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July
Why more priests need to train as fighters (and why
we don't see many boxers in church)
"Therefore I do not run like a man running
aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the
air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so
that after I have preached to others, I myself will
not be disqualified for the prize." -- (1
Corinthiansc9:26-27)
St Paul was a fighter. I don’t think he
ever competed in the ring, but that wasn’t
because he lacked the discipline or was afraid of
the pain.
I always say that to be a fighter you need to
have two things going for you. Firstly you need to
have a lot of energy inside that needs release.
Secondly, you need to be not too concerned about
your own health. This fits the profile of most of
our young men perfectly - on the edge of the drug
culture, full of testosterone, and with no thought
for the future. It also fits perfectly the profile
of another group - single fathers, struggling to
gain access to their children.
That was how I got into the fight game. I
hadn’t taken it up as a teenager, and I
certainly hadn’t been born into it. My dad was
a priest for God’s sake, and an academic.
Fighting had not been my birthright. I came in
through the back door of pain and loneliness and
bitter struggle.
Separated, and struggling for the right to see
my daughter, I had made one half-hearted attempt at
suicide already by that stage. And I had met with
my bishop the following day and he had told me not
to ‘trade off’ my situation (in other
words, not to get too comfortable). I appeared to
be losing my family, my vocation, and most of my
friends at the same time. Full of emotional energy,
obsessed with thoughts of self-destruction, and
drinking way too much, I managed to find my way to
the Mundine gym. It was my decision not to go
under, but to fight back.
Mundine’s is situated in the middle of
Everleigh Street, Redfern - the roughest street in
one of the roughest neighborhoods in our city.
Redfern is a largely Aboriginal suburb on the
outskirts of central Sydney. In recent years the
government has come through and ‘cleaned it
up’ somewhat, which meant pushing a lot of the
local residents further out west. Even so, it is
still a rough area.
I had grown up in the vicinity of Everleigh
Street. My dad had been a lecturer at the Anglican
seminary located only a few blocks from this dark
heart of Aboriginal Sydney. It was always an odd
location for the seminary. The ecclesiastical
community never had anything to do with the
adjoining aboriginal enclave. On the contrary, most
persons associated with the religious community
dealt with their black neighbours by practising the
same sort of avoidance strategy that I’d
learnt as a kid – scurrying quickly past the
end of Everleigh Street and its environs whenever
circumstances put us unavoidably within its
reach.
Ironically this strategy had to be invoked every
time you got off a train from Redfern station. The
platforms seemed to be designed to feed directly
into Everleigh Street! Of course I never made the
mistake of straying down that way myself, and as a
youngster, I had heard many a nasty story about the
price paid by some of the less wary.
None of this is to suggest that the reputation
of Everleigh was based on hearsay. I had seen
plenty with my own eyes.
Countless times I had seen young toddlers and
their slightly older siblings wandering the streets
at night while their parents got drunk at the
local. One night I watched as a stupid woman
stopped her car after these kids had thrown rocks
at it. She got out and tried to confront the kids
about what they had done. The result of course was
that they found some bigger rocks and a couple of
bricks. They made quite a mess of that car.
My brother told me that he had witnessed a roll
take place from the top of the street in broad
daylight. Some boys had pulled a knife on a
university student who had handed them his wallet.
The student had then located a nearby policeman and
had pointed out the boys to him, but the copper did
nothing about it. He said he didn’t want to
start a riot!
I had seen the bonfires that would be lit when
the new phone books or Yellow Pages directories
were delivered. I had seen the shells of burnt out
cars in the street. I had seen plenty, and had
plenty of good reasons to never deliberately
venture down that street, which is why my first
walk to the Mundine gym was like wading through
water – every step being a slow and deliberate
effort. But I was determined to become a fighter,
and I’d just as soon lose my life in Everleigh
Street than give up on my dream to have my day in
the ring.
The exterior of Mundine’s Gym is not
designed to draw attention to itself. You’d
walk right past it if you didn’t know it was
there. It’s missing entirely that glittering
windowed street frontage with the sleek bodies of
well-groomed athletes on display for passers-by
– the type that we associate with the sorts of
gyms where you pay a costly membership fee.
Mundine’s has no membership fee. I don’t
remember there even being a sign out the front.
Mundine’s looks like just another
housing-commission block, with its inglorious
entrance at the bottom of a stairwell. But you pick
up that it’s a gym long before you reach the
top of those stairs. The smell of liniment hits you
half way up – that manly smell that mingles so
harmoniously with the melodic whir of the skipping
rope tap, tap, tapping its way through another
round.
This is what makes a real gym – the smell
of liniment, the sound of the rope, the less
rhythmical thwacking of glove to bag, and of course
the fighting. When you step inside Mundine’s,
you know you’re in a real gym. No pretty boys.
No glamour workouts. No white-collar boxercise
sessions for indulgent professionals. Just bodies,
sweat, testosterone and blood.
They play hard at Mundine’s. That’s
governed by the sort of guys that show up there of
course, but it’s also embedded in the
architecture of the gym to some extent. The ring
stands in the centre of the building and it’s
a small ring, made for brawlers. There is a small
assortment of bags strung around the sides, but no
fancy speedballs or floor-to-ceiling bags, such
that you could justify turning up just to have a
workout on the bags. There are a few pieces of
weights equipment too, but again not enough to
allow them to become a serious point of focus. No.
The whole structure is designed to channel you into
the ring. Everything else is just padding.
That’s the way it should be in a real gym.
I wore my clerical shirt and collar the first
time I went there. Even now I don’t think it
was an entirely stupid thing to have done. I wanted
to be up-front about who I was and where I was
coming from. Even so, I hadn’t really thought
through the effect that this was going to have on
the other boys at the gym, most of whom were,
initially, very reluctant to hit me. They got over
it though, particularly after they realised that I
had no qualms about hitting them. Within a couple
of weeks I was coming home each night bruised and
bleeding from head to toe, and I knew I was one of
the lads.
Is it just me, or does every man need to go
through something like this at some time in his
life – to know the joy of falling into your
bed aching with the wounds that your sparring
partner has inflicted on you that evening, and
sleeping soundly in the knowledge that your ring
brother is likewise doing his best to sleep off the
impression that you made on him? I had many a
glorious sparring session during those first weeks
and months at Mundine’s. They weren’t
pretty to watch I suppose, but they were epic
struggles of the human spirit so far as I was
concerned.
There are few things in life more deeply
satisfying than a good fight. A hard night in the
ring is an enormous catharsis for a man who is
struggling with life, but it’s more than that
too. When you step into a ring you’re making a
decision to take control of your own destiny. The
forces that oppose you are no longer vague powers
that threaten to overwhelm you from a distance -
the law, the courts, the system. No. Your
opposition takes on a clear material form in the
shape of the other man advancing on you from the
other corner. To get into that ring and to stay in
that ring is to make a decision to give it a go
– to put your body on the line and to stand up
to the punishment like a man. Fighting is more than
a sport. It’s a way of life. It is the defiant
decision to confront your pain directly and not to
be overcome by it. Mundine’s gym taught me
that, or at least it played a significant role.
There was another vital lesson I learnt at
Mundine’s - perhaps even more important than
what I learned about fighting. I learnt to respect
the fight community.
The fight community is a culture all of its own,
and was certainly spawned on an entirely different
planet to the church community. I’m sure that
some Anglican church-goers must have wondered why
there are so many doctors and accountants in their
congregations and so few fighters. The truth is
that most church people just don’t speak the
same language as fighters.
The converse is also true. The fight community,
as far as I can see, has very little idea of what
the church is on about. I don’t mean that
fighters aren’t spiritual guys. On the
contrary, some of the most godly and inspirational
men I have met have been fighters. And yet they
have no point of contact with the established
church. The two groups just don’t understand
each other at all. Never was this made clearer to
me than on my fourth visit to Mundine’s
gym.
I had turned up quietly in my tracksuit and was
wandering over to the bench at the side of the ring
where we tended to leave our gear while we were
training. A group of guys were huddled there
talking, and there was nothing particularly private
about the volume of their conversation. I think
they were discussing relationship problems, though
I didn’t overhear everything. What I
couldn’t help hearing was one guy say very
clearly ‘So I grabbed her, and I punched her
in the fuckin’ head’. He said it loudly
and enacted a downwards punching motion as he said
it.
Then he noticed me standing nearby and suddenly
felt very self-conscious. ‘Oh, sorry
Father’ he said. And then he corrected
himself. ‘I punched her ... (and he said it
very slowly and deliberately) ... in the
head’.
If I’d had my wits about me that night I
would have said something clever like ‘I
don’t think the Lord really gives a fuck about
your language brother, but I think He does care
about your wife.’ As it was, I didn’t say
anything. I think I responded with a feeble smile.
At the time, I just couldn’t work out how this
guy had ever got it into his head that, as a
priest, I would be more concerned about the fact
that he swore than I would be about the fact that
he beat his wife? Nowadays I take that sort of
perception for granted.
I think it’s the church that has to bear
the responsibility for the communication breakdown.
So much of the church nowadays reeks of a sort of
insipid middle-class moralism that really does care
more about smoking and swearing than it does about
domestic violence or world hunger. I don’t
think the Lord Jesus or St Paul ever intended to
spawn any of these Christianized golf clubs that
call themselves churches. Personally, I suspect
that Jesus and the apostles would feel more at home
in the average boxing gym today than they would in
the average church. Of course they wouldn’t
like the threats and the violence, but they would
love the honesty. Fighters are very honest
people.
One guy, again from the Mundine gym, summed it
up for me. ‘Around here nobody stabs anybody
in the back’, he said to me. Then he pointed
to his heart and added emphatically: ‘You stab
here!’ That’s why I have so much respect
for the fight culture. I know I can trust fighters.
I know they won’t stuff me round –
smiling to my face but stabbing me in the back when
I turn around. I wish the same could be said for
all church people.
St Paul was a fighter. ‘I do not fight like
a man beating the air’ he says. They had the
ancient Pankration fighting in his day – a
vicious form of no rules combat that was concluding
event in the original Olympics. Those guys
certainly didn’t ‘beat the air’.
When Ulysses came home from the Trojan War, legend
has it that his own mother didn’t recognise
him. According to my friend and former trainer Kon,
legend has it that when the Pankration champion
came home from the Olympic Games, his own dog
couldn’t recognise him! Those guys knew what
real fighting is about.
St Paul would have made one tough bugger as a
fighter. What I wouldn't give to be able to jump
into the old Pankration ring with him to go a
couple of rounds! You’d never knock him down
though. I suspect most of the apostles would have
been like that – warm big-hearted men, but as
hard as nails in the ring.
I have a secret hope that when I get to heaven
I’ll be able to take on some of those boys and
try my luck. I guess it’s not everyone’s
idea of heaven, but it is mine.
©2011, Rev. David B.
Smith
* * *
Never contend with a man who has nothing to
lose. - Baltasar Gracian
Rev.
David B. Smith is a Parish priest, community
worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, author of
Sex,
the Ring & the Eucharist: Reflections on
life, ministry & fighting in the
inner-city and a
father of three. Get a free preview copy of Father
Dave, the 'Fighting Father's book when you sign up
for his free newsletter at www.fatherdave.org
or dave@fatherdave.org
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