Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [3]
Thankfully, my life prepared me for these moments. I grew up around violence and made not one but two careers out of controlling it.
As a twenty-two-year LAPD veteran, I’ve stared down the barrel of a gun thinking my next move could either save or destroy a life. In situations like these, I’ve learned to think quickly. I push aside the nerves and distractions and just act.
It’s the same in mixed martial arts. Making fast, clean decisions is paramount, and not everyone is cut out for that. It takes a certain temperament, an ability to stay focused in pressure-filled situations.
How did I learn this? I think it has everything to do with Ron McCarthy, my dad, the man who made me who I am. Ever since I can remember, he’s been my idol. Through my young eyes, he was my Incredible Hulk, Bruce Lee, Spider-Man, and “Smokin’” Joe Frazier all rolled into one. He’s the most fearless man I know, and he taught me how to go after life and live on my own terms.
That’s how he did it from the hardest of beginnings. He was born in Oregon in 1937 and raised in Winslow, Arizona. Far from the quaint scene of Americana described in the Eagles song “Take It Easy,” the dust bowl town greets visitors with a big “Welcome to Winslow” sign and then, after what feels like five feet, sends them off with a “Thank You for Visiting.” Apparently those famous lyrics didn’t apply to my dad either. His childhood was far from easy.
His father, my grandfather Joseph McCarthy, had a wife and five kids, whom he gave up to be with the woman who gave birth to his son, my dad. Supposedly she was very beautiful and had a penchant for marrying rich men, which my grandfather, the owner of a small-town car dealership, certainly was not. She soon left my grandfather, who returned to his wife and five kids with his two-year-old in tow.
Be it by accident or suicide, my grandfather killed himself, I’m told, while cleaning a gun that went off and shot him in the stomach.
My grandfather’s wife cared for my dad until his biological mother came back for him when he was two and a half. The McCarthy family tried to stop the separation, and afterward they searched for him for years.
When my dad was four years old, his mother abandoned him in a local orphanage and nuns raised him for the next few years, until his maternal grandmother took him in to her Arizona home. He lived with her until he was eleven, when his grandmother died.
His mother returned to take him to Oregon, where she was getting remarried. Along with a new father, he now also had a new older stepbrother, Jack, who would hold him down and spit in his face or throw darts into his back.
My dad, miserable in his new home, ran away at age thirteen to manage on his own in Arizona, living in a boxcar in a local railroad yard and working at a gas station. He wouldn’t see his mother for the next fifteen years.
To this day, I’ve never met my grandmother. I don’t even know her name and have never asked for it. The last time I heard, she’d been married something like seventeen times. I wouldn’t recognize her if I bumped into her on the street.
On his own, my dad couldn’t work to support himself and go to school at the same time, so he dropped out until he met the Lacey family. When a classmate named Terry Lacey told his dad, Tom, about my dad’s predicament, Tom allowed my dad to live with them on two conditions: my dad had to keep going to school and get good grades, and he had to play sports. The Lacey family’s generosity allowed my dad the opportunity to go back for his junior and senior years.
Though he was wiry, my dad was nimble and could play football positions usually reserved for the bigger guys, including defensive end and noseguard. He’d prove himself on