Year of the Fighter: Lessons from my Midlife Crisis Adventure (Paperback or Softback)

My childhood had been cool enough. Horses and four-wheelers to ride, East Tennessee 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, twenty years removed from school, I snapped. I was at a college football game and my team had just lost to their rival for the 10^th 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. I’d trade my sports fan pom-poms for a pair of boxing gloves. And man, did I have the time of my life.

If you’re facing your own midlife crisis, bemoaning unfinished business and suppressed dreams that will soon expire, this is the book for you. Relive my journey from “moving punching bag” rookie through experienced banger. Feel what I felt coaching myself in the mirror, stepping through the ropes in front of a live audience for the first time, fighting and sometimes beating guys half my age.

There’s wisdom in here for anyone ready to make a neglected dream reality. But I think it will resonate most for people who love Cobra Kai, the Rocky movies and a good UFC, and who’ve always wondered what it would be like to go toe-to-toe with somebody trying to take their head off.

I’ll tell you what it’s like. Even when you’re bleeding, even when you’re so exhausted (or concussed) that you puke, even when your body’s screaming stop, it’s primally satisfying like nothing else. There’s nothing like hitting dudes in the face – it’s just as good (if not better) than it looks in the movies.

Anyway, that’s the book. Hope you enjoy. But I hope more that you act on whatever brought you here. Enough with the procrastination. We get one life. No more waiting for cool things to happen. If we want the life we deserve, we take it. No more excuses. Let’s go. Matt