Thrown

190 Pages·2014·0.98 MB·English

by  Howley

FOR WILL
© 2014 by Kerry Howley FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries
to: Managing Editor Sarabande Books, Inc.
2234 Dundee Road, Suite 200
Louisville, KY 40205
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howley, Kerry.
Thrown / Kerry Howley.—First edition.
pages cm Summary: “Acclaimed journalist Kerry Howley infiltrates the world of mixed martial arts
and the lives of aspiring cage fighters. For three years, Howley follows these fighters as they tear ligaments
and lose a third of their body mass to make weight, and is drawn deeply into this riveting culture of
violence”—Provided by publisher.
1. Mixed martial arts—United States. 2. Martial artists—United States. I. Title.
GV1102.7.M59H68 2014
796.8—dc23
2014010165
Cover by Kristen Radtke.
Interior by Kirkby Gann Tittle.
E-book ISBN: 978-1-936747-97-9
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and
federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Contents
Chapter 1. Sean – August 2010
Chapter 2. Erik – Summer 2010
Chapter 3. Erik – Fall 2010
Chapter 4. Sean – Fall 2010
Chapter 5. Erik – Fall 2010
Chapter 6. Sean – February 2011
Chapter 7. Erik – November 2010
Chapter 8. Sean – Spring 2011
Chapter 9. Erik – Spring 2011
Chapter 10. Summer 2011
Chapter 11. Erik – September 2011
Chapter 12. Sean – October 2011
Chapter 13. Sean – Fall / Winter 2011
Chapter 14. Erik – February 2012
Chapter 15. Sean – March 2012
Chapter 16. Erik – Summer 2012
Chapter 17. Rio
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
SOMETIMES YOU’RE WATCHING LEGIT living legends of MMA lore and
sometimes half-drunk cornfield-born farmboy brawlers, but there is always an
octagon, always a fence, always a path down which only fighters may walk.
There is music upon their entrance. There are hard-bodied fans and fat
announcers, rolling cartfuls of cold beer, laser lights that shine from ceiling to
canvas. Always ring girls. Let’s talk about the ring girls, please, the way they
never seem to get anywhere, the way they set off, gleaming teeth and quivering
thighs, only to end up back in the same cageside seat from which they alight.
Round one arrives. Round two arrives. The ring girl spins in place. I used to
think a ring girl’s job was to be an idea of a ring girl, that is, to nest comfortably
inside the memory of every other ring girl the spectators had seen, not to draw
attention to herself but to the concept “ring girl” with which myriad personal
qualities of her own—perhaps she has synesthetic tendencies, a deep
appreciation for the late works of Schopenhauer, an engineering degree from
Iowa State—would doubtless conflict. But then I found myself at a big fight out
East, and the fighters were really hot on this one particular ring girl, “Britney,”
who, truth be told, was especially ogle-worthy as she strode across the cage. The
spectators lusted for Britney by name, and this willingness to individuate forced
me to reassess my position on the subject of ring girls, their function.
In the summer of 2010, when Sean was thirty pounds overweight and I was
already his most persistent and devoted spacetaker, I was convinced that a
successful fight had something to do not with the ring girl specifically—that
would be absurd—but the chemical reaction made possible by a ring girl, an
announcer, a beer cart, an audience, and who knows what else. That somehow
the spectacle transformed the space; that we were watching, in action, a Theater
of Cruelty, and just as Artaud would have predicted, the show sunk more often
than it soared.
I myself am not a fighter, not a fan, not a shadow or a groupie or a worried
wife. I am that species of fighterly accoutrement known as “spacetaker,” which
is to say that when the fighters leave the cage, where they are self-sufficient, for
the street, where they are not, I am that which separates your goodly fighter from
the common thug. As hipsters have glasses, and priests collars, and cops
mustaches, fighters have us. And just as the mustache does not at shift’s end quit
the cop, we belong to the fighter and not the fight. Most of what fighters do,
after all, is not within the purview of the octagon, and they need their entourage
as much if not more on a slow Sunday afternoon when the quiet is too much to
face. There is in some of them the same want that keeps cargo-shorted frat boys
traveling in packs the moment they leave home, that effortfully cheerful
desperation to drown out mind-traffic with the shuffle and shout of other men.
The story is this: I showed up, a spectator, to a fight in Des Moines. Moments
previous I had been at a conference on phenomenology, where a balding
professor stunningly wrong about Husserlian intentionality dominated the
postconference cocktail hour.
“Does anyone have a cigarette?” I asked a group of skirt-suited, fading, gray-
complected women, not because I wanted one but because I longed for an excuse
to exit. None of them moved. I am not myself a smoker but have always
preferred the company of the nicotine-inclined, and I took the aggressive health
of these academics to be unseemly dogmatism.
Having nothing to do in Des Moines beyond explore Husserl with
nonsmokers who did not understand him, I walked the conference center
hallways. I found myself at a hotel, and then a restaurant, and then ambling
along a glass corridor, one story up from downtown Des Moines. A group of
young men who had fragranced themselves such that I was sure their evening
had some immediate purpose passed me, and upon following them through an
ever more complicated labyrinth of hallways, I landed at their destination. A
framed sign standing before two closed doors read “Midwest Cage
Championship.” This interested me only in that it appeared to be the honest kind
of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just
abandoned would never partake.
Inside the room the lights were dim but for a great spotlight lofted above an
octagonal dais, lined on all sides with a six-foot chain-link fence. A hundred
male Iowans gathered in the dark on benches. Through the fence I saw that one
man was beneath another like a mechanic under a truck, and the man on top had
a full set of angel’s wings tattooed down the length of his back. Inked feathers
rippled as he punched the face of the man lodged under his stomach. A red
stream dribbled down the other man’s forehead, onto the canvas, where their
conjoined writhings smeared the blood like the stroke of a brush. Seconds later a
single hand fluttered out from beneath the wing. His fingertips touched the
canvas with extreme delicacy, as if to tap a bell and summon a concierge. There
was no one to inform me that this meant he had given up, so I assumed some sort
of grotesque exhibition had merely run its course.
“I suppose this gives us a new perspective on angels,” I remarked to my
nearest, cologne-soaked neighbor, “or perhaps a very old perspective, given their
not unthreatening depiction in the Old Testament.” He stared at me and walked
off, though I still think the point astute. When he returned, it was to a different
part of the bench.
I watched a second fight, a third. Sometimes the men were standing
exchanging shots as if in a streetfight, and sometimes they leaned against the
cage clutching and clawing at one another, and sometimes they rolled about the
middle of the canvas like hugging children tumbling down a hill. They tore at
one another with kicks and strikes, knees and elbows. Instead of turning away
from the heaviest blows, some long-suppressed part of me began focusing on the
mark each left behind. I felt then that I should leave, but I did not leave, and a
gloriously cut, hairless man walked out to great cheers from the crowd. His
name was Kevin “The Fire” Burns and he was, I gathered from the raucous
reception, a celebrated fighter from Des Moines. Twenty seconds into the fight I
realized that I was not at all interested in Kevin “The Fire” Burns, but rather the
misshapen man he was dismantling. That man’s name was Sean Huffman, and
there was not a single moment in the fifteen minute fight when he could be said
to be effectively staving off The Fire’s jabs to his face.
For three long and bloody rounds I watched Sean play fat slobberknocker to
another man’s catlike technical prowess. Jab after jab Sean ate, and with each
precisely timed shot to his own mouth Sean’s smile grew, as if The Fire were
carving that smile into him. All the while, watching, I had the oddest feeling of a
cloudiness momentarily departing. It was as if someone had oil-slicked my
synapses, such that thoughts could whip and whistle their way across my mind
without the friction I’d come to experience as thought itself. I felt an immense
affection for the spectacle before me, but it was as if the affection were not
emanating from anywhere, because I had dissolved into a kind of mist and
expanded to envelop the entire space that held these hundred men.
It was the last fight of the night, and after the loss Sean lay bleeding flat and
still across a row of metal folding chairs. I jumped up from the last seat I’d ever
pay for, shuffled past some legs in the cheap section, snuck under a divider, lied
to security, and strode over to his outstretched body to watch a doctor—well,
someone with a needle and thread—stitch pieces of Sean’s brow back together. I
was too moved to speak, or even to introduce myself. It was weeks later, after I
hunted him down in his own city, that I finally asked, “Did it hurt?”
He thought about this for a long while—I could tell he was thinking hard even