Pain Don't Hurt by Mark Miller Read Free Book Online

smell fear. This kid looked and smelled like he was terrified, and I almost felt bad. Almost. Then I remembered we were both there by choice. He signed on the same lines I did, so I crossed to my corner and waited. The bell rang, and I flew out of my corner. My steps were inelegant, my hands were shaky, and my timing was off. Not unlike in another first for most teenage boys, I was too eager, too aggressive, too excited. And it showed. One round blended into another. My heart was in my mouth as I went through the motions. My opponent hit me square a few times and I was pleased to find that I didn’t seem to need to pause to reflect before retaliating. At the end the referee raises both of our hands and the crowd started cheering. I turned to shake my opponent’s hand and saw that he was almost in tears. I knew this might just be his one and only foray into trying to make it as a fighter. I doubted he would be back. And I could not wait to return.
    In the shower I went back to thinking about the crossroads that was in front of me. In baseball I was undeviatingly dependent upon other people. In the ring, I had only me. The room for error shrank to being mostly within my control. In baseball the triumphs were distributed among all of the players, as were all of the defeats. I could handle the weight of those falling squarely on me. I had been conditioned in my life to search tirelessly and obsessively for flaws in everything I did. To hone in on them like a laser beam and then seek and destroy. For if I didn’t, my father would find them, and he would exploit them. An opponent in the ring will do the same, only the opponent, unlike my father, is in the unique position of not being the only one issuing an ass whipping, but inviting it upon himself as much as he seeks to offer one of his own. The term “fair fight” suddenly began repeating in my head, and I guffawed loudly. I wanted the fair fight. I wanted the purity of fighting. I longed for it already again. The one-on-one aspect of it. You come as you are, and I’ll come as I am, we’ll agree on the rules, and we will brawl like fucking balletic savages, and at the end, we’ll shake hands, and we will both know what only trained fighters know. We will know our mettle. We will know our fortitude. It will be solidly outlined in our minds, and with those tests come awareness. We will know what weaknesses we still have, for you will have shown me mine, and I will have shown you yours. We will know what we can take, how our hearts hold up when our bodies are battered. We will know that we did it. We survived. Nobody came to get us, nobody came to save us, we didn’t wave for help, we fucking took it on the chin and survived. Us, alone. And we will get to leave some of the blood of the demons that inhabit us, that urge us forward, that haunt us, on the canvas.
    It is hard to not get romantic about baseball. It requires more skill than most sports. High-level players are like aliens. There is no rhyme or reason for why an athlete ever gets so good at hitting a round object traveling at astronomical speeds with another round object. The application for it in nature is seemingly minimal. But it is beautiful. And I just didn’t want to do it anymore. My heart was breaking as I toweled off. I was realizing that the adoration I had had been in the process of being slowly wrenched from the hands of the sport that my father bred me to love. The last existing connection between us almost audibly snapped as I felt myself bending to kickboxing completely. I couldn’t lie to myself. Baseball was taking my pride, my health, my joy. Kickboxing gave it to me. When an athlete finds his sport, it is a homecoming. It is both pornographic and romantic. The know-how of a good fighter with the right coach on mitts . . . The sound of a flawlessly thrown roundhouse kick on a bag . . . The way you know your hands are wrapped right, the smell of