Let's Get It On!_ The Making of MMA and Its Ultimate Referee - Big John Mccarthy [8]
“Has she ever done that before?”
I nodded.
“Sheri, who the hell do you think you’re slapping like that? Have you ever done that before?” My dad was interrogating his suspect.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay.” He calmly took her by the hand and led us both to the garage. “All right, here’s the rules. John, you can hit her from the neck down. Do not hit her in the face. You hit her in the face, and I’ll wallop you. Other than that, she’s fair game.”
“Sheri, you can hit him anywhere you want.”
I don’t think an act of God could have stopped the smile that flashed across my face. I’d been wrestling down at the YMCA a little bit, so I shot in on her body with everything I had, grabbed her legs out from underneath her, and started kicking like she was one of Mr. Culley’s soccer balls. When Mom heard the commotion, she went running outside to find my dad.
“He’s killing her,” she yelled in utter terror.
“No, he’s not,” he said. “Just let it go. She deserves it.”
After about thirty seconds of pure glee, my dad came back into the garage and told me to stop. Sheri was balled up in the corner of the garage, sobbing. She never touched me again.
I’ve never had a fear of fighting. In fact, as you can probably tell, I would say I was enamored with it. I loved to watch Bruce Lee as the sidekick Kato on The Green Hornet as he punched and kicked the bad guys, leveling them all with superhuman speed and accuracy.
My dad didn’t buy into it. He thought TV fighting was BS, and he hated pro wrestling. If it was real, it was all right with him, but he had no time for anything he considered fake. “Lee’s an actor, not a fighter,” he’d say.
I knew better. I was ten years old when Lee’s blockbuster film Enter the Dragon was released in United States theaters in July of 1973, just six days before his mysterious and untimely death. I got myself a pair of wooden nunchucks and set out to become my own martial arts master in the McCarthy garage. I wasn’t smart enough to get a practice set, but after just a few hundred bumps and bruises, I felt I was pretty decent at it.
When a karate craze swept the nation shortly after, I begged my parents for lessons.
My dad said, “If you’re going to do something, you’re going to do something real,” then signed me up for boxing lessons. He took me down to the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles to watch the fights, and I ate up every minute of it. For a wide-eyed eleven-year-old boy, there was a grittiness and danger about boxing. The crowds would get raucous and throw their beers at the ring if their guys lost.
I loved the fights, and Joe Frazier was the man. He was the champ when I grew old enough to understand the sport. Frazier always came to fight. During their epic three fights between 1971 and 1975, my dad took great offense to Muhammad Ali’s calling Frazier everything from ugly to a gorilla to an Uncle Tom just to sway the black fans against his opponent. My dad felt Ali was a racist and that this was one of the cruelest and most dishonorable things a man could do to Frazier and his family.
Years later I met Joe Frazier when a local California TV station interviewed us about the UFC. As we were getting our microphones in place, I told Frazier I’d watched and admired him from afar for years.
Ironically, the vaunted boxer knew little about mixed martial arts. “They kick people in the groin, right?” he asked.
From SWAT ride-alongs to garage battles to boxing events, I was raised differently than other kids, but I don’t think I’d change any of it if I could. I’m sure there were people who looked at my dad like he was Attila the Hun, but I’m also sure most adults saw him as a good guy.
I’ve thought about how easy others may have had it because their parents weren’t as strict as mine, but I wouldn’t change it. As a father myself, I now believe it was a good way to be raised because life isn’t easy. It’s full of good and bad people, and you need to be able to deal with