Year of the Fighter

Lessons from my Midlife Crisis Adventure

By: Matt Deaton

Narrated by: Matt Deaton

My childhood had been cool enough. Horses and four-wheelers to ride, farmland to explore, good friends. The one blemish: a school bus bully.

A year older and always bigger, this guy we'll call "Larry" started picking on me around kindergarten - flipping my ear, frogging my leg, reminding me how much of a wimp I was - and I let him get away with it. With literally hundreds of chances (every miserable ride to and from school), I never fought back. And while I’d done a stint in the military, earned a fancy degree, and started a family, I was always haunted by the lingering shame.

Then, one day in 2015, 20 years removed from school, I snapped. I was at a college football game, and my team had just lost to their rival for the 10th year in row. Irrationally irate, I elbowed my way through pockets of the opposing team’s fans and found myself threatening to shove their band’s drummer’s drumsticks up his ass. Cooler heads prevailed. But walking away, I couldn’t believe what I’d done. How could I be so angry about a game I wasn’t even playing? How could a guy with a life as good as mine get that wrapped up in a sports fan’s vicarious fantasy?

The answer: childhood bully shame was eating at me more than I could admit, and time was running out to do something about it. A suppressed idea I hadn’t told a soul: I could box or kickbox, or even do a mixed martial arts fight. Fighting would redeem the little boy who’d wussed out all those years on the bus. And it would give my 85-year-old self something to smile about, big time.

Pushing 40, while I was still in decent shape, whipping myself into fighting shape would soon be impossible. For many things, being a little older was an advantage. But for combat sports, Father Time was a second opponent. I made two decisions that day - one, to stop living through a team of athletic strangers and to start living my own adventures, directly, not vicariously. And two, regardless of the outcome, to pursue my fight dream.

©2018 Justin Matthew Deaton (P)2021 Justin Matthew Deaton