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I watch a lot of UFC fights, and there is a moment before every fight where both fighters walk to the cage. It is a wild walk—there’s music blaring, and sometimes 20,000 people are screaming for a guy as he or she walks into a cage where they will try to absolutely destroy another human being.
I still remember some of the conflicting emotions that I used to feel as a wrestler running out onto the mat through a tunnel of teammates and coaches yelling and screaming and slapping me to get me wound up. It was exhilarating, terrifying, joyous, a little dangerous and very brotherly.
I was struck by that the past two weekends when I watched fights. A fighter would come to the cage with an entourage of their closest friends and family, men and women who sweated, bled and cried with these fighters as they trained for months for this moment. And now they were going to go into the cage, then somebody would lock the door and they would go to battle against another person with their own crew standing outside the cage.
They always hug. No high fives. No chest bumps. Hugs. There’s a reason why they always hug their people before they go into the cage, and it’s because they all knew what it took to get there and also how daunting the thing could be that they were about to do. There’s real danger when it comes to that kind of violence.
I’m writing about this on a sober blog because I was in the grocery store recently and saw a sober guy who I hadn’t seen in a year, maybe more. In fact, I couldn’t even remember his name, just that he went to some of the same meetings as me. I don’t have his number, don’t know where he lives, don’t talk to him outside of meetings and can’t remember a single conversation I have ever had with him one-on-one. And yet, I gave him a big-ass bearhug in the soup aisle today.
That got me thinking about what hugs represent, especially for us sober people. We are huggers. I think of the 5,000 or so people I’ve ever met at meetings, I think I have probably hugged about 4,900 of them. It’s actually a little odd to give out handshakes.
So why is that? It’s definitely not because we are going to cage fight anybody. But… we also know the fight that many of us went through to get to that moment. Everybody I meet at meetings has had a horrible bottom they have lived through. There’s lots of arrests, divorces, bankruptcies, missed birthday parties and funerals. We all have so many scars. They’re all different, of course. But they’re kind of all the same, too, if that makes any sense. As we say in the rooms, I may not know you… but I know you.
Maybe there are similarities with fighters, after all. MMA corner people know what somebody went through to get to that point, and they want to love them through the fight they’re about to endure. In that way, we sober people are similar. I know what it takes for a full-blown alcoholic to stay sober, so when I see them again, some part of me is glad that we won the fight—for that day, anyway. That’s why we hug.
I should say, though, that the initial reason I started thinking about this topic was because the UFC pay-per-view from two weeks ago came on at 10 pm. At about 10:02, the cameras zeroed in on the three-man broadcasting team, and all three announcers were staring backwards away from the camera because a massive brawl had broken out in the crowd. Fights at UFC fights are pretty common, but I have never seen the entire broadcast sputter like that because the brawl was so chaotic.
It turns out, the fight was on the floor, near the side of the cage, and it was between one fighter’s training partners and friends, with another fighter who is a well-known online troll. He’d been picking on that fighter for years on social media, and now he ran into the guys who hug the fighter before he goes into the cage.
So maybe the similarities end there with UFC fighters’ entourages and my sober crew. I don’t think I want a sponsor and sponsees who want to beat the living shit out of any sober nemesis of mine!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
After sharing my experience, strength and hope at an online meeting for the first time, I felt very much a part of the growing online world and proudly declared myself an official “cyber-drunk.”
“That’s fine,” an oldtimer responded, “as long as you remember you’re not a virtual alcoholic.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2001, Anonymous from New York, New York)
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