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

new gloves, the creak of a ring whose canvas is a little old . . . It is the set of welcoming arms I never fell into comfortably as a child. The difference between it and baseball is baseball is the blond sweet girl I could take anywhere and know she’d be accepted, because she’s nice. Fighting is like the redhead who wears the leather jacket, curses, reads Bukowski, and listens to the Stooges. And you know no one will ever get her, and everyone will judge her, but you get to be yourself around her, and she makes you feel like a man.
    I lay back on my bed and my head was swimming. I knew now that I would finish the semester and never return to baseball. My number would go to someone else. I would not go on to try to be a professional ball player. Instead, I would pursue fighting, with a vengeance. I had told my coach before we parted ways earlier in the evening that I wanted more fights.
    I got what I asked for. After that semester I quit baseball. My father was epically angry and condescending. He took his humiliating and caustic inventory-taking to new levels. I let it roll off my back. I knew that what angered him the most was the fact that he had no way of relating to this new sport. He couldn’t point to fighters he knew or fights he had seen. He had strong attachments to boxing. But kickboxing? I might as well have told him I wanted to go be an underwater surgeon. It made no sense to him, and therefore, he couldn’t accurately critique me as a kickboxer. And that was perfectly fine by me.
    I finished college. At the age of twenty-three I married my college sweetheart. It was a futile attempt at a marriage from the start. We were too young, too foolish, and I was just setting off on this new career in a sport that would require me to be far from home constantly, while she, in the career she was pursuing, would be tied to the small town she had grown up in. The best I can say is that we were optimistic and very good friends. Something I have been lucky to keep her as to this day.
    By the age of twenty-four I got my first professional fight. By the time I was twenty-six I had had three professional fights and was hunting down the perfect coach. The Internet was in its infancy at the time, so through much searching and struggling I sought out who I thought would be the very best guy for me. At the time kickboxing was blossoming, particularly overseas. There were only two guys from the USA who had made any waves, as the sport was so heavily dominated by the Dutch, French, Russians, Australians, and some Germans. Only two from here were ever anything to reckon with, but those two were a whole other level of ruthless, and I’ve already mentioned them: Rick “the Jet” Roufus and Maurice Smith. The kind of fighters these men were moved the bar, set it higher. You get maybe one like them every twenty years. Yet they both existed at the same time. Rick was a full-contact karate fighter, the greatest full-contact karate fighter there ever was, who transitioned to kickboxing. Rick, like me, wasn’t a big heavyweight. In the years of the six-feet-five, two-hundred-fifty-plus-pound guys, Rick was six feet and maybe two hundred fifteen pounds at his heaviest. He was never big, but it didn’t matter. Rick had fought Rob Kaman, arguably still one of the toughest and nastiest kickboxers to ever live, and Rick had planted his left hand so hard into Rob’s jaw that we used to joke that Rob’s kids were probably born with headaches. He had a side kick that he would throw in doubles. In doubles. It shouldn’t have worked. It was gut-wrenchingly beautiful. It made no sense that a man could apply such speed and fluidity to such unnatural movement, but Rick made it look easy.
    Maurice Smith though . . . Maurice Smith was a specimen. At six feet two and two hundred twenty-five pounds, Mo Smith wasn’t a huge heavyweight either. A black man from Seattle with roots in the South, Mo