Ultimate fighting literature

“Human cockfighting,” Senator John McCain called it in 1998. “Undignified,” complained boxing champion Barry McGuigan. Never mind that UFC competitors are among the most versatile and highly conditioned athletes on the planet. Or that the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) as regulated by the UFC is safer, blow-for-blow, than boxing. No, these men are the new damnatii, and we are the new Rome. Let the Goths shake our gates! We deserve it, don’t we?

Well, hold your horses. Barbarism has many forms, and one of them might be a refusal to appreciate the aesthetic properties of the UFC. Not only is a good MMA bout well worth your time, but the fighters themselves are a fascinating archive of human flaws and virtues. I know this because I’ve been reading their memoirs.

Yes, their memoirs. Did you imagine that these fellows can’t write books? Au contraire. The rise of the UFC has created a spinoff literature that is quirky, sentimental, ferocious, and not infrequently poetic. Generically speaking, it sits somewhere between True Crime and sporting reminiscence, and the fighters don’t so much write these books, truth be told, as sort of preside over them - the UFC memoir is typically produced “with” somebody. Each one, however, comes stamped with character. Forrest Griffin’s “Got Fight?: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat” (with Erich Krauss) is the latest, published this month by William Morrow. Griffin, a former light heavyweight champ, has a reputation in the UFC for waggishness, from which his book suffers greatly. That is to say, the jokes are terrible. But he does have some compelling nitty-gritty-type things to share with us. Did you know, for example, that cauliflower ears can be drained? I didn’t.

“Got Fight?” is actually a rather fancy, Generation Y take on the UFC memoir, with lots of numbered lists (“Things Not To Say Before A Professional Fight,” “The Only Pickup Lines You’ll Ever Need”) and an alarmingly postmodern reference, on page 114, to “the actual author of this book, Erich Krauss.” The more traditional model, followed by UFC giants Chuck Liddell in “Iceman” (with Chad Millman) and Randy Couture in “Becoming The Natural” (with Loretta Hunt), is a straight-up knocking-’em-down narrative, a two-fisted, two-footed saga of overcoming. Perhaps the central text is Jens Pulver’s Little Evil (with Erich Krauss), which begins in a brimstone atmosphere of infanticide - “When I was seven years old, my father decided that he no longer wanted children... [So] after lining us up in a little row by the fireplace, he stumbled into the kitchen to fetch his shotgun” - and ends with Pulver triumphant in the octagonal ring, his great rival BJ Penn vanquished, turning to the cameras and saying “BJ Penn wasn’t anything. After getting beat on all my life by my old man, there isn’t anything I can’t handle.”

Pulver has the harshest tale and the sweetest redemption. Along the way he goes up, down, up, down, now focused, now floundering, pausing at one stage to commune with an angelic, non-verbal gymnast named Kelly: “I drank from her tranquility as if from a well...” Such sensitivity is far from rare in UFC memoirs. Ten-year-old Randy Couture - one day to be a five-time heavyweight and light heavyweight UFC champion - goes hunting with his dad and almost walks into the jaws of a black bear. Later, he sees the same bear, dead by a hunter’s gun. “It was the first wild animal I’d ever been close to. I reached out and touched its dense, soft coat, remembering the power it had exuded only a few hours earlier.” And from “This Is Gonna Hurt” by Tito Ortiz (with Marc Shapiro) we learn that the Huntington Beach Bad Boy, the infamous thick-necked noisemaker, the closest thing the UFC has had to a professional “heel,” sheds tears before he fights. “But that was just the fear leaving me.”

Crucial to the morphology of the UFC memoir is the figure of the absent, incompetent, or abusive father. Pulver Sr. was, as described, a menace. Randy Couture’s father took off when he was 3: “Clinging to his pants leg, my small frame couldn’t muster the strength to stop him.” By the time Tito Ortiz was 7, his parents were both heroin addicts. Chuck Liddell’s father is referred to in “Iceman” as “my sperm donor,” although the UFC’s most notorious power-puncher pooh-poohs the obvious psychology: “I’m not holding in any ‘Where’s Daddy?’ demons,” he writes. “I never step into the cage angry, trying to turn my opponent into my long-lost father. You can’t win if you can’t control your emotions.” And the Iceman is a winner, no doubt about that, blank-faced and supremely violent, born to fight as some men are born to go fishing: landing a knockout blow, he writes, is like “breaking through a piece of paper... It just gives. You can feel it in your legs, your waist, your torso and your arms.”

So where did that come from? With Liddell’s book, as with all UFC memoirs, you turn back avidly as you read, again and again, to the photos. To the shots of the fighter as a boy, in a yard somewhere or at a table, grinning or posing or childish-pugnacious. And then to the image of the grown man in the Octagon, warrior-solemn and nearly naked, brow down for combat. Between the child and the man - what? An itch, a mystery. It’s why people write books.

James Parker writes regularly for Ideas and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.