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ground in incredible pain.
    In boxing, the damage is cumulative, slow, and hard to see. Even brutal KOs hardly ever leave a fighter with egregious and immediately visible damage once they are awake. I’m not trying to take anything away from boxing here. I love boxing and good boxers are amazing, but I wanted to be able to put my opponent’s entire body at risk. I wanted to dig my shinbone into the meat of a thigh, or a body, or a neck. I wanted to know how to prevent that from coming. As Maurice Smith says now, “The difference between kickboxing and other sports is, kickboxing always hurts.” The very thing that would terrify so many, turn them away from the sport, is what drew me to it. It was savage and beautiful.
    I trained locally for many years while still doing other sports, other martial arts, and while still boxing. It was hard to find my way in kickboxing right away given the lack of information and/or training gyms at that time. I tried the best I could to educate myself about certain fighters, fighters I wanted to aim to be like. Rick Roufus, Maurice Smith, Rob Kaman, and Pete “Sugarfoot” Cunningham were my idols. I watched every fight that I could find. I marveled at Rick’s side kicks, Rob’s low kicks, Maurice’s calm inside the ring, Pete’s speed. I watched these men crumple other men bigger than them with chopping kicks to their thighs, powerful punches, swirling kicks to the face.
    In 1989 a film called Say Anything came out. I have always been a Cameron Crowe and a John Cusack fan, so I saw it in theaters. At one point in the film Cusack’s character tells his date’s father that she’ll be safe with him because he’s a kickboxer: “Kickboxing. You ever heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?”
    I pilfered this line shamelessly and still use it to this day. It was only two years later that I would experience my first kickboxing fight, the beginning of a long and torrid love affair.

chapter four
    I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something, but I cannot accept not trying.
    â€” MICHAEL JORDAN, THE GOAT
    I was sitting in a sweltering room with a set of headphones on, listening to “Flavor of the Month” on repeat. The single had come out just recently, and the full album was just about to drop. The timing on that single was too perfect. The headphones were uncomfortable on my head, and I kept having to move them around, shifting them across my ears. My hands were already taped and heavy feeling. My whole body felt like a duffel bag full of hot angry snakes. Every nerve in me was flickering and flashing. In a few minutes I would fight my first official kickboxing fight. It was just a few days from my nineteenth birthday, and I wanted no gift more than this. Lately my days had been spent either in class, working with the Steelers still, or training. I’d been playing baseball for the University of Pittsburgh, which just fucking thrilled my father. My athletic scholarship was, in his eyes, the culmination of everything he ever hoped to instill in me. My future was laid out. As a pitcher, if I could preserve my arm, I would go pro, take a multimillion-dollar contract (if I was lucky), and he would sit at every game and tell everyone how he taught me everything. He would smirk, he would smile, he would claim my success. He didn’t know that I’d been having to get cortisone shots for months now in my shoulder because of the pain. He didn’t know that I spent a whole weekend wearing a hat because I couldn’t raise my arm to brush my own goddamn hair. He didn’t know I’d been continuing with this fight training. And he didn’t know that I was about to fight my first sanctioned fight in just a few minutes.
    My gloves were red . . . bright red. My pants were white; underneath my pants were my red shin guards, and on my feet, my red boots. I imagined how my pants would stain if this were a pro