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

good guy; as Kirik said, “the nicest guy in the sport.” He shook my hand and gave me a quick tour of the brand-new gym, fresh white paint and new equipment everywhere. We walked under the cardio machines and out into the giant weight room and took a hard right into the heart of the gym. Pat cocked an eye at me, smiling. “You’ve got some size on you,” he said. “What do you walk around at?” He meant weight.
    “Something like one ninety-five,” I said.
    “Good, you can cut to one eighty-five easily then.” We chatted a little about a piece I was planning on writing for Men’s Journal about MMA, an introduction to the sport. “It’s not for everyone,” he said with a slight pause, a tiny raising of the eyebrow. I got it.
    I rented an apartment across from the gym’s parking lot, filthy and decrepit but three hundred dollars a month and the shower got hot. One of those modern indoor flush toilets—what else do you need? I even could see a tiny brown strip of the Mississippi, and Illinois across the bridge. I had no furniture, so I rented a bed and bought a folding chair and table from Wal-Mart.
    That night, a Friday, I started training. “Sparring” just means practice fighting, standing up, usually three-minute rounds with thirty-second breaks or five-minute rounds with minute breaks. You wear headgear and big sixteen-ounce gloves, and a cup and mouth guard and shin protectors, and bang on each other. We kicked, punched, clinched, and on Mondays we went for “takedowns,” in which you take your opponent to the ground in such a way that you come down on top. The headgear keeps you from getting cut, but there were still knockouts and plenty of concussions and bloody noses to go around. Miletich’s place is famous for the hard sparring on Monday and Wednesday nights (Friday was light sparring), and I thought I was doing okay until Pat grabbed me and said, “Hey, Sam, come spar the heavyweight champion of the world.” What could I do but say yes?
    A minute later, I found myself sparring with Tim Sylvia, six foot eight and 260 pounds. He was so big and strong I couldn’t really get near him, and the few times I did hit him it was like punching into a tree. He was taking it so easy on me that I could actually see and think, which was very nice of him. I knew a little bit about Tim, that he was from Maine, so I tried to talk about Maine between rounds to keep him in a friendly mood. It was a key strategy, because he could have destroyed me easily, if he just decided to let a few body punches go hard. He wore no headgear. His head was massive, forbidding, like a stone statue with jutting brow and craggy jaw. He was a nice guy; he thumped me some, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been.
    After practice there was a warm glow in the gym, the air like a sauna from twenty or thirty guys sweating and bleeding their hearts out. People flopped down on the mats, discussing in groups of two or three their sparring mistakes, or fights seen recently on TV. The atmosphere was excellent; although I wasn’t a part of it, I could sense the camaraderie. It made me just a little lonelier as I packed up and limped home across the parking lot and up a set of rickety wooden stairs.
     
     
    The water out of the tap in my hovel was foaming and leggy, and left a serious rim of scum in the glass. Didn’t taste too bad, though. The light in the kitchen didn’t work. I stumbled around in the dark and showered (that shower was the only good thing in my life for weeks) and made a plate of beans for myself. I forced down a few bites but was too tired to eat.
    I was already beat to pieces. This is going to be rough, I thought to myself with a tinge of despair. I hadn’t trained like this in years. I had the suspicion that twenty-nine was going to be way different than twenty-five. Still, I was committed—I was going to fight, so I better get ready.
    I tried to get into a routine as quickly as possible. Monday, Wednesday, and