Gottschall - The professor in the cage: why men fight and why we like to watch

Its the night of March 31, 2012, and I am standing half naked in a chain-link cage. Im bouncing restlessly from foot to bare foot, trying to vent the tension building at my core. Im surrounded by a swarm of men in Tapout T-shirts who are hooting at me over cups of beer. I can see the young man coming through the crowd to break my face, to strangle me to sleep. Its like a nightmare.

Im thirty-nine years old. Im an English teacher at a small liberal arts college. My first book, The Rape of Troy, focused on the science of violencefrom murder to genocidal warbut I learned all I know from an armchair. Ive never experienced real violence, never even been in a fight. But thats about to change.

As I dance and pace, I watch them smear the young mans face with Vaseline, watch them slip a mouthpiece between his lips. Hes making fists in his fingerless gloves, and I can hear my own gloves creaking as I do the same. People have the wrong idea about the gloves. They think they civilize the sport, but they are the soul of its barbarism. The fine bones of the hand are no match for a heavy skull. Knuckles shatter on heads. But if you wind the hand in ribbons of gauze and tape, then armor it in foam and leather, you turn the fragile fist into a fearsome club.

The young man strides up the steps to the cage, sinews writhing beneath his skin like snakes. The steel door clangs shut behind him, and they drive the bolts home, locking us in to battle until one of us cant. The referee moves to the center of the cage. We will be fighting very soon, and Im so relieved that I dont feel the fear that I expected. Theres fear, but not the kind of terror that might unman me, might tempt me to hop the fence and run for home. Mainly I feel a sharpness of focus that Ive never felt before. Theres nothing in the world except the young manno sound or scent, no wife squirming in her seat, no cornerman murmuring soothingly at my back.

The referee stands sideways between us. He shouts to each of us in turn, Fighter, are you ready? We nod. In the next heartbeat civilization will melt away, the law will disappear, and we will meet at the center of the cage to try to kill each other. I have never seen the young man before, and I feel nothing for him but respect. And yet the crowd will cheer as I try to shut down his brain with punches, to wrench his joints, to throttle his neck until his eyes roll blindly in their sockets.

The referee yells, Fight! And so we do.

IT WAS THE CULMINATION of a journey that began two years earlier when I was sitting in the cubicle I shared with other English Department part-timers, mulling the disappointments of my academic career. I had a PhD, my name was on the cover of a few books, and I had already lived my fifteen minutes of fame (or what passes for it among university types), but I was still a lowly adjunct making $16,000 per year teaching composition to freshmen who couldnt care less. My career was dead in the water. Id known it for a long time. Whether this was because my effort to inject science into the humanities was before its time (the narrative that gets me through the day) or because that effort was wrongheaded (the more popular narrative in English departments) wasnt the question. The question was whether I could summon the courage to move on to something new, or at least to provoke my bosses into firing me.

As I paced between my cubicle and the adjoining lounge, a streak of motion caught my eye, and I went to the window. There used to be an auto parts shop directly across the street from the English department. But now a new product was on display in the buildings big showcase windows. There were two young men in a chain-link cage. They were dancing, kicking, punching, tackling, falling, and rising to dance some more. There was a new sign on the building: MARK SHRADER S ACADEMY OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS . I stood at the window for a long time, peeping at the fighters through the curtains, envying their youthful strength and braverythe way they were so alive in their octagon while I was rotting in my cube.

I began to fantasize. I saw myself walking across the street to join them. The thought of my peace-loving colleagues glancing up from their poetry volumes to see me warring in the cage filled me with perverse delight. It would be such a scandal. Thats how Ill do it, I thought with a smile. Thats how Ill get myself fired.

Over the next months, I began to plan a book about a cultured English professora lifelong specialist in the art of flight, not fightlearning the combat sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). The book would be part history of violence, part nonfiction Fight Club, and part tour of the sciences of sports and bloodlust. It would be about the strugglessad and silly and anachronistic though they may seemthat men endure to be men.

One day, not long after noticing the cage fighting studio across the street from my office, I met my family for lunch. When I ordered a salad, my wife gave me a skeptical look. Salad? she asked. Are you okay?