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old then, had apparently gotten bad grades. I was glad I had stepped to him once I heard that, even if he had been too much of a pussy to face me.

chapter three
    Kickboxing. You ever heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?
    â€” JOHN CUSACK IN THE FILM SAY ANYTHING
    F or as long as I can remember, sports have been interwoven into the fabric of my life, which might seem strange to some, considering I was gifted with not one but two conditions that could have made being an athlete relatively difficult. My father had played professional basketball, my godfather had played professional hockey, and I had grown up around one of the strongest teams in football during their strongest time. This sort of determined that these were the sports I would not be pursuing. I felt like because people close to me had done it, it wasn’t new, and certainly if I pursued any of those it would ensure that I would be burdened with opinions and pressure from the get-go. I played basketball and football in high school and a little in college but never took it seriously. What was left then? Combat sports and baseball. My options couldn’t have been more polarized. A team sport that relies heavily on the team, and a sport/grouping of sports that offer nothing in the way of diffused responsibility to the person involved. Be a team player, or be alone. Ultimately, I chose to be alone.
    As I said before, I started in boxing. My first training was in boxing; my first memories of any combat sport are of boxing matches. I began training in Tang Soo Do early on, alongside my boxing. I was attracted to martial arts because, as a child of the seventies, I grew up watching Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, and I wanted to be like them. Then one day as I was watching ESPN, something new came on. Professional Karate Association (PKA) was the organization, and these guys were boxing, but they were throwing kicks too. . . . It looked like ballet and boxing combined. It was the craziest shit I had ever seen, and I was hooked. I started hearing about fights overseas in kickboxing, and I started doing what I could to get my hands on the tapes of those shows. I sought out training in this particular art, and once I found it . . . it was like falling in love.
    Boxing is technical, make no mistake. No boxer worth his salt ever rose to fame on being a “brawler.” Somewhere in every known boxer, a technician resides, a thinking man. It’s a strange concept to understand, as here is a person playing a chess match, while getting punched in the face. Repeatedly. You have to think about defense and offense, and the punishment of forgetting one or the other is pain. It’s so simple. In boxing you have 50 percent of your body that is going to take damage, that is going to get hurt. But in kickboxing . . . In kickboxing you are a target from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.
    I remember watching Dennis Alexio fighting Stan Longinidis in an ISKA (International Sport Karate Association) kickboxing fight. Stan came out of the corner and threw a low kick, which Dennis checked, somewhat halfheartedly it seemed. (The thing to know here is that when a kickboxer “checks,” or blocks, a kick, they do it by meeting the thrower’s shinbone with their own shin. The idea is that if you take the coming impact and stop it with the flat part of your shin, it will hurt the person throwing the kick more than it will hurt you, and hopefully they will stop throwing them. The key is, the form of the check has to be proper, otherwise . . . well . . .) A few punches were thrown, then they separated. Stan then backed up, and Dennis stepped out to set up his own kick. When he stepped out onto his left leg, his leg folded like a napkin in a strong wind, as though he had a second knee located right in the middle of his shin. Dennis, who was wearing what looked like a grass skirt (because he’s Hawaiian), toppled to the