Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [7]
My mom, a PE teacher and cheerleading coach at John Glenn High School, was also a stud athlete. She was so good at sports, in fact, it was embarrassing. During one of the parents’ games in my baseball league, she hit four out of the park. I’d hit two home runs the whole season.
Growing up, I was allowed to play anything as long as it involved contact. If it didn’t, my dad didn’t consider it a real sport.
It wasn’t until sixth grade with Mr. Culley that I learned about soccer. He was obsessed with it, and his enthusiasm was infectious. Eventually he got the whole class playing.
Not only did Mr. Culley introduce me to soccer, but he was the greatest teacher I ever had. Not satisfied to merely teach out of a book, he brought out our passion for competition in the classroom with head-to-head spelling bees, geography tests, and math races. Whichever teams earned the most points got two days at the end of the semester to do anything they wanted. They didn’t have to do schoolwork. They could play at recess all day, bring in a TV, or have a party for all he cared. Mr. Culley’s example taught me that if you made learning fun and interesting, people listened, a lesson I would take with me into my careers.
I was a decent student but only because Mr. Culley was a great teacher and my dad was keeping a watchful eye. In our house, if you didn’t get good grades, bad things would happen to you. As and Bs were the only marks allowed. Anything lower and you were in trouble. Your life would be coming home from school and sitting in your room. Needless to say, I managed to keep As and Bs in grade school.
Anything that captured my imagination, I excelled at. I loved history and still read a lot of nonfiction books to this day. Math and English were boring. Science was super easy. And of course, I also had those lapses of stupidity we all go through. One day in grade school, I hid in the classroom closet until everyone left, then opened the locked door from inside for my friends. We rifled through all the papers the teacher had on us, sharing and scrutinizing the comments she’d made. Masters of espionage we were not, and a disheveled paper trail led to a phone call to my mom. My dad told me I was no better than any other burglar on the streets, then spanked the thievery right out of me.
I also had times when I lost my temper. Once I started a fight with another student for hitting the chessboard when I was close to winning a game. Now, by today’s standards, this student would have been popping Ritalin for hyperactivity, but back then ADD was just something you did with numbers.
That day we had a substitute teacher. She couldn’t control me and told the principal, “If he hadn’t stopped fighting when he did, I would have fainted.”
I wasn’t a bully, but I had been raised to not take crap from anyone. To toughen me up, my dad often roughhoused with me, twisting my arm or grabbing my ear or pulling my lips or nose. I grew a thick skin fast. I was confident and sometimes a bit bolder than I knew was good for me.
I couldn’t help myself, even from an early age. When I was five, my mother tried to spank me. I turned around and said, “That didn’t hurt.”
Before I knew it, my dad was in the doorway.
“Oh, it hurt, it hurt,” I said in panic.
“No, but it will,” he said.
Sometimes my mom would go to slap me, and I would grab her hand.
“Just settle down, Mom,” I’d say, which would infuriate her.
Discipline went both ways in the McCarthy household, and I could be a mean little bastard. I got one golden opportunity for revenge when I was twelve years old. I know every boy grows up hating his sister, but in my case I had a really good reason. My sister, Sheri, who was two years older than me, beat the snot out of me every chance she could get, and