disorienting to reconcile my love of combat with scenes of me crying buckets during Barbie or geeking out about world maps.
When I was a boy, my maternal grandfather (Nono) and my dad would sit in the kitchen eating peanuts and watching boxing on PPV. Nono had been a boxer in his youth; he bears the mark of it in his irreversibly flattened nose. And he claims he would’ve been the city champion of Rosario when he was 13 if he hadn’t dropped a concrete slab on his foot at work, breaking it weeks before the competition. Naturally, he and my dad preferred fighters who were real men, throwing caution to the wind and swinging for the fences. They paid to see warriors pummel their opponents into unconsciousness, not skip around the ring like kangaroos.
While they watched dudes beat each other up on TV, my best friends and I were busy trying to get my high school emo band signed to a record label. I only started paying attention my sophomore year when, on a day like any other, I got jumped.
On my walk home from school, a band of Dominican thugs who sat a few lunch tables away caught up to me, roughed me around, and stole my backpack.
Even though there were a dozen of them, when I told my dad what happened after he got home from work, he was disappointed to discover that I hadn’t sent any of the boneheads to the hospital with internal bleeding. He didn’t say it, but I knew the truth he was getting it: his eldest son was a pansy (and he was right). But even if I could’ve knocked one of the Dominicans out cold with a haymaker, the film’s final act would’ve played out the same as the original: me groaning and bloodied on the concrete, drained of all my masculine bravado while the bad guys got away with my Walkman.
The embarrassment I felt about getting pounded was overshadowed by fear. After I walked in bleeding from my head, my mom called the cops—not so much for justice but because the thugs had also stolen my phone, and she didn’t want to have to call T-Mobile to cancel the line. Three of the kids were arrested, and I knew that the rule of the street meant they might be out for vengeance the next day on my walk to school.
I spent the next couple of months either begging my mom to drop me off in the car, asking older friends to drive me home, or taking an incredibly inconvenient way back and forth to avoid them.1
A week after getting stomped out, I was watching TV alone when a preview for the first season of The Ultimate Fighter came on. This was 2005, the peak of my emo years when I wore skin-tight jeans, dyed my hair black and draped the long, thick strands across my eyes like a curtain (or a helmet, as Mr. Sweeney liked to call it). I had never seen a cage fight before. But I was curious.
The first episode introduced tough guys like Chris Leben, Nate Quarry, and Bobby Southworth. Some had tribal tattoos and muscles bulging from their necks. But others looked just like average dudes you’d see walking their small dogs on a leash through the neighborhood. They looked like they could’ve been me.
Every Tuesday night, I would sit in front of the television feeling this intense admiration for how fearless they were, risking being knocked out and embarrassed while their girlfriends and millions of others watched on national television. On commercial breaks, I’d stand up and imitate them shadowboxing before walking to the cage. In the dim light of the bedroom, as I peeked every couple of seconds to make sure my parents couldn’t see or hear me, I envisioned Johnny, the ringleader of the Dominican crew, walking up to me after school and saying, “Yo, you called the cops like a bitch, B.”
And before he could even square up, I’d respond with a hard low kick that would paralyze the muscles in his lead leg. Then, as he’d fumble to regain his balance, perplexed by my sudden masculinity, I’d clasp my hands around his neck and rip a knee just below his hairline, then follow with a short left elbow that would cause the blood to erupt from his forehead like a fountain. Dumbfounded and scared, Johnny would step back, wondering what had happened to the kid he and his boys had whooped just weeks before. Our eyes would lock. And right then, I’d throw a hard right uppercut that would lay him out like a comic book villain.
The bad guy would see stars.
Of course, none of this happened. For one, there was no mixed martial arts gym in Bayonne. And I was too lazy to join the wrestling team and too embarrassed to go to the PAL boxing club where tough Black, Puerto Rican, and Irish kids trained. I wasn’t any less soft than I’d been the afternoon of the encounter. Instead of toughening up, I asked my mom to order UFC cards on PPV. I consumed them like they were spinach and I was Popeye the Sailor Man, getting bigger and stronger without actually having to do anything.
Mickey and my other friends would come over and watch them with me in the kitchen. For hours, we tapped our feet in anticipation, smashing buffalo wings into our faces and trying (through failing) not to fall back in our chairs when Andrei Arlovski nearly decapitated Paul Buentello, underdog Matt Serra pummeled Georges St. Pierre, and the geriatric Randy Couture unexpectedly won the heavyweight crown against the giant Tim Sylvia.
By my senior year of high school, the fear of Johnny had gone, and I wasn’t keeping up with the UFC as consistently.
I was busy trying to find a girlfriend, applying to college, and enjoying my last months of childhood with my best friends before we had to take one step closer to becoming adults with real responsibilities. That fall, I started going to a church with a bunch of Filipinos. And even though most of them weren’t combat sports fans, they’d throw big parties each time Manny Pacquaio boxed2.
During one fight night, I noticed that one of the church’s youth leaders, a skinny computer scientist named Kuya Andre, was also flinching whenever Pac-Man’s opponent threw a punch in his direction. I could see no bruises on Andre’s fists, muscles on his arms, or visible gang markings on his neck or chest. But we got to talking afterward about the UFC, and he invited me to watch the next PPV card at his condo. I’ve lost count of how many fights we’d seen together before I left New Jersey, but I vividly remember jumping up and down with him, giggling like kids at the county fair after Shogun Rua anesthetized fellow Brazilian Lyoto Machida in May 2010 to win the light heavyweight championship.
There are few things I’ve consumed so consistently through the varying phases of my life—from a chubby kid watching Jean Claude Van Damme flicks after karate classes at the YMCA to a self-conscious high school student to, 15 years later, a married father of three in Tennessee—as combat sports. Other interests have come and gone. Some have waned in how intensely I pursue them. So what is it about fighting that keeps me tuned in?
In an earlier version of this story, I explored at least three reasons in exhaustive detail:
The magnetic and indiscriminate nature of fighting. Who of us hasn’t gotten into a backyard brawl, a schoolyard scrap, or at the very least, slapped their sibling from across the kitchen table when they wouldn’t quit chewing their cereal with their mouth open? Just like everybody poops, everybody fights: young and old, male and female, docile and unhinged. “Fighting is the oldest sport on Earth,” now-retired UFC fighter Scott Holtzman told me when I interviewed him before a card in Nashville eight years ago. “If you had four different sports on each street corner—soccer, baseball, football, whatever—the majority of the crowd is going to walk over and watch the fight.” I don’t disagree.
The (largely male) desire to present oneself as tough enough to handle their business if push came to shove in a bar or a living room when an intruder breaks through the front door. The writer Jonathan Gottschall, an English professor who started training in mixed martial arts in his mid-30s to rediscover his fire and bolster his manhood, wrote the book The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. In it, he gives a long history of fighting that I won’t recount here. But basically, while some people may assume scuffling is the arena of the poor or working class, that is not always the case. Longtime middleweight boxing champ Roy Jones Jr., who boxed his last bout at the age of 54, once said in an interview that fighting for money is the last resort of people who have no other way out of their circumstances. You don’t risk permanent brain injury if you can get into college or the military. And yet, there are plenty of examples—just read or watch Fight Club—of college-educated dudes with wives, children, and bosses who prefer them to show up to work without a split lip or a bruised eye socket that have deemed the passive experience of watching fighting not enough. They want to hit and be hit, too.
The fact that it’s an icebreaker, a platform for connection with other human beings, an interest you can share with your loved ones. I wasn’t close with my brother as a teenager, but he was also there in the kitchen crushing chicken wings and watching cage fights with me and my friends. We were each other’s first opponents, swinging fists over kid’s toys and getting into wrestling matches that shook the floor of the apartment, leading my mom or grandmother to scream from downstairs to knock it off. Today it’s rare that we don’t text as many times on fight nights as we did in our entire early twenties. I think a lot of our hobbies, whether sports or otherwise, persist in our lives because we happen to experience them with people we care about. If not, why would Arizona Cardinals, New York Mets, and Everton fans keep filling their stadiums? Shared joy unites as much as shared suffering.
But instead of taking you further down this rabbit trail, I want to get into why—personally—I can’t turn myself away from the brouhaha.
Nearly a decade ago, I was in the middle of my divorce from my first wife when I started training at an MMA gym down the street from my house in South Knoxville. In many ways, I was the same soft, anxious kid I had been when the Dominicans got a hold of me. Except this time, I decided to do more about the pummeling than shadowboxing in the bedroom.
Within the first six months of training, I had taken chisel to my physique, shedding around 40 pounds through a daily mix of cardio, kickboxing, and jiu-jitsu training at Knoxville Martial Arts Academy. Even though my frame was better suited to grappling, I loved the sensation of throwing a hard roundhouse kick or right cross into a pad—especially when my partner would have to shake it off, as if the power stung them through the cushioning3. I wasn’t a badass by any means. But I was looking better and feeling better. I changed out my entire wardrobe. I had transformed like Cal Weaver (Steve Carrell) in Crazy, Stupid, Love and was confident with women. And I liked to think that I had learned enough to kick the tail of any dude who crossed the line at Southbound or Sassy Ann’s…
Unless those dudes happened to go to my gym.
Because the truth is that on most Friday nights when we sparred, I got my nose busted, my neck wrung, and my ego bruised. There was one dude in particular—I can’t remember his name, and even if I could, I wouldn’t write it here for fear he’d come through my window tonight. He was about 5-foot-5 with a shaved head, thickly muscled arms, tribal tattoos, and a bad reputation4. He wasn’t a mean dude in the gym. But every time we squared up, I’d try to tap him extra light—let him know, “Hey dude, I’m no threat to you, please don’t break my collarbone.” And every time, just when I thought I had absorbed enough punishment and the buzzer was about to sound, he’d hit me with a straight punch that would slip through my guard and knock me on my butt, where I’d sit as long as it took for the round to be over as I tried to find my equilibrium.
I had gotten close to Eric, the head trainer, who was also a once-divorced dude who studied philosophy. He saw how nervous I was to take a punch. The first few sparring sessions, my partners—male or female—would walk me off the mat with how committed I was to avoiding fist-to-face contact. Eventually, he helped me get used to getting hit. But even as I eased up during training, I was still walking around with a dark cloud above my head any time he or Joey or Taylor weren’t running things. The weight of my divorce was heavy on my shoulders, and he could see it. So one night, while I was taking off my sweat-soaked hand wraps, he said, “Brian, whatever you’re facing out there doesn’t matter as soon as you step onto the mat. The most important thing is not getting punched in the face. Everything else can wait.”
I think that’s ultimately what is most appealing about fighting—not its brutality, but the intense amount of focus a competitor must display in order to stay conscious.
In life, we spend an inordinate amount of time doing mundane and unmemorable things: sweeping the kitchen floor, loading the dishwasher, and staring at the time in the corner of our laptop screens between hours of scrolling through our phones. I lament the time I could’ve spent doing something meaningful, which I’ve squandered due to either laziness or indifference to the ticking clock.
Finishing this essay has taken me two years. Writing this latest version has taken early mornings and late nights for a week. Between start and finish, I’ve brewed coffee, stepped away to pee, and gotten distracted countless times by text messages, YouTube videos, and screaming children. There is none of that in combat sports, where even a second’s worth of distraction may lead to a concussive blow to the head.
The boxing or MMA round is an extremely focused, unextendable amount of time in which the most important thing is not losing your senses.
I trained at KMAA for nearly three years before leaving for CrossFit. Now I don’t do either. But I’ve got a heavy bag hanging in my garage that I try to hit a few times a week. I get nostalgic over my time training to fight because I miss the friendships, the sounds of pads being hit, bags being kicked, and the constant movement sideways, backward, and eventually headfirst into danger. Every time I turn a fight on, I can’t help but think back to those days when I was rebuilding myself in the image of a man who wasn’t a coward.
In the end, the story didn’t play out as it could’ve. I’m still pudgy and anxious. I’ve got more regrets than points of pride in the PowerPoint presentation of my life. But whenever there’s a fight on—doesn’t matter which one—I feel like the possibilities are still out there. Despite the constant advertisements, neck tattoos, domestic abuse allegations, and all the other controversy that’s inextricable from a sport in which violence is monetized, I can see past it and imagine that maybe these men and women are also doing what Eric taught me. They’re shutting the world off for five minutes. Nothing else matters except for staying alive. One breath at a time.
While I thought the attack was unprovoked—just thugs being thugs—I learned later that the ringleader, a 5-foot-3 greasy-haired dude named Johnny, had overheard me talking smack during lunch. These dudes sat a few tables away, and they looked like goons in their baggy white tees, with their spotty chin-strap beards and black bandanas. It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I would’ve cracked some jokes to get a rise out of my tablemates, not realizing I was making myself a target. After I got beat up, not only did I take a way home that had me avoid all the people traffic, walking around the edge of a park and along rock banks beside the bay through sketchy abandoned condos, but I also stopped going to lunch period and instead went to the library. I wound up reading some good books, losing 30 pounds over three months, and didn’t have any other run-ins with Dominicans Don’t Play.
This remained true even in 2015 when Floyd Mayweather and Pacquaio finally fought, and I watched it in the South Knoxville living room of my Filipino friend Josh Mayer’s parents while eating lumpia and cursing Pac-Man for not throwing a punch.
It didn’t happen often. I learned quickly that your boy might have legs the size of tree trunks, but for fists God gave him pillows.
I’m talking T-Swift level, except I’m pretty sure by the time I left, he was on the run from the cops after stealing money from some dude’s house where he was crashing.