Fighting reveals the truism that Kimmel is bent on and which I agree with, that manhood, that endless test, is a sham, an illusion of sorts; because when you start fighting, you realize there’s never an end to it, there’s always somebody better—stronger, faster, bigger, younger, whatever, something. Brandon told me how he used to destroy people when street fighting, and that when he walked into Pat’s, he thought, There’s nobody who can fight me at 155 pounds (his weight class), and then he ran into Jens Pulver. A lot of these guys were street-fighting terrors, but when they get in the cage or boxing ring against strong, trained guys, they are the bottom of the barrel, because there are monsters out there. The quest to be the toughest in the world is an empty quest, and fighters realize that pretty quickly, I think. Muhammad Ali might have been one of the greatest strikers in history, but when he and Frazier got into a prefight scuffle, they ended up on the ground, rolling around ineffectually. You might be the world champ in your weight class, but a decent guy twenty pounds heavier will give you fits. There’s always someone out there who can beat you. It’s about being the best you can be, bringing yourself closer to the perfect version.
Of course, there’s a manhood aspect to it—we want to know ourselves under stress, in pain and in adversity—we want to know if we are game. If you don’t think gameness is a critical concept in our culture, think about the game test, in which they fight a dog, and when he’s exhausted send a fresh dog at him to see what he’ll do. Now think about every single climactic fight scene in every action movie: The hero fights, starts getting beat, looks like he’s about to lose; and then he demonstrates pure gameness and comes back hard and wins the fight. Every damn time. It’s for dramatic tension, but also more: It’s satisfying because he’s shown that he’s game, he’s proved himself worthy of our love. He’s a worthy member of our pack.
Manhood, or the pursuit of masculinity, is really about the “hunter” virtues that had survival value for prehistoric man: strength and speed, courage and loyalty, skill—all things that have obvious survival value in the extreme conditions in which Homo sapiens first eked out existence. It wasn’t that long ago. Society and technology have changed, but biology hasn’t, at least not as much. You still want to see gameness in your friends, your family, your leaders, the men you hunt with and who protect you from wild animals—the old savage gods. As man mastered animals, those hunter virtues became the virtues of the warrior, as interspecies aggression in the form of warfare came to dominate human activity.
As far as watching fighting goes, the same rules apply: We are drawn to the spectacle of violence for hereditary, genetic reasons, but here, too, I think there is something more, and it’s not easily accessible—you have to watch a thousand bad or mediocre or even good fights before you see one that is truly great, truly transcendent. In Reading the Fights, a collection of essays, Ronald Levao writes:
These are forces played out on the physical stage—the raised white canvas is a blank and basic platea—which make it possible to see great fighters as great artists, however terrible their symbolic systems. It may be, and perhaps should be, difficult to accept the notion that a prizefighter’s work merits the same kind of attention we lavish on an artist’s, but once we begin attending to and describing what he does in the ring, it becomes increasingly difficult to refuse the expenditure. The fighter creates a style in a world of risk and opportunity. His disciplined body assumes the essential postures of the mind: aggressive and defensive, elusively graceful with its shifts of direction, or struggling with all its stylistic resources against a resistant but, until the very end, alterable reality. A great fighter redefines the possible.
Fight fans keep watching, hoping for the great one, that fight that transcends and becomes art.
Down in Mexico, on the movie set, I met muay Thai legend Rob Kaman. He was the real thing—lived in Thailand for years and years, fought all over the world. He’s the guy who should have written this book. He was a great champion and among the very best in the world in his day. A friend of Stefanos’s, he was a hard-faced Dutchman in his mid-forties, but he had that glorious human warmth that the great Thai fighters had, a real friendliness, lack of ego, and compassion. We talked a few times, and he said to me, “When I stopped fighting, I thought I could start living—drinking and partying—but I found that wasn’t the case.” I felt the same way: The minute I pulled out of the fight, even though I had the time to write, I felt bereft of purpose. Why work out? Now what do I do? Rory said he felt pure when he got close to a fight, and I know what he meant—there’s a refreshing purity of purpose.
I spoke with an old professor of mine, Gregory Nagy—a leading classical scholar—and he told me that the athlete in antiquity underwent a spiritual transformation during competition. It can happen only if the athlete is connected to something bigger than him-or herself. I was reminded of Zé Mario in Brazil, who said that after training for five months, he could feel the presence of God in a fight. Greg said that for the ancient Greeks, when the athlete is in the highest moment of competition, when he is in his “deep waters,” he comes face to face with divinity—and is reborn on the other side. But in order to achieve that, the fighter has to be connected to the sacred somehow; otherwise, it’s just games.
I examine my heart for fear and don’t find any. If I found any fear, I would force myself to go straight at it; but without fear I have to wonder what the point is, because I’m not going pro. If I were ten years younger and where I am right now, maybe I would take two years and find a gym and live there and see what happens, but I am thirty-one. Is it time to move on? I wonder if getting out of fighting will be as easy as I think. Is there something wrong with really enjoying getting hit?
But there is something else. There is a quality around these men, the good fighters I’ve met—they are among the best people I know. Kirik, Virgil, Andre, Zé, Rodrigo, Master Chen, Pat, and Apidej are some of the best examples of humanity I can think of. They’ve been face to face with divinity—they’ve swum deep waters—and been reborn in the fight.
These men who have fought, and who really understand what it’s about, have left their egos behind, in the tough-guy sense. The pressure of proving masculinity has been removed. You’re more interested in seeing if your skills are better (like Jens said in Japan) than your opponent’s than whether you are a man or not. It’s a form of enlightenment; lack of fear leads to nobility of character. Not all fighters develop like this, but a surprising number do; the really good ones seem to. They stop street fighting, because untrained men don’t interest them. Pat said he used to walk through the mall and feel like a shark among seals. And that power, in the great fighters, breeds restraint, understanding, wisdom—even gentleness, except when in the ring. I’ve seen it in different corners of the world, in totally different cultures. That’s the other part of the fighter’s heart.
Having a fighter’s heart, having gameness, is about knowing yourself and not being afraid of losing. You become a better version of yourself. Nobility is a by-product of that attitude, just like love is a by-product of aggression.
Kimmel gets a little personal when he writes about “a new subgenre of travel literature” where “the journeyman/writer/hero” is “testing manhood in a Land Rover.” He talks about that kind of literature as a way to prove masculinity and to escape the dangerously feminine city, and his voice is dripping with sarcasm. I’d never talk that way to him.
Luckily, I can easily refute that statement. I do things out of a genuine interest, a desire for knowledge, a deep and abiding curiosity that I think is the birthright, the God-given duty, of a citizen of the world.
You could argue that I have just been dabbling—fighting got me a book deal. I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a fight writer for the rest of my life. But I’m not done with fighting, I know that. I doubt I ever will be, completely. It’s been six years and seven continents since I first fought in Thailand, and although I’m desperate for a break, I know I’ll be back in a gym somewhere, getting pounded on, before too long.
Cormac McCarthy wrote a book called Blood Meridian in which the character of the judge makes an argument that war is the most essential of human activities. He starts by saying that men are born for games, and that everybody, even children, know that “play is nobler than work.” If that is true, says the judge, then what changes the quality of the game but the stakes? And what could be a more valuable stake than your life? So war, the game you play with your life, is the greatest of human endeavors.
In that same argument the judge says that