Theme Park at its Darkest

I didn’t start playing sport because I was athletic, or because it was part of the school curriculum. I was angry; furiously angry, and I wanted to fight.

I realised this one afternoon when I walked past the window of a karate school and saw a video of someone breaking a baseball bat with their shin. I was electrified: I had to learn how to do it.

Eventually, things came to a head with my father. He backed down from a fistfight and I left the house, moving in with two guys I had met through the karate school that worked as bouncers.

I retired from fighting at 35 after shattering my ankle on an opponent’s head. I’d had a pretty good run; despite my pathetic high school beginnings, I had grown to 196cm in height and weighed in for my last fight at about 108kgs. At that time, I could bench 150kgs and run five kilometres in less than twenty minutes.

I’d had seven professional fights for six wins and a draw, in the space of that I was Victorian super heavyweight kickboxing champion and even trialled for a prestigious European team, where I had been accepted.

I left however, after my first novel had been picked up by a Sydney-based literary agency. I decided to avoid brain damage and come home to Australia and be an author instead.  

I continued to box, but the tendonitis in my left shoulder eventually became so bad it felt as if I was being stabbed in the bicep with a screwdriver every time I threw a jab, and when I lay down at night, that pain was even worse.

Without anti-inflammatories, I can’t walk on my ankle, either. I just had my right hip replaced, and I’ll have the ankle replaced soon, also.

After that, I’ve got one more surgery planned, and I think I’ll be able to achieve a complete yoga practice. However, I’m currently in so much pain that my spectrum of activity since my fighting days has been sorely reduced. I can’t train anymore. I can’t even hit a bag.

But just because the ability to fight had deserted me, doesn’t mean the necessity has done the same.

Getting One’s Story Straight As Possible

Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, writes that the ability to cooperate is the trait that allowed mankind to become the ascendant species on planet earth.

This cooperation is facilitated by the ability to tell stories. Stories allow us to understand each other and then work together to achieve a common goal.

Islam, Christianity, Judaism, feminism, Marxism, Nazism; all of these religions and ideologies are stories and none is essentially more ‘true’ than any other; belief in them is simply the means towards a cooperative social end.

Harari has quite a bit to say about masculinity as a construct, one of the issues at the core of this particular tale, and perhaps some measure of the truth of his observations is how much his book has bothered me.

This entry was posted on January 27, 2024 at 9:23 pm and is filed under The Duel with tags bouncer, Christianity, Feminism, Islam, Karate, Nazism, Sapiens, Victorian Super Heavyweight Champion, Yuval Noah Harari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.