My Fight / Your Fight (3 page)

I was raised to be ready to fight at a moment's notice. I hardly warm up at all, and yet, I am so prepared to fight that at the beginning of a match, I am almost forcibly holding myself back, just waiting for that referee's hand to drop.

You never know if you'll have to be ready sooner than you expected.

When I was born, I almost died.

On February 1, 1987, my pregnant mother was rushing around the house trying to get everything in order before my parents left for the hospital.

“Ron, are you ready?” my mom asked my dad.

“Darlin', I was born ready,” he answered.

But my parents were not ready for the events that would follow.

I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, cutting off my air supply. My heart stopped. I came out blue and listless. On the 0–10 Apgar scale used to rate babies' health at birth, seven is considered good. My score was a zero.

Mom says that the doctors thought I was dead. Everything was movement and chaos. Doctors running in from all directions. The squeaking wheels of metal carts carrying equipment being rushed into the room. Cabinets slamming as the medical staff pulled items from the shelves. The lead doctor shouting orders as people poured into the room. Eventually, the doctors managed to get me some air. They cut the cord, unwrapped it from around my neck, gave me baby CPR and oxygen. Then after what my mom describes as an eternity—but was probably closer to a few minutes—I started breathing and my heart started beating.

The whole experience had my parents pretty freaked out. It was the only time my mom saw my dad cry.

My parents named me Ronda after my dad, whose name was Ron. Some people think there's some special reason I'm Ronda without an
h
, but it was unintentional. After all the panic died down and it was clear that I was going to live, the nurse asked my dad what they wanted to name me. He said, “Ronda.” The nurse asked how to spell it. His name was Ron and he just assumed it was spelled the same, so he told her, “R-O-N-D-A.” And that's what they put on my birth certificate. They might as well have put down “Ronda, no H” since I've had to go through my entire life correcting people on the spelling—and only recently have people started spelling it right more often than not—but I think it fits me better.
H
is a stupid letter anyway.

My parents were happy I was alive, but the doctor who saved me said that I might have brain damage and that it might not be evident right away. In fact, he told my mom it might take months or even years if the damage was in areas that control things like walking or speech since those delays aren't apparent until you get to those developmental stages.

Doctors don't usually sugarcoat the truth, but he offered my mom his nonclinical opinion.

“In most cases like this, she would not have survived,” he said. “I can't tell you anything definitive right now beyond the fact that she's breathing, her heart rate is good, and her reflex responses are what they should be. I have no idea what the future holds, but babies are unbelievably resilient and this one is certainly a fighter.”

Winning was conditioned in me early on. When I was little, during judo tournaments, I would sit and play hand games with the kid I was about to fight. My mom would pull me away and say, “Sit there and think about winning. Stop messing around.”

When I win, I'm euphoric. Nothing can bother me. Winning raises me up, above the fray. I float happily above all the things that make life messy and hard. After I win, for a little while, everything is right in the world. Winning feels like falling in love, except it's like falling in love with everybody in the room all at once—and it's amplified when you are in an arena of 18,000 people.

When I turned two and still wasn't talking, my parents started to worry. My pediatrician told my mom lots of things, like I'd just start talking when I was ready or that I wasn't speaking because I didn't see a need to talk. My two older sisters seemed to understand what I wanted and would communicate my desire for a cookie or to play with My Little Ponies. But my mom knew something wasn't right. She had two other daughters and was taking classes in things like developmental psychology as she worked toward her PhD.

With my third birthday approaching, I had yet to say a single intelligible word. My mom took me to lots of specialists. They couldn't find anything in particular wrong with me, but the doctors seemed to believe that being cut off from oxygen at birth might have something to do with my difficulty learning to speak.

When part of your brain dies, it's dead forever. (OK, so that's pretty much the definition of dead.) However, babies are pretty amazing. Babies are super-resilient. Sometimes, baby brains can rewire themselves so that they still work. My developing brain just rewired itself. If you took one of those multicolored cerebral activity scans, you'd see the part that controls my speech is located in a different part of the brain than it is for most people. But until my brain got everything rewired, it was like I couldn't connect the words in my head with my mouth.

Speaking was a constant battle between what I wanted to say and what I said. It wasn't just about words, it was about everything. What I felt. What I wanted. What I meant. It was always a struggle. If I was asked to repeat myself too many times, I would get frustrated and kick the person I was speaking to. It is one thing to fight other people, but fighting yourself is different. If you're fighting yourself, who wins? Who loses?

On my third birthday, more than anything else, I wanted a WWF Hulk Hogan Wrestling Buddy. My sisters and I used to watch
WWF Superstars of Wrestling
on Saturday mornings after
X-Men
. During commercial breaks, we launched ourselves off the brown upholstered couch, attempting to submit one another on the itchy tan polyester carpet. One of the greatest toys to come out of the 1980s was Wrestling Buddy, a two-foot-tall pillow version of Hulk. You could body-slam it, wrestle with it, throw it to the ground. It was awesome. When my mom asked me what I wanted, I kept repeating one word, “Balgrin.”

No one had a clue what I meant. But my mom took me and my sisters to the toy store to find my Balgrin. The guy who worked there showed me every toy that involved a ball. We left empty-handed. We went to another store. And another.

Each time I tried to explain what I wanted, sounds spilled out in a jumbled mess that no one understood. It was like the words I needed were pinned down, and I couldn't free them. I could see them. I could feel them. I just couldn't say them. I felt trapped. I burst into tears, snot ran down my face. The world closed in on me; I began to lose hope.

My dad met up with us when he finished work. We went to one last toy store and met the greatest toy store salesman that ever lived, deserving of enshrinement in the toy salesmen Hall of Fame.

As soon as we had made it through the doors my dad approached a clerk and said, “My baby girl wants a Balgrin. I don't know what the hell a Balgrin is, but we're not leaving here until we have one.”

“Well, what does it do?” the guy asked me.

Afraid to speak, I slammed my body into the ground a few times.

The clerk didn't laugh. He thought about it for a moment. I looked up at him hopefully.

“Do you mean a Wrestling Buddy? It's like a pillow, and you wrestle with it.”

I nodded slowly.

“Balgrin,” I said.

“Right,” he replied as if I'd spoken clear as day, “Hulk Hogan.”

He got one from some back shelf. I did a happy dance in the aisle. My mother thanked the heavens.

The clerk placed the Wrestling Buddy box in my hands and I was flooded with joy. I refused to let my parents take Hulk Hogan for even a moment, not even to pay for him, so the clerk just rang up another box.

When we got home, Hulk and I were nearly inseparable. I jumped off the couch with an elbow to his chest. I'd pin him on the ground and make my mom count to three. In what was either complete coincidence or an eerie sign of things to come, I eventually ripped off his arm. Using an old trick to patch up judo gis, my mom sewed his arm back on with dental floss and then, as I did every night, I got into bed with him.

Yep, that's right. I slept with Hulk Hogan.

For a kid who couldn't communicate like all the other kids, being understood by a stranger on my third birthday was a major breakthrough. This was an early lesson on the importance of always believing that if I wanted something bad enough and tried hard enough, I could make it happen.

I have done a fair amount of things so far in my life. (I don't want to say a lot because I'm not even thirty, and I've got a lot left to do—let's say I'm at Gandalf-the-Grey level, post all the Hobbit drama, prepared to help destroy the ring and become Gandalf the White.) And often I've accomplished things people said were unrealistic, unlikely, or, my favorite, impossible. I never would have been able to do any of those things without hope.

The kind of hope I'm talking about is the belief that something good will come. That everything you're going through and everything you've gone through will be worth the struggles and frustrations. The kind of hope I'm talking about is a deep belief that the world can be changed, that the impossible is possible.

The day of my third birthday was an early introduction into never giving up hope, never giving up on myself, and surrounding myself with people who saw in me things I might not see in myself. It was the first time I felt like I had won.

Anyone who watches fights has seen it happen: One second a fighter is looking dominant, unstoppable. Then he hits the canvas. One punch or split second of lost focus can change the entire direction of a fight. Life is like that.

One of the reasons I crave winning so much is that life is so uncertain, so volatile. When I win, there is that one little moment of time where I'm not worried about everything being taken away from me at any second.

There have been so many times when what I thought was real totally got turned upside down, sending my whole world into free fall. The knowledge that everything good can be taken away at any second is what makes me work so hard.

Los Angeles, California, to Minot, North Dakota, is not a traditional route for American migration. But when I was three, my sister Maria saw someone shot point-blank in the head while coming home on the school bus. My parents saw that as a sign that it was time to get the hell out. We moved to middle-of-nowhere North Dakota.

My mom had finished her PhD and one of the job offers she received came from Minot State University. Minot State had a solid speech pathology program and, as part of the job benefits, the university would provide me with intensive speech therapy. My dad retired from his job as an aerospace plant manager when we moved. The cost of living in North Dakota was cheap compared to California, and my parents decided we only needed one income. So, in the summer of 1990, we moved into a house on a five-acre piece of farmland that was twenty miles outside of Minot.

My sisters and I had free rein. In California, we had never been allowed outside without a grown-up. But here, away from the peaking crime rates and smog levels that were plaguing L.A. at the time, we raced our bikes up and down the gravel driveway. We explored the small patch of woods behind our house. We gathered cocoons, until my mom barred that activity after one of them turned out to be a spider's egg sac and hatched in the house, sending tiny spiders in all directions. We set up a Slip'N Slide on the hill our house was built into and spent hours hurling ourselves downhill on the yellow sheet of plastic.

I was obsessed with collecting rocks and amassed an impressive assortment. My dad taught me how to identify quartz, pyrite, petrified wood, limestone, and flint. In August, my mom started going to town daily to prepare for her class. My sisters were not as enamored with country life as I was and usually joined her, leaving me and my dad alone. On these days, he would buckle me into the front seat of our brown and white Ford Bronco and take me off-roading in search of the perfect rock hunting spot. We would drive through the fields and between the trees planted as windbreaks, bouncing over rocks and roots. After a while, we would come to a clearing we had never seen before and my dad would say, “This looks like the place.” I would spend hours digging in the dirt and bringing him specimens to examine as he leaned against the car, wearing aviator sunglasses and smoking a cigarette.

It was during one of these adventures that I discovered my father was the strongest man who ever lived. A thunderstorm had passed through the night before, and as we drove, mud flew everywhere. We came across a normally dry creek bed that had a few inches of water. My dad stopped and turned to me, “What do you think, Ronnie? Should we ford the river?”

I nodded.

“You got it, kiddo,” he said, touching the brim of his hat in a mock salute.

He grinned and gunned it. Muddy water doused the windshield as if it had been thrown from a bucket. The Bronco jerked, then nothing. My dad pushed down on the gas again. There was a whir of tires moving, but we did not move. He thrust the car into reverse. We bumped backward, but the car didn't go anywhere. In the passenger side rearview mirror, I saw mud flying everywhere as the tires spun to no effect.

“Well, fuck,” my dad said. He got out of the car; I slipped out of my seatbelt and climbed out after him. He was squatting down by the back tires.

“What we got here is a problem,” he said. “Now what we gotta do is find ourselves a solution.”

He surveyed the area.

“This looks like as good a rock hunting spot as any,” he said as if it was all part of his plan. “But we're going to be looking for different rocks than usual. What I need is for you to find me some big rocks, like rocks the size of your head, OK?”