Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking

256 Pages·2007·5.9 MB·English

by  Eugene S. Robinson

FIGHT

everything you ever wanted to know
about ass-kicking but were afraid
you’d get your ass kicked for asking
EUGENE S.
ROBINSON
FOR ALL OF MY ENEMIES.
Every single one of them. Without you none of this would have ever been possible.
THE REAL & TOTALLY MIGHTY
TABLE OF FRIGGIN’
CONTENTS
Fighting: Why Not?
INTRODUCTION
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU LOOKING AT? PART 1
ONE
LET’S GET IT ON
TWO
FAR EAST FIGHTING FOR FUN AND PROFIT
THREE
JAILHOUSE ROCK
FOUR
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE LIKE
FIVE
BREAKING ANOTHER MAN’S JAW
CURBS, CAR DOORS & YOU
SIX
THE REAL SAD AND WEEPY PART OF OUR STORY
SEVEN
THE ONLY FIGHT SPORT
EIGHT
MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE
I, SPARTACUS!
NINE
SO YOUR EAR’S BEEN BITTEN BY MIKE TYSON …
TEN
SO YOU’VE BEEN BEATEN UP … OR, WHAT THE HELL
ELEVEN
ARE YOU LOOKING AT? PART 2
SO YOU’RE KNOCKED OUT: OPTIONS TO CONSIDER
TWELVE
“I KILLED A MAN”
THIRTEEN
I, SOCCER HOOLIGAN!
FOURTEEN
HOLIDAY ON ICE, OR, WHAT TO DO WHEN
FIFTEEN
CONFRONTED
BY AN ANGRY CANADIAN WITH A STICK
I STOOP TO CONQUER
SIXTEEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION
FIGHTING:
WHY NOT?
There’s the spastic flurry of hands and the smell that always ends
up smelling like chicken soup gone bad (fear). There’s the mumble and
the groan and eventually the slip into recognized roles (doer and done
to). And finally, if everything works right, there’s the reminder that we
are far worse/better than the animals we own as pets and
unsophisticated chattel.
What we are, though, is this: We are fighters.
And the scenario is repeated again and again. It wheedles its way into
boardrooms and bedrooms, this not so particularly male obsession with
the eternal, unasked “Can I take him?” Which could be extended to “Can
I take it?” Or better yet, “Can I?” With all apologies due to Sammy Davis
Jr. (also a student, despite his diminutive frame, of the fistic arts), the
answer is always the same: “Yes I can.” Even when you can’t.
My name is Eugene. (Hi, Eugene.) And I’m a fightaholic.
“Hey, I’m going to need my seat back.” The speaker was Todd
Hester, former longtime editor of Grappling magazine, once editor of
Bodyguard, and probably soon-to-be editor of an as-yet-unnamed mag.
(Here’s a scoop: Ready2Rumble—you didn’t hear it here first). He’s 6′4″,
245 pounds. The scene was ringside at the very first King of the Cage
competition, California’s own paean to pummel. The year was 1998.
This was the response: “You’re also going to need to breathe.” The
speaker was Rickson Gracie, one of the best fighters on the face of this
entire planet. Probably any other planet you can think of. And there it is
again, the skin torn off all of our quiet and civil discourse, civilly
delivered but definitive in its assertion to your unasked question: “No.
No, you can’t. Not today. Maybe not ever (take me, that is).”
Or better yet, just simply, “Fuck no.”
Because even though he’s got two arms and two legs and a head just
like you, there’s no chance. None.
Hester apologized, grabbed his bag, and found a seat somewhere else.
Laughing, he added, “Well I did need to breathe.”
We all need to breathe. Some realize that sooner, some later. But of
the ones who realize it, there are those whose realization of it does
nothing to actually help them. Continue breathing, that is.
It started for me with another not-so-simple, simple question:
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
It’s New York City. The Clash’s Rude Boy is letting out of a midnight
showing in Bay Ridge. Three cugines—think Italian cholos—are fighting
with three men by a gypsy cab. Two of the Italians have wrenches. One,
curiously enough, in an Axis level of think-tank thinking, has a German
shepherd. I am on the other side of the street. Crossed the street to get
closer, natch, just as one of the be-wrenched cuginos took out the back
window of the cab, which went skidding off into a Brooklyn night,
leaving three very angry men with no reasonable resolution to whatever
situation was at hand.
“What the fuck are you looking at?”
It was times like these that were meant for words like fracas, melee,
and donnybrook. Broken bottles, broken noses, broken jaws ensue, and at
the end of it I ended up in an emergency room with my left lower
earlobe dangling and cartilage torn inside my ear. Topographical maps
of the evening’s fun had spread out all over my suit in bloodied rivulets.
I cleared my throat and waited for the overweight and angry nurse to
render assistance because, after all, this was an EMERGENCY. “Yeah,
yeah, they’re all emergencies,” she said. And aside from the guy who
walked in smoking a cigarette to announce that he had been shot (and
he had, right in the thigh), we all had to sit and ponder the highly
ponderable foolishness of our wayward ways.
It was a meditation that inevitably carried me along with it back to
the crawl space at home, where—in my head—I had already retrieved
my Hi-Standard pump-action shotgun. Except, you see, it’s not so easy to
stroll through the kitchen with a pump and a bloody suit when you’re
seventeen in a household where people give even the remotest fuck
about you. Back at the hospital, I got stitches and a meditation that
stuck. If I was going to do this shit, I might as well learn to do it right.
“This is called the rear naked choke,” said Matt Furey.
I was standing at AKA Kickboxing in San Jose, California. Now it’s the
home of a revolving group of at least eight great fighters of significant
worth; names you’ll never even know—well, all right, if you must know,
Dave Camarillo, Bob Southworth (Frank Shamrock used to work out
there), Phil Baroni, Josh Thomson, Paul Buentello, Mike Swick, Mike
Kyle, and owner Javier Mendez. But back in 1999, it was where NCAA
champion wrestler Matt Furey reigned. Though now widely derided by
those in the know as sort of a quasi-Billy Blanks exercise enthusiast,
Furey was (and is) the real deal. I’d seen his Charles Atlas-esque ad in
some weekly rag, and where it said, “Want To Fight?” I thought,
Yeahhhh. And so after eight years of kenpo karate (“You might as well
have been studying interpretive dance”), a year of muay thai, and a
month of thinking about how another Gracie (Royce this time) had run