I went to the only shrink I knew, a nice guy named Stuart Bicknell; I’d gone to high school with his daughter. I asked for his help, and we had two sessions (which he said wasn’t really enough). I wanted to know what he thought of me, what was the psychiatric evaluation of this whole quest?
Stuart told me that “when one hears about kick-boxing and ‘cage-fighting,’ the response is often revulsion and contempt tinged with curiosity. ‘Who would do such a thing? You’d have to have a death wish—or at least be a little unhinged—to put yourself in that arena.’” He looked at me for psychopathology and, in his own words, “found none.” Stuart gave me a big-picture look at the diffent theories on aggression:
Instinctual, catharsis theory argues that aggression is the self-destructive (death) instinct turned outward, away from the self and toward others. In so doing, in discharging this instinctual aggression, a basic human need is satisfied. The frustration-aggression hypothesis proposes that aggression is simply a generic response to frustration, a response to provocation. Social learning theory argues that aggression is learned behavior, which is reinforced. Reinforcement comes from praise (for being aggressive) or from the discovery that it reduces tension. And, of course, the nature/nurture debate becomes part of the discussion. It’s nature; the interaction between high whole blood serotonin, testosterone, and chemical activity in the frontal lobe—not to mention the concept of an “aggression gene”—plays a key role in determining one’s degree of aggressive behavior. Those in the nurture camp argue for the influence of family, neighborhood, and peers. Environment is the determining factor…. Any explanation of aggression relies as much on interpretation and soft speculation as it does on hard science.
Confused yet?
Stuart’s thought was that while my environment didn’t have any red flags or smoking guns, the fact that my father was a Navy SEAL was probably significant, if only from a genetic viewpoint. The Freudian thought would be that I was still in competition with my father—although I have a great relationship with him, and we haven’t competed for years and years, and we never did except in friendly play. But when I graduated from college, my dad did say, “The one thing I regret is not being able to make you into a world-class sailor,” and what was the first thing I did? Sail around the world. So there.
I think Stuart was closer when we talked about my discovering boxing in college. “Love at first punch” was how he described it, and then, “For you, whose modus operandi has been to take it to the limit, the journey from boxing at Harvard to fighting in a cage was, with a few detours, a predictable one.”
I thought of what Dan Goossen had said to Gabriel Ruelas: “You can’t make fighting come out of you. It has to be in you.”
We rolled a lot, and I was finally starting to pick up on the ground game—although I was a long way from having one. Kirik maintained that the ground game needed a two-pronged attack, as one attack would be easily countered by a halfway skilled guy. You had to distract him, keep him from thinking, and have two separate but related attacks going on at once and be able to flow from one to the other. I could grasp that conceptually, if not in practice. I started to learn to control the hips, using direct pressure as well as pressure on the head, shoulders, arms, or legs, all to limit his hips. If you shut down a guy’s hips, he’s halfway beat.
Kirik’s other main focus was on the transition, “the scramble,” the time between things in a fight. These were the times, going from standing to the ground, or in reverse, that a fighter might be vulnerable, and in MMA you needed a relentless attack, so that in the scramble you were always coming, because it might be the only chance you got at a clean shot for the whole fight.
Kirik was an interesting guy, tall and rangy. His dad was working in Ghana, and Kirik had been named after the noise that a bird in Alaska made, a gray jay, when his father was doing his anthropology study (with his young family along) in a small Inuit town. I considered him as we rolled.
Kirik had been in martial arts and fighting for a long time, around thirty years; he still trained all the time and was toying with the idea of fighting again. Yet he was one of the sunniest guys I’d ever met, smiling, relaxed, and happy. He claimed to be a happy drunk, not a mean one; and I bet most of the girls he knew thought he was just the sweetest, nicest guy in the world. They would be horrified, perhaps, by his knowledge of and attitude about fighting. I have a friend who said that older guys who were still really into fighting had “missed something,” that their development wasn’t quite there. I didn’t think that was the case with Kirik, or some of the other guys I knew, who’d let the tough-guy stuff fall by the wayside but had become involved in the craft of fighting, in the expertise of it.
I wondered if it all was just a smokescreen for a manhood rite. Kimmel writes that for men, one of the deepest fears is that “others will see us as less than manly, as weak, timid, frightened.” In American manhood, there is an incessant fear of failure—you aren’t a man without constant, endless success. The point he keeps harping on is that in America, manhood is never something that is over and done with—it needs to be constantly proved, a “relentless test.” Was this all MMA was, Brandon Adamson’s idea of “clout,” a new manhood initiation rite? People will always point to Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, which is a terrific book and was made into an even better film, but it was essentially a middle-class nihilist fantasy, which is revealed when the narrator claims that “fight club isn’t about winning,” because it would be, especially when the blue-collar kids got involved. The issue is more complicated. The real fight clubs aren’t proving grounds where guys look for beatings just to feel alive, although that may be a part of it. Kirik and I had laughed about how fighters, almost without fail, sit backstage before a fight—in the moments before the bell, when the absurdity of the situation becomes clear—and wonder why the hell they do this. But I think I know: They train hard to win fights, so that no one will be able to dominate them, to damage them where they have been damaged—but in the end, they train hard to make themselves better. The test is necessary. It completes the training, and it changes you.
Fighting is not just a manhood test; that is the surface. The depths are about knowledge and self-knowledge, a method of examining one’s own life and motives. For most people who take it seriously, fighting is much more about the self than the other.
Leah Hager Cohen, who wrote Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight, noticed that boxers always embrace after fighting, and she wondered at it. She eventually realized that it was genuine, that afterward the fighters saw each other in a grateful light—“the happy eventuality that permitted them to take their own measure.” She saw what the fighters were providing for each other.
The person agreeing to fight you is doing you a great service, allowing you to test yourself against him or her; they agree to abide by the same rules, to meet you on an exact date in a specified location. The opponent allows you to strive fully, without reservation, and you do the same for him (or her). When you think about it, fighting in a ring is incredibly civilized. We’ll try to kill each other, but we agree to stop the instant the other wants to, or is hurt, we’ll shut down all the killer instincts inside us the moment we feel a tap on the leg. The embrace after a fight is not false, or forced, it’s respect and gratitude. Usually, the issue of dominance and mutual respect has been decided one way or the other. It’s why I had to train with these guys to get to know them, because men before they fight are filled with contradictory impulses of hierarchy, while afterward things are decided: I am the student, you are the teacher. But not just that; someone who has agreed to fight you has agreed to serve as part of your test, your struggle for knowledge, your quest to make yourself better.
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