Eugene S. Robinson - Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid Youd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking

FIVE THERES NOTHING QUITE LIKE
BREAKING ANOTHER MANS JAW

EIGHT THE ONLY FIGHT SPORT
MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE

ELEVEN SO YOUVE BEEN BEATEN UP OR, WHAT THE HELL
ARE YOU LOOKING AT? PART 2

FIFTEEN HOLIDAY ON ICE, OR, WHAT TO DO WHEN CONFRONTED
BY AN ANGRY CANADIAN WITH A STICK

Theres the spastic flurry of hands and the smell that always ends up smelling like chicken soup gone bad (fear). Theres the mumble and the groan and eventually the slip into recognized roles (doer and done to). And finally, if everything works right, theres the reminder that we are far worse/better than the animals we own as pets and unsophisticated chattel.

What we are, though, is this: We are fighters.

And the scenario is repeated again and again. It wheedles its way into boardrooms and bedrooms, this not so particularly male obsession with the eternal, unasked Can I take him? Which could be extended to Can I take it? Or better yet, Can I? With all apologies due to Sammy Davis Jr. (also a student, despite his diminutive frame, of the fistic arts), the answer is always the same: Yes I can. Even when you cant.

My name is Eugene. (Hi, Eugene.) And Im a fightaholic.

Hey, Im going to need my seat back. The speaker was Todd Hester, former longtime editor of Grappling magazine, once editor of Bodyguard, and probably soon-to-be editor of an as-yet-unnamed mag. (Heres a scoop: Ready2Rumbleyou didnt hear it here first). Hes 64, 245 pounds. The scene was ringside at the very first King of the Cage competition, Californias own paean to pummel. The year was 1998.

This was the response: Youre also going to need to breathe. The speaker was Rickson Gracie, one of the best fighters on the face of this entire planet. Probably any other planet you can think of. And there it is again, the skin torn off all of our quiet and civil discourse, civilly delivered but definitive in its assertion to your unasked question: No. No, you cant. Not today. Maybe not ever (take me, that is).

Or better yet, just simply, Fuck no.

Because even though hes got two arms and two legs and a head just like you, theres no chance. None.

Hester apologized, grabbed his bag, and found a seat somewhere else. Laughing, he added, Well I did need to breathe.

We all need to breathe. Some realize that sooner, some later. But of the ones who realize it, there are those whose realization of it does nothing to actually help them. Continue breathing, that is.

It started for me with another not-so-simple, simple question: What the fuck are you looking at?

Its New York City. The Clashs Rude Boy is letting out of a midnight showing in Bay Ridge. Three cuginesthink Italian cholosare fighting with three men by a gypsy cab. Two of the Italians have wrenches. One, curiously enough, in an Axis level of think-tank thinking, has a German shepherd. I am on the other side of the street. Crossed the street to get closer, natch, just as one of the be-wrenched cuginos took out the back window of the cab, which went skidding off into a Brooklyn night, leaving three very angry men with no reasonable resolution to whatever situation was at hand.

What the fuck are you looking at?

It was times like these that were meant for words like fracas, melee, and donnybrook. Broken bottles, broken noses, broken jaws ensue, and at the end of it I ended up in an emergency room with my left lower earlobe dangling and cartilage torn inside my ear. Topographical maps of the evenings fun had spread out all over my suit in bloodied rivulets. I cleared my throat and waited for the overweight and angry nurse to render assistance because, after all, this was an EMERGENCY. Yeah, yeah, theyre all emergencies, she said. And aside from the guy who walked in smoking a cigarette to announce that he had been shot (and he had, right in the thigh), we all had to sit and ponder the highly ponderable foolishness of our wayward ways.

It was a meditation that inevitably carried me along with it back to the crawl space at home, wherein my headI had already retrieved my Hi-Standard pump-action shotgun. Except, you see, its not so easy to stroll through the kitchen with a pump and a bloody suit when youre seventeen in a household where people give even the remotest fuck about you. Back at the hospital, I got stitches and a meditation that stuck. If I was going to do this shit, I might as well learn to do it right.

This is called the rear naked choke, said Matt Furey.

I was standing at AKA Kickboxing in San Jose, California. Now its the home of a revolving group of at least eight great fighters of significant worth; names youll never even knowwell, all right, if you must know, Dave Camarillo, Bob Southworth (Frank Shamrock used to work out there), Phil Baroni, Josh Thomson, Paul Buentello, Mike Swick, Mike Kyle, and owner Javier Mendez. But back in 1999, it was where NCAA champion wrestler Matt Furey reigned. Though now widely derided by those in the know as sort of a quasi-Billy Blanks exercise enthusiast, Furey was (and is) the real deal. Id seen his Charles Atlas-esque ad in some weekly rag, and where it said, Want To Fight? I thought, Yeahhhh. And so after eight years of kenpo karate (You might as well have been studying interpretive dance), a year of muay thai, and a month of thinking about how another Gracie (Royce this time) had run through the competition in the first bow of whats now called mixed martial arts, no-holds-barred or submission fighting, I wanted to learn the rear naked choke. I mean, Gracie won using this selfsame chokeI had to learn it.

But what do you do when they get you in one of these?

Thats like asking, What do you do after youve been knocked out? said Furey.

Dream?

No. Not yet. But to hell with this brain-twisting Mr. Miyagi crap. Patience is not a virtue Im given over to, and so off with the Eastern aphorisms, barroom wisdoms, andhow about just this: field-testing. Screw the books, bring on the left hooks. What say we bounce?

Bounce?

Bounce. Not the intransitive slang verb but, you know, more Patrick Swayze-in-Road House bounce. It seemed so seemly, what with me now pushing the scales at 265 pounds of animal under my skin, that, of course, I should end up here: here being floating raves, stripper security scenes with me wielding Maglites and escorting mud wrestlers amidst and betwixt fucking bachelor parties full of drunken hockey players, or South Bay clubs where those who came to fuck but didnt would stay to fight.