Fighting for a Living
Before starting my current project, I used to toy with the idea of getting into
ultimate fighting. I know, that sounds like a joke, but I was fascinated by the subculture of this bizarre and violent sport, and I thought it'd be a great thing to write about from a George Plimpton-like perspective. But after actually watching some ultimate fighting, I realized that I'd get the daylights beaten out of me in about 15 seconds, and therefore wouldn't really have very much material to write about.
Anyway, turns out that
a Harvard grad named Sam Sheridan had the same idea, except he actually had the guts/requisite degree of insanity to pursue it. Now he's written a book about the process of training to learn to fight, "
A Fighter's Heart."
Here's part of the book description from Amazon:
In 1999, after a series of wildly adventurous jobs around the world, Sam Sheridan found himself in Australia, loaded with cash and intent on not working until he’d spent it all. It occurred to him that, without distractions, he could finally indulge a long-dormant obsession: fighting.
And a bit more from today's Boston Globe article on Sheridan:
By the time he finished researching "A Fighter's Heart," Sheridan had logged time in Rio de Janeiro with jiujitsu champions, in Oakland, Calif., with Olympic boxing gold medalist Andre Ward , and in New York with a tai chi master. The account of his travels gradually reveals itself as a kind of spiritual quest, albeit one that came at the expense of a rearranged nose and a chronic rib cage injury.
Sounds very macho, no? And probably wholly uninteresting to women; I don't think they feel this urge to prove oneself through fighting that men do. But it's nice to see that
some Harvard grads still long for a life more adventurous than deciding which investment bank to sign up with....
