Josh Rosenblatt

Josh Rosenblatt's memoir, Why We Fight: One Man's Search for Meaning Inside the Ring, is an experimental blend of narrative sports writing and reflective, mid-life male psychology wrapped up in a short, punchy package. It is clear from the start that he values his writing far more than his fighting, and the journey which he relates is one of self-exploration and testing the limits of his own abilities – both body and psyche – rather than a genuine foray into the fight game.

Indeed, while Rosenblatt's yarn of hitting and getting hit is authentic, his year-long training regimen and one-fight finale feels very much like it was constructed to be fodder for a story, like Gallico and Plimpton before him. Ironically, the author's interstitial vignettes of the fascinating characters he encounters in the gym and even the awkwardly-placed snippets of literary and fighting history tend to convey more gravity and insight than the personal experiences and perspectives that he chronicles.

This book is a personal journey, of course, and therefore it winds around and sometimes trips over Rosenblatt's crises of identity and mid-life agency: his struggles with alcoholism, his relationship with his deceased father, and his sharp feelings about religion and politics. These reflections are the least deft of the work, and while they function as emotional antagonists to fuel his ordeal of training and discovery leading up to the fight, they ultimately fail to conjure any real empathy – these are the reasons he fights (read: writes), not why we fight.

It is here that the book does not quite deliver on what it promises on the cover. Why We Fight is an autobiographical toe in the spit bucket of mixed martial-arts by an intellectual well past his fighting prime. It might be going too far to say that its targeted audience would not find much of value within, but much of the content features flamboyant literary references and poetic reflections upon existential concepts to which the standard 16 to 28-year-old fighter could have difficulty relating. Furthermore, the only thing that happens in Rosenblatt's titular "ring" is some sparring in the months before his fight. As the fighting style with which he chooses to engage is MMA and not boxing, the culmination of the story naturally takes place in a cage.

It so happens that this reviewer shares some of the salient context of the author's yarn, and for this reason I was pleased to have read it. In a similar fashion, I experimented with amateur boxing in my late twenties and trained both inside and out for two years leading up to my first official fight. Along the way, I knew the experience was not a deep dive but a try-out – something to help me understand what others go through and to learn more about myself. Perhaps also like the author, I stopped fighting shortly thereafter because I was old (in boxing years) and I needed my senses intact to follow the academic track on which I was already well along.

Carrying forward with Rosenblatt's conveyance of why we fight, however, our experiences quickly diverge. His narrative keeps coming back to struggles with addiction and the regrettable sacrifice of joy to get into fighting shape. He focuses on the act of violence as a primary draw for motivating the combatant, and repeatedly references the need to harness the misery and boredom of training against one's eventual opponent. Cultivating deprivation and abstinence into rage against another human being as the embodiment of everything one hates is the author's explicit motivation. None of these things represent an iota of why I fought. However violent this sport, the real combat that is recounted herein is clearly one within the protagonist's psyche.

Josh Rosenblatt is a gifted writer with a real head on his shoulders, and ultimately I am glad he has chosen to preserve it rather than to subject his 40-year-old body to a continued trajectory of blows and bruises. May he live to write another day.… (más)