A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting by Sam Sheridan
THE RESPONSIBILITY TO FIGHT
Apidej sit-Hirun at Fairtex Gym, Bangkok, Thailand, May 2000.
Elephant behind Fairtex Gym.
Ibn Khaldun, the immortal Tunisian historian, says that events often contradict the universal idea to which one would like them to conform, that analogies are inexact, and that experience is deceptive.
—A. J. Liebling, A Neutral Corner
Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.
—F. Nietzsche, “Homer on Competition,” 1872
Samrong Stadium, in Bang Pli, an hour from Bangkok, is dirty, dingy, and high ceilinged, with concrete floors, rows of folding chairs, and crowds milling around drinking Singha beer and smoking Krum Thip cigarettes. A fight has just ended and the canvas ring is brightly lit and empty. Now it’s my turn to fight, and I look at Johann, a short, muscular, bald Belgian, and say, “Win or lose, I want a beer in my hand as soon as I climb out of the ring.” He smiles tightly and nods. I roll my neck like a real fighter and step through the vermilion ropes. I’m wearing a robe designed for Thais who fight at 130 pounds and it barely covers my oily thighs.
My heavily tattooed opponent ignores the screaming crowd and I ignore him, even though I can feel his eyes on me across the ring, his attempt to engage me in a samurai stare-down. I am absurdly, frenetically excited, and yet calm in the knowledge that I’m as ready as possible for my first fight. I can ignore my opponent’s mind games because, hey—we’ll find out who’s tougher soon enough. I suppress an urge to smile at him. I have no ill will toward the guy.
My body is aglow with the power of recuperation and heating oils, and my face is greased with a layer of Vaseline. The harsh blatting horn, the lilting pipes, and the stomping drum begin their song. There is nothing left to fear.
When I was in junior high, at the Eaglebrook School in the green hills of Massachusetts, I read a book about John F. Kennedy that said he used to carry an anonymous poem with him in his wallet:
Bullfight critics, ranked in rows,
Crowd the enormous plaza full.
But only one is there who knows,
And he’s the man that fights the bull.
I loved that quote. I carried it in my own wallet for years, well through college, until that wallet was lost when I flipped the dinghy during a hurricane in Bermuda. I wanted to be the one who knows. To me, the quote wasn’t just about critics and performers and artists. The man in the ring knows, and not just about that particular bullfight and whether or not he did a good job. He knows.
I grew up romanticizing fighting and fighters: matadors, soldiers, knights, samurai. There was nothing more noble. That boys should worship fighters was as unquestioned as patriotism, bred into the fabric of masculinity. Little boys pick up sticks and turn them into swords and guns no matter what their mothers might do.
I went to high school at Deerfield Academy, a fancy prep school where my father was the business manager. I had a circle of friends who were locals and sons of teachers, and we had our own sort of world between the rich kids who lived in the dormitories and the surrounding rural public school kids.
We watched a lot of kung fu movies, but we didn’t fight. Deerfield wasn’t that kind of place; nobody fought, although they did wrestle, and in hindsight I wish I had wrestled, too. Our favorite part of any kung fu movie wasn’t necessarily the climactic fights; it was the training sequence, when the hero becomes an invincible warrior.
I played sports, football and lacrosse, and was a mediocre varsity athlete. I was a not-so-secret nerd, really. I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes by myself as I got older and it became less socially acceptable. I read voraciously and insatiably. I had one girlfriend for a few weeks, and she pretty much hated me.
After high school I joined the merchant marines out of a burning need to escape before college and an attempt to see the world in a supremely clichéd fashion. I took the three a.m. train from an unmanned station in Amherst down to Maryland, to the Seafarers Harry Lundenburg School of Seamanship, in Piney Point. When my mom dropped me off, in a pool of light from a street lamp at the deserted train station, with my dad’s old navy duffel bag, I was a living Norman Rockwell painting.
The school was run like a boot camp—shave your head, shine your boots, do push-ups till you puke—and my “class,” number 518, started out with about twenty-eight guys and finished, four months later, with thirteen. Classes usually lost five or ten guys, but we were gutted. Some of this was due to racial tension; the class was half white and half black, and there were some fights. The black guys, it seemed to me at the tender age of eighteen, had a better handle on how to deal with the pressure, and the endless work: They did just enough to coast through, while the white guys were killing themselves trying to complete the Sisyphean tasks put to us by an unusually cruel bosun. I found a way to live in both worlds, and I learned one of the most important lessons in life: Keep your mouth shut. It was my introduction to the world of tough guys.
Half of the class had been in jail for one reason or another, and I told no one about my prep school background or Ivy League future. One of my best friends there had a spiderweb tattooed on his face, right under his eye. I dared him to cut my hand off one night on the meat slicer, laid my hand on it, stared him in the eye, and said, “Fuck you, do it” (everybody had to talk that way). He gave me a small, tight-eyed look and then looked away. On the first ship he got on, he stabbed the chief mate three times.
We would fight in the weight room with some old boxing gloves, and looking back with the benefit of some experience, I realize we had no idea what we were doing. There was a tall black kid named Sypes, from Mississippi, who spoke like birds chirping and claimed to have been a pro boxer, but when he was sparring with Walzer, a five-foot blond redneck who would just windmill, Sypes didn’t look that good. Walzer in his fury caught Sypes and blasted his eyebrow open, and blood sprayed everywhere. Sypes dashed to the bathroom clutching his eye, leaving long spatters of blood on the filthy linoleum. We mopped up the blood, rusty stains trailing like a big orange-brown paintbrush. I got in there and tried to box with a few people, and I was hesitant and awkward. A tough kid from Florida, Davey Dubois, racked me with an uppercut, and for days my jaw clicked in a funny way. Still, I got in there; my curiosity edged out my fear. I had to know. I wanted to know.
A few years later, an art critic named Peter Schjeldahl, who was teaching at Harvard (I was an art major), said to me, “You’re wondering what all young men wonder: Am I a coward or not?” That was part of it, though I knew I probably wasn’t a coward. Bravery is something different. Bravery has to be proved.
My dad had been a Navy SEAL, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and the military was an obvious choice after college, maybe a little too obvious. It didn’t really grab me, partially because of my merchant marine experiment but mostly because I learned too much history, too much about politicians and great-power politics. I don’t want to kill people, and I didn’t want to be a tool, a tooth in the cog of a great machine. My idea of a war hero is Hawkeye on M*A*S*H: If you have to go to war, then you go; but if you don’t, then you don’t.
Bar brawling didn’t interest me, either; when I’m in a bar, I’m interested in having fun. What appealed was the dynamic of a duel: What is it like to meet a man on open ground, a man who is ready for you, a man who is your equal in most measurable ways?
At Harvard I tried tai chi and tiger kung fu, and one day I happened upon the boxing gym, where Tommy Rawson was the coach. He was about four foot five and maybe eighty years old. He’d been a professional fighter in the thirties and New England lightweight champ in 1935 with a record of 89–6, and he was magical. Finally, here was real fighting and sparring, with headgear and a mouth guard and big sixteen-ounce gloves. Tommy couldn’t remember anyone’s name, but he understood boxing in his bones. “Hey slugger, don’t start weaving until he gives you trouble,” he’d call in a harsh voice that had yelled out things like that for fifty years. He always had a gleeful smile on his handsome, crumpled face.
Once I started boxing, I prized hammering away on a big bag, working the speed bag, running stairs, jumping rope. Of course, I still smoked two packs a day and drank five nights a week—this was college. Sparring with headgear comes as a revelation, because you get hit and it doesn’t really hurt. It becomes like a chess match: You think, Hey, he jumped back when I did this, so next time I’ll fake this