Getting in the Cage
Todd Sampson is a very successful guy. I like Todd Sampson. I enjoy listening to him on the Gruen project or Gruen planet or whatever it’s called now. Sampson’s a well-known documentary maker and when I first saw the advertising for his latest work entitled Body Hack I was keen to have a look.
The premise of Body Hack is that Sampson places himself in extreme situations and or lifestyle environments to determine the limits of the human body. It seems an interesting premise. I was somewhat sceptical yet intrigued to see what the talented Mr Sampson could do with this.
That enthusiasm lasted until the first and only episode I watched of Body Hack. This episode saw Sampson training to be an MMA fighter. After two weeks Sampson would then enter the ring for a ‘real’ fight with a MMA fighter.
Those of you who are somewhat knowledgeable about combat sports are probably right now laughing. The more knowledgeable the person, the harder they are laughing. The fight itself was a fairly obviously sham. Sampson ‘lasted’ into the second round. His opponent barely looked interested.
I’m not super knowledgeable but I have read a very good book on the subject which I will recommend. This book is entitled The professor in the cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to watch. In it, the author, Jonathon Gottschall, takes authenticity to heights perhaps unmatched.
The book begins with Gottschall regaling the reader of his current situation. He’s a fairly unsuccessful academic employed by a university. He’d like to get fired. He imagines that taking up the most brutal combat sport on the planet might just achieve that.
By the end of the book Gottschall had survived his first and I believe only officially sanctioned MMA fight. It did not get him fired. He did quit to further pursue his literary career. It was difficult to arrange the fight due to Gottschall’s age and relative lack of experience. Gottschall trained for two years. He lost his bout in under a minute.
Gottschall’s book though is so much more than a simple tale of a man training to be an MMA fighter. The authors tale is interspersed with historical anecdotes about the history of combat sports and the people who watch them.
It can be at times a difficult book to read. In particular, what I learnt about the types of fights our less evolved ancestors arranged between animals was confronting. Research Bull baiting for example, it’s truly awful. If you can think of a way in which humans could torture an animal for entertainment, it has probably been done somewhere.
There is also a lengthy section on the practice of duelling and why people assigned so much value to their personal honour. Before you consider such things consigned to history remember that the inmates in our prison systems have a well-developed honour culture. It’s evidence that we haven’t really changed much. People’s behaviour is often a result of circumstance.
Perhaps most interesting are Gottschall’s views on the ‘civilizing’ nature of rule bound fighting contests. He suggests that conflicts can help people work out small conflicts before they become larger. Another use is to thrash out a hierarchy.
He talks at length about an Amazonian tribe in which two rival tribes competing for space meet up and take turns hitting each other in the chest until one side has no men left standing. In this way they can determine which tribe is strongest without having to fight an actual war.
It's an intriguing thought in a book which contains many. Whilst Gottschall does seem to have become a cheerleader for the MMA the book balances this with some uncomfortable human truths which educate the reader. The uncomfortable parts are what elevates the work from slightly gimmicky memoir to compulsory reading. Again I recommend it to you.