Author Sam Sheridan Back With a New Book – The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Boxing has its own distinguished literature.
Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates and perhaps the greatest fight writer of them all, A.J. Liebling, wrote reams of excellent copy about the “Sweet Science.”
Sam Sheridan is trying to do the same for MMA.
Sheridan, the Harvard-educated author, follows up his superb tome, A Fighter’s Heart: One Man’s Journey Through the World of Fighting, with his latest effort, The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game.
“This is almost like a gift back to the fighters and to my friends that helped me with the first book,” Sheridan said. “After doing the first book, I had a bit of access, cachet and a name, and I could get these guys, these famous fighters, to talk about the mental game.”
Sheridan has a way of getting the most out of an interview, and in this book, his talks with fighters peels away the public layers they develop.
Author and former Muay Thai and MMA fighter Sam Sheridan
Sheridan spent time with trainers like Greg Jackson, martial artists including Marcelo Garcia, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion. Through those interviews, Sheridan sought to delve into the details of MMA at the highest levels.
“Successful fighters have a similar track,” he said. “Usually the bigger, better, faster fighters for five or six fights blow through regular guys. They don’t start to appreciate the mental side of things until they run into the first guy who gives them a struggle. Everybody you’ve ever punched has been KO’d, and then in the seventh fight, you punch him and he’s still coming at you. Can you figure out other ways to beat this guy?”
Sheridan knows a thing or two about the men who fight for a living.
He did it himself to gather material for his first book and, well, because he liked to mix it up. What he found – and finds again in this book – should provide a cautionary parable to fighters at the end of the string like, say, Jens Pulver who figured prominently in Sheridan’s first book.
“A lot of these guys, their issue is they’re damaged men,” he said. “They come from self issues, self-loathing, but on that one night, you’re loved. It’s your day. When you’re in a big fight, you’re the most important guy in the world. You feel bigger than a movie star. You’re ‘it.’ Andre Ward’s trainer Virgil Hunter would say, ‘In the next 1,000 days, one of those days is your day and no one can take it from you. It’s hard to walk away from that feeling of euphoria.”
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