Frank Curreri is a former elite high school amateur wrestler and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Masters world champion. He’s also one of the very best and most experienced writers in the fight world.
With all that experience in and around elite combat sports athletics, the Las Vegas resident and black belt has certainly developed perceptive observational theories on high-performers. Still, when his own controversial pet theory got support from one of boxing history’s most legendary coaches – Emanuel Steward – Curreri rightfully felt validated in his thinking.
I’d waited a long time to get [an interview with] him, I finally got him on the phone and, 20 minutes in, I ask him the most important question – All the world champions you’ve worked with, what’s the one trait, the one characteristic they all had? Curreri recounts in his new TedXTalk, titled, Why a Big Ego Gets a Bad Rap.
He said, ‘a big ego. They all had a big ego.’
I wanted to leap out of my chair because it confirmed a conviction I had for years,” said Curreri. “I had trained in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, nine years, three-thousand hours, plus, to get a black belt, I interviewed 20,000, plus, people as a journalist, as a writer. I [spoke with] all these high-performers and I kept seeing it. I thought, ‘man, could it be a big ego gets a bad rap?’
I’ve trained several times with Curreri in recent years, follow many of his informative social media posts, talks, and podcast episodes, and, going back even further, have always sought out his insightful feature profiles on top fighters, often focusing on the psychology of competition, and nutrition. So, whenever the writer-warrior comes out with someone new, I tend to pay attention.
Watching his latest TedX Talk video, I did my own version of jumping out of my seat because I’ve also long felt that the nuances of ego, of confidence, of arrogance – whatever you want to call it – in sports, and in fight sports in particular, are lost in most discussions. Based merely on observation, intuiting, and my own relatively low-level experience as an amateur MMA fighter, I’ve come to believe that a big ego, in and of itself, is not a character flaw or liability in a fighter.
In fact, I think it’s a requirement. It takes a certain abnormal audacity walk into a cage or ring to face a person trained with lethal tools of their own and believe that you’re going to best them, to believe that upon pitting your abilities, work, aspirations, and spirit directly against theirs, you will vindicate your own efforts and crush their dream.
After years of competing himself as well as interviewing world-class MMA athletes, Curreri has concluded that in fighting, mental fortitude is paramount, and that oftentimes mental battles can only be won with the assistance of brashness.
I got to interview hundreds of elite cage fighters – raw, unfiltered, fascinating minds. And, the more I picked their brains, the more one pearl of wisdom surfaced again, and again. Fighting is 90% mental, he continues, in his talk.
I have competed in hundreds of tournaments, I know what it takes mentally, and I have a soft spot for someone like, say, Ronda Rousey. Her career didn’t end that well. A lot of people laughed and mocked her, but I get it. I get why…she had this angry swagger and persona. I get why she told reporters, ‘look, you guys call me cocky, you call me arrogant, but the thing is, how dare you think I should think less of myself.’ You know what it takes to go out there.
It may be easy and fashionable for fans and would-be pundits in the niche world of MMA to pick out Rousey as some supposed casualty of a large ego causing a downfall. While there is not much in the way of evidence to support that theory as explanation for her finally losing in her two most recent bouts (as opposed to, let’s say, looking at the many ways in which her conquerors Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes were simply bad match ups for her in a sport where match ups are such a big part of any bout’s outcome), Curreri posits that Rousey would have never been able to reach the heights she did as, first, an Olympic athlete, and then world champion MMA fighter without holding herself in high-esteem and up to high standards.
He also points out that Rousey’s braggadocio is not really an outlier among great athletes. Cristiano Ronaldo. Reporters asked him, ‘are you the best soccer player in the world? He said, ‘I’m not the best, now, I’m the best, ever,’ he cites.
Dan Gable, Mr. Intensity. Mr. wrestling icon. The hardest sport in the world, arguably. He said, ‘some wrestle without great skill. None wrestle without great pride.’
ESPN ranks number one athlete of all-time, in any sport, and it’s the guy with the biggest mouth, and the biggest ego, Muhammad Ali. Maybe a connection, there.
Just as ego has its place in success at a high level, so does humility. It just so happens, Curreri believes, that society also often has a misapprehension of what true humility is.
Obviously, it’s wise to hedge that ego with humility. The problem with humility is we’ve done a poor job defining what humility is, he claims.
Not doing something because you’re scared what other people think is not humility. Feigning humility, faking it, repressing it, is not humility.
Humility requires the presence of, ‘I know my power. I’m aware of the power I have.
In tough moments, all we usually have is ourselves. Understanding that, how can we can then fault those who place themselves in high-stress, demanding, and even dangerous professional situations as a matter of daily routine for being their own number one fan?
Nobody volunteers, sometimes, to be your biggest cheerleader. Nobody does. When nobody volunteers, guess who it falls on to do that? It falls on you, Curreri explains.
In moments of self-doubt, the ones all fighters inevitably face many times before any contest, Curreri believes that we can all use an internal Muhammad Ali-like voice, audaciously spurring us on, perhaps even against all reasonable odds.
So, I think I understand the fighters, the high-performers…I’ve seen the fear that encircles even the best of the best. The doubts. ‘Why am I here? What if I lose? What if I get hurt? What if this, what if that? You have all these things racing through your head, he details.
And then you have this one great why, that says to all the 10,000 Why Nots, just goes in there and wrecks shop and says, ‘, no, no, we’re taking the mountain. We’re doing what we said we were going to do and that’s it!’
And you’re communicating that like an inner Ali. You’re commanding yourselves, ‘this is what you’re going to do, we’re not turning back, now.’ That’s the voice you need.
About the author:
Elias Cepeda is a host of Sports Illustrated’s Extra Rounds Podcast, a staff writer at FloCombat, and has a regular column for The UG Blog.
