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CHAPTER TWO:

A PUNCHER'S CHANCE

Authenticity,

Im/materiality, and Physicality

It’s Friday night. I’m standing ringside, a plastic cup of Michelob in hand. It’s a low-end casino and I’m watching live Mixed Martial Arts. Two sweat-slicked fighters are grappling ten feet away. Remnants of smoke-machine-distributed atmosphere drift through the air. There’s a posse of G-string-and-silicon ring-girls with model postures and tolerant expressions to my left. The front rows are full of lethal-looking Russian dudes with bored platinum dates, thuggy steroid users, playas, playa wannabes, and a ton of young men straight outta Jersey Shore outtakes. It’s been a good evening of fights but there haven’t been any really devastating knockouts yet. A couple of guys have gotten dropped hard but nothing huge. I’m a little disappointed.

But honestly, who do I think I am? I’m bald, go to the gym, and have tattoos, so I fit in here, at least at first glance. But I don’t own any Affliction gear, I only make gangsta hand symbols when I’m goofing around for photos, and I haven’t thrown a real punch at anyone in twenty years. I have my tough-guy affectations, but I’m a middle-aged father, I subscribe to the New Yorker, I drink tea, I garden. I’m out of my league here and kind of thrilled about it.

It’s not just testosterone that’s gotten me down here though: I’m intrigued by the explosion of interest in Mixed Martial Arts fighting. MMA carries a lugnut kind of visage, and that’s part of it for sure, but it’s really just an amalgam of other disciplines, infused with the admirable qualities of judo, jiu jitsu, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, samba, and lots else. I can’t see any reason to think of MMA as significantly different than any other fighting styles, aside from its current commercialization. That’s part of why I am here tonight—though maybe it’s because I want a taste of something real. Not “real” in the phenomenological sense: I’m talking about the right-here-right-now-in-my-face sensuality sense.

It’s worth saying that I like to fight and I admire fighters of all kinds, but my goal here isn’t to defend fighting per se. Instead, my defense of fighting in this context is intended to serve as a route to my larger argument about the value, power, and potentiality of sports, and, even more than that, the exigency of neighborly friendship. But talking about fighting provokes people, so it’s a convenient way to put the argument to a stiff test right off the hop.

What I’m articulating here is an aesthetic desire for sure, but it’s also, and maybe moreso, a political one. I am convinced that sports offer a particular and irreplaceable arena for radical social transformation. All sports—fighting maybe more immediately than most—open up specific and enigmatic possibilities for engaging with pillars of liberatory politics: difference, equity, and solidarity. And, in part, it’s the encounter with materiality that I am after here.

It’s like the difference between walking and driving: sliding by in a vehicle you really don’t see shit. You can’t smell or hear anything, you move too fast, you miss all the subtleties by keeping at a comfortable distance. If you walk (and especially if you walk regularly), you feel places differently. There is something analogous about the physicality, the bodies-on-bodies immediacy and pleasure of sports: it’s the promise of an unmediated capacity to apprehend ethical decisions, the expression of difference, and the visceral encounters with solidarity that interest me.

THEY'RE RUNNING UP THE SCORE ON US

I’ve always been a fight fan. I remember watching a little black and white TV with my dad, and loving Ali sparring with Howard Cosell during prime time. I can mentally replay Hearns-Hagler in omnicolor detail. The Hit Man almost decapitating Roberto Duran. The Hawk. Alexis Arguello. Lights Out Toney. In college I was legitimately (and probably justifiably) embarrassed by my admiration of Mike Tyson and my sparring sessions in the basement of the university athletic complex. Righteous friends and nice college kids took it as proof of my loutish tendencies, so I snuck off to the north end of town on fight nights to watch pay-per-view in biker bars, trained quietly, and kept that shit right to myself. I only ever fought a little and haven’t done it properly for almost two decades now, but remain enthused and attached.

And I’m not embarrassed about it anymore. I’m more confident in articulating why boxing is a good thing and why I watch. And I don’t really mind so much if good people think I’m a bit of a pig. To me boxing specifically, and fighting in general, is an increasingly precious route to cut through the artifice and banality of contemporary life.

In a twenty-first century where what’s real, what’s fake, and what the difference is seems tenuous at best, fighting is a simple, pure pleasure. In the face of a plague of reality TV, WMDs, Facebook “friends,” “conversations” on Twitter, Second Life, and the average kid spending almost eight hours a day staring at screens, looking for “reality” and “truthfulness” is a disorienting mess. Pining for the authentic mostly just sounds nostalgic, trite, and/or painfully quaint. But there’s nothing fake about a sharp right cross in the mouth. There’s no irony, no subtext, no spin, no fabrication, no “reality” in quotes, no disclaimers, no reset function, no replaceable avatar to start over with. It just hurts. And if you’re watching, there’s no way to pretend it’s not happening. That kid’s nose really is pouring blood, his neurons really are scrambling.

But wait. That’s exactly the Fight Club story. Didn’t Pitt and Norton and Palahniuk do all this already? Isn’t the idea that fighting is particularly “authentic” just another lame Maileresque, patriarchal cliché? Really, what’s real about scrapping? And what’s so great about “real” or “authentic” anyways?

At first glance, I’d say it’s pain, the threat of pain, the inescapable physicality that sharpens a poignancy in fighting. It has always been the ostensible realness of boxing that attracted me—I don’t think boxing has anything to do with violence. Violence is coercive by definition; it’s done to someone against their will. You step into the ring voluntarily. It’s painful, risky, dangerous, scary, often damaging, and probably not a great idea on balance, but it’s not violence. Capitalism generalizes intrinsic and extrinsic violence throughout our social and cultural relationships, and boxing is one more site for that expression. The act of fighting is scary, thrilling, and potentially damaging absolutely, but the same can be said for ballet, skateboarding, mountain climbing, scuba diving, riding a horse, mountain biking, and playing hockey. There is danger in varying degrees inhered in nearly every activity, risks to be taken and compromises to be made. Everything has a cost. If you don’t like boxing, if it makes you squeamish, if you think that’s not a risk you’re comfortable with, I totally understand. But that’s an aesthetic choice.

Well-earned physical pain and suffering, whether it’s from grappling, walking all day, or digging dirt is sweet relief for those of us who sit on our asses too much, and that materiality promises an encounter with trust and solidarity. Maybe that’s why I’m standing ringside after a long, immobile day writing emails, finishing an article, and applying for a grant. I’m vertical, and there are real people, real sounds, and real action around me. There is a physical encounter here that’s soaking into the immateriality of my day. There is immediacy, instead of a-temporality. It’s right here in front of me, and I flinch as a young man gets his elbow dislocated.

A more just and equitable world is one where we are willing to encounter the consequences of our actions and make ethical individual and collective choices. Capitalism insists that it is reasonable for an old-growth watershed to be sacrificed or workers to be downsized or land to be colonized in the name of growth and efficiency. A better world requires us being able to resist that logic and claim that some things are incommensurable: they do not adhere to market logic.

If we abandon or condescend to sports, we lose a valuable and fertile route to a world where people are more than industrial inputs: a world where people can trust and rely on each other. Sports are hardly the only way we can bodily encounter trust, but they are a specific and irreplaceable one, in no small part due to their physicality. Fighting, like all sports, requires trust, without which larger notions of solidarity and community are impossible. Why is it that after almost every bout combatants gratefully and effusively hug each other, check to make sure each other is alright, and give thanks that no one was really hurt?

The immediacy of these physical encounters forces us to face the consequences of our actions, putting our ethical choices into living color. Every time you agree to fight someone, you are placing a huge amount of trust and faith in them. There is the very real possibility that they can damage you, maybe badly. In any fight, you have to take care of the other, and pull up before anything ugly happens: you have to believe that when you tap they’re going to stop. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes that trust is misplaced. Overwhelmingly, though, that trust is validated. In team sports there is another layer of mutual aid involved, when you not only enter a series of agreements with your opponents, but with your teammates as well.

WITHIN STRIKING DISTANCE

The lived experience of giving and granting trust is a precondition for mutuality, or in a more abstracted, politicized rendition: solidarity. There are lots of other places to encounter this kind of mutuality, say doing work with others, but sports are one highly accessible and joyful route. Trust is necessarily bound up with the possibility of suffering, and in an antiseptic and duplicitous era, that’s an attractive commodity to many—ergo the phenomenon of fake memoirs. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is the flag-bearer for this genre—but there is a boatload of these clowns. Frey is a rich-kid frat boy who claimed a life of unbelievable drug and alcohol abuse, violence, Mafia relationships, and general chaos so extreme that it turned his “memoir” into a critically-lauded bestseller. Pretty much none of it was true and he got famously flogged for it.

But he is hardly alone. Over the course of multiple celebrated Oprah appearances, and in a book intended for publication in 2009 (but cancelled), Herman Rosenblat claimed that he met his wife through the fence at Buchenwald. He actually is a concentration camp survivor, but his love story and many details of his book are fantasy. In 2008, Margaret Seltzer, a rich, white suburban girl pawned off Love and Consequences, a memoir of growing up as a half-white and half-Native foster child, living a bad-ass life of drugs and violence as a Blood gang member. She even faked a thug accent in radio interviews, until she was exposed and the book pulled.

Then there’s the weirdness of JT LeRoy who has written a bunch of books, articles, and screenplays as a once-homeless, transgender, sex-working, oft-abused drug addict. But LeRoy is a middle-aged straight woman named Laura Albert who was eventually outed (and now sued) after a long investigation. Michael Gambino published The Honored Society in 2001, pretending to be a full-on Mafiosa who spent significant time in jail for murder, pimping, money laundering and all the rest. None of it was true. In 1997, Misha Defonseca wrote a massive European bestseller about being a Holocaust survivor, killing a German soldier, and living with a pack of wolves (!). It was B.S. In 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski wrote a similar Holocaust survival story that was hugely popular and won plenty of literary awards. Also total B.S.

There are tons of other examples of memoir-deception, both recent and historical, many of them prominent hoaxes. The thread that runs through these stories is the presumption of authenticity in describing a life of trauma and pain. These fake memoirs are all characterized by their “gritty realism” and their witness to “horrifying reality.” A huge proportion of fake memoirs are written by people pretending to be indigenous or Holocaust survivors.

Nasdijj, for example, wrote three acclaimed and awarded books, starting with 2000’s The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, about growing up Navajo, his brutal childhood and abusive parents, eventually adopting an FAS kid, then an HIV+ child. Esquire reviewed it as an “authentic, important book.... Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect.” Except it was a total lie. He’s a white guy from Michigan named Tim Barrus.

All these books claimed authenticity on the basis of suffering. Misery lit is a boom sector of the flailing publishing world, and from Frank McCourt to Dave Pelzer to Augusten Burroughs, offering up personal grief has made for good business, so it’s hardly any wonder that a few folks with less-than-traumatic lives have given it their best shot, reality notwithstanding.

It’s not just books either. Memoir is a fluid genre, and much of the hiphop I listen to is predicated on streetness. I love 50 Cent, but how would I feel if all his bravado and macho bullshit was a total lie? He got shot like I got shot but he ain’t fuckin’ breathing. I presume that thug rappers are habitually full of shit about their heroics, but at least I know it’s coming and love them for it. I don’t mind too much when my hiphop bleeds fiction and non-fiction a little: talking trash is part of the package. But I made no such deals with Frey before I read a Million Little Pieces and most everybody hates being lied to. Including Sherman Alexie, who isn’t real fond of Nasdijj either: “His lies matter because he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real suffering endured by generations of very real Indians because of very real injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed very real tribes.”9

But why is pain so identified with authenticity? And vice versa? Why is street cred about the suffering you’ve endured? In a world buried in half-truths and untruths, in lust with artifice and superficiality, a life watched on screen, what’s with the hand-wringing about realness? Is fighting really more authentic than sitting at my computer all day? Why is pain more real than pleasure? Is it that pain is a documentable affirmation of consequence?

That’s more or less what is going through my mind as I consider how to extract myself from a kimura submission hold that Roy Duquette has put me in. A kimura is a jiu jitsu hold, more or less the same as a hammerlock, chicken-wing, or ude-garami. It also fucking hurts. Roy’s in side control and is hyper-rotating my shoulder by pinning my chest and leveraging my upper and lower arms in opposite directions.

Roy’s a good guy. He is a trainer, coach, and therapist who works with all kinds of fighters at all kinds of levels including stars like Dennis Kang from the UFC and Emily Kwok, who in 2007 became the first female Canadian to win a world championship in Brazilian jiu jitsu. Roy has trained in a bouquet of disciplines himself including jiu jitsu, boxing, grappling, Karate, and Russian Sambo, and still spars regularly. He knows what he’s doing.

We’ve sat and talked at length about his philosophies of fighting and I’ve watched him train and spar several times. He employs a melange of styles, but not haphazardly. Roy is a classic new-school MMA practitioner: it’s not meathead bar-brawl stuff he employs, it’s more like chess with submissions. Roy is convinced that there is something elemental about fighting, especially martial arts, mixed or otherwise: “There’s no hiding when you’re fighting. That’s the realness of it—it’s an expression of you.”

Sure, but I think that’s really true about hockey or dancing too. You learn so much about someone just by playing a little pick-up ball or baling hay or cleaning a house with them. It’s not easy to hide yourself on the court or when doing hard work with someone. Roy tells me,

That’s exactly what I teach my students: to be connected to your opponent. If you can’t get into a relationship with your opponent you’re already in trouble. You have to focus completely. No matter what happened to you that day you have to leave it behind. In that way we could say that what happens outside the ring is less real than what happens in it.

Today I’ve convinced him to work with me a little, just for fun. I think I’m strong enough and I like to fight, but I have no idea what I am doing. I have no wrestling or grappling skills, but I’m game and excited to learn some jiu jitsu.

Roy also brings along a student of his: Emma Lynds, a thirty-six-year-old mother of two who is the only woman owner of a martial arts gym in Vancouver. She also has a black-belt in Hapkido and trains extensively in muay thai, boxing, judo, and jiu jitsu. The three of us take turns fighting over the next couple of hours. Roy and Emma are beautiful to watch: spinning, rolling, leaping over each other, countering, counter-countering, and countering again. Roy has a lot more jiu jitsu experience and is far bigger than Emma so he wears her down every time, but there’s no charity going on, he has to fight hard.

I love fighting with Emma. She’s 135 pounds and I can muscle her around, but she is so smart and skilled that I am constantly getting caught in holds that are very difficult for me to negotiate out of. Because I am fifty pounds heavier, Emma works from her back keeping me in full-guard most of the time. In our first bout, she just fends me off patiently for a few minutes, then locks in a triangle choke that finishes things. In our next few rounds, I figure out a couple of moves so I have some offense. Emma is really helpful, waiting as Roy pauses us and explains what I should be doing, and letting me try stuff out. It feels like I am in a fight, even though I know Emma could submit me pretty easily. Her conditioning is awesome, while I wear down quickly, which clouds my thinking. It’s really Emma’s quick reactions and strategic manoeuvring that impresses me most.