392 years ago the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag celebrated the first Thanksgiving with days of wrestling contests, and dined on venison, wild turkey, and a popcorn. The original colonists included siblings Love and Wrestling Brewster.

Wrestling Brewster is a cool name.

It is an honor to first give thanks to all the men and women in uniform serving our country, and those of our allies, so far from home in theaters of war. You are heroes.

Great thanks and respect to Justin Wren, who is recently back from the Congo, where he freed a large number of MButi slaves, who now live on their own land.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to each one of you who comes here. Without each of you, this place is a bunch of antiquated code. With you, well, you are The UnderGround.

A special shout out to anyone cutting weight for a fight. The sacrifice of your thanksgiving feast being 7 ounces of skinless turkey and some green beans with no butter, will be rewarded in the cage. I hope everybody wins, I really do.

Valentines day is about chocolate and getting lucky. Easter is about bunnies. Christmas is about giving cool stuff to kids. But Thanksgiving is about friendship and love.

There is no contradiction between love and fighting; from an evolutionary perspective, love came from fighting.

In Sam Sheridan’s great book “A Fighter’s Heart” he explains, using pioneering academic research on aggression by Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz.

“(Lorenz) talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intra-species aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behavior-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel toward others of their species into something else when they mate.

“The same thing, although in a more complex way takes place among men and women of the same tribe or family, bound together for increased success against the outside world. Lorenz writes that friendship is found only in animals with “highly developed intra-species aggression,” and goes on to say that the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship.

“The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression. Men and women who form these deep bonds – who evolved ways to mitigate interspecies aggression – have great success in passing along their genes.”

It is all about love.

Without fighting in our DNA, humankind would not have developed the capacity for deep friendship, and above all, for love.

So Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks, to each of you. And to all the Canadian UGers, apologies for being a month late. And for all the UGers outside of North America, if not happy Thanksgiving, then just sincere thanks.