A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting by Sam Sheridan Page B

knockouts and bad cuts happen all the time, and one slipup and a good jiu-jitsu player will have you in a submission and tapping before you even know what happened. Yes, it’s a rough sport, especially now, when many people grow up so distant from fighting and blood. But it wouldn’t have been considered rough a hundred or two hundred years ago, and before that, MMA would have seemed mild and overly refereed.
    After you watch the fights for a while, you start to see how amazing some of these guys are, not just as athletes but in their composure and their technical thinking. Of course, Pat’s right: It’s not for everyone. But there can be no denying that it is a legitimate sport, a contest of wills, an arena for excellence on a par with any sport in the modern world. Fighters go into the arena stripped to their core, naked for the world to see and judge. They go in the face of a highly trained man whose goal is to break them down and destroy them.
    After the Olive Garden, Robbie went to bed and everyone else went out; and we fell or were picked off by the Vegas evening, one by one, until we were all gone.
     
     
    Fight day in Vegas was rainy and grim, and no one stirred before noon. Around four o’clock that afternoon we came together to walk Robbie down into the arena. He was quiet and relaxed; the rest of us were a little more keyed up. I overheard Matt saying that he finds it more stressful to be in the corner than to fight.
    We headed through the cool, quiet, carpeted halls and into the dense casino. The crowd was thick with fight fans in black T-shirts and tattoos calling after Robbie, and we tried to keep moving. Robbie stopped sometimes and shook hands or signed, but we moved quickly, across the casino floor and into the dark depths of the Events Center.
    We found our private locker room, and Robbie sat in the corner. I went to find some water and took a look out through the heavy black curtains. My press pass was a shield against the angry glares of the ushers and security guards. The Events Center was a steep stadium, not huge but with seats for twelve thousand, and it was maybe half full before the preliminary fights began. I found my name printed on a seat at the press table, just like a real journalist. I headed back to Robbie.
     
     
    Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Blood Rites is a fascinating attempt by an admitted layperson to understand some of the roots of violence and its “nobility.” She posits a gem of an idea: Homo sapiens, for most of his evolutionary history, was prey. He’s weaker, smaller, slower, and without natural weaponry like fangs or claws. His natural inclination was probably toward group survival, like the monkey’s: throw rocks, keep watch, and run and hide up trees when predators approach.
    As Ehrenreich writes, “No doubt much of ‘human nature’ was indeed laid down during the 2 1 /2 million years or so when Homo lived in small bands and depended on wild animals and plants for food. But it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves.”
    However, Homo sapiens, with his big brain and his tool building, has become the ultimate predator on the planet, by a thousand times. Ehrenreich argues that this is a social and learned change, as opposed to an evolved one. Man learned to hunt in packs, to build better and better tools. He has moved to the apex predator spot relatively recently, yet his “wiring,” his natural inclination, is to act like prey.
    Fear is part of our lives—fear of the dark, the unknown, of strangers—especially at a young age. Fear of being eaten is the rudimentary evolutionary concept that we all share. All of the old gods required sacrifice, forms of which exist today: Thus the ritual of