dark wilderness of my heart, I still wanted to fight. I had promised myself when I went to Thailand that I would get ten fights, and then stop; because ten fights would be enough to know what fighting really is. I had quit after one—and I had never been tested. If only I could find a way to get it to pay for itself—that’s how I had done all my traveling before. It’s a part of my philosophy: You can always get it to pay for itself somehow.
Fighting is a way to feel, an anti–video game, a way to force something to happen. That’s what brought me back to it, because when I’ve fought someone, I know something has happened. How many days of your life pass you by that you could take or leave? When nothing really happened?
During college, I had lived and studied at the Slade School in London for a year, and I became involved in the trance club scene—the Fridge, Escape from Samsara, Return to the Source—and what became apparent was that these thousand kids tripping balls on ecstasy just want to feel something. They just want to feel as though everyone in the room understands them, and belongs, and that they belong, and, most important, that something is happening.
All those experiences—sailing around the world, Antarctica, firefighting—I chose them because they were the best options I had going. All I am is persistent, and willing to entertain many ideas. I’ve done drugs; and I used to drink like it was my job. I wasn’t a college athlete; in college, I was a painter who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I’ve done things that maybe I should be ashamed of, but I’m not.
You have a specific responsibility to existence, to God if you like, to taste, touch, and smell what there is to experience. You have to do everything. If given an option between doing something and not doing it, you have to do it; because you’ve already done the “not do it” part. This can be juvenile and dangerous, I realize, and there are a lot of things I have chosen not do, for a million reasons. I was raised polite. I’ve never hurt anyone, except guys I was sparring or fighting with. And I don’t take needless risks. The idea is to make it through intact; “safety” is my middle name. But I feel that you owe it to the world to be curious. Somebody asked me if I was looking for something. I am looking for everything.
Part of my responsibility, while I am strong enough, lies with fighting—not just to get as good as possible, but to understand it, and I maintain that to understand something, you have to do it, and do it more than once. I thought I had closed the door on fighting when I left Thailand, but I hadn’t. Four years later it was still there.
So I set out to explore and explain the world of fighting, to myself and to anyone who would listen—not everywhere in the world, and not everything, because that would never end—to try in some small way, with some logical progression, to understand it.
RULE NUMBER SEVEN, FIGHT CLUB
Sam fighting in Springdale, Ohio, May 7, 2004.
It’s not something he can do anything about, being a bleeder, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can do something about not having a set of whiskers.
—F. X. Toole, Rope Burns
It started when I walked into the back room of the Amherst Athletic Club in Amherst, Massachusetts, a little college town in pastoral New England. I was back at home, visiting my mom after a fire season with the Gila Hotshots. December and January in Massachusetts were record-breaking cold, down in the negative 40s at night.
The Amherst Athletic Club had a dark, small room with mats on the floor and rows of gloves and shin pads and various martial arts training gear. The Sheetrock was caved in with human silhouettes where people had been mashed into the wall. I was curious. I asked around, and started training a little bit there, and was shocked to discover how far Mixed Martial Arts had come.
Nearly everyone has heard or seen clips of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), started in the United States in 1993, held in the infamous Octagon, a high-walled, chain-link octagonal cage for the fighters to battle in. Ultimate Fighting was marketed as the answer to the questions that had persisted since the karate boom in the sixties: Which style was more effective? My tiger-crane kung fu is far deadlier than your Okinawan karate. Well, now you could prove it. Who wins when a good boxer meets a good kickboxer? When a wrestler fights a kung-fu expert? We can answer those questions by fighting with “no rules,” evoking old gladiator contests, and satisfying the crowd’s bloodlust. Since then, the UFC has moved through various incarnations and venues, has added some basic rules and the use of a referee, and has come under political fire and had management problems. For a while it wasn’t even on cable TV. But the UFC survived due entirely to a grassroots fan base that also trains, and more important, fights.
This is a fan base that fights. It is interested in and drawn to fights, fistfights, action movies, who’s the toughest?–type questions. It is considered “white trash,” and, judging from the crowd shots at the UFC, it is primarily white, male, and tattooed—the disenfranchised, burning to test their manhood, angry at their father or situation or something—in short, my people.
The first UFCs were dominated by a slender Brazilian named Royce Gracie, who won by taking the fight to the ground and using Brazilian jiu-jitsu to control his opponents. Royce and his family’s jiu-jitsu stood the American martial arts world on its head. All these guys who had been doing karate for twenty years, who had their own schools, suddenly realized they had a glaring weakness: the ground. If a fight went to the ground, and they often do, their vaunted kicks and punches were ineffective. People scrambled to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What evolved was a style known as mixed martial arts, or MMA, where practitioners “mix” the various martial arts to make a complete fighter. You mix boxing and kickboxing and muay Thai with freestyle wrestling and jiu-jitsu, maybe a little judo, whatever you want. Just make sure it all works.
Though I knew the UFC was still around—I’d occasionally catch ads for it on television—finding it in my hometown in western Massachusetts was hard to believe. I soon discovered that it was everywhere. There are several hundred all-amateur events a year in the United States. This isn’t like amateur boxing with headgear; this is serious. Your only protection is a mouthpiece, a cup, and some little fingerless gloves so you can punch your opponent in the head and not break your knuckles but still be able to grip and wrestle. This is real fighting, and you can get pounded in there. Although it is sometimes called NHB for “no holds barred,” there are some things you can’t do: head butting, eye gouging, fishhooking (when you hook a guy’s mouth with a finger or two), punching the back of the head. Other than that, it’s pretty much all fair game; you can knee and elbow, you can choke, you can crank his ankle until he submits.
For weeks, trapped in the deep midwinter freeze that gripped New England like an immense, airy python, I kept coming back to the idea of an MMA fight. I’d had my taste of fighting in Thailand, but it hadn’t been enough; it was over too quickly. I hadn’t learned enough; my fighting was still weak and flawed. Training and fighting in MMA would be a chance to round out my skills as a fighter. I was still afraid that there was so much I didn’t know and wasn’t comfortable with. I had just sold the Thailand story to Men’s Journal, and I realized there was a way I could maybe get someone else to finance my training: by writing about it. I decided to approach an editor with some ideas to see where it got me, and surprisingly, he was enthusiastic. He asked me why I was so interested in learning enough to fight in a cage. I told him I wanted to learn the skills, to learn how to fight without rules, but there was more.
MMA fighters are scary in a way that boxers and kickboxers aren’t. They are savage. When you go to the ground, there is a desperation in the struggle for dominance that fuels a ferocity that you don’t get in other sports. I find these fighters frightening in a “monster-under-the bed” scary way. Shaved heads, bulging muscles, and, above all, anger, eyes snapping with anger. There is no letup; you pour it on until you win. You hit him, he falls back, and you swarm him. And whoever wins the fight, the unspoken signifier of victory is I could have killed you. There are no excuses in the rules. If we were alone, in some back alley or on a deserted island, and we fought without all these people watching, then I could have killed you.
I was lured by the siren song of violence, the dark-faced coin of masculinity. Could I find my own rage? Could I tap into it?
The co-owner and trainer at Amherst Athletic was an African expatriate named Kirik Jenness, a tall, lean white guy who has made MMA his life. He runs the largest MMA Web site in the world and has been training and fighting for thirty years. He had a long list of con