DCMMA recently spoke to author/fighter Sam Sheridan about his experiences traveling the world to find out what it truly means to be a fighter for his book A Fighter's Heart: One Mans Journey Through the World of Fighting. This is part one of that conversation.  Part two will be coming soon.               

Sam Sheridan:  So what’s the plan, man?  You going to record this for broadcast or what’s the idea?

DCMMA:  I’m actually recording this and I’m also, obviously, going to transcribe everything, too so…

SS:  Okay cool, perfect!  So I’ll be on my best behavior.

DC:  Cool, well, hey actually don’t!   Just be yourself.  Alright, Sam, let me start off by saying that Jon Stewart didn’t let you talk at all.  Pissed me off a little bit.

SS:  Yeah, it was pretty annoying.  I can’t give him a hard time, it was an interesting experience going on that show. I actually think dealing with the main stream media was kind of like an interesting facet of the book which I should probably write something about. Just the inability of the main stream media like ESPN and Sports Illustrated and all the, you know, all these sort of major outlets to even sort of begin to know what its all about. When I first talked to the Jon Stewart Show they called me up, I did a pre-interview with this woman and I spent, honestly I spent like a half an hour trying to explain to her the difference between UFC and MMA.  You’re just like, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be disastrous, this interview.’ So I was actually happy with how it went because you know he put the book up and sold some copies and he seems like a nice guy and… but I don’t know if he really read it.

DC:  No, I doubt it, because the whole time I’m looking at this thing, I’m like, “Are they ever going to let Sam talk or what?” Or is Jon…

SS:  Yeah, I actually doubt it too. I think he watched, I sent him that National Geographic documentary about Muay Thai and that’s what he had just watched. So, all he asked me about was living in Thailand and the ants getting on you and stuff like that.

DC:  Right. Well you know I read the book. I promise you and I want to ask you a few things about the book. First of all, can you explain the relationship between love and combat and how that makes a fighter great?

SS:  Well, yeah, I mean there is a… it’s a tough one, it’s an interesting question. There is this direct relationship that I came across in this book by Conrad Lorenz about aggression where he was studying geese and he noticed that geese would… you know geese are extremely aggressive, but when they mated their aggressive behavior became this thing called trumpeting behavior which was something different, so he was putting out this idea that when you have a very aggressive species, um the more aggressive it is, the more it needs to have an evolutionary lock or turn when it mates. Otherwise it won’t live with its mate it won’t take care of its young and it won’t survive and that’s what he was calling love is that turn. So, like, the more aggressive you are, the more love comes out of you when you do change from aggression to a different emotion. So that was fascinating to me, that aggression and love would be linked so directly like that. And I think as a fighter, I mean, it was most obvious in the dogs when I looked at the dogs and one of the reasons I wanted to watch the dogs, because it was a way to get some distance on the subject and not be clouded by watching men fight and thinking of all the things that men think about and watching something a little bit simpler. And really, what I saw with the dogs was that when a dog really had a lot of love for its handler it would do a lot more, it would fight a lot harder, it would get up off the ground and get out from underneath another dog and the handler could really bring his dog through to victory. But if the dog didn’t have that sort of relationship with its handler it wouldn’t fight that hard. It wouldn’t give a damn, you know what I mean? So I think love for a fighter is hugely, hugely important. It goes to heart and it goes to will and you know, you see it again and again with guys. One guy decides he just doesn’t want to lose, he can’t lose this fight and another guy will not have the ability… the intestinal fortitude to make that decision. And its because the one guy has love in his life for something, whether its his teammates or his family that he’s fighting for or just something that’s giving him the strength to really… you can really will yourself to victory. I mean, not always, but in a close fight it can make the difference for sure. So there’s nothing more important.

DC:  So has that worked for you in a fight?

SS:  I haven’t fought in a while, but the one fight that got stopped on cuts, I don’t know if I would have lost that fight if we had been outside. You know, if we kept going. I wasn’t stopping, there was nothing in me that was going to stop and the guy really wasn’t going to put me out. But you know…who knows? I haven’t had an opportunity for it.

DC:  Well, now that we got a handle on love and how that works for a fighter, explain now getting respect or ‘clout’ as you called it in the book?

SS:  Yeah, you know, that the line on why boxers box. It’s not about money; it’s not about this and that. It’s all about respect. Yeah, I think it’s something that’s true to all people, not just fighters. People do things for respect more than any other reason. Why do you make money? Why do you chase pretty girls? Is it because you like pretty girls or is it because people give you tons of respect when you have a pretty girl on your arm? You know what I mean, there’s a lot of that in every decision that gets made and in every behavior of people. So fighters, I think, especially professionals are guys who love to fight. You can’t take that away from them and the reason that they fight in the street and in other places before they get into professional fighting is something you see again and again. A lot of it has to do with they haven’t been respected by usually their father or somebody like that. They haven’t felt that they’ve gotten what they deserved, so they’re going to make you respect them and I think as you become a professional fighter and it gets bigger and all of a sudden now you’re on a stage in front of 200 people or 500 people or 10,000 people and now it’s a way you can make people respect you and it’s a way to be loved. This is something that I didn’t put in the book, which came to me later while I was working on some other things. I think a lot of young fighters, you know, where they come from, is they never felt loved, never felt like anybody ever respected or loved them and now they found a way to make people love them. “You can’t help but love me now, because I just won this fight.” Yeah, respect is everything. I’m reading up about prisoners now and everything that anyone ever does in prison is for respect. There is a lot of similarities.

Don’t lose your shirt, the next installment of An Interview with A Fighter’s Heart author, Sam Sheridan is coming soon!

You can find out more about Sam and his work on his MySpace page as well as order the book through Amazon here.