Pain Don't Hurt Read Online Free PDF Page B

minute. . . . Hey, Andre! ” Andre trotted over, and I froze. “Hey, Andre, this young man here is Mark Miller, and he is a big fan of yours. You want to stick around a minute? Seems that young Mr. Miller here is a baseball player himself, and I’m thinking maybe we could show him a thing or two about a thing or two. What do you say?”
    Andre grinned, handed me a bat, and said, “You know how to hit, kid?”
    I spent the afternoon in the middle of a lesson with Billy Williams and Andre Dawson coaching me. Hours went by. When they finally left the field I thanked them both, and Andre told me, “Keep that arm in good shape, kid, you got a real good arm. . . .”
    All throughout high school I played football, basketball, and baseball. I wrestled (because I’m from Pennsylvania and you kind of have to) and I also ran cross-country. I also continued to box and study Tang Soo Do. Sometimes in the gym a few of the guys who were entrenched in the fight scene would play around with something new called kickboxing.
    The summer of 1990 I was working with John Fox, who was the Steelers’ defensive back coach. By this time I had gained my own reputation with some of the players. Over ten years of working with these guys, hearing their bullshit, taking their nonsense and giving it back, I had started being known as something other than “little Moose.” I was creeping out from under my father’s backbreaking shadow with these guys. They knew me as a hard-assed seventeen-year-old, an athlete who favored combat sports. Most of them loved me for it. A few just weren’t prepared to deal with a youngster who would “give back.” Greg Lloyd was a linebacker then. It crept around the field that Greg had started training in Tae Kwon Do and was telling everyone who would give him two seconds of ear how tough he was. One day in the locker room, Greg started in on me. I was around six feet one inch tall and maybe one hundred sixty pounds dripping wet. A beanpole, all angles and piss and vinegar. I turned and looked at Greg, and in my clearest, most overenunciated voice, the best impression of my father I could muster, I said, “Well, Greg, why don’t you tell me where you train and I’ll come there. I’ll be happy to kick your ass any day of the week.”
    The whole locker room went quiet for about thirty seconds before one by one the guys burst out laughing. Greg sputtered out a gym name and told me he was inviting me personally, trying to gloss over my underplayed venom with patronizing class. I tried to schedule with him multiple times and strangely, Greg was never available. Something about him creased me so hard, and I could never put my finger on it. He was a sideline bully, a tourist when it came to the actual art of kicking ass. He struck me as the guy who got off on pushing around people who he didn’t think would fight back. I had a real problem with that sort of person.
    I received a letter from the University of Pittsburgh asking me to come play baseball for them. I was offered a scholarship based on my athletic ability in baseball. They recruited me as a pitcher. My first semester was golden. But after just one semester my “good” arm was shot, and I had been pulled in another direction. By then I was training to fight full-time. I didn’t want to be a professional baseball player. I didn’t want to hear my father brag to his friends about how he had prepped me to become this. I wanted to be bigger than that, bigger than him. I didn’t want teammates. I wanted the onus to fall directly on my shoulders as to whether I would succeed or fail every time I stepped up to compete. As a fighter, when competition time comes, all you have is yourself. Within one year I was kickboxing full-time.
    In 2001 I heard somewhere that Greg Lloyd had shoved a gun into the mouth of his own young son because the kid, who was just twelve years