The things you learn in fight gyms

Sometimes it's how to get rid of ringworm and staph. Other times it is Life Lessons!

There’s this thing I’ve been trying out in interviews recently. Every person I talk to, whether it’s for a story on pro fighting or poetry, I try to ask at least one question that may not be at all useful for the story itself, but will hopefully teach me something about life from another person’s perspective.

That might sound easy, but it’s the kind of thing that gets drilled out of you when you’re organizing your days around ten-minute Zoom interviews with whoever’s fighting on the next UFC card. The time is limited and therefore valuable. People are expecting an article and/or video – the Almighty Content – whether it’s a good interview or not. So you focus on extracting quotable quips that will hold an article together and ideally make it shareable across the internet. A lot of times, this is not much fun.

So now I’ll sometimes tell people that I’m mostly asking this to satisfy my own curiosity, but…

It’s worked pretty well. Sometimes I even get something out of it that does work for the story, like just last week when I talked to Michael Chandler about cultivating a sense of gratitude and optimism. (You can read that over on Uncrowned; I won’t rehash it here, I promise.)

This got me thinking about all the stuff I’ve heard in fight gyms over the last couple decades of my life. A lot of that stuff is garbage (iron sharpens iron, bro). But some of that stuff has really helped me at times and I still think about it.

(The author, seen here interviewing Roy Nelson in Las Vegas circa 2015)

Like, one of the first jiu-jitsu gyms I ever trained at was Fabio Santos’ place. This was when I was in college at San Diego State. (The Navy SEAL turned self-actualization guru Jocko Willink also trained there and used to beat the crap out of me every Tuesday and Thursday morning, between my Shakespeare class and shift at the YMCA gym, so that kept me pretty humble as a 20-year-old blue belt.) Dean Lister taught classes there at the time while working his way up the regional MMA scene, fighting at King of the Cage-type events. He used to say that you had to think about your belief in yourself and your eventual success as though it were a fire inside you. Sometimes things are going well, the fire is being fed more and more fuel, it grows into a roaring blaze that seems like it’ll never go out. Other times the fire starts to die down. The oxygen gets slowly choked off. It becomes a weakly flickering flame, producing little light and almost no heat.

The important thing, he used to say, is that you never allow the fire to go all the way out. It doesn’t matter if it’s reduced to a single glowing ember, you must keep it alive. Then, when the fuel and oxygen return, you can build it up again into a mighty inferno or whatever.

For Dean, this was a metaphor to be applied to competition. He was not necessarily trying to give us life advice. He was very much trying to help us win jiu-jitsu matches and tournaments. The fire in his metaphor was the belief that you will win the current jiu-jitsu match. Full stop. Still, I find that it works. If you can remind yourself during tough times that, though the fire has dimmed it has not gone out, that all you need is one little twig to feed it and then another, you can keep going.

Along these same lines, my good friend Dan Di Stefano (shouts out to his SBG Whitefish gym, a facility of gentlemen and scholars) used to say that you should never think of yourself as losing during a fight – you just weren’t winning yet. And when you rolled with Dan you could feel that. You might be crushing him one minute, but he wouldn’t panic or break. He’d endure. He’d win one little battle and then another. Next thing you knew he was squeezing your neck until your head changed colors.

The other one I think about a lot came from the late Robert Follis. When his fighters got stressed and anxious about upcoming bouts, worrying about what if they got knocked out or had to go into the fight injured or sick or what if they otherwise humiliated themselves in any of the million ways that can happen in the frenzied swarm of combat, he would tell them: If we’re going to make up the future, we might as well make it up in our favor.

I probably say this to myself once a week on average. Because I’m a worrier by nature. I like to think that my worrying helps me plan and prepare for the future, and in some limited ways that might be true. Mostly what it does is stress me out in advance over things that: a) may never happen, and b) even if they do happen, will not be much improved by worrying about it ahead of time. That’s when I need to remind myself that, hey, maybe I should at least spare a moment to imagine a version of the unknowable future where everything works out great. Because, for the most part, hasn’t it? Haven’t I always figured it out in the end? Shouldn’t I have accounted for that possibility back when I was making up the future that is now my overall very good present?

I shared this once with a therapist who was like, that’s actually really great and I’m going to steal that for use in future sessions. Then I kind of ruined it for her by telling her that Robert died by suicide a couple years after he told me that. I’m still not sure what to make of that. A part of me thinks that maybe one of the things that made him good at helping others – especially on the mental side of things – was that he’d struggled enough with his own very hard things to have gained some insight. (You ever try talking about depression with a person who has always been generally happy? They don’t get it. They just think you should shake it off and be happy. That’s what they’d do.) Another part of me wonders, did he just forget how to apply that lesson to his own life? Did he let the fire go out? I don’t know.

Dustin Poirier once told me that the days only seem intolerable when you try to live them all at once. (I’m paraphrasing there. My version is maybe slightly more eloquent than his was, and he was definitely talking about training camp and not, you know, life in general. Again, though. It works.) If you sit there and think about all the days ahead of you, how many more times you’ll stub your toe in the dark or forget the one thing you went to the grocery store for or lay there in bed staring at the ceiling in despair, sure, it feels like too much. But you don’t have to do it all at once. The only day you have to do is this one. It’s also the only one you get to do, since the rest exist only in theory.

If you’ve read this far you might be thinking, hey what’s up with this Substack? He wrote it for a while and then stopped. So yeah, about that. See what had happened was, I got a job. Then I got another job in addition to that job. And of course there was also the Co-Main Event Podcast to keep up with. So basically I had somewhere between 2.5 and 3 jobs, which is too much, man. Now that I’m down to two jobs, I finally have a chance to breathe and think again, so I returned to this here Substack.

Will I keep it going? Maybe! Will I write about things other than professional fighting? Probably! Should you tell your friends about it? I mean you could, yeah! Or you could just tell them that you love them and you’re glad they’re alive. Either one.