The Violent Saturday
It is Saturday, November 15, 2008, and I am home, in my living room, watching sports. It’s not an uncommon development. But in this case, I am watching a sport that was introduced in the United States only fifteen years ago. This is the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts organization where men are legally encouraged to kick a man on the ground, to break a man’s arm, and to choke an opponent until he’s unconscious. These are some of the ways you can win a fight in this competition. I’ve seen them all. And now, I am watching a superhuman physical specimen named Brock Lesnar dominate his opponent. Lesnar stands 6’4”, weighs 280 pounds, and, according to ESPN, ran a 4.65 in the 40 yard dash when he played for the Minnesota Vikings. (For a frame of reference, that’s faster than the Combine times of either Emmitt Smith or Jerry Rice – the all-time rusher, and the all-time receiver in NFL history.) In addition, he won a NCAA freestyle wrestling championship in 2000 for the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Lesnar is freakishly big, freakishly strong, freakishly athletic – and one hundred percent terrifying. On this night, he is raining down 38 consecutive unanswered blows (I hit the rewind button and counted them) to the head of Randy Couture, a 45 year-old man who is lying on the ground defenseless, 60 pounds smaller than Lesnar, and who came out of retirement a couple of years ago. It’s quite a sight. And I am experiencing confusion. Again. Which, I suppose is no surprise. Because, as I continually discover, this is just one more, transitional moment in my personal lifetime of confusion.
The Hard Truth Between Friends
A little more than a year ago, Kendall was sitting in my living room. She was asking questions, trying to learn more about me, trying to figure me out. She knew I liked sports. I liked them more than she did, that was for sure. I followed the Sox. I followed the Patriots. I followed the Celtics. It was something she didn’t fully grasp, didn’t fully understand. She wanted to measure everything, to quantify it. “What’s your favorite team?” she asked. “What’s your favorite sport?” My favorite? Ah, I don’t know. I don’t. But I’ve known Kendall too long. As always, she deserved an answer.
(Note: Parents are given a free pass on the predictably sinister variation of this question, because giving any other answer would be cruel. It’s not worth it. When one of their kids asks “Which one is your favorite?” a mom is allowed to say “I love you all equally.” That’s fair. That’s how it works. But I don’t think you’re allowed to do that when you start talking about sports teams. The stakes are lower. The potential damage to human lives is less severe. When it’s just two friends, sitting around the living room, talking to each other and asking questions, it’s a little lazy to get evasive. A little cowardly. Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Sometimes, you have to answer the tough questions.)
I thought about it, and tried to sort out my answer while talking out loud. Basketball was the sport I loved to play the most. It wasn’t even close. I grew up playing pick-up games every week for years and years – in someone’s driveway, in a gym, on a playground. Went to basketball camps, played on varsity teams. I’ve played more hoops with my buddies than any other sport. And my favorite sports team of all time is the ’86 Celtics with Bird, McHale, Parish, DJ, Ainge, Walton, Wedman, and Sichting. That was a beautiful crew. They were exhilarating to watch.
Patriots games are an event. Must-see viewing. Because they only play once a week, and because the franchise had established such a high-level of consistency, I would re-arrange my schedule for every game. Three Super Bowls in four years. A perfect regular season. Bob Kraft and Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. What other local franchise could make that claim? Who rewarded our expectations more faithfully?
But I spend more time on baseball than either of these sports. More time watching it. More time reading about it. More time writing about. Exponentially more time thinking about it. That was true, long before I was given the opportunity to write for Bill James Online and The Hardball Times. And it remains true today. Football has a greater weekly peak. And basketball had the most meaningful stretch in my life. But in terms of long-term devotion, the answer was probably baseball. Probably.
Unless you factored in cagefighting. Then things got murky. Then things got muddled. I told Kendall that I might like cagefighting more than any other sport. What a weird answer. What a weird thought. Kendall didn’t react much. She just smiled and nodded. She knew me well. In the end, to her, the answer really wasn’t much of a surprise.
The Person You Would Like To Be
So, like I said, I was experiencing another moment of confusion on Saturday night. They weren’t new questions. But they were the questions that I was struggling with all over again. Firstly, I was trying to figure out which sport I enjoyed the most, baseball or cagefighting? And secondly, and possibly more critically, what the hell kind of question is that?
I suspect that you are always two people at all times. The person you are. And the person you would like to be. And deep down, I know that I would like to be a man who values the graceful artistry and the gentle rhythms of baseball more than the compressed violence and uninhibited destruction of cagefighting. It sounds better. It’s more a more acceptable answer during a conversation at a cocktail party in polite society. But it’s not necessarily an honest one. It’s not necessarily true. I would like to be a man who likes baseball more than cagefighting. But in my lifetime, I have learned the lesson over and over again that I am not in control of my own heart. I’m not.
Ah, the hell with it. I don’t go to any cocktail parties, anyway.
The Box
As much as I care about the Celtics and basketball, as much as I cared about the Pats and football, and as much as I cared about the Sox and baseball, cagefighting operates on a different level. The sport itself is more primal. The appeal to me is more primal. There is something visceral and gripping and cathartic about cagefighting. It’s explosive. It’s pure.
Fifteen years ago, when I was in college, my sister bought an illegal black box converter that could de-scramble the pay cable stations. (She got this from a co-worker with a drug problem who was often selling items of questionable origin.) We were able to pick up all the movie channels: HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel. We were also able to de-scramble the porn channels – which, for a teenage boy in the age before the internet, was a dangerous development. But another consequence of the purchase was that we could watch all the pay-per-view events we wanted for free. We got to see recent Hollywood blockbusters. We got to see random concerts from big-time recording artists. We got to see Professional wrestling cards featuring Bret “the Hitman” Hart and Flyin’ Brian Pillman and the Great Muta. And in 1993, we got to see the introduction of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the very first mixed martial arts competition to be broadcast in the United States. Muay Thai flying knees to the head. Running powerslams. Brazilian jiu-jitsu guillotine chokeholds. People representing different martial arts disciplines facing each other in blood-soaked battles. It was eye-opening. What was I watching? Fighting. I was watching fighting at its highest level.
I was hooked. From the start. I loved professional wrestling. And this was the same thing – but better. Much better. This was professional wrestling, but legit and real. Perfect.
I watched each Ultimate Fighting Championship event, one after another. The sport evolved, my understanding grew, and it slowly started gaining societal acceptance. At this point, it’s getting covered in traditional mainstream outlets. ESPN covers it. One of my local papers, The Boston Herald, has reported on the sport for years. I noticed that recently, our other paper, The Boston Globe, also decided to follow suit and write about the fights from this past weekend. (And now, I suppose in thanks to this article, Bill James Online has decided to write about it, too.) One small step after another, that’s how you build acceptance.
(Note: After years of service, our illegal black box cable de-scrambler died a long, drawn-out death. In the end, it was literally held together by duct tape, unable to change channels successfully, pieces rattling around and threatening to fall off at the slightest touch. But it served us well. And I can only hope that the statute of limitations has expired on cable theft. It has, right?)
Undisputed
When Brock Lesnar threw one punch after another into the side of Randy Couture’s bald, unprotected skull, I was not aghast. I was not disgusted. No. I felt wired, alive, and full of adrenaline. I loved it. It was the highlight of my weekend. And I’m not ashamed to say that.
Which sport do I love the most, baseball or cagefighting? Ah, I don’t know. I don’t. I pretend that I’m a parent. I pretend that I’m a father. “I love them both equally.” It’s not an answer. But that’s my only answer. Whether it’s true or not, I can’t really tell. It’s a tough question. And of course, I’m not surprised. I’m not. I don’t control my heart. Once again, this is just one more fleeting, passing moment in my ongoing lifetime of confusion.
If you have any thoughts you want to share, I would love to hear from you. I can be contacted at roeltorres@post.harvard.edu. Thank you.