Pain Don't Hurt (4 page)

chapter three

Kickboxing. You ever heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?

—
JOHN CUSACK IN THE FILM
SAY ANYTHING

F
or as long as I can remember, sports have been interwoven into the
fabric of my life, which might seem strange to some, considering I was gifted with not one but two conditions that could have made being an athlete relatively difficult. My father had played professional basketball, my godfather had played professional hockey, and I had grown up around one of the strongest teams in football during their strongest time. This sort of determined that these were the sports I would not be pursuing. I felt like because people close to me had done it, it wasn't new, and certainly if I pursued any of those it would ensure that I would be burdened with opinions and pressure from the get-go. I played basketball and football in high school and a little in college but never took it seriously. What was left then? Combat sports and baseball. My options couldn't have been more polarized. A team sport that relies heavily on the team, and a sport/grouping of sports that offer nothing in the way of diffused responsibility to the person involved. Be a team player, or be alone. Ultimately, I chose to be alone.

As I said before, I started in boxing. My first training was in boxing; my first memories of any combat sport are of boxing matches. I began training in Tang Soo Do early on, alongside my boxing. I was attracted to martial arts because, as a child of the seventies, I grew up watching Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, and I wanted to be like them. Then one day as I was watching ESPN, something new came on. Professional Karate Association (PKA) was the organization, and these guys were boxing, but they were throwing kicks too. . . . It looked like ballet and boxing combined. It was the craziest shit I had ever seen, and I was hooked. I started hearing about fights overseas in kickboxing, and I started doing what I could to get my hands on the tapes of those shows. I sought out training in this particular art, and once I found it . . . it was like falling in love.

Boxing is technical, make no mistake. No boxer worth his salt ever rose to fame on being a “brawler.” Somewhere in every known boxer, a technician resides, a thinking man. It's a strange concept to understand, as here is a person playing a chess match, while getting punched in the face. Repeatedly. You have to think about defense and offense, and the punishment of forgetting one or the other is pain. It's so simple. In boxing you have 50 percent of your body that is going to take damage, that is going to get hurt. But in kickboxing . . . In kickboxing you are a target from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.

I remember watching Dennis Alexio fighting Stan Longinidis in an ISKA (International Sport Karate Association) kickboxing fight. Stan came out of the corner and threw a low kick, which Dennis checked, somewhat halfheartedly it seemed. (The thing to know here is that when a kickboxer “checks,” or blocks, a kick, they do it by meeting the thrower's shinbone with their own shin. The idea is that if you take the coming impact and stop it with the flat part of your shin, it will hurt the person throwing the kick more than it will hurt you, and hopefully they will stop throwing them. The key is, the form of the check has to be proper, otherwise . . . well . . .) A few punches were thrown, then they separated. Stan then backed up, and Dennis stepped out to set up his own kick. When he stepped out onto his left leg, his leg folded like a napkin in a strong wind, as though he had a second knee located right in the middle of his shin. Dennis, who was wearing what looked like a grass skirt (because he's Hawaiian), toppled to the ground in incredible pain.

In boxing, the damage is cumulative, slow, and hard to see. Even brutal KOs hardly ever leave a fighter with egregious and immediately visible damage once they are awake. I'm not trying to take anything away from boxing here. I love boxing and good boxers are amazing, but I wanted to be able to put my opponent's entire body at risk. I wanted to dig my shinbone into the meat of a thigh, or a body, or a neck. I wanted to know how to prevent that from coming. As Maurice Smith says now, “The difference between kickboxing and other sports is, kickboxing always hurts.” The very thing that would terrify so many, turn them away from the sport, is what drew me to it. It was savage and beautiful.

I trained locally for many years while still doing other sports, other martial arts, and while still boxing. It was hard to find my way in kickboxing right away given the lack of information and/or training gyms at that time. I tried the best I could to educate myself about certain fighters, fighters I wanted to aim to be like. Rick Roufus, Maurice Smith, Rob Kaman, and Pete “Sugarfoot” Cunningham were my idols. I watched every fight that I could find. I marveled at Rick's side kicks, Rob's low kicks, Maurice's calm inside the ring, Pete's speed. I watched these men crumple other men bigger than them with chopping kicks to their thighs, powerful punches, swirling kicks to the face.

In 1989 a film called
Say Anything
came out. I have always been a Cameron Crowe and a John Cusack fan, so I saw it in theaters. At one point in the film Cusack's character tells his date's father that she'll be safe with him because he's a kickboxer: “Kickboxing. You ever heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?”

I pilfered this line shamelessly and still use it to this day. It was only two years later that I would experience my first kickboxing fight, the beginning of a long and torrid love affair.

chapter four

I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something, but I cannot accept not trying.

—
MICHAEL JORDAN, THE GOAT

I
was sitting in a sweltering room with a set of headphones on, listening
to “Flavor of the Month” on repeat. The single had come out just recently, and the full album was just about to drop. The timing on that single was too perfect. The headphones were uncomfortable on my head, and I kept having to move them around, shifting them across my ears. My hands were already taped and heavy feeling. My whole body felt like a duffel bag full of hot angry snakes. Every nerve in me was flickering and flashing. In a few minutes I would fight my first official kickboxing fight. It was just a few days from my nineteenth birthday, and I wanted no gift more than this. Lately my days had been spent either in class, working with the Steelers still, or training. I'd been playing baseball for the University of Pittsburgh, which just fucking thrilled my father. My athletic scholarship was, in his eyes, the culmination of everything he ever hoped to instill in me. My future was laid out. As a pitcher, if I could preserve my arm, I would go pro, take a multimillion-dollar contract (if I was lucky), and he would sit at every game and tell everyone how he taught me everything. He would smirk, he would smile, he would claim my success. He didn't know that I'd been having to get cortisone shots for months now in my shoulder because of the pain. He didn't know that I spent a whole weekend wearing a hat because I couldn't raise my arm to brush my own goddamn hair. He didn't know I'd been continuing with this fight training. And he didn't know that I was about to fight my first sanctioned fight in just a few minutes.

My gloves were red . . . bright red. My pants were white; underneath my pants were my red shin guards, and on my feet, my red boots. I imagined how my pants would stain if this were a pro fight. My coach was pacing the room. I was almost up. Every second started passing by like murals on the walls of a subway. . . . I was excited. I was overjoyed. I slid my red headgear on and started chomping onto my mouth guard. My taped hands were inspected by the overseeing commission and then were slid into the brand-new soft leather gloves that my coach had been stepping on and attempting to crush for the last forty minutes to soften them up. The laces were tied and taped down. If I had to pee before the fight I'd need a friend to help me. I was literally locked in, and the only way out was through.

This fight was an exhibition match, which meant that there would be no winner and no loser. But I'd know if I had gotten the best of him. I'd know, and that was what mattered.

My coach brought me up to warm up. I began hitting mitts, starting to break a small sweat. We went through combinations; he reminded me what strikes followed certain attacks the best. My foundation as a counter fighter was already laid. I was ready.

You see, this fight, the first fight, would be the telling one. Plenty of people come into combat sports with big ideas of how they are going to be the next Rocky Balboa, the next Jean-Claude Van Damme. I'd guess that more than half of the people who ever set foot in a ring or a cage do it once, and never again.

You see, no one is ever really prepared to get smashed in the face proper by a trained fighter while an audience is watching. Nothing will ever truly prepare you for that. Not street fights, not beatings at home, not even sparring sessions. Nothing compares to the first time you feel completely that the person in front of you truly wants to physically dominate you and has been training specifically to do just that, and that there is a screaming audience just wanting to see you hurt, see you damaged. The opponents who stand in front of you in a ring are driven by an intoxicating mix of fear, competitive desire, and adrenaline. Nothing can prepare you for the first time you get hit in the gut and hear your own breath escape loudly, knowing the other guy heard it. Nothing will prepare you for the first time you end up clinched against another fighter, and you can feel them shaking, their nerves a cacophonous roar, just like yours, demanding reprieve from the damage. The first time a person gets hit in the mouth, they do one of two things. Some recoil in fear and defensiveness, clearly wanting to run the other way. This is completely natural. As human beings we should want to protect ourselves. We should seek safety and move away from danger, not run toward it. Yet some people, some people stand their ground and know when to move forward and when to walk away. These are the folks who have the potential to be glorious fighters. Chris Leben once said, “Strippers and fighters, no one ever does those jobs because they are one hundred percent sane.” In a way he was right. At least about the fighter bit. No normal person wakes up thinking that they can't wait to get smashed in the face. We are all working something out in there. Every one of us.

I was not afraid of this fight. I was not afraid of the outcome. I knew what I had come here to do and I had no room inside of me to allow anything other than just that to happen.

My name was called and I walked. As I pulled the ropes down and stepped into the ring, I looked directly into my opponent's eyes. A sinewy, wan kid about my age was standing in front of me. His pupils were so fear-dilated that his eyes looked like two wet river stones jammed into his head. He was screwing his face up into a series of grimaces and squints, simultaneously wincing against the light and trying to make me think he was truly something to fear. He was transmitting all kinds of hostility to try to look intimidating, and really he just looked like a plucked, underfed chicken being made to dance for company. Fighters, like dogs, can smell fear. This kid looked and smelled like he was terrified, and I almost felt bad. Almost. Then I remembered we were both there by choice. He signed on the same lines I did, so I crossed to my corner and waited. The bell rang, and I flew out of my corner. My steps were inelegant, my hands were shaky, and my timing was off. Not unlike in another first for most teenage boys, I was too eager, too aggressive, too excited. And it showed. One round blended into another. My heart was in my mouth as I went through the motions. My opponent hit me square a few times and I was pleased to find that I didn't seem to need to pause to reflect before retaliating. At the end the referee raises both of our hands and the crowd started cheering. I turned to shake my opponent's hand and saw that he was almost in tears. I knew this might just be his one and only foray into trying to make it as a fighter. I doubted he would be back. And I could not wait to return.

In the shower I went back to thinking about the crossroads that was in front of me. In baseball I was undeviatingly dependent upon other people. In the ring, I had only me. The room for error shrank to being mostly within my control. In baseball the triumphs were distributed among all of the players, as were all of the defeats. I could handle the weight of those falling squarely on me. I had been conditioned in my life to search tirelessly and obsessively for flaws in everything I did. To hone in on them like a laser beam and then seek and destroy. For if I didn't, my father would find them, and he would exploit them. An opponent in the ring will do the same, only the opponent, unlike my father, is in the unique position of not being the only one issuing an ass whipping, but inviting it upon himself as much as he seeks to offer one of his own. The term “fair fight” suddenly began repeating in my head, and I guffawed loudly. I wanted the fair fight. I wanted the purity of fighting. I longed for it already again. The one-on-one aspect of it. You come as you are, and I'll come as I am, we'll agree on the rules, and we will brawl like fucking balletic savages, and at the end, we'll shake hands, and we will both know what only trained fighters know. We will know our mettle. We will know our fortitude. It will be solidly outlined in our minds, and with those tests come awareness. We will know what weaknesses we still have, for you will have shown me mine, and I will have shown you yours. We will know what we can take, how our hearts hold up when our bodies are battered. We will know that we did it. We survived. Nobody came to get us, nobody came to save us, we didn't wave for help, we fucking took it on the chin and survived. Us, alone. And we will get to leave some of the blood of the demons that inhabit us, that urge us forward, that haunt us, on the canvas.

It is hard to not get romantic about baseball. It requires more skill than most sports. High-level players are like aliens. There is no rhyme or reason for why an athlete ever gets so good at hitting a round object traveling at astronomical speeds with another round object. The application for it in nature is seemingly minimal. But it is beautiful. And I just didn't want to do it anymore. My heart was breaking as I toweled off. I was realizing that the adoration I had had been in the process of being slowly wrenched from the hands of the sport that my father bred me to love. The last existing connection between us almost audibly snapped as I felt myself bending to kickboxing completely. I couldn't lie to myself. Baseball was taking my pride, my health, my joy. Kickboxing gave it to me. When an athlete finds his sport, it is a homecoming. It is both pornographic and romantic. The know-how of a good fighter with the right coach on mitts . . . The sound of a flawlessly thrown roundhouse kick on a bag . . . The way you know your hands are wrapped right, the smell of new gloves, the creak of a ring whose canvas is a little old . . . It is the set of welcoming arms I never fell into comfortably as a child. The difference between it and baseball is baseball is the blond sweet girl I could take anywhere and know she'd be accepted, because she's nice. Fighting is like the redhead who wears the leather jacket, curses, reads Bukowski, and listens to the Stooges. And you know no one will ever get her, and everyone will judge her, but you get to be yourself around her, and she makes you feel like a man.

I lay back on my bed and my head was swimming. I knew now that I would finish the semester and never return to baseball. My number would go to someone else. I would not go on to try to be a professional ball player. Instead, I would pursue fighting, with a vengeance. I had told my coach before we parted ways earlier in the evening that I wanted more fights.

I got what I asked for. After that semester I quit baseball. My father was epically angry and condescending. He took his humiliating and caustic inventory-taking to new levels. I let it roll off my back. I knew that what angered him the most was the fact that he had no way of relating to this new sport. He couldn't point to fighters he knew or fights he had seen. He had strong attachments to boxing. But kickboxing? I might as well have told him I wanted to go be an underwater surgeon. It made no sense to him, and therefore, he couldn't accurately critique me as a kickboxer. And that was perfectly fine by me.

I finished college. At the age of twenty-three I married my college sweetheart. It was a futile attempt at a marriage from the start. We were too young, too foolish, and I was just setting off on this new career in a sport that would require me to be far from home constantly, while she, in the career she was pursuing, would be tied to the small town she had grown up in. The best I can say is that we were optimistic and very good friends. Something I have been lucky to keep her as to this day.

By the age of twenty-four I got my first professional fight. By the time I was twenty-six I had had three professional fights and was hunting down the perfect coach. The Internet was in its infancy at the time, so through much searching and struggling I sought out who I thought would be the very best guy for me. At the time kickboxing was blossoming, particularly overseas. There were only two guys from the USA who had made any waves, as the sport was so heavily dominated by the Dutch, French, Russians, Australians, and some Germans. Only two from here were ever anything to reckon with, but those two were a whole other level of ruthless, and I've already mentioned them: Rick “the Jet” Roufus and Maurice Smith. The kind of fighters these men were moved the bar, set it higher. You get maybe one like them every twenty years. Yet they both existed at the same time. Rick was a full-contact karate fighter, the greatest full-contact karate fighter there ever was, who transitioned to kickboxing. Rick, like me, wasn't a big heavyweight. In the years of the six-feet-five, two-hundred-fifty-plus-pound guys, Rick was six feet and maybe two hundred fifteen pounds at his heaviest. He was never big, but it didn't matter. Rick had fought Rob Kaman, arguably still one of the toughest and nastiest kickboxers to ever live, and Rick had planted his left hand so hard into Rob's jaw that we used to joke that Rob's kids were probably born with headaches. He had a side kick that he would throw in doubles.
In doubles.
It shouldn't have worked. It was gut-wrenchingly beautiful. It made no sense that a man could apply such speed and fluidity to such unnatural movement, but Rick made it look easy.

Maurice Smith though . . . Maurice Smith was a specimen. At six feet two and two hundred twenty-five pounds, Mo Smith wasn't a huge heavyweight either. A black man from Seattle with roots in the South, Mo was unexpected. A professional fighter, eloquent, stylish, and quick-witted. While Rick came on like a ball of violent energy in a fight, flustered and evaded his opponents while attacking with impossibly difficult shots and throwing everything at full power, Mo demoralized opponents by meeting them head-on, taking no damage and pummeling away at them. Rick at his core was a brawler with incredible skill, and Mo was a skilled fighter who just loved to brawl. Mo didn't widely evade, he didn't “explore the ring's space,” as we used to say. He cut small angles and popped at his opponents with the same quickness you would expect a person to use when brushing a bee off their shoulder, yet inflicting seismic damage with what looked like no effort. Rick made it look easy to kick a skilled fighter's ass. Mo made it look fun. From the first walk out, Mo's face would never change. He had this incredible “So what?” look that he would wear while he fought. No rage faces, no harried expressions, no wincing. Just “So what?,” which made his onslaught seem all the more unbelievable. Mo was more or less self-taught until he rose to a particular level of success, at which point he took it upon himself to seek out every trainer he felt was worth it to learn from. He spent tedious time honing his abilities. He always spoke softly at interviews, never was cutting or classless or brutish. It was as though he had risen to the highest level of alpha that a man can achieve and had nothing to prove to anyone anymore. Before a fight against Mike Bernardo, Mo had walked to the center of the ring. As the referee read out his rules, Mike began grimacing and leaning closer and closer in to Mo, who seemed unfazed. Mo never looked away, never pushed back, just stood his ground. The message was clear: “My mountain; you ain't gonna scare me off, you're going to have to take it.” Finally, as Mike pushed harder and harder, Mo did the best thing I have ever seen. He puckered up and planted a kiss full on Mike Bernardo's snarling lips. In one second, Mo defused Mike, and Mike pulled away giggling. Mo barely cracked a trace of a smile. Mo lost that fight to a decision, but he won the audience clean. There was just something about him. He reminded me of my first trainers in that dingy boxing gym. Big, black, and unflappable. He was so comfortable in his own skin, so completely at ease.