I don’t like to fight. Heck, I don’t even like to argue. I still remember the last fight some twenty years ago and one particular sucker punch. An overhead right, launched unexpectedly, sounded like somebody had dropped a lush watermelon from a third-story balcony. Somebody lost control and somebody else lost consciousness.
But not so very long ago, I asked myself, ‘Can somebody become great at age sixty-whatever?’ And myself answered , ‘Sure, why not?’ Why not indeed, I pondered. Then… how?, I wondered. I am already amazingly fit, strikingly handsome and not a little delusional, so when I stumbled upon a documentary called Fightville, I found myself somewhat mesmerized by the mixed martial arts (MMA). The physicality was impressive, the fighting skills, the training… but what really caught my attention was the drive, the discipline, the determination, the focus. Figure out how to bottle those attributes – no news here really – and you are likely to become great at any age, at any endeavor. A great husband, a great grandfather, a great writer, a great anything. Seems I am searching for the mysteries of the tough guys. After all, we are almost always fighting something. A bully, procrastination, fatigue, a deadline, the finish line….
“Continuous training and fervent disciplining of the body unveil hidden knowledge, paving the way for mastering the secret of things.” – Kazumi Tabata
So, as you might expect, I started studying. Part of my studies involves watching many hours of two well-built young men, usually heavily tattooed, beating the crap out of each other in an enclosure aptly named a cage. Two decades removed from the sound of that watermelon dropping, turns out I can finally watch these battles… as a student. How to inflict pain, how to avoid pain, how to recover from pain. How to win, how to lose.
Seems one of the most necessary and important lessons to be had is losing.
“Maturity is a big part of success in fighting, because it means you understand the game – that losing is part of the game,” said Ricardo Liborio. “It doesn’t mean you let yourself get conquered , but to know that you can win again, at the right time you can be great. The key to doing well in competition is to accept. Accept you can lose, you can not perform. Take this big bag of rocks out of your backpack, take the pressure off, and you’ll do better. Once you understand that, man, you can do well.”
With any luck, you learn what you did wrong, you learn what didn’t work, you learn what you need to do to be successful the next time. Do what you tell yourself and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
Sam Sheridan would have us believe, “You need to develop a feel for what a fight is like, the intensity of the moves, how desperation fuels the struggle.”
And so it goes.