This is a hurting game.
Some day he said you know it’ll be you. You think you understand that but you don’t do you? Not until Some Day kicks in your door and sits on your chest and asks if you’ve had enough yet.
A HURTING GAME BY BEN FOWLKES 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 132
A HURTING GAME
Before he went all the way crazy I remember
how BJ Penn would greet these moments
of human carnage by saying
so calmly: This is a hurting game.
As in, of course you got your jaw cracked in half
or your shoulder torn out by its roots
or the divine weaving
of your precious knee ligaments
shredded all to shit.
What else did you expect,
you who have decided
to play this hurting game?
But who knows. Your ego says
maybe you’ll be the exception
who never has to see your own blood
speckling the floor or feel around
with your tongue for teeth
that aren’t where you left them.
I think of the old Brazilian that night
in Toronto looking down at his freshly ruined arm
with a placid wonder like he was regarding
a wounded bird
that had landed limply at his side
and was still too scared
of being touched
to let itself be helped.
SOME DAY
In a Houston steakhouse the middleweight champ
showed me his ear
bulging like a furious infant’s fossilized fist
and said See now this? I knew it
would happen to me some day
but once it happened I thought
wow I didn’t think it would happen yet.
He said it was the same
when he got his nose broken
the first time and when he got betrayed
by teammates and again
when he got screwed
by a promoter. You start out young
living in your van
in back of the gym and you see the older guys
all of them fucked up and deformed,
looking at you with eyes drooping
in permanent sadness
from the weight of the scar tissue.
Don Frye unfolding
himself to rise from a barstool.
Big Nog crossing
the Copacabana Hotel lobby
in his creeping little grandfatherly steps
at the age of 36.
Some day he said you know it’ll be you.
You think you understand that but you don’t
do you? Not until Some Day kicks in your door
and sits on your chest and asks
if you’ve had enough yet.
Then just keeps sitting there
smiling and saying how about now?
THESE THINGS YOU LEARN IN FIGHT GYMS
Dustin Poirier told me that the days are only intolerable
when you try to live them all at once.
He was talking about the slow ascetic rolling pin
of a long training camp but still.
And Daniel Cormier once said that if you can nudge
your own breaking point a tiny bit further every day
eventually it will be out of everyone else’s reach.
He was talking to 10-year-olds learning to wrestle
in an old racquetball court
but that doesn’t make it any less useful
for a 45-year-old man in an attic office.
Erik Silva once choked me to the darkening edge
of unconsciousness and then told me
in his blunt force English:
“You need believe more.”
He’d known me for all of 45 minutes
by this point but he wasn’t wrong.
Most of all I think of Robert Follis telling his fighters
that if we’re going to make up the future
we might as well do it in our favor.
And just because he shot himself in Red Rock Canyon
one December day it’s no reason for me to stop saying it
to myself at 3am. Because lying there
in the dark, clubbing yourself over the head
with someone else’s wisdom
what you realize is
that the difference between a mantra
and a prayer is as small as
who you think you’re talking to.
BEN FOWLKES
My specialty as a journalist is fight sports like mixed martial arts (MMA) and boxing, the extreme fringes of the pro sports world. I’ve worked for The Athletic, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, The Guardian, and now Yahoo Sports and FightingLife.Substack.com. I’ve taken that world and put it in fiction and poetry. Sometimes I think I’m doing it to make use of those ideas and images and stories that, for one reason or another, don’t work as journalism. And also I think I must just need some place to put those things in order to get them out of me and move on.