When I lace up my gloves and get in the ring, a switch flips inside me. I’m not Steve Dufresne, Desktop Support Analyst II, anymore. I’m Steve “The Warrior” Dufresne. I’m jacked up and ready for battle, just like the Roman gladiators, the Spartans, and John Cena in The Marine.
And when my shift ends this Saturday, I’m heading over to the county recreation center for a six-round war. It’s going down. If I’ve learned anything from studying the sweet science, it’s that you have to be willing to put everything on the line.
I’m going to do just that, and I’m going to lose it. All of it.
My opponent is much more talented than I am, but talent is a handicap in boxing. Naturally gifted boxers never develop the resilience to keep fighting when things aren’t going their way. True pugilists, like me, have grit. They never stop throwing pathetic punches that have no effect on the outcome, which is exactly what I’m going to do this Saturday.
Whether you win or lose doesn’t matter to a real fighter. The fight game is about honor, and there’s nothing more honorable than standing upright after a straight right shatters your orbital bone for the third time in two minutes. You’ll see this weekend.
The craft of boxing is about more than having good footwork and head movement and being able to throw crisp combinations. It’s about remaining steadfast when somebody with far better footwork and head movement throws combinations so crisp that your blood splatters on your crying wife in the third row. My craftsmanship will be on full display under those rec center lights.
The hardest part of the warrior lifestyle is having friends and family watch as you get pummeled by a genetically superior opponent with a decade less experience. But it’s the price of glory. And I will bask in that glory this Saturday when I lose my vision but keep stepping forward to be clubbed with left hooks.
Doctors warn about the damage repeated head blows cause to boxers’ brains, but you don’t need a brain to fight. All you need is heart. I have more heart than any man on this planet. And when I step inside the squared circle this weekend, you’ll see that it lasts a lot longer than my brain.
A fighter’s heart keeps beating long after he’s put in a medically induced coma to treat his acute subdural hematoma. When I’m lying in that hospital bed late Saturday night, tubes draining the excess fluid off my brain, you can rest assured that the heart monitor will be beeping. I may be on the verge of meeting the criteria for brain death, but my fighter’s heart can never die.
When my family elects to remove life-sustaining treatment and my heart finally dies, I’ll become immortal. I won’t be conscious, but I’ll most certainly be alive, in the form of a blurb in the local newspaper. It won’t mention my name, but my young son will know it’s about me. And he’ll be reminded to live by the advice I always gave him, which I took from Rocky Balboa in the movie Rocky Balboa: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
