The First Person Account of "Brawl in the Cage III", Part One

This is Jake reporting, a day after my fight last night at the third installment presented by Brawley Fights. Perhaps one of the most intriguing (especially if the potential reader is one of those unforgivably sadistic types about whom we incessantly hear on the news) stories about the fight is an episode that precedes the majority of fights: cutting weight. To anyone unlucky enough to be forced to bear witness to such a disheartening debacle, I have no sympathy for you! for I am forced, in a far more coercive and much less forgiving manner, to have to cut weight myself. This may be the more literarily Romantic side of me speaking, but it is within the calescent recesses of the wood and sweltering stone sauna that the most palpable and permeating sense of camaraderie is found. Cutting weight with my team mates and friends... well, suffice it to say that I would most certainly not have made the weight if a very select few of the constituents of the amateur MMA community were not sharing in my execrable plight. Lending to the efficacy of the camaraderie was, in no miniscule portion, the fact that those who were likewise partaking of my detestable fortune could be found by my side, who were extinguishing their eccrine glands without cessation. The very unfavorable truth is that cutting weight is horrible. The thought and process have become pure anathema to me, the odium of all things on this Earth that promote happiness. I, even with all of my verbal faculties, have the most unimaginably difficult time articulating the feeling in English. I suppose the idea of a person's vitality draining away is applicable, but until a person has felt that, such a stolid definition has next to no real meaning. I think we all understand heat, but in the sauna, that is where we become quite mindful of its potential, quite cognizant of its effects. I went through a particularly lengthy process this time around, and I am by no reasonable means a master at cutting weight: I never wrestled in high school, and the only other time I attempted such an unwise thing was for my last fight. As it is, though, I must admit how grateful I am that Tony, Lucas, and Adrien were there with me, through two gyms and fifty some miles between saunas, to the interminable wait for the scale to appear at weigh-ins, and the fifty feet to the water fountain that felt most oddly like fifty miles. I think the fact that we suffer together, even with something as trivial as cutting weight, is precisely what made our celebration of our clean sweep so much more mellifluous. Cutting weight is not the only suffering, of course, but the classes, the pressing cardio, the nicks and bruises that we often induce on each other, and the small victories we share both in becoming something better than we were previously and watching each other advance every day... I think this is really what makes us a team. I do not consider the records we have and the publicity we might receive even an inkling of the proper representation of who we are: all of that is plainly evident by watching us train together, and the amount of respect we have for each other. And, with this atmosphere, it is quite difficult to conceive that our records should be anything different: we win because the ring or cage is small time compared to who we are, it is just a minor part of what we do. Our true battles are won long before we ever step into there, and I know that I have nothing but love, respect, and a sense of unity for and with my team at MMAI Charlottesville, and the MMA community in general.

Besides, what other thoughts should a sane young man be experiencing in the inferno, as febrile delirium slowly overtakes his mind? Nothing else, of course. Saunas are quite conducive to clarity.

-Jake