Born to Fight by Mark Hunt, Ben Mckelvey Read Free Book Online

a crim, and not just a junior criminal (there were plenty of those in league), but a felon with prison time under my belt. After that, the talk of me being picked for a rep side cooled.
    One day the coaches sat me down and said it’d probably be too difficult for me to get a visa to tour overseas, and perhaps I should shelve the idea of rep rugby. I’d worked hard at my league but after that conversation, I walked home from training with my mate Dave and decided I was done with it.
    ‘If they don’t want me, then fuck them and fuck their sport,’ I told him.
    I was done with the petrol station job, too. Fuck the long nights, fuck my neon tan, fuck ‘three dollars fifty on pump nine’. Fuck it all.
    I went back to robbing then, and I also thought about getting into drug dealing. There was a weed dealer round our parts named Barton who was a mate of mine and he seemed to do a brisk trade in tinnies, so I took Dave along with me to see if we could help him with his business.
    Barton acted like Scarface on the streets, but when I went round to his place, I tell you, it was no Miami mansion. His place was tiny, and looked smaller because there were piles of crap everywhere – clothes, dishes, pizza boxes. There was also shit on the roof – yes, actual shit. How it got there, I have no idea.
    Barton was happy for me to help him out, but having visited his joint, I wasn’t so sure anymore. The idea completely died a week later when Barton got batted up by some of his competitors. Next time I saw him, he had all kinds of surgery scars. Maybe that’s why he was so keen to get me into his enterprise.
    I took another menial job working at a factory and soon my weeks and months were held up by the tent poles of weekend drinking sessions with the lads, robberies of various stripes and a shitload more street fighting. If you weren’t there in South Auckland in the nineties, you probably don’tunderstand how it worked. Wherever you were, a fight was only one glance away, one look at any moment. That’s how it usually started, with a look. Sometimes you threw that look because of a real slight – perhaps someone had said something to your girl, or one of her friends, or maybe there was money owed, or you’d smashed a friend of theirs, or they’d smashed your friend. Sometimes the look was just because you were bored or because you’d had a shitty day, and someone had to pay for it.
    Either way, when someone threw that look over to you, you had two options – you could pretend you didn’t see and bitch out, or you could throw over a look of your own. When you did that, it was on.
    As my body grew bigger I started fighting every week, and I just got better and better at it. I can’t account for all of why I’m good at fighting, but some of it is that I don’t really feel pain, not like most people do. I know I can never feel what other people feel, and other people can’t feel what I feel, but I really don’t think we can feel it the same way, because otherwise others wouldn’t be so scared of it.
    I vaguely remember what it felt like when Dad started beating the shit out of me. It’s not something I’m familiar with now, even when I’m being pounded by dudes like Junior dos Santos or Stipe Miocic. At some point as a little kid, I managed to take pain and put it somewhere outsidemy head. It existed somewhere, but not anywhere it could stop my fight.
    I didn’t really ever get injured then, either. I’d hear people I scrapped with copped broken jaws, busted noses, fractured eye sockets, broken ribs, but me, I was always golden. If I didn’t feel pain and didn’t get hurt, why wouldn’t I scrap? I fought in the city, in the south, in the suburbs. I fought at schools, I fought in bars, I fought in the street, but it was one day, fighting out the front of a club, where someone noticed and my life started to take a nice little turn. It took me nearly another decade after that brawl to realise how significant it was,