Happy Thanksgiving UG & OG

Today, more than any day of the year, we travel to sit down and eat with friends and family. So what does fighting have to do with friendship and love?

Everything.

In Sam Sheridan’s great “A Fighter’s Heart” he explains, relating 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.

Dana White famously explained to the Oxford Debating Society (and everyone else) that fighting is in our DNA. But it is more than that. Fighting, along with fear, and procreation, are not just in there somewere as a part, they are the core of who and what we human beings are. Love and friendship developed to make fighting and aggression work for us. Without fighting in our DNA, humankind would not have developed the capacity for deep friendship, and above all, for love.

As you should expect, the relevance of fighting and Thanksgiving extend back to day one. Three hundred and ninety four years ago, on the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag came together for the first Thanksgiving. They feasted on venison, popcorn. and maybe wild turkey. The original colonists that day included William and Mary Brewster, and their sons Love and Wrestling. And the historical record shows that the settlers and the Indians wrestled, for days.

So there is no more fitting a place from which to wish for you all a Happy Thanksgiving.

I give thanks first 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 to this sports’ heroes, and to the rest of us.

A special shout out to those of you cutting for a fight, for who the feast is a piece of skinless turkey and a quite finite number of green beans, no butter. I hope everybody wins, I really do.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who comes here. Thanks to the fighters and the fans, to the gym rats and the champs, to the company owners and the customers. Thank to all, from the 01ers to that troll who signed up last week. You know who you are. Thanks to the blues and to the muds and to the rouges and the greens . Without each of you, this place would be what my high school wrestling coach said was the most worthless word in the world – potential.

A friend of this sport is a friend of mine, so If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit digitally next to me, and post on the UG and the OG.

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