Book Review: A Fighter's Heart

I read Sam Sheridan's A Fighter's Heart several months ago. At first i thought it had the potential to be a classic-- not only a good book on the culture of fighting, but also one of the first journalistic treatments that includes the mixed martial arts world. After some time, i'd still recommend the book as a good read, but it falls short ultimately in its purpose.

Sheridan is one of those guys who has done more interesting things in his life than about a dozen normal people. He was in the merchant marine, captained sail boats, graduated Harvard, worked as a fire jumper, etc. You begin to hear the voice of John Lovitz's Tommy Flanagan character after a while ("I was an astronaut, and i'm married to Morgan Fairchild"). So anyway, when he decided that he wants to test himself by doing some semi-professional fights, he doesn't go down to corner gym like most people would. He wants to be a Muay Thai fighter, so he goes to Thailand. He wants to learn about jiu-jitsu so he goes to Brazil. He wants to train MMA, so he goes to the Miletic school.

This first part of the book where he's training in various styles while also exploring the culture of the associated schools and styles is fascinating. The chapter in Thailand goes into the Muay Thai training, life at the gym, and the world of professional fighting in Thailand. Best of all, it culminates in Sheridan fighting, which is really what the book was intended to explore-- his motivations for and reaction to fighting.

The chapter on the Miletich camp is almost as good. While the surrounding culture of a gym in rural Iowa is far less exotic for a U.S.-born reader, the exploration of the Miletich fighters, their training schedule, and the lives they lead is great stuff for anybody who's an MMA fan or martial artist. His trip to Brazil to train with Brazilian Top Team is almost as good, though Sheridan gets injured and so that chapter primarily recounts the fights of others, particularly Antonio Nogueira, who Sheridan follows to Japan for a Pride fight.

Here the book begins to run out of steam. He has a short chapter on training in tai chi with C.C. Chen in New York that i felt could have been far more interesting if he'd given the training more time. There's a section where he's training with Virgil Hunter, the trainer for Olympic and professional boxer Andre Ward. This chapter seems like it would have fit in naturally with the previous chapters on Muay Thai and MMA, but it begins to feel at this point that Sheridan is simply collecting experiences to write about rather than exploring his own will to fight.

The remainder of the book, which includes chapters on dog fighting and hanging out on a movie set where Miletich is the fight adviser are interesting, but give the sense that Sheridan simply needed more material to fill out the book. Both chapters would have made excellent magazine articles, but are only peripherally related to the theme of the book. Sheridan tries to tie the dog-fighting chapter into the fighter's heart theme by discussing the concept of "gameness", the quality that distinguishes the best fighting dogs. However, trying to equate the motivations of dogs and human beings with respect to fighting defeats the purpose of Sheridan's book.

Again, i'd recommend this book to fight fans and martial artists. However, it's not the sort of classic sports journalism that will have wide appeal. Sheridan is in my opinion a good, insightful writer, and i hope he covers this territory again.