Fight, fight, fight, fight!
When you start to write a book (in my case, The Last Word – Mixed Martial Arts), more often than not you don’t really know where it will take you and what emotions it might stir within your bowels.
I’ve always had an interest in martial arts. As a youngster, I harboured dreams of being Bruce Lee, even though the slightest hint of real life violence or fighting sent me scurrying in the opposite direction – you’d be able to find me by tracking the trail of shit that was running down my leg. That’s the kind of emotion fighting used to stir in my bowels.
One of my abiding childhood memories was watching professional wrestling on TV on a Saturday afternoon at my Gran’s house. I used to sit and watch it with her, fascinated as my normally demure and meek Gran shouted at the TV, encouraging the flabby wrestlers to do all sorts of nasty things to each other. The sight of two grown men trying to do damage to each other brought out her inner savage.
Instead of Saturday afternoon wrestling with Giant Haystacks, Big Daddy and Mick McManus, we now have Mixed Martial Arts, or “MMA”, with characters like Anderson “Spider” Silva, Randy “The Natural” Couture and Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell among the many hundreds of fighters providing the entertainment on a TV near you.
MMA is a big entertainment business, but unlike wrestling, it’s for real. You have a fighter who specialises in his favourite form of martial art fighting another who specialised in something totally different. One might be a kick boxer, the other might be a jiu-jitsu master. It doesn’t matter. The whole point of MMA is to see who is the better fighter. It’s totally in-your-face, not fixed or staged, and the crowds love it, just in the same way my Gran did.
As I researched the book, it became clear that today’s MMA fighter is a complex character. Without doubt, they train hard and are generally supremely fit. I say “generally” because there is more than one fighter in the super heavyweight division who should really lay off the beers and pizzas, or consider a change of career and become a Sumo wrestler. But mostly, you wouldn’t want to kick sand in their face.
Some are well educated with college degrees or have left promising corporate careers behind for the chance to beat the crap out of people for money. Some are absolute nutbags who have spent time behind bars, and survived by beating people to a pulp if they looked at them without permission.
Any MMA event will have a real cross-section of society on show. Not only are they fighting to see which martial art is best, they are fighting across the social classes, just like we always have. That’s what makes it so interesting as a socio-anthropological study... Really? I had you there! What makes it interesting is to see whose shoulder is going to be dislocated or who is going to be choked unconscious before they can submit. That’s the kind of thing we want to study.
The fighters have their idiosyncrasies too. They have tattoos that proclaim their neo-Nazi beliefs and the miniscule size of their penis (yes, that tattoo really does exist), haircuts that you wouldn’t be seen dead with, the weirdest tastes in music as they enter the arena, and nicknames that you couldn’t come up with when you are sober. Honestly, did Joseph “The Ho Bag” Bochenek really see his name in six-foot-high neon lights topping the bill at the Mirage in Las Vegas?
Writing the book did take me in directions I wasn’t expecting and I’ve found out so much about MMA than I ever thought possible, and it’s really fascinating.
But I’ll leave the last word to my Gran. She’ll be watching MMA from her wing-backed armchair in the sky and there’s no doubt she’ll be smiling and shouting “Come on ya big jessie, choke the lily-livered fecker out... fight, fight, fight, fight...”
Alistair McKillop is the author of the upcoming The Last Word – Mixed Martial Arts, available through Germinal Press
Comments
On Friday, April Apr 2011 Simon Jones said...
“I've only seen UFC on TV but it's compelling in the most unlikely way. I've grown up on boxing, but the sport in Australia is a joke and while Mundine has done much to lift media attention, he's done little in terms of the world stage simply because his fighting ability is minimal. MMA, though, is real, technically very good and totally believable.”
On Friday, April Apr 2011 Phil Estrada said...
“There's this great book called A Fighter's Heart that has a passage in it where the writer goes to some backwater US MMA gym (apparently the best in the US) and sees a sign on the wall that reads: "Your kung fu is no good here". Is kung fu even part of MMA?”
On Friday, April Apr 2011 Jim Wilson said...
“Great piece of writing which flows really well, did things to my bowels and made me think of how Sonny Liston would treat these punks. I loved it.”
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