‘I still feel like a coward to this day’: A bullied fighter never forgets their first opponent

“Stand up to the bully” is one of the first lessons we’re taught as children and a test for which revision comes afterward rather than before. Stand up to the bully, we’re told, and the bullying stops, just like that. As though a disease, we all believe the damage, if caught early, can be mitigated, yet know the disease itself can only be arrested, not cured, and that only the bully’s presence can be removed, never the impact. The latter sticks around, unfortunately. It clings on. It travels. It breaks as many as it builds.

Like any form of abuse, the experience of being bullied often keeps a person suspended at the age at which the bullying occurred. They still grow up, of course, time ensures that, but they can always be reduced in both size and years by a single comment or suppressed memory. It is then you realize that standing up was a momentary win. It is then you realize the adult body is no more than scaffolding, and that the core infrastructure remains as fragile as it was when first developing and shaken.

As for the ones who couldn’t stand up — that is, the majority — only time, the merciful passing of it, comes to their rescue. Once the physical threat is removed, the bully often continues its work via proxies and circumstances in adulthood. Now the victim sees the bully in overbearing bosses, demanding partners, traffic wardens, tax returns and morning alarms. Now they feel their heart race when asked to speak in public, or when ordering food, or when invited somewhere, or when merely watching two strangers argue. Never again will they see the bully’s face, no, yet neither will they be able to misplace the mementos or escape the memories. It’s just as Fernando Pessoa once wrote: “I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”

The best one can hope for is to control these feelings and keep them at bay. An even better idea is to find a profession like combat sports, in which these feelings are not only confronted on a regular basis but can be expunged in the most emphatic manner possible. There is, after all, no more gratifying way to exorcise one’s demons — bullies or otherwise — than to imagine the demon as a heavy bag, speed ball, punch mitt, or sparring partner. Even better to fight them, even if just a simulacrum, for money and acclaim.

They go by different names in adulthood, and come in different shapes, sizes and colors, but it remains the same shapeshifting entity and threat, one that refuses to either leave or surrender. I know this to be true because some 15 years ago I spent an afternoon in November being introduced by Georges St-Pierre, the then UFC welterweight champion, to people I would never meet whose names I would never know and was left to figure out why. He was in Manchester, England for the week, ahead of UFC 105, and the expectation upon meeting St-Pierre was that he would spend our allotted hour talking about his welterweight rivals, one of whom, Britain’s Dan Hardy, was next in line for a shot at his belt. Instead, he spoke mostly about other people. Nameless people. Faceless people. Nonentities. Bullies.

“One time I was leaving school with my friend Mathieu and we were approached by a group of local delinquents a few years older than the both of us,” said St-Pierre, suddenly back to being 11 years of age. “We were both heading to the bus with a group of friends we knew. These friends were not tough guys or popular kids. They were your typical nerds or geeks. They were clever kids and didn’t like confrontation. While we were waiting for the bus, we spotted the three delinquents nearby and then started to hear a spitting sound. It almost sounded like it was starting to rain. We turned around to face the delinquents and Mathieu raced on ahead. I went after Mathieu and stopped him. I then noticed that there was saliva all over the back of his coat.”

With his worst fears confirmed, St-Pierre watched his friend remove his coat and prepared, on his friend’s behalf, to confront the delinquents in question. Mathieu, however, insisted they forget about it and go home. “Like most of the kids at school,” said St-Pierre, “he was scared of these delinquents and would give them whatever they asked for. I was different and felt we needed to prove a point. Even if we got our asses kicked, at least we would have fought back and showed them they couldn’t get away with this sort of thing.”

In defiance, then, St-Pierre took a stance and stood up to them. “I pretended I forgot something — a pencil case maybe — and then headed back toward school and the delinquents on the wall,” he recalled. “As I went by them, I closed my fist behind my back and clenched it tight. They had no idea what was coming. I hid the fist and smiled. Then, as soon as I got level with them, I raced towards the first bully and hit him square on the jaw. He went down hard and the other two bullies jumped on me.

“I wouldn’t say I won the fight that day. There were too many of them and they were too big. I did win a mental battle, though. I showed those guys that I’d always be the kid willing to fight back. They pretty much left me alone after that. I was too much of an effort for them.”

By the time we met in Manchester, St-Pierre, at 28, had beaten the following fighters in the UFC, several of them already legends: BJ Penn, Jon Fitch, Thiago Alves, Sean Sherk, Matt Serra and Matt Hughes. In these wins, though, he showed no apparent interest that day, preferring to instead remember battles from his time at school, long before he even knew how to properly fight, let alone win fights.

“My mom was in tears when she saw what the bullies had done to me,” said St-Pierre. “She wanted to know what was going on and wanted to know the names of the kids that would be evil enough to do this stuff to me.

“That was bad enough, but my dad” — who, by the way, was a black belt in Kyokushin karate — “went a step further and actually contacted the school and visited the bullies’ homes. It was the right thing to do from a parent’s point of view, but it was incredibly embarrassing for me. You don’t want to be seen telling your parents about school stuff. You don’t want your mom and dad sorting your problems out for you. That brought me a lot of shame.”

It was his father who first introduced St-Pierre to Kyokushin karate at 7 years of age. And yet, whereas some kids may have taken the techniques and confidence from a fighting art and started flexing in school corridors and playgrounds, St-Pierre was never that way inclined. He knew enough to protect himself and others, but he remained at heart a quiet, sensitive and unassuming child.

“Even though I trained karate, sometimes you just face too many bigger guys and have to take a beating,” said St-Pierre. “That happened a lot at school. I would probably be able to beat all the kids one-on-one, but they would gang up on me and would often be much older and bigger. I usually had to fend off three or four guys at any one time.

“Gradually, in time, I persisted and they left me alone.”

In boxing, a similar experience shaped a young Joe Calzaghe, the former world super middleweight and light heavyweight champion. He, like St-Pierre, was a shy, self-effacing boy growing up, and he too can recall incidents of bullying with a clarity even his finest wins in the ring sometimes lack in the retelling.

“I remember looking out of my bedroom window and seeing them coming up the road, into the cul-de-sac of the council estate where we lived,” he said. “There must have been 30 kids on BMX bikes. Most would have had to cycle about five miles but some lived locally and had been friends of mine since I was 3 or 4. I think that hurt the most.

“There was a short kid at the front and he’d come to me earlier at school looking for a fight. I knew I could handle myself but I didn’t want to fight him. There was no reason. So he came to my house and brought the other kids with him.

“My dad, Enzo, went to the door, saw what was going on, and said: ‘Fine, if you’re going to fight, you fight one at a time.’ They scarpered. I found out later that they’d all planned to take me down to the park, jump me and give me a good kicking.”

Calzaghe’s experience with bullying at Oakdale Comprehensive, a secondary school in Wales, lasted the better part of two years. He was during this period called all manner of names, blanked by old friends, and rejected at a time when the goal each day was to fit in, blend in, and essentially hide. By 13, he was, by his own admission, an “introverted wreck” and even later, as a man and a father, he struggled talking about the experience for fear of returning to both that time and the mindset of that scared child.

“Every night I would feel sick just thinking about what classes I had the next day,” he said. “Things that in themselves might seem petty were massively destructive when taken as a whole. It took me to a breaking point. I can understand why kids feel desperate enough to take their own lives. You feel so lonely and isolated. I kept it all to myself and my only release was boxing. I don’t blame my parents for not knowing what was going on. Really, I became two people. At school I just disappeared. I was a scrawny kid, which might have had something to do with it. But at the gym, I could punch the hell out of the bags and feel proud of what I could achieve. The year the bullying started was the year I won my first amateur boxing title. On Saturday I was raising my ABA trophy above my head in Derby Assembly Hall, and the next night I was sick and crying at the thought of going to school the next day.

“I just lived for the hours spent in the gym and in the ring. Boxing kept me alive. It was my salvation.”

The thought of all this happening to someone like Calzaghe, a boxer who retired unbeaten in 46 professional fights, is incongruous with the image we have of what he went on to become. Yet if a man as terrifying as Mike Tyson can be the product of bullying, perhaps we should be less surprised when learning that other great champions in boxing and MMA have used the same experience as a fighting base. Tyson, after all, the very embodiment of intimidation, famously had difficulties growing up, describing himself as a “pudgy kid, almost effeminate shy” who happened to also speak with a lisp. On school days, when his mother was too drunk to take him, he became accustomed to other kids hitting him, kicking him and picking on him while making his own way to where he needed to be. He was on occasion even met with weapons and robbed in his own apartment building.

But that, to Tyson, was merely street stuff, almost to be expected. The real damage arrived at school, where he hoped he would be safe; where he went to learn how to survive.

“Having to wear glasses in the first grade was a real turning point in my life,” he wrote in a New York Magazine essay titled “My Life As a Young Thug” in 2013. “My mother had me tested, and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get glasses. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you got any money?’ I said, ‘No.’ He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my f*cking meatballs. I was resisting, going, ‘No, no, no!’ I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food.

“So he started hitting me in the head and then took my glasses and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. That was the last day I went to school. I was 7 years old, and I just never went back to class.”

Another boxer bullied in Brooklyn was Dmitriy Salita. He stayed in school much longer than Tyson, but the Ukrainian’s life was every bit as turbulent, having moved to Brooklyn from Odessa as a Jewish boy with good eyes but no voice.

“We lived in a one-bedroom apartment and had no money and were on food stamps,” explained Salita, who found boxing at 14 and is now a promoter. “It was a very difficult and challenging period for me. I used to get picked on in school a lot because I didn’t speak English and I wore cheap clothes and sneakers.

“When I first came to the United States and went to school, I had no idea what kind of sneakers you were supposed to wear, and I didn’t know that this choice determines whether you are cool or not cool. We went to the Payless store and there was this big rack of shoes and you just took one, found another, and matched them together. They made shoes that looked like Jordans and Nikes but they were only $10 or $15. I used to wear these Payless shoes and think that they were really nice. They were the best shoes I had ever worn in my life, coming from Odessa.

“But when I wore them to school, people used to make fun of me. People would then make fun of me for the way I would say, ‘How are you doing?’ It’s kids being kids, but it was very hard going through it.”

As is true of any detailed account of trauma, none of these tales are told without some hesitancy and reluctance on the part of the person who endured it. It is, Salita confessed, a phase of his life he rarely ever thinks about, yet also one he can never forget. “It made me feel terrible,” he said of that time, “but that frustration gave me the fuel to go to the gym and box with guys like Curtis Stevens and Luis Collazo and Danny Jacobs. I was able to use that emotional energy to be successful.”

As well as confidence, boxing gave a “weak child” muscles and power both in his hands and the way he walked. It gave him a place to go, a place where he belonged. “At school I was a nerdy kid,” Salita said. “I was a good student but socially boxing gave me purpose. If things were tough for me at school, it gave me something to look forward to. I always had the boxing gym at five o’clock after school was over.”

For Salita, the gym was a sanctuary and safe house, and to thrive in it, which he did as an amateur and pro, was the victory over those who once considered him weak; the directionless ones; the ones with nowhere to go after school. Through boxing Salita found a language easily spoken and understood, even by bullies, and he came to appreciate that the best victories are often the quiet ones celebrated alone.

In that respect, he was not alone.

“I learned a lot of life lessons from my time at school,” said St-Pierre. “The funny thing is, a lot of the scars I have in my head are from my time at school, not from experiences in mixed martial arts. People find that hard to believe. They see me as this strong and dominant UFC champion and just assume that I’ve always been the one handing out the beatdowns. That’s not true at all, though. The most pain I ever suffered was when I was growing up in school.

“Competing in mixed martial arts is fairly easy compared to what I had to go through as a child. You’re afforded weeks and months of preparation time for a fight in the UFC. You can train your body and mind to get ready for a certain fight. You know the time, place, and reason for it. You can visualize the outcome. On the school playground, it’s completely different. I often didn’t know when a fight would break out or why an older kid would be kicking and punching me. There is no time to prepare or negotiate at school.”

It could be argued that St-Pierre and the others roundly beat their bullies every time they vanquished an opponent in their chosen fighting arena. Yet rarely did it ever feel like that for St-Pierre, not when someone else’s face was the target, and not when someone else’s name was soon to be added to his record. In fact, for all his success on a global stage, St-Pierre’s biggest rivals remained largely elusive until the day he finally saw and defeated them, not in a cage but a shopping mall. He did so without even making a fist.

“I was walking through a mall in Montreal and I happened to see one of the bullies — now grown up — walk past me in the opposite direction,” he said. “We both saw each other and our eyes locked. He saw me and I saw him, albeit for only a couple of seconds. My stare locked on him, but he was very quick to look down at his feet and shuffle along. He didn’t want to look at me any longer. He had obviously seen me on television and heard about my life since our school days. He knew what I had become.

“I didn’t know what he had become.”