Your Support is Overwhelming

All the niches are taken, and my connection to combat sports.

Halloween is always a weird, reflective time for me. Every time the leaves turn a different color in New England, and Michael Myers is splashed all over AMC, I feel a bit reflective. Halloween 1993 is the first time my dad lost control enough to put his hands on me in public. It’s a bit cloudy for me now, all these years later. What I do remember is being caught up in the joy and mysticism of trick-or-treating and walking out in the street a little far for my old mans liking. It hit me like a freight train. Right in my left temple. I was used to it, but I crumpled to the ground like a deflated beach ball, man I still remember the shrieks of the kids and some of the parents. Imagine being so full of rage you put your hands on your own kid? In public?

The police arrived. They smelled the contents of my dad’s ever-present Ginger Ale bottle and took him away. It was the last time I would see my dad, mom, or sister for 8 months. I remember being put in the back of a car. I can’t remember what costume I wore that year. I think I was a pirate. Certain memories are always there. Certain memories fade fast. Weird thing about the human psyche. It almost prioritizes memories for you, the dutiful secretary sorting out your life’s pictures.

Why is that story important? I don’t know. When I started writing about combat sports, people would tell me all the time: You have to find your niche. Your niche. Your niche. I hate that phrase now with a passion. If I am being honest, all of the niches are taken. The only thing I can do is be brutally honest. Honest about the figures that I cover, and honest about myself. I am never going to be like Ariel Helwani, who is the most recognizable face in the history of combat sports media. In the spirit of being honest, I recently wrote a story where I listed all the players in MMA media I considered actual ‘‘Journalists’’ I did not include Helwani. I received a ton of emails asking if that was an oversight. The answer is yes. Helwani is the face of MMA media and I have been consuming his content since the AOL fanhouse days. His dues are paid in full. Those are my honest thoughts on the matter.

Point is, all of my favorite writers as a kid I felt a personal connection with. I have written before that the greatest sportswriter of my life is Bill Simmons. It was not because Simmons was prolific with his Boston sports coverage, but because he made me feel like I was a part of his world. As a young kid and teen, that was an invaluable gift bestowed on me. When I read Simmons, I felt like I was the 5th member of his family at his Thanksgiving dinner table. That is what I am trying to create here. I want you to be in my world, and vice versa.

Right after the Halloween incident, I went to live with my aunt for a little bit. She had 3 kids of her own and was raising him all by herself in the tiniest damn apartment you ever saw in Charlestown. For a long time, she would tell me that my mom was working. I honestly believed that my mom would come home to my aunts after I fell asleep, and leave early for work before I got up. She worked at Dunkin Donuts, I was told. I used to go to bed knowing that my mom would come home late and give me a kiss before she retired for the night, and lay out my clothes for school before she left in the morning, long before I was awake. It made sense. Shit, someone has got to make the donuts early right? Someone had to stay late for the nurses and police who worked late. I believed that shit at 8 years old. Truth be told, my mom was MIA for 7 months. Rehab, then county jail. Looking back, I thank my aunt for protecting me from it.

One thing I did have during all that turmoil was reading, and wrestling. I cannot begin to explain how much I looked forward to Saturday morning wrestling at that age. It was my escape. For 1 hour a week, I could shed my skin and be Hulk Hogan, or the Ultimate Warrior. I lived for that. Sometime during all that mess, I used to have to cross over the bridge into the city to go to school. I used to fantasize about jumping off that bridge. Listen, I am not afraid to say what it is. Jumping off that bridge was a hell of a lot better than facing another day at my aunts place. She was kind, but my god was she overworked and stressed out. I lasted through Christmas, and my oldest cousin shared his Christmas gifts with me. I never forget that all these years later. Were not kids anymore, we are concert buddies now, and more often drinking buddies, and we never mention that Christmas.

Eventually I got back in with my mom and dad. We had a lady, her name was Renee, who came and talked to me every week. My dad drank and my mom worked. I am thinking this was early 1995 where my memory picks up again, because WWE Raw and WCW Saturday night was the pinnacle of my life then. I used to try and survive long enough to make it to the next week’s Raw. Weird I know, but that is how I lived. I literally lived my life one episode of WWE Raw at a time. I remember when Raw signed off for the night, I would immediately start wondering if I would make it to the next week. When I made it to another one, I treated it like a gift and cherished every second of it. My dad by then, really liked to fuck with me in the mornings. I had this Hugo Boss shirt. It was White and kinda stylish for the times, I wore it all the time. One day before school my dad fucked with me and tore the shirt in half. I remember my sister screaming up the stairs to my mom ‘‘He’s hitting him!’’

Mom couldn’t do shit. My mom could not even walk me to the bus stop sometimes because she had a black eye. I would beg her to walk me up the street and she would say ‘‘You know I can’t’’ It was silently understood why she couldn’t. Oh yeah, the old man did not discriminate, my mom was on the menu for his rage too. When I was in my mid-twenties I caught up with my aunt on my dad’s side. She told me that the first time she ever saw my dad put his hands on me I was in diapers. I did something to piss the old man off, and he booted me in my diaper-clad ass. My aunt also told me that my father was beaten constantly by the long line of boyfriend’s their alcoholic mother brought home. Knowing these stories, all these years later I forgive the guy. I am 34 years old now, I couldn’t hold a grudge. It’s just wasted energy, I am past it.

My school started to catch on in 95-96 too. By then, he was completely out of control, and my mom was hooked on whatever. My sister thank god, had taken up to staying with her friends family, she was a bit older and they loved having her. My sister is 36 now, she has a 8- year old son who is severely autistic. He has never spoken a word in his life. I used to dream when he was first born, and I was really angry about the cards he drew, that I was offered a chance to change my nephews lot in life if I simply gave my own life. I would still take that deal today. I really would. Anyway, my school started to see that I didn’t have any clothes. My Boss shirt was gone. I had one pair of pants that I wore everyday that was about one size to big for me. Remember, my old man loved to fuck with me in the morning before school, I used to have to hide those pants behind the couch. If I didn’t there was a chance he would get to them. I would unfurl them in the morning, and throw them on and bolt out. I never ate breakfast. To this day, I never eat breakfast. To this day, my wife always makes a hearty breakfast and I never look that way. I guess there is two types of people in the world: those who ate breakfast in a loving family, and me, the guy who had to hide his clothes from his drunk father every morning. I would hide in the evenings when I got home from school too, I used to hide on the porch of are second floor apartment and read wrestling magazines that I would take from the mag section at Shaw’s or Star Market, and play out fights in my head.

Right there on the second floor is where I always hid. 440 Ashmont Street. Boston, Mass

I heard Teddy Atlas say recently on the Joe Rogan podcast that if you hid your whole life, chances are you are going to hide forever. Some of that is true. Eventually, the school got involved and contacted Children’s Services and took me away. I remember the Principal asking me why I didn’t have a belt on with pants that did not fit me. I had no answer. I barely spoke a word. I just looked down at the ground. When I arrived in Taunton, Mass to be placed, the first thing I got was a haircut. I met my counselor, an older woman with red hair named Mrs.Burkett. She looked at me like I was sub-human. Honestly I think she questioned why my parents just did not do the world a favor and choke me out in the crib early in life. She always growled at me ‘‘Smile!’’ and would talk to me about ‘‘Forgetting’’ about the past and focusing on making myself a responsible adult. One that went to College and maybe became an accountant or a lawyer. Seriously, this woman’s whole job in life was to counsel kids who had nothing. She used her powers to belittle me, and make me feel like I was worthless every day that I spent there. She was the definition of evil.

Group homes are exactly what you think they are. Brutal. A bunch of loser kids from loser parents is how I saw it. Some kids parents died. Some were like mine, abusive drug addicts and alcoholics who could not care for their kids and decided to hand them over to the state. Everybody had a story. I have written here about my uncle who visited me regularly during my 6-month placement in that hell-hole. My uncle recently passed, and the emotions are still raw, all I will say is my gratitude for him is undying. I lost a little bit of my childhood a few weeks ago when he passed, and I am still making sense of it. It was there though that I was able to frequent the library. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen King. I was also able to receive the Pro Wrestling Torch newsletter and read about wrestling and MMA. In those days, I had no friends. wrestlers, writers and books were my friends. They were my older brother, father, and mother. Those characters in the books and TV raised me.

You know how you read and see things at different times in your life and it makes you feel different things? Let’s fast forward 2001. The country was united after September 11, and I felt the call to do something, I guess. I wish I had some patriotic story for you. I don’t. I just had zero options. No money. No place to go, and no future. So I enlisted. As I write this in 2019, I just recently got out. I never would have believed in at least a million years if you told 17-year old me that I would last 2 decades in the military. I am old now, I have a ‘‘dad bod’’ and almost a hundred grey hairs, and I just separated from service. Life is weird.

Truth be told, I was a garbage human being my entire twenties. My upbringing made me feel like I had to out-mean everyone. I felt everyone was going to hurt me eventually and I better do it first. I was way to quick to put my hands on other men, for the slightest infraction, and I objectified women. I was a serial cheater. With the benefit of hindsight, I hurt a a lot of people. I always hid behind the fact that I was going to war every other year for the most part. I drank my entire existence away. I was a functioning alcoholic, with a mean streak. I looked at myself once just before I turned Thirty and said: ‘‘Dude, you have to grow up.’’ I was becoming what I hated. I didn’t beat women or my kids (Didn’t have any yet) but I was not contributing to society in any positive, meaningful way.

Remember when I said that sometimes you see stuff at a certain point of your life and it makes you feel a certain way? That is how I felt on my 2009 deployment and someone handed me Jonathan Snowden’s book Total MMA. That deployment was particularly rough. The work was harder than ever. The conditions even worse. I had a roommate who had such a badly broken rib that he would howl at night from pain, then put on his specially fitted protective jacket and do it all again the next day. It wa downright inspirational, man. I too had a nasty groin strain which basically had me starting every day getting a cortisone shot right into my balls. I read that book like a madman. Every night I would disappear into that world and out of my current reality.

I had always been an avid fan of MMA, but that book made me ravenous to consume the product. I also started to think that maybe one day I could write about it too. I am not kissing anyone’s ass here, but I don’t think I could underrate how much influence that book had on me. Much like Helwani earlier, Snowden’s greatness as a writer cannot be overstated in my view. No ass kissing, it is just the straight truth, and part of my story.

When I got done with the active Army to join the Army reserve, I was like a rudderless boat floating down the delta just waiting to hit a big wave and crash. I went back out on deployment again in 2013, and suffered a major traumatic brain injury. Right before that deployment in 2012, I met my wife. I envy my wife in a lot of ways. She was adopted. Her parents were Vietnamese immigrants, but her adopted parents who raised her are an older well to-do white couple. Her dad is a doctor, her mom is a lawyer. She tells me that she never once saw her parents fight growing up. That is impossible to fathom for me. I envy it. God bless her fathers maturity, never allowing his kids to see that. Some people, I guess are just born under a bad sign. Hi, my names Dave.

If I asked you what part of your body you think your soul resides in, what would you tell me? I would tell you unequivocally it is in your brain. One hit to the head, and your whole source code gets screwy. You stop becoming the person you are and become another person altogether.

After the 2013 injury, I had a few problems. I had a newborn son and a wife, and a terrible affinity to feel lost and hopeless. I have no idea what changed in me. If I am being honest, I was a terrible husband in the beginning, and an even worse father. I bullshitted my way through the first few years of my oldest sons life. I would wake up in the middle of the night, go downstairs to my basement and think about suicide. I know. I don’t have any answers either. I would walk past my beautiful newborn sons room, make a left past my gorgeous wife and sit downstairs and conjure the guts to end my life. I just think everything from my childhood to my injuries, both mentally and physically, started to pile up. It was the proverbial getting tired of being sick and tired. Something inside me just snapped.

I finally hit bottom in 2015. I just walked outside one day and went down to my favorite spot, its a creek with a waterfall(now converted to condos) that was so incredibly peaceful. I figured I would hang myself, or maybe I would freeze to death.

In a lot of ways that was the best day of my life. I hit my bottom and lived to tell the tale. I gathered the courage to face what I was running from my entire life. My therapist calls it ‘‘Keeping rocks in your pockets’’ It’s so true. I had so many rocks in my pockets I could barely move. I was at the proverbial stand-still. My wife asked me a few weeks after that: ‘‘Why do you want to die?? ‘‘ There is no answer for that. I did not want to die, I just couldn’t keep going the way I was going. I had to shed it all. I did that. Now, I see someone every week. I do an outpatient PTSD clinic, and I take the meds every morning. Guys, if you asked me 10 years ago about mental health, or told me you were hurting, I would have called you a pussy. For better or worse, I was that ignorant. Now, I promise you if you read this and don’t reach out to me about your own story, or problems. Seriously, you are a pussy.

Now, I write about sports. Combat sports specifically. I feel I owe wrestling and MMA that. It gave me so much as a kid. I must confess one thing: If you have not already figured it out, I am a shitty technical writer. I am a journalism graduate, but in the interest of honesty again I pretty much bullshitted my way through College. I feel it is far more important to have a strong voice and I worry less about grammar in this space. It’s more important for me to connect with you here, I need to shoot from the hip(and be hip when I shoot) Your guys feedback and personal stories have been amazing. I look forward to them, everyday. I could not possible overstate that.

I added another son to the mix 5 months ago too. I became acutely aware when my wife had her parents, and family members in the room to celebrate our new son that I had no parents to reach out too. It hit me hard in that moment that some people are really lucky to have their parents still in their lives. I suggest if you are one of those people, finish this column and call them.

I hope that we can share our own world here. I want you to feel like you are the 5th cousin at my dinner table. I want you to read my writing on MMA, wrestling, and life and say wow, that dude is not like anyone else, and I feel like I know him. That is all that matters to me. I mean, all the other niches are taken anyway.

Oh yeah, and fuck Mrs. Burkett.