Why We Fight: One Man’s Search for Meaning Inside the Ring
Written by Josh Rosenblatt
Narrated by Joe Knezevich
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
Finally, we can talk about Fight Club!
or,
A physical and philosophical mediation on why we are drawn to fight each other for sport, what happens to our bodies and brains when we do, and what it all means
Anyone with guts or madness in him can get hit by someone who knows how; it takes a different kind of madness, a more persistent kind, to stick around long enough to be one of the people who does the knowing.
Josh Rosenblatt was thirty-three years old when he first realized he wanted to fight. A lifelong pacifist with a philosopher’s hatred of violence and a dandy’s aversion to exercise, he drank to excess, smoked passionately, ate indifferently, and mocked physical activity that didn’t involve nudity. But deep down inside there was always some part of him that was attracted to the idea of fighting. So, after studying Muay Thai, Krav Maga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and boxing, he decided, at age forty, that it was finally time to fight his first—and only—mixed martial arts match: all in the name of experience and transcending ancient fears.
An insightful and moving rumination on the nature of fighting, Why We Fight takes us on his journey from the bleachers to the ring. Using his own training as an opportunity to understand how the sport illuminates basic human impulses, Rosenblatt weaves together cultural history, criticism, biology, and anthropology to understand what happens to the human body and mind when under attack, and to explore why he, a self-described “cowardly boy from the suburbs,” discovered so much meaning in putting his body, and others’, at risk.
From the psychology of fear to the physiology of pain, from Ukrainian shtetls to Brooklyn boxing gyms, from Lord Byron to George Plimpton, Why We Fight is a fierce inquiry into the abiding appeal of our most conflicted and controversial fixation, interwoven with a firsthand account of what happens when a mild-mannered intellectual decides to step into the ring for his first real showdown.
Josh Rosenblatt
Josh Rosenblatt is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in VICE, the Texas Observer, and the Austin Chronicle. Between 2012 and 2014 he was the editor-in-chief of Fightland, VICE Media’s mixed martial arts publication. Josh lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Katchen.
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Reviews for Why We Fight
22 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Josh Rosenblatt's memoir, Why We Fight: One Man's Search for Meaning Inside the Ring, is an experimental blend of narrative sports writing and reflective, mid-life male psychology wrapped up in a short, punchy package. It is clear from the start that he values his writing far more than his fighting, and the journey which he relates is one of self-exploration and testing the limits of his own abilities – both body and psyche – rather than a genuine foray into the fight game.Indeed, while Rosenblatt's yarn of hitting and getting hit is authentic, his year-long training regimen and one-fight finale feels very much like it was constructed to be fodder for a story, like Gallico and Plimpton before him. Ironically, the author's interstitial vignettes of the fascinating characters he encounters in the gym and even the awkwardly-placed snippets of literary and fighting history tend to convey more gravity and insight than the personal experiences and perspectives that he chronicles.This book is a personal journey, of course, and therefore it winds around and sometimes trips over Rosenblatt's crises of identity and mid-life agency: his struggles with alcoholism, his relationship with his deceased father, and his sharp feelings about religion and politics. These reflections are the least deft of the work, and while they function as emotional antagonists to fuel his ordeal of training and discovery leading up to the fight, they ultimately fail to conjure any real empathy – these are the reasons he fights (read: writes), not why we fight.It is here that the book does not quite deliver on what it promises on the cover. Why We Fight is an autobiographical toe in the spit bucket of mixed martial-arts by an intellectual well past his fighting prime. It might be going too far to say that its targeted audience would not find much of value within, but much of the content features flamboyant literary references and poetic reflections upon existential concepts to which the standard 16 to 28-year-old fighter could have difficulty relating. Furthermore, the only thing that happens in Rosenblatt's titular "ring" is some sparring in the months before his fight. As the fighting style with which he chooses to engage is MMA and not boxing, the culmination of the story naturally takes place in a cage.It so happens that this reviewer shares some of the salient context of the author's yarn, and for this reason I was pleased to have read it. In a similar fashion, I experimented with amateur boxing in my late twenties and trained both inside and out for two years leading up to my first official fight. Along the way, I knew the experience was not a deep dive but a try-out – something to help me understand what others go through and to learn more about myself. Perhaps also like the author, I stopped fighting shortly thereafter because I was old (in boxing years) and I needed my senses intact to follow the academic track on which I was already well along.Carrying forward with Rosenblatt's conveyance of why we fight, however, our experiences quickly diverge. His narrative keeps coming back to struggles with addiction and the regrettable sacrifice of joy to get into fighting shape. He focuses on the act of violence as a primary draw for motivating the combatant, and repeatedly references the need to harness the misery and boredom of training against one's eventual opponent. Cultivating deprivation and abstinence into rage against another human being as the embodiment of everything one hates is the author's explicit motivation. None of these things represent an iota of why I fought. However violent this sport, the real combat that is recounted herein is clearly one within the protagonist's psyche.Josh Rosenblatt is a gifted writer with a real head on his shoulders, and ultimately I am glad he has chosen to preserve it rather than to subject his 40-year-old body to a continued trajectory of blows and bruises. May he live to write another day.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another book by an intellectual type that finds himself drawn to fighting, takes up mma and writes a book about it. The book had been better had the author been less pompous and self-important, but it does manage to tell his story, which is valuable and may be inspiring to others, even if not unique. Recommended.