Let’s Get It On! (4 page)

“Oh, it hurt, it hurt,” I said in panic.

“No, but it will,” he said.

Sometimes my mom would go to slap me, and I would grab her hand.

“Just settle down, Mom,” I’d say, which would infuriate her.

Discipline went both ways in the McCarthy household, and I could be a mean little bastard. I got one golden opportunity for revenge when I was twelve years old. I know every boy grows up hating his sister, but in my case I had a really good reason. My sister, Sheri, who was two years older than me, beat the snot out of me every chance she could get, and there was little I could do because I’d been taught to never hit girls. That is, until one day when my dad caught Sheri slapping me.

“Has she ever done that before?”

I nodded.

“Sheri, who the hell do you think you’re slapping like that? Have you ever done that before?” My dad was interrogating his suspect.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay.” He calmly took her by the hand and led us both to the garage. “All right, here’s the rules. John, you can hit her from the neck down. Do not hit her in the face. You hit her in the face, and I’ll wallop you. Other than that, she’s fair game.”

“Sheri, you can hit him anywhere you want.”

I don’t think an act of God could have stopped the smile that flashed across my face. I’d been wrestling down at the YMCA a little bit, so I shot in on her body with everything I had, grabbed her legs out from underneath her, and started kicking like she was one of Mr. Culley’s soccer balls. When Mom heard the commotion, she went running outside to find my dad.

“He’s killing her,” she yelled in utter terror.

“No, he’s not,” he said. “Just let it go. She deserves it.”

After about thirty seconds of pure glee, my dad came back into the garage and told me to stop. Sheri was balled up in the corner of the garage, sobbing. She never touched me again.

I’ve never had a fear of fighting. In fact, as you can probably tell, I would say I was enamored with it. I loved to watch Bruce Lee as the sidekick Kato on
The Green Hornet
as he punched and kicked the bad guys, leveling them all with superhuman speed and accuracy.

My dad didn’t buy into it. He thought TV fighting was BS, and he hated pro wrestling. If it was real, it was all right with him, but he had no time for anything he considered fake. “Lee’s an actor, not a fighter,” he’d say.

I knew better. I was ten years old when Lee’s blockbuster film
Enter the Dragon
was released in United States theaters in July of 1973, just six days before his mysterious and untimely death. I got myself a pair of wooden nunchucks and set out to become my own martial arts master in the McCarthy garage. I wasn’t smart enough to get a practice set, but after just a few hundred bumps and bruises, I felt I was pretty decent at it.

When a karate craze swept the nation shortly after, I begged my parents for lessons.

My dad said, “If you’re going to do something, you’re going to do something real,” then signed me up for boxing lessons. He took me down to the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles to watch the fights, and I ate up every minute of it. For a wide-eyed eleven-year-old boy, there was a grittiness and danger about boxing. The crowds would get raucous and throw their beers at the ring if their guys lost.

I loved the fights, and Joe Frazier was the man. He was the champ when I grew old enough to understand the sport. Frazier always came to fight. During their epic three fights between 1971 and 1975, my dad took great offense to Muhammad Ali’s calling Frazier everything from ugly to a gorilla to an Uncle Tom just to sway the black fans against his opponent. My dad felt Ali was a racist and that this was one of the cruelest and most dishonorable things a man could do to Frazier and his family.

Years later I met Joe Frazier when a local California TV station interviewed us about the UFC. As we were getting our microphones in place, I told Frazier I’d watched and admired him from afar for years.

Ironically, the vaunted boxer knew little about mixed martial arts. “They kick people in the groin, right?” he asked.

From SWAT ride-alongs to garage battles to boxing events, I was raised differently than other kids, but I don’t think I’d change any of it if I could. I’m sure there were people who looked at my dad like he was Attila the Hun, but I’m also sure most adults saw him as a good guy.

I’ve thought about how easy others may have had it because their parents weren’t as strict as mine, but I wouldn’t change it. As a father myself, I now believe it was a good way to be raised because life isn’t easy. It’s full of good and bad people, and you need to be able to deal with all of them, to treat the good people right and to let the bad people know bad things will happen to them if they screw with you.

I raised my kids softer than my dad raised me, no doubt about it. It’s a different world. What’s allowed and what’s acceptable in today’s society is nothing like it was in past generations. When I was a kid, there were no video games or Wiis or Internet or 300-plus channels to choose from on your flat-screen, high-definition TV. Everybody played outside, and not everybody made the Little League team. You learned to deal with disappointment.

My dad grew up in much harsher times, which is why I appreciate what he taught me in my childhood. The lessons I learned from him made me the man, the police officer, and the referee I would be in years to come.

Being a gentleman and helping Mom put on her water ski

What family vacations were like for the McCarthys: water skiing on Lake Havasu, Arizona

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

—George Orwell

I was going to be the greatest lineman ever to play in the NFL. At least that’s what I thought when I was nine years old. Pro football players like Los Angeles Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel and defensive tackle Merlin Olsen were my heroes.

My dad, who had every expectation that I’d play sports, must have been encouraged by my size. Though I was never the biggest kid, I was always above average, a definite plus for any aspiring pigskin practitioner. At age eight, I even tried out for the Junior All-American team a year early alongside about 200 kids ranging from nine to eleven years old. There were thirty-three spots, and I was the last kid to be cut during hell week after my dad had given me a crash course in tackling to help me hit with power.

When I made the team the next year, the coach wanted to put me at tight end because I could catch any ball thrown to me. But there was one problem: I was as slow as a friggin’ turtle. So he started putting me on the offensive and defensive lines instead. They couldn’t let this big guy go to waste, could they?

For my first few years of football, I had to diet to make the eighty-five-pound cutoff. I ate a lot of steak and stewed tomatoes, then salivated as the other kids scarfed down potato chips and candy. It didn’t make me the happiest camper.

Honestly, I never thought about my size. I wasn’t the biggest or the tallest kid out there. I fell somewhere in between.

From the age of six and into high school, I also played baseball, though I wasn’t what you would call an all-star. I was assigned to pitching and first base because I had a really strong arm, which was both good and bad. I could hum a ball, and it mostly went over the plate. The rest of the time, I had no control over it, which meant it sailed past the batter or beamed him. It happened just enough that kids would take to the plate with their feet slightly turned outward, poised to make a quick getaway. My mom and dad watched from the stands and laughed.

As I got older, my issues with my speed, or should I say lack of speed, became more prominent. I walked with a bounce, and my heels were always sore. I don’t know if this was because of growth spurts or what, but the doctor said my Achilles tendons became too short and began to pull away from their attachments.

Between my freshman and sophomore years, I had surgery on both of my Achilles tendons. The surgery left me immobile for months, and the doctor told me I couldn’t play football. The one activity he did recommend for my rehabilitation was swimming.

In California, almost all of the high schools have swimming pools, so I headed off to mine to find the coach, Scott Massey.

“Okay,” he said, looking me up and down, “but instead of just swimming, why don’t you play water polo?”

I couldn’t even describe what water polo was, but summer was coming and it was something to do. I couldn’t go back to football in the fall, and I definitely couldn’t run cross-country, so I thought I might as well find something to keep me in shape. Water polo it would be.

If you’re picturing me in tight briefs, a cap pasted around my melon, you’re not far off, though I’d recommend keeping that image to yourself. One of the immediate benefits of water polo was that it helped tame my asthma. Something about the humidity allowed me to breathe easier, which meant I didn’t get tired as fast. I was able to go and go and go.

The season came and went, and although my plan had always been to return to football come next season, Coach Massey approached me with another idea. “If you want to go back and play football, I understand that,” he said. “But I’m telling you, if you stay with this, you’ll get a college scholarship. Can you say that about football?”

I couldn’t answer him, which tells you the decision I made.

In the beginning, my dad didn’t like water polo because he didn’t understand it. My entire first year, he didn’t watch me play. He rationalized that I was doing it as a part-time gig that would pass once I could get back on the football field the next year.

When I did start running again, I wasn’t slow anymore. I was catching people, even passing them. All signs pointed to me returning to football and, believe me, I thought about it. But there seemed to be more opportunity for me in the pool.

My dad wasn’t thrilled with my decision to stick with water polo until I got him to come to a tournament at the LA Watts Summer Games.

Water polo is hard for a new spectator to follow. There are whistles and flags and referees kicking players out when they foul. I’d equate it most with basketball, with its strategic passing and scoring setups, except water polo allows you an extra man and a goalie covering the net.

Water polo can be played on two plains: above and below the water. What you see above the surface can be quite athletic, orchestrated like a water ballet as players stretch their torsos and arch their arms to launch the ball the length of the pool to their teammates.