A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting

The true calling of man, real manhood, is about creation, not destruction, and everyone secretly knows it.

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 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.

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.

“The arms are the chisel and the body’s the hammer,” he’d say, and you have to move your feet to swing that hammer.

Celebrity is an interesting phenomenon in the United States, directly tied to power. A famous judge is more powerful than a non-famous judge; celebrity is its own currency and is worth something very specific, set dollar amounts for so much notoriety

Pain is a friend. It is a reminder to mindfulness, and it tells us in the end that it is only pain, another illusion, and this helps our understanding

Sodium holds water in the skin, and potassium holds water in the muscles, and we don’t want to touch that muscle—the heart, after all, is a muscle. You know that steroids aren’t banned from bodybuilding shows—just diuretics. Too dangerous.

Virgil took over and said to him lightly, “Relax, champ, you don’t need to be doing this,” and there was a sense that fighters have given so much to us, they have sacrificed everything for us, and that they should never have to give again, everything should be given to them.

There is a connection between fighters and those outside of society’s rules, like children and drunks and the homeless, who need a protector and a source of ultimate strength and safety. Fighters step in and out of society; society’s rules (don’t cut in line, don’t punch people in bars) have a looser hold, because society asks them to cast those rules away on certain strict occasions.