Issue 038

June 2008

Eugene S Robinson’s new book Fight: Everything you wanted to know about ass-kicking but were afraid you’d get your ass kicked for asking, is not your ordinary literary treatment of all-things combative.  

Funny, serious, jovial, deadpan, hostile and friendly, Fight is the kind of book that forces you to read it, because if you don’t, you really feel like Eugene is going to arrive over your shoulder and ask “Why the hell not?”

As well as being an award-winning journalist, Brooklyn-born Eugene is a musician, philosopher and most importantly, a fighter. He’s fought on the streets, in underground No Holds Barred (NHB) matches and in sanctioned competition. One thing becomes very clear early on in his book: Eugene loves fighting. “If you know somebody who loves fucking, this person spends all their time trying to fuck. I don’t feel that way so much about fighting, I train a lot for fighting, but I think the moments you get into unscheduled bouts are really something special. ‘Those moments are like love. You look across the room and see somebody, a five-minute interchange, whose life will be changed and will probably change yours, forever. I distinctly remember every single fight I’ve gotten into. I’ve forgotten many people who I’ve fucked, but I remember every single fight I’ve gotten into.” To top it off, he laughs as he says, “If sex is gold, fighting is platinum!”  

In the course of the book, Eugene travels across the US and the world to meet bar fighters, soccer hooligans, mercenaries, murderers, ex-con’s, and of course, MMA fighters. Robinson isn’t just a fan or some pretty-boy journalist – he’s been training with top professional fighters for years. “I just did a two-day seminar called Masters of the Mountain, and they were like ‘you gotta teach something!’ I said ‘I haven’t got anything to teach!’ ‘Bullshit, you don’t’ they said! I figured out what I could teach would be secrets of the pro’s – every single pro that has beaten me, I will tell you the one thing they did that I remember most clearly that they used to beat me. I went through shit I learnt from Frank Shamrock, Jake Shields, Daryl Gholar, Rico Chiapparelli, Vladimir Matyushenko…” That’s quite a list of guys, and Eugene agrees. “Yeah! And they all beat me with varying degrees of savagery! My whole goal was to lose over a longer period of time, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m not getting smoked in the first 30 seconds any more.”  

Now resident in San Francisco, Eugene finds time to train with local fighters Jake Shields and Gilbert Melendez, and sometimes Cung Le’s wrestling buddies when he goes down to LA. Hailing originally from the streets of New York, Eugene is of the old-school hardcore punk scene, something he hangs on to with his band Oxbow, whose performance has been described as ‘fight club meets arthouse’. Crowd members often engage in combat during their sets, and Eugene has been known to join in while singing, choking people out while carrying on with the show.  

It is this ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude that permeates the book, but there is also a sense of humour throughout, an accurate representation of the always-laughing author. “People are always giving me books for Christmas and shit like that, that trod on that ground [fighting]. And, all that stuff tends to do stuff I don’t have any great feeling for, which is to impress you now that you’re in a serious place. It dawned on me that this is not the way people process reality. It’s the not way people think about things.”  

“I look at this partially as a philosophical monograph on the interpersonal nature of combat. As such, I wanted to do something that had that cheap-seat thrill for people who were not interested in the deeper meanings of why they did what they did, but I wanted to have something that elevated it into a treatise by somebody inside the community – we’re not talking about Norman Mailer and boxing, some outsider coming in – but somebody who said ‘Look, this I why I suspect we do what we do’, and this is as much my story [as it is] your story: it’s an attempt to define our stories.”  

Fight: Everything you wanted to know about ass-kicking but were afraid you’d get your ass kicked for asking is out now, published by Harper Collins.  For more info on Eugene go to www.eugenesrobinson.com.