The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (13 page)

In most sports, you expect to be on different teams during your lifetime, but in fighting your team is not your gym. Your team is your weight class. That means that we must expect to fight our own teammates over the course of our careers. That’s the job, so if you sign up for it, deal with it. If you and your sister-for-life decide to throw a press conference to show off your best-friends-forever collage and your shiny new matching necklaces, maybe you need to rethink your career aspirations. Pinkie swears are bad for sports, kids. Swearing off competition against friends is just making athletes weaker, less entertaining, and less distinctive. I don’t know—maybe Anderson isn’t as hungry as he looks.

While Anderson is an easy target, there are plenty of fighters who are very quietly making these nonviolence pacts with one another. Why is this even tolerated in MMA? What are these fighters afraid of? I’ll tell you: They’re afraid of going up against the people who know their tricks better than anyone else. For the average fighter, it is scary to think of facing the person who has seen you train, who has experienced your strengths and weaknesses firsthand, and has seen exactly how their own training stacks up against yours. What’s a fighter to do when he can’t hide behind what his opponent doesn’t know? You won’t know what kind of person you are if you duck the people who are most likely to beat you. And you’re certainly not a fighter.

very rock of wisdom added to the human race’s collective hoard eventually gets another rock placed on top of it. As a result, the knowledge that we have now is better than what came before it. Jets are better than biplanes. Cars are better than horse-drawn carriages. Vaccinations are better than polio. Catch my drift? The people who get all crazy about the past—you know the types, the ones who go to Renaissance fairs in cloaks and tights, those crazy hipsters who run around dressed like the cast of
Mad Men
, and don’t get me started about people who collect antiques—are delusional.

Do you yearn for the days when letters were handwritten? Do you wish you could go a few rounds with Hemingway (boxing or booze, take your pick)? Give me a break. Even Hemingway wishes he lived here and now.

Knowledge is acquired and honed, and when you really get down to brass tacks, it saves us a lot of time. Why make so many mistakes of our own when we can take this gift from father knowledge. Do we have to eat uranium and punch a lion and move to Brazil to know that they are all horrible ideas? People before us learned how to make bread, forge tools, tame animals, and get girls so we could just sit back and take advantage of the fruits of their trials and errors. What a wonderful world.

With all that in mind, when someone mentions the word “ancient,” the first thought that crosses your mind should be, “Not as good.” Sure, tradition can be nice and comforting, but at a certain point it holds us back from being better, smarter, more impressive versions of ourselves. Case in point: fighters who think they are part of some centuries-old martial legacy. I have a long list of grievances with anyone who fights just because he feels like he’s an extension of some ancient order. I’m going to spare you my thoughts on religion for the moment, mostly because I just don’t have the time to open that jar of pickled-pygmy-chimp fingers, but I’ll just say that the wackos who treat martial arts like some sort of religion have, with a few very key exceptions to the rule, not achieved any level of enlightenment just because they can kick or punch a guy good. I hear that Steven Seagal is a holy man in some culture or another. Holy according to whom? Maybe the word for holy was confused with “I recognize you because the VHS of
Under Seige 2
is the only tape I have in this mosquito-plagued scab of jungle that I call home.”

Most true athletes in the world, no matter the sport they play, will not act all pompous about the roots of their sport or claim to be more pious because they climbed a grassy knoll for some fresh air and a toke and found themselves in a meditation-cum-fighting salon with Bodhidharma and Musashi. True, most sports are pretty modern, but I don’t see track-and-field stars mouthing off about their Greek forebears running around naked back in the day. You certainly don’t see wrestlers embracing the roots of their sport by wearing togas and laurel-leaf wreaths around their heads, not to mention doing other stuff that spawned prison-time behavior.

So if the rest of the athletic world can stop with the high-handed speeches about their roots and the bratty behavior along with it, why do some fighters feel the need to swagger around and brag about being a member of an “elite, time-honored tradition.” Fighting isn’t about honor, and it sure as hell isn’t about integrity. If we’re talking about “the old days,” as these rat bastards so often like to do, then what fighting really was about was either “you have something I want” and “I don’t want to give you the something you want” or “I disagree with you, I am a king, and I have more disposable peasants than you do.” Where is the honor and integrity in that? The only people who benefit from fighting are the fighters themselves, or the kings who get the spoils, making fighters the most selfish people on the planet and our job the most appalling in the universe. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not just selfish but unbelievably ignorant.

Look, any kind of fighting is brutal unless you throw in some dance moves and dress it up in pretty-colored sashes. Then you have Capoeira, which is about as effective as using lambs to stop a missile. Also, I am not keen on the term “martial arts.” When I think of art, I think of Bob Ross—that guy on PBS who tried to teach you how to paint a tree—and a fat opera singer with a Viking helmet. Though to be fair, I bet Bob could’ve whipped the snot out of any strip-mall karate student while simultaneously dabbing some shrubbery next to those white porch steps because what person in his right mind would have a white porch with no shrubbery? It’s ludicrous.

Just say “fighting,” which is a science and a crude (but seriously fun and far more enjoyable) form of diplomacy. The people who get really insistent about calling it an “art” secretly want to be poets, and probably spent their lonely nights in bed writing haikus about clouds and leaves. News flash, Matsuo-san. Musashi became an artist only once he ran out of worthy opponents to whoop.

So martial arts are “time honored” and “ancient”? That’s rich. It’s a nice way of saying that something is dead and obsolete. If time-honored traditions were still so important to the modern world, we’d all still be taking trains and going crazy from syphilis. Stop pretending that you’re tapping into some kind of ancient wisdom. Do you want honor and integrity? Go build a homeless shelter. Go keep a senior citizen company. DO something, because fighting sure as hell isn’t doing anything. Look at Brian Stann: that guy fought a war, built a nonprofit organization, and can whip your ass, all while not being a jerk about it. That’s a true fighter. In fact, Brian Stann has a distinction that only five or so fighters get to boast: he is a real fighter and a real man. What a rare combination, one that is never found in the same room as a
gi
. For those of you too busy talking about your roots, I suggest you take your pajamas, your rainbow sashes, and your dried herbal tonics to some stone monastery while the rest of us enjoy our penicillin, indoor plumbing, and the real fruits of ancient knowledge.

an’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had with people, and how many articles I’ve read, about great films. The two films that are always discussed in a hushed, reverential tone are
The Godfather
and
The Godfather: Part II
. Let me make something clear: People discuss these films like they are brilliant works of art for much the same reason that people fall over when they get shot—because culture
instructs
them to.

Let’s get the physics of the gunshot thing out of the way first. If you get shot, and the bullet has enough energy to knock you down, it should also knock down the person firing the gun. This is simple Newtonian physics and has been proved beyond doubt. Of course you have to take into account the instances when the bullet causes instant death, resulting in a lack of muscle control and inevitable collapse. You also need to account for instances when the individual being shot is off-balance or otherwise physically compromised from maintaining verticality, allowing the relatively mild nudge of a small lead projectile to affect his status. When such scenarios are removed from the equation, studies have shown that people fall down when they get shot because it seems like the right thing to do.

Why? Because films and television shows have instructed them that this is the correct and justified reaction. And so they fulfill their contract with their instructors by behaving accordingly. In most cases people function better, and stay vertical a lot longer, when they don’t know that they’ve been shot. It happens in firefights and shootouts all the time. Just ask some of your cop or veteran friends.

Similarly, the culture of film critics and film buffs have anointed
The Godfather
movies (I and II)
^*
with a status that far outstrips their genuine artistic value. They’re not awful; there’s some decent acting by Duvall and Cazale, but these performances are eclipsed by the unfathomable, self-reverential, slovenly, baffling performance by Brando, the usual bag-of-tricks mugging by De Niro, the stone-faced, self-impressed faux-portentousness/eye-rolling volcanic eruptions of Pacino, the high-school-play-level, off-the-wall antics of Caan, and the absolutely atrocious, mannered, stylized, vomit-inducing hamfest that is Lee Strasberg’s “performance” as Hyman Roth. The movie is lit OK in some scenes, but in others it appears to be working way too hard to brood. It’s obvious that the director was trying to imbue the characters with weight and meaning by hiding them in the murkiness of poorly-lit rooms, hallways, and garages, but this attempt at “mood” fails, since the characters, a bunch of bumbling half-wits, don’t have the weight of character to make themselves worthy of our respect, or their own dignity. As a result, their semi-concealment in the shadows does not lend them, or their actions, any gravitas. It simply makes it appear as though the mighty Corleone crime family has taken a bit of a downturn and had their electricity turned off by the power company.