Fighter's Mind, A by Sam Sheridan Read Free Book Online

that much of Collins’s purse, which is a lot more than a trainer gets.
    This topic led us to the “Rumble in the Jungle,” when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. Ali, one of the great psychological warfare practitioners in boxing, had local witch doctors “hex” Foreman, and Foreman, somewhere in his heart, believed it had worked. Which means it had. Just the shadow of doubt can spell doom.
    Freddie weighed in on an eternal boxing debate: “Everyone always asks, ‘Ali or Tyson?’ Well, Ali would have fucked with his head and made Mike a mess going into the fight. Pure power for power, Mike would have knocked him out, but Ali could have gotten to him mentally, and I think he would have, because Mike was so weak mentally.”
     
    Josh Waitzkin, a chess prodigy and martial artist (and whom I’ll write more about later), wrote a book called The Art of Learning, and in it he describes the different types of chess kids he was teaching. He discusses at length “entity” versus “incremental” forms of learning, so classified by developmental psychologists. “Entity” kids think their chess skill is born of natural and innate ability, a pure talent, while “incremental” kids think they learned chess incrementally, step-by-step, and that hard work pays off.
    Josh would give his students impossible problems, well beyond their level, that no one in the class could solve. So all the kids would fail that problem. But then, when he gave them other, manageable problems afterward, the entity kids would struggle; they had broken mentally, and were unsure of themselves. The incremental kids would just go back to work, slogging away. Entity kids were brittle; when they lost, their faith in their talent was shaken. The incremental kids, who believed in the power of labor, would keep digging in the trenches, even if faced with insurmountable problems.
    It reminded me of Gable talking about a wrestler on steroids: make him do something that wasn’t perfect and he’d crumble. Maybe that was the steroid trap—it would make you physically stronger but mentally weaker, prone to breaking.
    When Freddie Roach lost, his world was shaken and he never fully recovered. He knew his skill had come from hard work, but he was convinced his invincibility was a pure thing, a part of the universe, and when that was revealed to be untrue it had hurt his game.
    One of the old boxing truisms is “Frustrate a puncher and he’ll fall apart.” A “puncher” is a fighter who hits hard, with a big punch. It’s a natural gift that coaching can help, but you can’t teach power. The puncher relies on his big punching. He hits guys and they go down. As he works his way up through the boxing ranks, this is the law of the land—he hits them and they disappear. Now, he gets to his first title fight, his first big fight, and he hits his opponent— boom —and the guy is still there. The guy can handle the punch and keeps coming. So the puncher hits him again, but the other guy is still there. Now comes the crucible for the puncher. Does he go to pieces? Or does he buckle down and keep fighting? Can he find another way to win? Mike Tyson, one of the greatest punchers of all time, rarely fought past six rounds. If he hit you and you were still there, he’d mentally break. He’d bite your ear off, to foul himself out of the fight, or not answer the bell.
    Successful fighters have things that work for them, and work incredibly well, but the great champions are those who can accept, internalize, and understand defeat. Waitzkin’s tai chi teacher, the renowned William C. C. Chen (whom I studied with briefly), called this “investing in loss,” and it means study your defeat without ego, let defeats happen in practice without reverting to your old habits, and then grow from it. It’s an essential skill, for even during a fight the fighter needs to be able to understand—and accept—when he is losing, and change his game plan. In order to