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Sam Sheridan

A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting

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  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    The true calling of man, real manhood, is about creation, not destruction, and everyone secretly knows it.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    The embrace after a fight is not false, or forced, it’s respect and gratitude. Usually, the issue of dominance and mutual respect has been decided one way or the other. It’s why I had to train with these guys to get to know them, because men before they fight are filled with contradictory impulses of hierarchy, while afterward things are decided: I am the student, you are the teacher. But not just that; someone who has agreed to fight you has agreed to serve as part of your test, your struggle for knowledge, your quest to make yourself better.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    Fighting is not just a manhood test; that is the surface. The depths are about knowledge and self-knowledge, a method of examining one’s own life and motives. For most people who take it seriously, fighting is much more about the self than the other.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    I wondered if it all was just a smokescreen for a manhood rite. Kimmel writes that for men, one of the deepest fears is that “others will see us as less than manly, as weak, timid, frightened.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    “The arms are the chisel and the body’s the hammer,” he’d say, and you have to move your feet to swing that hammer.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    Celebrity is an interesting phenomenon in the United States, directly tied to power. A famous judge is more powerful than a non-famous judge; celebrity is its own currency and is worth something very specific, set dollar amounts for so much notoriety
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    Pain is a friend. It is a reminder to mindfulness, and it tells us in the end that it is only pain, another illusion, and this helps our understanding
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    Sodium holds water in the skin, and potassium holds water in the muscles, and we don’t want to touch that muscle—the heart, after all, is a muscle. You know that steroids aren’t banned from bodybuilding shows—just diuretics. Too dangerous.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    Virgil took over and said to him lightly, “Relax, champ, you don’t need to be doing this,” and there was a sense that fighters have given so much to us, they have sacrificed everything for us, and that they should never have to give again, everything should be given to them.
  • Nikolai C.has quoted2 years ago
    There is a connection between fighters and those outside of society’s rules, like children and drunks and the homeless, who need a protector and a source of ultimate strength and safety. Fighters step in and out of society; society’s rules (don’t cut in line, don’t punch people in bars) have a looser hold, because society asks them to cast those rules away on certain strict occasions.
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