People ask me why I want to fight…

I’m not a fighter. But I want to fight. When I tell people this, I almost always get the same question: why?

At first I wasn’t completely sure why. I’m certainly not good at fighting, nor do I plan on trying to do it more than a few times at most. But there’s something about it. Something about sweating – and bleeding – and pushing yourself past the point where you thought you could ever go.

Most things in life have come pretty easy to me. Fighting doesn’t. I was the kid in class who acted out because I wasn’t being challenged. When my mom told my teacher this, she began to challenge me and I was happy. With more work.

I made it through high school and college without much effort. I wasn’t the top of the class, but I could have been if I wanted to be. That’s not me bragging, just trying to prove a point.

MMA is a challenge for me. I get tapped and I get punched right in the nose. And I love it. Aside from the fact that it has given me more of a respect for my passion than I ever had before, I’m learning and it feels good.

But more so than most things, the reason why I fight is to say that I can and that I have. I just finished Sam Sheridan’s book A Fighter’s Heart, and one of the points of the book that stuck out to me was when he scoffed at the other “journalists” who said that a fighter should do this or that without ever having experienced what doing this or that would actually feel like. Inside a cage. Where there is no escape.

But the reason why I’m writing this today is because of a quote that I saw earlier today on a church marquee. I looked it up, and sure enough, it was a Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

And that’s why I want to fight.