Boxing Was Never the Hard Part
There’s something I hear fighters say all the time.
“Boxing is the loneliest sport in the world.”
“The fight game is the hardest life you can choose.”
And whenever I hear it, part of me understands exactly what they mean.
But another part of me thinks:
Is it, though?
Because boxing never felt like the hardest thing in the world to me.
In a strange way, it felt like the easiest.
Don’t misunderstand me. Boxing is physically brutal. Training camps are hard. Getting up to run when you’re exhausted is hard. Sparring is hard. Making weight is hard. Fighting another trained man who is trying to knock you unconscious is obviously hard.
But there’s another kind of difficulty that we don’t talk about enough.
The difficulty of doing something you don’t naturally want to do.
And that’s where I think fighters sometimes give themselves too much credit.
When I was boxing, I could train for hours every day. I could hit the bag, spar, run, drill combinations and come back the next day wanting to do it all again.
People might look at that and think:
“What incredible discipline.”
But was it really discipline?
I was obsessed.
I loved boxing.
You almost had to stop me from doing it.
Put me in a boxing gym for six hours and I was in my element.
Put me in an office for six hours answering emails, working through spreadsheets, filling in tax forms and dealing with paperwork?
Now you’re going to find out how mentally tough I really am.
That shit is hard.
And I mean that seriously.
I look at someone who gets up every morning, travels to an office, sits at a desk and concentrates on something they might not even particularly enjoy for eight hours, five days a week, year after year, and I think:
How do you do that?
Where does that discipline come from?
Because I’d rather have somebody punching me in the face.
And I think there’s something important in that.
We often admire people for being able to endure the things they were almost made to endure.
The fighter fights.
The artist creates.
The musician plays.
The entrepreneur builds.
And from the outside, their obsession can look like extraordinary discipline.
Sometimes it is.
But sometimes they’ve simply found the environment in which their particular mind makes sense.
That’s what boxing was for me.
It wasn’t somewhere I had to force myself to go.
It was somewhere I wanted to be.
There’s a strange simplicity to fighting.
When the bell rings, life becomes incredibly uncomplicated.
There are no emails.
No bills.
No forms.
No pretending.
No worrying about next month.
There is just you, another human being and the problem immediately in front of you.
Hit.
Don’t get hit.
Keep going.
And for certain types of people, there is an incredible peace in that simplicity.
That’s why I sometimes smile when fighters describe themselves as almost superhuman because they chose such a hard life.
Yes, fighters deserve respect.
But so does everybody else.
Because the things I find easy, somebody else might find terrifying.
And the things they do without thinking might require enormous effort from me.
Maybe resilience isn’t simply about how much suffering you can tolerate.
Maybe it’s about how much resistance there is between your nature and the thing you’re asking yourself to do.
I know how to fight.
I’ve understood that world for most of my life.
What impresses me is watching people who can thrive in worlds where I would struggle.
So when people ask what it takes mentally to be a fighter, maybe the answer isn’t always what they expect.
Yes, you need courage.
Yes, you need toughness.
Yes, you need resilience.
But there’s another ingredient that makes all of those things considerably easier:
You have to fucking love it.
And most real fighters do.
That’s the secret.
We weren’t necessarily suffering through something we hated.
A lot of us were lucky enough to find the one place in the world where being exactly who we were made perfect sense.