Issue 023
March 2007
Sam Sheridan is one of those men you only ever seem to read about – an adventurer, a maverick, someone who is successful in the things that they do and fearless in the pursuit of their goals. You name it, he’s done it: sailing around the world, fighting wildfires, ranching across the USA, fighting in cages…
He’s had a go at pretty much all of it at one time or another, and this is no 60-year-old veteran we’re talking about. This is a young man who had the heart and the will to go out into the world and do what others dream of. Lucky for us, he decided to write a book about it.
‘A Fighters Heart: One Man’s Journey Through The World Of Fighting’ Sheridan wrote the book (his first) on the back of a combination of hard work, a great attitude and more than a few bruises. He has fought Muay Thai in the Orient, trained jiu-jitsu in Rio and sparred with UFC champions and Olympian boxers, but believe it or not he still classes himself as an average guy. “I’m not like a world-class athlete or anything, I’m kind of a normal guy who just went and did it” he says offhandedly.
Growing up on the east coast of America he had an ordinary and pleasant life, and though he tried his hand at martial arts, it wasn’t until he was in university before he really developed his passion for combat sports. “I came from the east coast of the US, I grew up traveling a bit and sailing a bit, being out on the water and working on boats and things with my father. I started boxing in Harvard with this famous old boxing coach called Tommy Rawson. He was a lightweight champ in the ’30s, he was exactly like the trainer in Rocky, it could have been based on him, he was this old guy with a crunched-up face, he’d shout ‘come on slugger, whaddya doing?!’”
The adrenaline rush he encountered in the boxing ring was something he would find hard to forget. “The realness of boxing sparring, getting hit in the face was so exciting. Having somebody trying to really smash your face in was just a revelation. With headgear and a mouthguard it doesn’t really hurt that much, it’s just the pure adrenaline of it. It really drew me into it. You really learn what you can and can’t do when someone’s trying to hit you in the face.”
Something of a thrill seeker by nature, Sheridan gelled with this sport but didn’t pick it back up until some years later thanks to an offer he couldn’t refuse. “After college, there was a bunch of different things I was going to do but a guy offered me a job on a boat sailing around the world, I couldn’t really find a way to say no. You’re gonna pay me really well to sail a boat around the world? Ok! That’s how I ended up in Thailand with a lot of money. I had 30 grand in the bank, I was 24, I had been working for a year and a half straight on a boat and hadn’t gotten off. I read an ad for Fairtex in a kickboxing magazine, I thought ‘what if I just go live there?’”
Six months later and Sam was being put into his first professional Muay Thai fight against an opponent flown over from Japan. To top it all, a documentary crew from the National Geographic was there to film him! Winning his fight by stoppage, Sheridan left the ring behind with no remorse. “People asked are you gonna try and do this or make this into something? I said, what are you crazy? I’m too old, I’m not good enough, I’m not strong enough and I’m not fast enough. I’ve seen those K-1 guys, they’re something else.”
A typical job wasn’t the sort of thing this young man was about to fall into, and stints as a wildfire fighter, a construction worker in Antarctica and more sailing followed. “For several years I didn’t train at all, I would hit a bag on my own, but I was working. An agent heard about my story in Thailand and said ‘why don’t you write that for a magazine? It would make a great article.’ I was firefighting in Idaho and I heard that I’d sold a little piece to Newsweek. I thought ‘wow, maybe I could be a writer’. All of a sudden Men’s Journal published the first Muay Thai experience, years after it happened. It was apparent people wanted to read about this stuff; they wanted to know about it.”
Sheridan found himself a writer, and his assignments saw him box with Olympic hopeful and now undefeated professional boxer Andre Ward as well as train with some of the top MMA stars in the world. “I met Andre Ward through Men’s Journal, they were doing a piece on Olympians and I went and worked out with him, he went on to win gold and he was a terrific kid. My workouts were him working on his defense and me working on my offense (laughs). He has over 150 amateur fights and hasn’t lost since 1997.”
The link to MMA began even though Sheridan himself wasn’t an aficionado of the sport. “[I started] in 2004. Men’s Journal kept asking if there was another piece out there. I had been aware of the UFC but I didn’t really ‘get’ the ground game. In 2003 and 2004 I really started to notice in the smaller gyms there were guys training in this no holds barred, or mixed martial arts, and I couldn’t really believe that people were actually doing this on an amateur level.
“I was just stunned, I said [to Men’s Journal] those guys are monsters, that’s real fighting. There’s a real-world amateur fight club going on and there are 300 amateur events in the US a year. They said ‘sure, go to the best gym in the country’, so I said OK, let me figure out what it is and I ended up in Pat Miletich’s place in Iowa.”
Going to the home of Miletich Fighting Systems in Iowa was a good choice for quality, but Sheridan found out the hard way what it takes to train with a team like MFS. “I got my nose broken twice and my ribs broken and beat to piss, but once you stand in there and take your licks for a few weeks, everybody just opens up a little bit and it gets to be a really great place.”
Fighting MMA wasn’t just a goal for Sheridan though; it was part and parcel of the whole deal. “I knew I was going to fight, that was the capstone on the article. I think you have to fight in these situations, even when you’re dreading it. You think [to yourself] ‘I’m not ready’. I had no ground game at all, but I think to do it without a fight at the end is to take away the urgency and it becomes meaningless. The fighting is an important part of the whole process. It’s the end of the training but it gives you a reason to do what you do.”
His commitment to his work saw him step into the cage, although the result didn’t go the same way his Muay Thai experience had. “I’m telling you on the level, this guy was pretty decent. I’ve sparred with all kinds of people, this guy was no slouch. He was solid, he has some good uppercuts, and he pounded me. They stopped it on cuts. I was in better condition than him but I was cut up and bleeding from a couple of different cuts on my face.” As if he could ever forget, Sheridan faces a constant reminder thanks to the cover of his book, which sports a picture of his bloody lower face and torso! “It kinda sucks, but I can’t complain, it’s a good photo,” he cheerfully remarks.
His journey didn’t end there though, and before long he was on a plane to Rio and training at the Brazilian Top Team. “The book idea was sold now and I had enough money to do it, so I was like ‘let’s go to the home of the ground game,’ so I went down to train with Top Team. I tore my rotator cuff quite early, so I ended up just watching, but they were very open to me. I went with [Antonio ‘Minotauro’] Nogueira to PRIDE for New Year’s Eve when he fought Fedor, and I stayed in the rooms with the guys and hung around and did the behind-the-scenes of that show. Rodrigo and Ze Mario Sperry were so cool about it.”
With stories like these, it's hard to imagine the book being anything less than compelling, but Sheridan is keen to point out that it works on a number of levels, and is not just about his personal experience. “I tried to get into questions like why fighting is so popular and what the crowd is getting out of a fight, I tried to answer that question, what does a crowd undergo during a big title fight? I wanted women to want to read it, so that they could understand why their boyfriend loves to watch fighting.”
He also looked into the class divide between jiu-jitsu and Luta Livre practitioners in Brazil and the conflicts that rose as a result, he was offered a bare-fist boxing match in Myanmar and he explored the combative origins of Tai Chi. All in all the book promises to be packed with the kind of stuff MMA fans will love, and even ‘ordinary’ readers will find it enjoyable. “I think it's something that every guy is at least tangentially interested in,” says Sheridan. “Every guy has a brother or a buddy who use to train, or he watches boxing with his dad. Every party I’ve been to I get cornered by someone who has their own interest or connection to fighting. It’s a very basic biological and genetic predisposition that exists in all men, and all people to a certain extent. We’re drawn to seeing who’s ‘game’ and who is tough.”
How many people dream of giving up everything to pursue their true passion in life? Given half a chance, anyone who is slave to the clock or wage packet would happily leave behind their humdrum existence in search of something better. Life is there to be lived, and Sheridan knows this. “I know what I am. I’m not going to be a pro fighter. I don’t have those tools, those guys start off with an athletic toolset that I feel I don’t have. I’m a guy who is interested in this and willing to test himself and try things out.” That’s exactly what he does in this book, and maybe we can all take a little inspiration from that.
A Fighters Heart: One Man’s Journey Through The World Of Fighting by Sam Sheridan is published by Atlantic Monthly Press and is out now
