Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  If I have seen further than others it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

  —ISAAC NEWTON

  Frank, my God, put that enormous thing away or you are going to trip Tony when he comes in here, and then we’ll all catch an earful. I can hear it now: ‘Who let Frank unwrap his cock without hazard signs?’ ”

  Frank Wilson, number 37 for the Pittsburgh Steelers, a tight end who was a draft pick from Rice University, was in the locker rooms after training, sitting on the edge of a three-foot-tall stool, naked. His massive frame pitched forward as his elbows rested on his knees, he was using his towel to blot his face and shoulders. Frank sported great promise: he had incredible athleticism, good looks, and charm that only came with the Southern players. His physique was something that nine-year-old me used to be absolutely baffled by. Huge, muscled, not a bubble of fat. If repeat injuries hadn’t been his curse, Frank could have been great. Frank was funny; he loved to laugh. Always making jokes. And Frank had the biggest cock I have ever seen, and will ever see, in my natural born life.

  “Seriously, Frank, goddamn. What are you trying to prove? This guy, before he beds down a chick he probably has to call 911!”

  Loren Toews, number 51, a scientifically minded genius from Berkeley who at this time was a linebacker for the Steelers, was visibly flinching at the image of Frank’s penis dangling off the edge of that three-foot stool and brushing against the floor. The room erupted again into laughter as Frank gripped his enormous member and began swinging it around like a lasso. I was standing in the corner of the locker room, laughing hysterically. I owed moments like these, and many others I would share over the years with the Steelers, mostly to my godfather, Tony Parisi, a former professional hockey player who, when the Pittsburgh Hornets folded, retired and took a job as the equipment manager for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Tony and my father used to get together and talk sports, and “Moose” had decided that between the boxing lessons I received, I needed to be around more real men. Tony had then volunteered to take me on as a ball boy when I got old enough. It would later become my first real job at the age of fifteen, but the paycheck would be the only difference. Starting from when I was about four or five, I spent nearly every summer around these men, hanging in their dorm rooms, where they would read me stories; on the field, where sometimes I got lucky enough to have them teach me how to throw, catch, punt, or buttonhook; and inside these locker rooms, listening to their dirty jokes, watching them rib one another for various things, and doing any and every small odd job I could just to try to absorb more of whatever they seemed to have. I learned different things from each of them, attributes I wanted. Frank made me want to look better physically, and he made me wonder when puberty was going to hit. He also was about to smack a sixteen-year-old, awkward, redheaded Mike Rooney directly in the thigh with a penis so large they used to have to gauze it to his leg just so he could play football.

  Mike came wandering in to start cleaning up, picking up the dirty clothes to run laundry, collecting cleats to start brushing them clean, any number of jobs we had as ball boys, when Frank smacked him directly on the leg. Mike Rooney jumped as though he had been hit by a Louisville slugger jammed full of rusty nails. Upon absorbing the full reality of what had just happened to him, and how many were there to witness it, Mike contorted his face and body up into some odd tribal-looking dry heave and shrieked like a four-year-old girl. The room thundered with laughter.

  Frank pulled his towel up and smacked Mike on the back. “I’m sorry, little man, I’m so sorry,” he said, gripping the towel with one hand and wiping tears away with the other.

  Mike, thrilled to be included in a joke with these men, even if he was the butt of it, grinned through a rashy-looking blush and began grabbing up piles of damp, sweaty clothes. He tossed a jersey at me, and the wet cloth of Jack Lambert’s number 58 smacked me right in the chest. As I fumbled to keep it from hitting the ground again, Jack slapped a massive hand onto my shoulder and grinned a wide grin (his dentures in place, as he was off the field), saying, “Thanks, kid.”

  Mel Blount, number 47, a kind-faced cornerback from Georgia whom I looked up to and who grew to be something of a distant uncle in my eyes, walked his jersey to me and placed it neatly in my hands, smiling, and thanked me. Jack Ham, number 59; “Mean” Joe Greene (who hated being called mean actually), number 75; and on and on . . . Titan after demigod stacked their “hero capes” into my hands. This was almost an everyday occurrence in the summers. One of my first summers with the Steelers, I had jokingly called Lynn Swann “Swannie” after hearing another player toss the nickname out. Lynn had gotten two inches from my then four-or-five-year-old face and growled at me, “Don’t you ever, ever call me that.” I trembled until I felt an enormous arm cross over my chest and number 34, Andy Russell, a fearsome linebacker, leaned in to mirror Lynn’s posture and snarled, “Back off, Swannie, he’s just a kid.” I let myself softly close one hand around Andy’s jersey hem, gently running the fabric between my thumb and forefinger, and felt vindicated when Lynn Swann stormed off. It was like having the Incredible Hulk standing behind me. I returned every summer after that even though I didn’t start getting paid for helping out for another ten years.

  I pushed the laundry to the washers in giant bins, where we would then separate all of it neatly. Jockstraps, T-shirts, and sanitary shorts went into small string bags to be washed separately. The players didn’t always take their pads out of their practice pants (knee pads, quad pads) even though they were supposed to, so we would have to peel them out. Pants got washed separately. Jerseys were the third pile and got washed on their own. This was my favorite washer to load up as I could count out the numbers, and I knew every single player who went along with the numbers. From roughly 1980 to 1990, I was a part of this ritual.

  The shoes were set aside, as all dirt collected in them would need to be brushed out carefully. The pads were stacked on top of the lockers (I used to think dirty pads were the foulest things in the world until I smelled dirty hand wraps getting repeatedly used). Mike and I pulled bits of tape off the players’ uniforms and carefully cleaned every bit of them. We finished brushing field dirt from the shoes, and when the laundry was finished we folded, hung, and gathered up the complete uniforms and placed them in the players’ lockers. On this particular day I made my way back to the players’ dorms. I went to Mel’s room, dodging wads of paper tape being lobbed at me by Jack, and wandered in. Donnie Shell, number 31, was leaning against the table. Mel shifted his feet up onto his bed and said, “Grab a seat, Mark.” I smoothed a bit of the bedspread out and sat down. Donnie and Mel were talking about music. So I sat and listened. After a while of hearing them rattle off names, I decided to chime in.

  “Hey, do you guys like Jimi Hendrix?” I asked brightly. I was so sure I had just suggested a name that would win me accolades with these two men just because I knew it. I knew the name of a major black rock musician, and I was positive that they would be absolutely blown away. I was wrong.

  Mel shifted to his side and raised his eyebrows at me quickly, his face a mixture of surprise and offense, as though he had just witnessed a person de-pants the queen of England. Donnie smiled and just started shaking his head, saying, “Oh no, Mel, oh, you gotta tell him, Mel.”

  Mel patted my knee and said, “Son, we listen to Motown. You know Motown?”

  I smiled. I knew it from the boxing gym. “I know Motown. They play it in my boxing gym.”

  An expression I had never seen before passed over Mel’s face. Mel was impressed. “Are you boxing on the side, Mark? That’s a tough sport. Heck, that sport is too tough for me! You’re a brave man, Mark!”

  I went so hot all over with pride I felt like my skin might blister.

  After a few minutes Mel reached over and slapped me on the back, saying, “Aw, kid, you are all right. The little Moose is all right.”

  These were my summers. Between working with the players I would jam training in. I started Tang Soo Do when
I turned ten. My first martial arts training. I would come to practice and some of the players would ask me how my “karate lessons” were going. I didn’t even care that they got the name of the art wrong, I was just happy they were asking. Some would ask me to “show [them] some moves.” I would jokingly show a few things off and then resume work.

  When I was around fifteen I was at the field after a training session with the Steelers, talking to the grounds crew, when a few men from the Chicago Cubs started coming onto the field for batting practice. Carmine from the grounds crew shouted out to Billy Williams, “Hey, Billy! You know this kid here, he’s been playing ball since he was probably born! You should give him a lesson or two!”

  Billy Williams, the batting coach for the Chicago Cubs, turned his head toward me and flashed a smile. “Is that right?”

  I nodded a little too quickly. “Yessir. I’ve been playing since I was six years old!”

  Billy looked around and motioned for me to come onto the field. I stood and started toward him, Billy’s stats swimming in my head. I stepped backward to avoid Shawon Dunston, who was running laps. Andre Dawson stood a few feet away, a player who later that same year would be named National League MVP; his stats were ridiculous. I approached Billy and muttered, “Is that Andre Dawson? Oh my God, he had forty-nine home runs and a hundred and thirty-seven RBIs! He’s one of the best!”

  Billy grinned wide. “Oh yeah? You a fan? Well, hang on just a minute. . . . Hey, Andre!” Andre trotted over, and I froze. “Hey, Andre, this young man here is Mark Miller, and he is a big fan of yours. You want to stick around a minute? Seems that young Mr. Miller here is a baseball player himself, and I’m thinking maybe we could show him a thing or two about a thing or two. What do you say?”

  Andre grinned, handed me a bat, and said, “You know how to hit, kid?”

  I spent the afternoon in the middle of a lesson with Billy Williams and Andre Dawson coaching me. Hours went by. When they finally left the field I thanked them both, and Andre told me, “Keep that arm in good shape, kid, you got a real good arm. . . .”

  All throughout high school I played football, basketball, and baseball. I wrestled (because I’m from Pennsylvania and you kind of have to) and I also ran cross-country. I also continued to box and study Tang Soo Do. Sometimes in the gym a few of the guys who were entrenched in the fight scene would play around with something new called kickboxing.

  The summer of 1990 I was working with John Fox, who was the Steelers’ defensive back coach. By this time I had gained my own reputation with some of the players. Over ten years of working with these guys, hearing their bullshit, taking their nonsense and giving it back, I had started being known as something other than “little Moose.” I was creeping out from under my father’s backbreaking shadow with these guys. They knew me as a hard-assed seventeen-year-old, an athlete who favored combat sports. Most of them loved me for it. A few just weren’t prepared to deal with a youngster who would “give back.” Greg Lloyd was a linebacker then. It crept around the field that Greg had started training in Tae Kwon Do and was telling everyone who would give him two seconds of ear how tough he was. One day in the locker room, Greg started in on me. I was around six feet one inch tall and maybe one hundred sixty pounds dripping wet. A beanpole, all angles and piss and vinegar. I turned and looked at Greg, and in my clearest, most overenunciated voice, the best impression of my father I could muster, I said, “Well, Greg, why don’t you tell me where you train and I’ll come there. I’ll be happy to kick your ass any day of the week.”

  The whole locker room went quiet for about thirty seconds before one by one the guys burst out laughing. Greg sputtered out a gym name and told me he was inviting me personally, trying to gloss over my underplayed venom with patronizing class. I tried to schedule with him multiple times and strangely, Greg was never available. Something about him creased me so hard, and I could never put my finger on it. He was a sideline bully, a tourist when it came to the actual art of kicking ass. He struck me as the guy who got off on pushing around people who he didn’t think would fight back. I had a real problem with that sort of person.

  I received a letter from the University of Pittsburgh asking me to come play baseball for them. I was offered a scholarship based on my athletic ability in baseball. They recruited me as a pitcher. My first semester was golden. But after just one semester my “good” arm was shot, and I had been pulled in another direction. By then I was training to fight full-time. I didn’t want to be a professional baseball player. I didn’t want to hear my father brag to his friends about how he had prepped me to become this. I wanted to be bigger than that, bigger than him. I didn’t want teammates. I wanted the onus to fall directly on my shoulders as to whether I would succeed or fail every time I stepped up to compete. As a fighter, when competition time comes, all you have is yourself. Within one year I was kickboxing full-time.

  In 2001 I heard somewhere that Greg Lloyd had shoved a gun into the mouth of his own young son because the kid, who was just twelve years old then, had apparently gotten bad grades. I was glad I had stepped to him once I heard that, even if he had been too much of a pussy to face me.

  chapter three

  Kickboxing. You ever heard of kickboxing, sport of the future?

  —JOHN CUSACK IN THE FILM SAY ANYTHING

  For as long as I can remember, sports have been interwoven into the fabric of my life, which might seem strange to some, considering I was gifted with not one but two conditions that could have made being an athlete relatively difficult. My father had played professional basketball, my godfather had played professional hockey, and I had grown up around one of the strongest teams in football during their strongest time. This sort of determined that these were the sports I would not be pursuing. I felt like because people close to me had done it, it wasn’t new, and certainly if I pursued any of those it would ensure that I would be burdened with opinions and pressure from the get-go. I played basketball and football in high school and a little in college but never took it seriously. What was left then? Combat sports and baseball. My options couldn’t have been more polarized. A team sport that relies heavily on the team, and a sport/grouping of sports that offer nothing in the way of diffused responsibility to the person involved. Be a team player, or be alone. Ultimately, I chose to be alone.

  As I said before, I started in boxing. My first training was in boxing; my first memories of any combat sport are of boxing matches. I began training in Tang Soo Do early on, alongside my boxing. I was attracted to martial arts because, as a child of the seventies, I grew up watching Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris, and I wanted to be like them. Then one day as I was watching ESPN, something new came on. Professional Karate Association (PKA) was the organization, and these guys were boxing, but they were throwing kicks too. . . . It looked like ballet and boxing combined. It was the craziest shit I had ever seen, and I was hooked. I started hearing about fights overseas in kickboxing, and I started doing what I could to get my hands on the tapes of those shows. I sought out training in this particular art, and once I found it . . . it was like falling in love.

  Boxing is technical, make no mistake. No boxer worth his salt ever rose to fame on being a “brawler.” Somewhere in every known boxer, a technician resides, a thinking man. It’s a strange concept to understand, as here is a person playing a chess match, while getting punched in the face. Repeatedly. You have to think about defense and offense, and the punishment of forgetting one or the other is pain. It’s so simple. In boxing you have 50 percent of your body that is going to take damage, that is going to get hurt. But in kickboxing . . . In kickboxing you are a target from the tips of your toes to the top of your head.

  I remember watching Dennis Alexio fighting Stan Longinidis in an ISKA (International Sport Karate Association) kickboxing fight. Stan came out of the corner and threw a low kick, which Dennis checked, somewhat halfheartedly it seemed. (The thing to know here is that when a kickboxer “checks,” or blocks, a kick, they do it by m
eeting the thrower’s shinbone with their own shin. The idea is that if you take the coming impact and stop it with the flat part of your shin, it will hurt the person throwing the kick more than it will hurt you, and hopefully they will stop throwing them. The key is, the form of the check has to be proper, otherwise . . . well . . .) A few punches were thrown, then they separated. Stan then backed up, and Dennis stepped out to set up his own kick. When he stepped out onto his left leg, his leg folded like a napkin in a strong wind, as though he had a second knee located right in the middle of his shin. Dennis, who was wearing what looked like a grass skirt (because he’s Hawaiian), toppled to the ground in incredible pain.

  In boxing, the damage is cumulative, slow, and hard to see. Even brutal KOs hardly ever leave a fighter with egregious and immediately visible damage once they are awake. I’m not trying to take anything away from boxing here. I love boxing and good boxers are amazing, but I wanted to be able to put my opponent’s entire body at risk. I wanted to dig my shinbone into the meat of a thigh, or a body, or a neck. I wanted to know how to prevent that from coming. As Maurice Smith says now, “The difference between kickboxing and other sports is, kickboxing always hurts.” The very thing that would terrify so many, turn them away from the sport, is what drew me to it. It was savage and beautiful.

  I trained locally for many years while still doing other sports, other martial arts, and while still boxing. It was hard to find my way in kickboxing right away given the lack of information and/or training gyms at that time. I tried the best I could to educate myself about certain fighters, fighters I wanted to aim to be like. Rick Roufus, Maurice Smith, Rob Kaman, and Pete “Sugarfoot” Cunningham were my idols. I watched every fight that I could find. I marveled at Rick’s side kicks, Rob’s low kicks, Maurice’s calm inside the ring, Pete’s speed. I watched these men crumple other men bigger than them with chopping kicks to their thighs, powerful punches, swirling kicks to the face.