Free Pain Don't Hurt by Mark Miller Page A

weapons. He pointed out his scars, explained where they came from. From his birth, the world had whittled him into a fighter, carved into his flesh what he was to be. I didn’t share my stories. Stories about your dad being the enemy, taking the harshest beatings in your life starting from when you are young, but always from the same guy, just don’t have the same veneer as fending off tons of Samoan street thugs.
    At the end of the night, which was more like early morning, I lay on my bed in my hotel room, every bruise, cut, and welt now firmly standing out. As bad as losing is—and it is a bad feeling—I got to thinking about the one feeling, win or lose, that followed every fight. The feeling that brought me back to fighting every time. The minute my opponent would fall or the final bell would sound, a feeling of immeasurable relief, as though the clenched fist my heart often felt like had opened up, if only for a moment. It was a feeling that let me know I had come through it and was still standing.
    I started to drift off, thinking of a boat. When I was a kid, the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flooded. Johnstown was about thirty miles from where I grew up. I used to play baseball on a field there. The flood was captured all over TV, images of people pushing cars through mud and water that was quickly rising, while houses stood nearby on fire and befuddled firemen watched from dry patches, helpless as the homes burned. I remember seeing two workers in a boat with giant boxes covered with the Red Cross insignia on the sides, paddling toward what looked like a hospital. I asked my father what was in the boxes, and he told me, “It’s blood. For people who need more of it.” I remember thinking about what a relief it would be to those people in that drowning hospital to finally get that blood, and how comforting it was to know that even in the middle of a storm, there was someone with a boat coming if you could just grit your teeth through the sticking point and hang on a little bit longer. . . .

chapter seven
    Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
    â€” VINCE LOMBARDI
    A fter returning from Thailand I really hoped to try to rematch Tommy Glanville. The opportunity arose promptly, and I was offered the rematch on May 5, 2001. Mo was going to be fighting on the same card, only he was going to be fighting in an eight-man tournament. What this meant was that he would have to fight three times in one night, if he was to win. Eight men are matched into four fights; the four winners then are matched into two fights, and then finally, the last two winners fight each other. K-1 hosts tournaments like this all the time, and they are so fucking brutal. A single injury accrued in the first fight could mean a loss in the second or the third. Small injuries that a fighter would normally think nothing of risking in a single fight have to be considered more carefully. A cut above the eye in the first fight could mean the second fight getting called off due to swelling. Never mind the third. Each fight becomes a balance of trying to win and trying to not take so much damage that the next fight is lost. It’s a whole other ball game. I was going to help Mo get ready, and he was going to help me. We both took this card very seriously. Mo had the tournament to win, and I needed to avenge my loss. You see, losing to Suttie wasn’t something I felt so urgent about “fixing.” Jason was a hurricane; he was a violent, dangerous fighter who had respected me. Our rapport was good before and after the fight, and I felt that he had thrown everything at me. He was the better fighter that night, fair and square. I was satisfied with that and glad that I had survived. I had earned my stripes just for that. But Tommy, Tommy was different. I knew I was better than him, and I needed to prove it.
    Something else had happened before this camp. . . . In January of 2001 I became