A Fighter's Heart

One man's journey through the world of fighting

Sam Sheridan

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848872660
• Print ISBN:
  9781843547334

After a series of adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, cash-rich and with time on his hands to spend it. It occurred to him that he could finally explore a long-held obsession: fighting. Within a year, he was in Bangkok training with Thailand's greatest kickboxing champion and stepping through the ropes for his first professional bout. But one fight wasn't enough, and Sheridan set out to test himself on an epic journey into how and why we fight, facing Olympic boxers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu stars, and Ultimate Fighting champions.

CONTENTS

1. THE RESPOSIBILITY TO FIGHT

2. RULE NUMBER SEVEN, FIGHT CLUB

3. THE RIVER OF JANUARY

4. THE TAO OF THE PUNCH

5. A COLD GAME

6. THE SLIGHT RETURN

7. GAMENESS

8. COOLER THAN REAL

9. A FIGHTER’S HEART

AFTERWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A NOTE ON PERMISSIONS

1

THE RESPOSIBILITY TO FIGHT

Apidej sit-Hirun at Fairtex Gym, Bangkok, Thailand, May 2000.

Elephant behind Fairtex Gym.

Ibn Khaldun, the immortal Tunisian historian, says that events often contradict the universal idea to which one would like them to conform, that analogies are inexact, and that experience is deceptive.

—A. J. Liebling, A Neutral Corner

Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.

—F. Nietzsche, “Homer on Competition,” 1872

Samrong Stadium, in Bang Pli, an hour from Bangkok, is dirty, dingy, and high ceilinged, with concrete floors, rows of folding chairs, and crowds milling around drinking Singha beer and smoking Krum Thip cigarettes. A fight has just ended and the canvas ring is brightly lit and empty. Now it’s my turn to fight, and I look at Johann, a short, muscular, bald Belgian, and say, “Win or lose, I want a beer in my hand as soon as I climb out of the ring.” He smiles tightly and nods. I roll my neck like a real fighter and step through the vermilion ropes. I’m wearing a robe designed for Thais who fight at 130 pounds and it barely covers my oily thighs.

My heavily tattooed opponent ignores the screaming crowd and I ignore him, even though I can feel his eyes on me across the ring, his attempt to engage me in a samurai stare-down. I am absurdly, frenetically excited, and yet calm in the knowledge that I’m as ready as possible for my first fight. I can ignore my opponent’s mind games because, hey—we’ll find out who’s tougher soon enough. I suppress an urge to smile at him. I have no ill will toward the guy.

My body is aglow with the power of recuperation and heating oils, and my face is greased with a layer of Vaseline. The harsh blatting horn, the lilting pipes, and the stomping drum begin their song. There is nothing left to fear.

When I was in junior high, at the Eaglebrook School in the green hills of Massachusetts, I read a book about John F. Kennedy that said he used to carry an anonymous poem with him in his wallet:

Bullfight critics, ranked in rows,

Crowd the enormous plaza full.

But only one is there who knows,

And he’s the man that fights the bull.

I loved that quote. I carried it in my own wallet for years, well through college, until that wallet was lost when I flipped the dinghy during a hurricane in Bermuda. I wanted to be the one who knows. To me, the quote wasn’t just about critics and performers and artists. The man in the ring knows, and not just about that particular bullfight and whether or not he did a good job. He knows.

I grew up romanticizing fighting and fighters: matadors, soldiers, knights, samurai. There was nothing more noble. That boys should worship fighters was as unquestioned as patriotism, bred into the fabric of masculinity. Little boys pick up sticks and turn them into swords and guns no matter what their mothers might do.

I went to high school at Deerfield Academy, a fancy prep school where my father was the business manager. I had a circle of friends who were locals and sons of teachers, and we had our own sort of world between the rich kids who lived in the dormitories and the surrounding rural public school kids.

We watched a lot of kung fu movies, but we didn’t fight. Deerfield wasn’t that kind of place; nobody fought, although they did wrestle, and in hindsight I wish I had wrestled, too. Our favorite part of any kung fu movie wasn’t necessarily the climactic fights; it was the training sequence, when the hero becomes an invincible warrior.

I played sports, football and lacrosse, and was a mediocre varsity athlete. I was a not-so-secret nerd, really. I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes by myself as I got older and it became less socially acceptable. I read voraciously and insatiably. I had one girlfriend for a few weeks, and she pretty much hated me.

After high school I joined the merchant marines out of a burning need to escape before college and an attempt to see the world in a supremely clichéd fashion. I took the three a.m. train from an unmanned station in Amherst down to Maryland, to the Seafarers Harry Lundenburg School of Seamanship, in Piney Point. When my mom dropped me off, in a pool of light from a street lamp at the deserted train station, with my dad’s old navy duffel bag, I was a living Norman Rockwell painting.

The school was run like a boot camp—shave your head, shine your boots, do push-ups till you puke—and my “class,” number 518, started out with about twenty-eight guys and finished, four months later, with thirteen. Classes usually lost five or ten guys, but we were gutted. Some of this was due to racial tension; the class was half white and half black, and there were some fights. The black guys, it seemed to me at the tender age of eighteen, had a better handle on how to deal with the pressure, and the endless work: They did just enough to coast through, while the white guys were killing themselves trying to complete the Sisyphean tasks put to us by an unusually cruel bosun. I found a way to live in both worlds, and I learned one of the most important lessons in life: Keep your mouth shut. It was my introduction to the world of tough guys.

Half of the class had been in jail for one reason or another, and I told no one about my prep school background or Ivy League future. One of my best friends there had a spiderweb tattooed on his face, right under his eye. I dared him to cut my hand off one night on the meat slicer, laid my hand on it, stared him in the eye, and said, “Fuck you, do it” (everybody had to talk that way). He gave me a small, tight-eyed look and then looked away. On the first ship he got on, he stabbed the chief mate three times.

We would fight in the weight room with some old boxing gloves, and looking back with the benefit of some experience, I realize we had no idea what we were doing. There was a tall black kid named Sypes, from Mississippi, who spoke like birds chirping and claimed to have been a pro boxer, but when he was sparring with Walzer, a five-foot blond redneck who would just windmill, Sypes didn’t look that good. Walzer in his fury caught Sypes and blasted his eyebrow open, and blood sprayed everywhere. Sypes dashed to the bathroom clutching his eye, leaving long spatters of blood on the filthy linoleum. We mopped up the blood, rusty stains trailing like a big orange-brown paintbrush. I got in there and tried to box with a few people, and I was hesitant and awkward. A tough kid from Florida, Davey Dubois, racked me with an uppercut, and for days my jaw clicked in a funny way. Still, I got in there; my curiosity edged out my fear. I had to know. I wanted to know.

A few years later, an art critic named Peter Schjeldahl, who was teaching at Harvard (I was an art major), said to me, “You’re wondering what all young men wonder: Am I a coward or not?” That was part of it, though I knew I probably wasn’t a coward. Bravery is something different. Bravery has to be proved.

My dad had been a Navy SEAL, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, and the military was an obvious choice after college, maybe a little too obvious. It didn’t really grab me, partially because of my merchant marine experiment but mostly because I learned too much history, too much about politicians and great-power politics. I don’t want to kill people, and I didn’t want to be a tool, a tooth in the cog of a great machine. My idea of a war hero is Hawkeye on M*A*S*H: If you have to go to war, then you go; but if you don’t, then you don’t.

Bar brawling didn’t interest me, either; when I’m in a bar, I’m interested in having fun. What appealed was the dynamic of a duel: What is it like to meet a man on open ground, a man who is ready for you, a man who is your equal in most measurable ways?

At Harvard I tried tai chi and tiger kung fu, and one day I happened upon the boxing gym, where Tommy Rawson was the coach. He was about four foot five and maybe eighty years old. He’d been a professional fighter in the thirties and New England lightweight champ in 1935 with a record of 89–6, and he was magical. Finally, here was real fighting and sparring, with headgear and a mouth guard and big sixteen-ounce gloves. Tommy couldn’t remember anyone’s name, but he understood boxing in his bones. “Hey slugger, don’t start weaving until he gives you trouble,” he’d call in a harsh voice that had yelled out things like that for fifty years. He always had a gleeful smile on his handsome, crumpled face.

Once I started boxing, I prized hammering away on a big bag, working the speed bag, running stairs, jumping rope. Of course, I still smoked two packs a day and drank five nights a week—this was college. Sparring with headgear comes as a revelation, because you get hit and it doesn’t really hurt. It becomes like a chess match: You think, Hey, he jumped back when I did this, so next time I’ll fake this and actually do that—and then you have the satisfaction of burying a hook to the side of his head. There is the battle rage that is so enthralling, the berserker emotion that doesn’t discern friend from foe but simply rejoices in blood. This was the feeling I was after. My adrenal glands were triggered and I was fully engaged in the moment: Someone was trying to kill me. The door opened on a new world.

By senior year, I was boxing less and less. College was winding down, and I was wondering what the hell comes next. I was signed up with the Marine Corps, but also to go to Honduras with the Peace Corps, both to begin right after graduation. I vacillated daily, hourly. I used to say, “Peace Corps or Marine Corps, just so long as it’s hard core.” Hilarious. Then, about two weeks after graduation in 1998, my godmother told me that a friend of hers had just bought a yacht and was looking for crew. I sent him my scrawny résumé and we talked and I kept my mouth shut (that essential survival skill learned in the merchant marine) and didn’t reveal my cluelessness, and he hired me. He was going to pay me good money to help fix up his yacht and sail it around the world with him. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, impossible to refuse, and so I spent a year and a half on the boat, seeing her through three captains, five stewardesses, two engineers, and a variety of guests. I made it all the way to Australia, where I finally had had enough of being part of a rich man’s toy and stepped off onto dry land.

I was twenty-four, in Darwin, Australia, loaded with cash, and I planned not to work again until I’d spent it all. I got a room in a hostel and started working out in a local gym; I stopped smoking and began thinking again about fighting. It occurred to me, slowly, that I could return to fighting now, without distractions. I started taking classes in muay Thai, the Thai variation of kickboxing that utilizes elbows and knees, with the local Aussies. The instructor, a thin, bald, narrow-faced former professional fighter named Mike, had trained in Thailand.

Muay Thai is considered by the sport-fighting world to be the premier “stand-up” ring sport, for the simple reason that it allows the most dangerous moves. Western-style boxing is all hands, and punches must be above the waist. Kickboxing, full-contact tae kwon do, and karate all allow kicks, but they’re restricted to above the waist. Muay Thai, on the other hand, allows kicks anywhere, which dramatically changes the style of fighting, as leg kicks are quicker, nastier, faster, and easier to execute. Perhaps more telling is that muay Thai also allows fighting in the clinch. In Western boxing, the clinch—when fighters come together and lock up arms—is a safe haven. The clinch in muay Thai is very different: The fighters wrestle for control, looking to throw knees and elbows; the clinch is where most of the damage is done.

After a few weeks training with Mike, when he could see I was getting more serious, he told me that months spent training in Thailand were worth years of training anywhere else, including his gym. He also said, “You can either be tough or you can be quick.” When I asked him which he was, he smiled ruefully and said, “Quick.” I thought that maybe I could fake tough.

I left Darwin with Craig, the engineer on the yacht I had crewed on, traveling in a Kombi-van with flowers painted all over it. We spent a few months driving across Australia, telling girls we were professional long-board surfers but the waves were too small for us today. Along the way, I kept thinking about muay Thai, and at campsites I would throw three hundred kicks with each leg at trees, amusing and occasionally alarming the other backpackers.

We ended the road trip in Sydney, and I found my way into a gym where I met a short, mean-looking Maori who had spent a year training in Thailand. His legs were a lattice of scars and veins: In muay Thai, the leg kick uses the shin as a striking point, and the only way to counter a shin kick is to block it with your own shin. Shin-on-shin contact is very painful—at least until all the nerve endings there have died. The Maori told me that if I was going to get serious about muay Thai, I should cover an empty bottle with a little oil and vigorously roll the bottle up and down my shins while pressing hard, a procedure that if repeated enough times would eventually kill the nerve endings.

I started doing the bottle rub back in the hostel while watching The Simpsons and figuring out how I could become a real muay Thai fighter. I had the money, I had the time, I had the inclination—so I decided to train in Thailand. I’d always wondered what would happen if I could train all the time, like the Shaolin monks who were raised in the temple, the samurai, the Spartans. No drinking, or smoking, or coffee, or girls—just fighting all the time.

I wanted to find a contact before I went over to Thailand and on a whim bought a copy of International Kickboxer magazine, which featured a full-page ad for a muay Thai camp called Fairtex. I began a tentative e-mail correspondence with its manager, and he was matter of fact: Come on over and stay as long as you can, no experience necessary.

I arrived in Bangkok around midnight on Valentine’s Day of ’00. A gentle, round-faced Thai named Han picked me up at the airport and drove me the hour to Fairtex, where he unceremoniously deposited me at my room. There were two men inside asleep when I stumbled in and flicked on the lights; they half-woke to curse me out in French before I hurriedly shut off the light and lay down on a mattress on the floor.

I was too jet-lagged to sleep, and tossed and turned in the dark with the snoring of strangers in my ears, the unfamiliar heat thick in the air. I stared at the ceiling for long minutes or hours, ears pricking at strange noises. Finally, I crept from my room, trying not to wake my unseen roommates, and padded down the stairs into the green wash of morning. The camp was silent, still and deserted. I glanced briefly at the boxing rings; the heavy bags hung like a neat row of lynched corpses. I could hear dogs barking and a nearby cock marking the morning.

I found my way out of the camp through leafy bowers over cracking concrete and scurrying geckos. At the end of the driveway, at a loss for which way to go, I turned right and walked up onto a curving concrete bridge. It was warm and light already, although nobody else seemed to be up yet. The sun was low in the eastern sky, nearly obscured by the muggy clouds of gray and pearl. The river was still and black and silver, and a low mist hung on it, getting thicker farther upstream. Rickety wooden houses and piers stood in the white shrouds of fog; a lone Thai woman with a broad straw hat poled her boat through the murk. I finally felt the full strangeness of where I was, this movie set of the Far East, the mystic Orient.

That first day I didn’t train, on the say-so of the camp manager, an American-born Chinese named Anthony, the guy I’d been e-mailing. He told me to let my body adjust after the long journey, so I sat and watched.

One of the first things one notices about muay Thai is the youth of the fighters: The boys are often six or seven when they climb into the ring for their first fights, and they’re generally considered to peak at about seventeen. Muay Thai, like many of the ring fighting arts, is a way out for the very poor. The prize money can support families who can’t afford to send their children to school. It is an extremely grueling sport, not only the fights themselves, but the training. Most Thais are surprised that anyone would pay to come to train in muay Thai, because it is such a horrible, painful way to live.

I sat next to the far ring, which was reserved for the Lumpini fighters—Lumpini is the premier fighting stadium in Thailand, where the best muay Thai fighters in the world compete—and watched them train. They were working the pad rounds, which I learned are the heart of training. A trainer with shin guards, a thick belly pad, and pads on his forearms takes the fighter through rounds of kicking, punching, elbows, and knees. The noise was tremendous: The fighters yelled with every kick and every punch. In other martial arts, you execute moves at 70 percent of full speed and power; in muay Thai, everything is 100 percent all the time. The din of twenty men and boys all yelling and hitting is a strange, desperate noise. That noise was my introduction to the urgency of a real fight.

The trainers were older, heavier Thais with battered faces and scarred brows. They would drill their fighters relentlessly, switching through positions smoothly, and the fighters would follow, kicking and punching and kneeing, screaming something like “Aish,” while the noise of their legs hitting the pads crackled like gunshots. The fighters resembled oiled, tireless machines, functioning beautifully. Competence displayed is always fun to watch, but this kind of speed and power and skill was mesmerizing.

The next morning, I had my first training session, with a trainer named Kum. He asked me to put on my wraps, the binding fighters “wrap” around their fists and wrists for padding and protection. I rushed through it, doing it the old Harvard boxing way, with short wraps not going between the fingers, instead of asking him to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• AFTERWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• A NOTE ON PERMISSIONS