Book Reports

Just finished reading the Matt Hughes book, Made in America. If his contributor has any writing chops, they certainly didn’t shine through on this gig. My interest in MMA and my desire to find out if Hughes is really the guy he comes across as on TV/in interviews is really who he is (yes, he appears to be exactly the kind of guy you think he is—beating the shit out of people for fun in high school, becoming monstrously strong on the farm, a total hardass with an admirable work ethic). Now I’m reading ‘Iceman,’ one of the other MMA autobio’s rushed to market in the wake of the rise of The Ultimate Fighter.

 

It’s ghosted by some ESPN the magazine guy who obviously spent about two months writing it. Reads like really shitty, exaggerated magazine writing, big on adjectives, over the top analogies, etc. Reading the intro, I can see that it was ripped from his book proposal as it’s exactly the kind of cartoonish crap that nonfiction book editors think America wants to read. I don’t think even dumb people will appreciate this book, which is really a shame because Chuck Lidell is quite an interesting guy and while I don’t think he’s the Mike Tyson of MMA as Dana White often claims (come on, Tyson was head and shoulders above EVERYONE from the time he was 19. He was a vicious animal clearly suited to one purpose in life: beating the living shit out of anyone who stood in his way on the ring or in the street. Lidell is a badass, but Tyson is a breed apart. Like everyone else in the world, I find little to admire in Tyson’s behavior outside the ring, but he’s indisputably one of the greatest athletes of the modern era).

 

Also reading the Sam Sheridan book, A Fighter’s Heart, the one excerpted extensively in Men’s Journal over the past few years. Unfortunately, it’s a book about a Yardale guy in search of an identity more than it’s a book about fighting. Which also makes it suck. Once I got to the part where he guided his parents’ friends’ yacht for a year after he graduated Harvard, I was pretty much ready to quit reading, and that was on page 4 or so. Wish I’d bought a remaindered copy.

 

Drill it,

 

Vontz