What kind of man decides to fight for his life in a cage?

A few days ago I was sitting there with Instagram open on my phone, as you do when you procrastinate and hate yourself for it, and the algorithm served me something that it knew I was interested in. I hate it when the algorithm is right – yes, I want to watch the old Barry Sanders highlights and Razor Ramon promos, and I hate that the computer knows, but even before it hates me.

What I saw was a view of Jordan Leavitt sitting in his car as a UFC fighter, talking about the question of whether or not MMA should destroy people’s lives.

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A friend, he says, recently argued, and pointed out those fighters, whose life seems to be falling apart after retirement.

“I’ve been thinking a little bit, a few hours, and I want to push the narrative a little bit,” Leavitt said in the video. “Because chances are, if you’re going to go all in on martial arts, your life is already broken.”

It was safe to say that my attention was right. Over the course of 20 years in this sport, I’ve gotten to know a lot of fighters from all different types of backgrounds, but I’ve often wondered what the common denominator is. What kind of man ends up in this world? What must be done in their heads to choose the cage fighting as a calling?

So I called Leavitt to follow up with some questions about his teaching. He is an interesting guy “Monkey King.” (I have used a hundred if not a thousand fighters at this point, and Karl Marx is the first to ever quote me.)

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Looking at his path, he explained, he doesn’t think he’s seriously broke, knowing people in pursuit of an MMA career. They are looking for more than the fact that martial arts and fighting games are the best to provide, and they are mistaken in this success for a career that fixes everything about them.

“In combat sports, you’ve got people training themselves through martial arts,” Leavitt told me. “It helps them find a purpose and it helps them find direction. You can see progress every day. You feel like you’re getting better.

“And while you’re doing this, don’t think about anything else.”

This, Leavitt said, is why he thinks people with histories of trauma and abuse are drawn to combat sports. For the use of military arts is immediate. Cause and effect — if you lose focus, you’re immediately punched in the face or choked — so visceral and urgent that any other thoughts or feelings can be driven out, at least temporarily.

But the inherent violence, and the intensity of those emotions, can also be seen as if the demons were somehow exorcising him. As a result, as he said in his video, so many “men who grew up wanting to hit themselves and couldn’t” and “women who were abused and found power” learn that they are the perpetrators of violence rather than its targets. (This happens to be an almost verbatim description of what two-time UFC champion Rose Namajunas said was the first thing that drew her to MMA).

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In short, Leavitt suspects that fighting attracts “broken people.” The battle becomes like a wall machine. We often hear of fighters who replace their drug addiction with an obsessive devotion to MMA training. Incredulous Leavitt who replaced one addiction with another true solution, he said, “but I feel like often in life, putting a Band-Aid on something that is the best can do a lot for us.”

Talk to a few fighters and you’ll find that there’s a lot of metaphors for drug addiction. I remember former WEC and UFC fighter Danny Downes once telling me that, even when he was an active professional, he thought of his MMA career as being like a drug addiction. Exhilarating at times and terrifying at others. He loved her, but he knew he would eventually hurt her. He scratched a special itch, even if he always knew that he would have to leave the road at some point.

One guy who experienced both drug addiction and MMA fame is retired welterweight Matthew Brown, owner of the second most knockouts in UFC history. As he noted on social media recently, whenever someone asks him for advice on entering the MMA career, the advice is simple: Don’t.

It is not that anyone is trying to suppress dreams, he said. That is to say that anyone who believes that they can be easily dissuaded – someone who is not absolutely obsessed with action – is not in the game to begin with.

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“If you only look at the job, from a financial perspective, it doesn’t make you a fighter at all,” Brown told me. “I could have done almost any other job and, in the same amount of time, I probably would have made more money and been better off. But would I have lived the lifestyle that I lived? Would I have had the experiences that I had, or f***ed the girls that I f***ed, or could I brag to my friends that I was a UFC fighter and that I got respect? No, and this is addictive.

Brown also suspects that, with a few notable exceptions, combat sports tend to attract a different type of athlete. Those people who are gifted enough to excel in sports like football or basketball or baseball, their talents are usually discovered early and refined through structured programs like school or club programs. There is a support system built into those worlds. There is a flat road to follow and guardrails to keep you on that road, at least to a point.

Fighting, on the other hand, is something more like a troubled youth finding their way through a series of anti-social behaviors. Turning into a paying gig, Brown said, is usually the only challenge for those who have a little money to start with and aren’t averse to shedding blood to get a little more.

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“I think a lot of people are coming into this plan, and it’s certainly not going to be a long-term plan,” Brown said. “There’s a certain type of people out there. They don’t think five years down the road, and neither did I when I got into this.”

But entering this work is another matter. Going out is another matter.

Do something because of them. Either no one pays them to fight anymore or their bodies just aren’t up to it. Most people arrive at the plan through some kind of risk-versus-reward calculation, when they compare the success of the payoff offers, all are weighed against their desire to keep getting in the head.

That was when Brown was going through a rough patch, he said, especially when he felt his desire to start competing was waning as he neared his 40s.

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“That’s another thing about the whole thing, is at the end of your life, that’s when you start making more money,” Brown said. “You’ve been around for a while, people know you, your salary has been steadily going up. Justin Gaethje is at a point now where, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but it looks like he’s ready to give up. But he’s also the most valuable he’s ever been in his life.”

But what about those who show themselves as broken people, then spend a decade or two turning frustration and fear and trauma and fighting for money into a business? What happens to them when they finally get out of the game? Are they better from experience?

This is where it gets really tricky, and for a few different reasons. For one thing, it is required that certain things be taken from the road not taken. We would think that 15 years for MMA would be a number for someone, but how do we know that they were not after 15 years of someone else’s worse, completely different life? Obsessive exercise can break down the body. Therefore, the total neglect of the body is possible.

For another thing, there are those who will tell you that they took something of value from this, even if they did not know that they were looking for it.

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I remember women’s MMA pioneer Julie Kedzie saying that she knew it was time to retire once she felt like she was working through her issues during a fight. She was better mentally and emotionally, but with that came a cooling of the inner fire that had fueled her as a fighter. Sometimes he felt, he said, as if doing well as a man and doing well as a fighter were at odds with each other. As if this game was not made for well-tempered people.

Then again, as Leavitt notes, there isn’t a clear distinction between broken and continued, either in games or in combat. Maybe MMA can help some people with trauma elsewhere, and maybe it just distracts them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse than those who sit in bed while they’re in the gym.

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“I think that if you take the average person on the street, they have their own stuff when they’re dealing,” Leavitt said. “Are strong people broken? Maybe, but so are a lot of people. Fighters are sometimes seen more, but I don’t know if that is pervasive. … I think we all sell our bodies and our time and our efforts to survive.

“I think about what people say about pain fighters,” Leavitt continued. “We all understand that there is pain that is between you and good. A fight is a metaphor for life in that sense. You have to suffer that this is good, and if you win, it is not a fun experience. You just look at it to wish it. There is something about it that is innate to understand. But because a large part of people are in it, the fight is the world that you go through.”

A version of yourself emerges from the other side that is more important than the mixture of hurt and emotional obsessions that brought it up in the first place.