Guys Read: The Sports Pages (15 page)

My basketball talent got me into Harvard, and my hard work in learning as much as I could at Harvard prepared me for all of the fun opportunities God has opened up for me since.

My parents were right: focusing on getting the best possible education truly has provided me with the foundation to have enjoyed much more in life than I could have ever dreamed.

Thanks, Mom and Dad.

H
ow did I get here? That's a question most of us have asked ourselves at one time or another. But not about the situation in which I now find myself: standing across the ring from someone who looks twice my width despite us both having weighed in at 165 pounds on the button. Not only that, but as the referee has us touch our gloves at the center of the ring, Tipper Sodaman leans forward with a grin as friendly as a mako shark's.

“This time, fish, I'm going to gut you.”

How nice of him to remind me—just in case I could have somehow forgotten having my face pushed down into a pile of dog poop behind the football bleachers—that we had met before. How fun to renew old friendships a year later!

I don't answer him, of course. That would be bad form according to all of my teachers, men who've been in this sort of situation themselves.

Oh really?
my inner voice replies.

Shut up, inner voice.

But I do whisper to myself as I go back to my corner, “It doesn't matter if I win or lose. Just as long as I don't choke.”

Oh really?

Inner voice, if you don't cool it, I am going to kick your butt.

I'm not here to prove myself.

Then what are you here for?
asks that sardonic inner voice.

There's just enough time for me to think back an answer that I believe to be the right one.

Because.

And then to ask myself one more time that same damn question.

How the heck did I get here?

It is not a long story. It's so short that I can relate it to you as the two of us approach each other to meet in the center of the ring.

Let me begin by making it perfectly clear that I was not a scrawny 98-pound weakling when, at the age of fifteen, I decided to devote myself to mixed martial arts. I tipped the rusty bathroom scale—which was at least as reliable as a congenital liar—at a full 104 pounds. That weight, I concluded, combined with my bony height of six feet three inches, meant that I was well equipped to become a deadly ninja-type warrior. For it is widely known that ninjas can make themselves invisible. All I had to do was turn sideways to more or less vanish. And I was hardly in need of weapons, for as my little sister, Maggie, so supportively observed, I was so bony that I could disembowel someone by just bumping into them with my hips.

If a sense of humor—or self-deprecating sarcasm—was a weapon, then my entire family would be deadly warriors.

“It is just your Slovak blood,” my mother helpfully observed as she passed by our diminutive bathroom, which, lacking an actual door, might be better described as a family showroom. True, everyone else politely averts their eyes when someone is in there. But my mother, being the mother, assumes that she is exempt from such considerations as recognizing her children's desire for privacy. That is why Maggie, a popular and perky fourteen-year-old, never applied makeup at home but lugged her whole kit—which weighed as much as I do—with her to school in her backpack.

“We Slovaks,” Mom continued, “we are slow to thicken. We start thin. Like Johnny Little Pea. Like the oak tree, we take time to put down roots. Weeds grow fast and stay small. Trees take time and get big.”

I know Mom was trying to build me up. She knew, as did everyone in the universe, about my recent dismal athletic failure.

The football team I'd tried to join that fall had been so full of weeds—older boys and kids my age with twice my bulk—that I was choked out from the first moment I set foot on the field. Maybe I would have found a way to fit in if I'd been allowed to stick with it longer than the two weeks I suffered being dissed by everyone, beginning with the equipment manager. When I held a tackling dummy, I was not only knocked over by the first guy who hit it but sent rolling for a good twenty feet with my spidery arms and legs wrapped around the dummy. The line coach looked at me with a combination of pity and contempt that made me feel lower than a gopher's basement. And when I not only failed to catch the ball that was tossed to me by the second-string quarterback, but also allowed it to hit me square in the forehead, leaving a red mark that morphed into a big purple bruise, the offensive coach wrote me off like a bad debt.

The head coach took me aside after that.

“Son,” he said, “I admire your spirit. I've never seen a kid less athletic who's tried harder. But you are going to have to quit now. Otherwise you are going to end up getting really hurt.”

“Why?” I asked. “You mean my blood isn't good enough to keep fertilizing your football field?”

The coach almost laughed, but he shook his head instead. “There it is,” he said. “Your mouth. The way you keep making remarks like that. That's what really makes this too dangerous for you. If I don't kick you off this team, someday one of those other kids who's not as smart as you is going to kill you because of something you said.”

It was when I was coming out of the back of the building on the other side of the field after turning in my ill-fitting uniform that I ran into Tipper Sodaman, stocky, simian-shaped starting right linebacker.

Several of his buddies were behind him. All of them equally anthropoid.

“What's the matter, fish?” Tipper said. “Quitting 'cause you're scared?”

I spread my arms to show I had no intention of responding in an angry fashion. “No,” I said with a friendly smile, “I just seem to have too much crane in me and not enough gorilla.”

He took my remark as sarcasm. Which, to be fair, it was. Sadly, perhaps because
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
had just hit the theaters, he knew what a gorilla was.

“You calling me an ape?” he said, stepping forward and throwing me down before I had the opportunity to reply. The fact that my mouth was open to make said reply meant that I more or less ate a good bit of the pile of dog doo-doo in which my face was thrust.

As I sat up, spitting it out, he and his gang walked away from me in disgust. I doubt that they heard me say “But I prefer Alpo.” Nor did they see me sit there for at least five minutes more, my chest heaving as I cried my heart out.

When you have been undone by your lack of physical prowess and your overabundance of quick repartee, it helps to have understanding parents. If they weren't incredibly understanding, they would not have signed the waiver that has allowed me, underage as I am, to step into this ring to take part in an amateur mixed martial arts contest.

“Dad,” I said, “I need to learn how to fight.”

My father took one look at me—and probably one smell, for I had failed to get all of the poodle poop out of my hair—and understood.

“Want boxing lessons?” My father had boxed in the navy and, though he never bragged about it, had been good. I'd found the medals he'd won one day by accident when he asked me to bring him a shirt from his closet and I accidentally tipped over the cigar box he had them stashed in. Gold and silver every one of them.

“More than that,” I said. “I want to be like Anderson Silva.”

“The Spider?”

“You got it, Dad!” I'm pleased he knew my reference to the Brazilian MMA fighter. He's the best in the world, pound for pound.

“Want to take a ride?”

I'm always a little surprised at the number of people my dad knows. Maybe it's because his job as a news editor at our paper takes him around to so many places. And maybe that job is why his conversational style is invariably interrogatory. The next thing I knew, we were pulling up in front of the storefront of what once was a neighborhood corner grocery but now had the words
EAST COUNTRY MMA
on the window in small letters.

“You want to go inside?”

“Only as much as I want to keep breathing.”

The wide floor was covered with blue mats. The walls that had once held display cases were covered with mirrors. And there was a boxing ring in the far right corner, an MMA cage in the far left.

The rangy man who came loping up to shake my dad's hand had a craggy face that looked like it had been through more than one storm but still emerged like a peak from the clouds to reflect the sun.

“Jao, how are you?” my father said, holding out his hand as Jao took it with both of his.

“Good, Frank. This your boy?”

Dad nudged me, and I stepped forward.

“Johnny,” I said, holding out my own hand.

Jao took it, again with both hands. His grasp wasn't one of those crush-your-fist grips that so many men use to prove their strength. But it was firm enough to make me feel that if he held on, there was no way I could pull away.
He's a jaguar
, I thought. Don't ask me why. Then, with the lazy certainty of one of those big predatory cats, he locked his eyes on mine. I felt as if he were reading my mind. Something like an electric pulse ran down my back. He let go and then clapped both hands on my shoulders, punched my chest with the flat of his right palm, and then stepped back.

“Hmm,” he said, looking me up and down.

And even though this was the point where the usual me would have made a sarcastic remark—like maybe “Be careful you don't cut yourself on my ribs”—my mouth stayed shut.

“Think you can do something with him, Maestre?” Dad said.

“Sure. If he wants.”

“You want?” Dad asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You know you're going to have to pay for it out of your own savings?”

“I know,” I said, thinking there was no better way than this to spend the bucks I'd earned packing groceries at the Saveco.

“Tomorrow,” Jao said. “Beginner's class. Six p.m. You bring mouthpiece, shorts, cup. Okay? Now we fit you for gi. Make it nice and roomy so you grow into it. Thirty-five dollars.” Jao held out his hand and I took it again, realizing as soon I did so that I was being my typical stupid self because he was clearly asking me for payment rather than another friendly handshake.

But instead of making fun of me, Jao pulled me closer so that our chests bumped and laughed in a way that made me laugh along with him.

“I think you got a good boy here,” Maestre Jao said.

“You think?” my dad said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the thirty-five dollars that he counted into my new teacher's hand.

“Pay me back when we get home?” Dad asked as we walked toward the back of the room, where a small shop was set up offering various martial arts gear including a rack of white gis.

“Yes, sir,” I said. This was the longest I had gone since I had learned to talk without saying more than two words at a time. But also knowing I was saying just enough.

To say that first class I attended was the hardest workout in my life would be like saying that the sea was somewhat moist. We began by running in place for five minutes, then did about fifty thousand stomach crunches (I lost count after twenty), a million push-ups, and twenty or thirty more muscle-building and stretching exercises I had never heard of before. Somehow I stuck it out, even though I felt alternately like a limp dishrag and a rubber band about to snap. The room was full of people—twenty-four others in addition to me—and they ranged from kids my age or younger to people with graying hair. Mostly men, but a few very determined-looking women, too. And no one I knew, thank the gods.

I'd learn later that most kids my age preferred to study MMA at the Pit Bull Fight Pit way on the other side of town, where the motto was “Bite my leg off. I'll just use it to club you to death.”