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On January 2, 2017 By In fiction

Stranger in a Familiar Land

“Even the air felt different. It whipped through the building crevasses and alleyways like they were the sails of Magellan, imbued with the bite of adventure. Tile patterns, architecture, bumpy cobblestones and municipal missteps wore a certain charm, a rush of new and different and exhilarating. He stretched his arms deeper into his coat pockets, an invitation for an embrace with the refreshingly chilly urban breeze.

Autumn was a poetic time. Christian never truly experienced it before he moved to Seoul. A San Diego Fall required little more than a long sleeve tee, maybe jeans and a hoodie at night or if you were close to the shore. Leaves stayed put, and the most colorful part of the city was still the pastel adobe-style Mexican restaurants. But Seoul was enchanting with the swing of the seasonal pendulum. And that’s exactly what Fall was, he was warned – a brief alignment of nature’s clock, the evening before winter’s midnight.

Christian had been in Seoul for three months. It was a reactive move to combat the doldrums of his everyday routine back home. Money was good here, and life was new every day. Each block he strolled along, every park he glided through, it all glimmered with a wide-eyed newness.

He walked slowly, eyes on a swivel, losing himself in the wonder of his surroundings. He noticed the trees, first. Of course, he had seen trees before, but none like this. They rested with a sense of ease, a zen-like calm, as if they were content with the rings of their life that lay patiently hidden beneath their barked skin. He took a right, moving forward into the unknown…”

 

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On January 2, 2017 By In Social Media

Some Things I Wrote in 2016

2016 was a strange year to say the least. Headlines abounded of political shocks and scandals or celebrity deaths, and nobody could say for sure how true any of those headlines were since we all got our news from Facebook.

Still, it was a productive year for yours truly. I wrote a lot, and I appreciate everyone who has taken time to read my work. Here are the 10 pieces I feel most proud to have written in 2016, with a few thoughts looking back on them. I assure you none of it is fake news.

March 7, Sherdog
Conor McGregor and the Death of Imagination

Conor McGregor had built an aura around him. He captured the UFC’s featherweight championship via spectacular dominance, and became one of the sport’s two biggest stars ever along the way. Then he was unceremoniously and, frankly, embarrassingly defeated in his first fight of 2016.

March 9, The Classical
Away Games: A Dispatch from the Korean Basketball League

I had already been living in Korea for over a year when I first went to a professional basketball game. The sense of newness and excitement of living in a foreign country had mostly subsided, and the shitty parts – like cold weather – were still shitty. Then I went to a Korean Basketball League game.

April, Eastlit
Jong Il from Yang Pyeong

Jong Il had recently moved from his home in the countryside to Seoul. A day spent catching butterflies and dragonflies in the park causes him to reflect on what he kept with him, and what he didn’t.

May 2, Sherdog
The Costs of Control

Dana White claimed the secret to the UFC’s success has been to incentivize fighters with performance bonuses while keeping guaranteed pay low. “If you were guaranteed to earn $37 million, guess what you’re gonna do? Not much.” Can’t argue with that logic, right?

August 22, Sherdog
Mixed Martial Artistry

The rematch between Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz was a truly great fight. But its greatness was not just that of an exciting fight; it connected in a more essential way.

October 10, Sherdog
A Beautifully Weird Twisted Reality

Mixed martial arts is strangely alluring. Its youth as a sport means there’s an absence of the polished professionalism in other major sports leagues. The type of people who makes a living inflicting violence on others is inherently a different set of psychologies than other professional athletes. And yet for all the ridiculous, absurd and downright bizarre aspects of the sport, it can also simultaneously be beautiful. Enter Dan Henderson vs. Michael Bisping.

November 4, Harvard Review Online
Book Review of Annie Dillard’s “The Abundance”

Pulitzer winner Annie Dillard is inimitable. Her writing is beautiful, hilarious, bizarre and familiar all at once. “The Abundance” is a collection of essays spanning across decades, and it shows how her voice is as unique and vital now as it ever was.

November 14, Sherdog
Politics, UFC 205, and What It Means to Fight

The first two weeks of November were quite possibly the most 2016 moments of 2016. Donald Trump won the presidential election, Conor McGregor headlined one of the biggest UFC cards in history – at Madison Square Garden, no less – and my parents came to Korea to visit for a few days. It was a time of complex ideas and emotions pulsing within and around me, and ironically it was the dumbest and simplest of them all that helped me recalibrate.

December 12, Sherdog
A Fighter Forged from Conflict

Where we’re from can powerfully inform who we become. To understand interim featherweight champion Max Holloway, who has become one of the toughest and most technical mixed martial artists on the planet, you have to understand what life is like in his hometown of Waianae.

December 15, The Classical
John John Florence and Surfing’s Hawaiian Homecoming

When John John Florence became the World Surf League champion, it was the first time a surfer from Hawaii had done so in over a decade. It’s strange to think that the place that invented surfing has gone through such a long drought on the competitive circuit, but a closer inspection explains why – and why John John’s win is so important.

*****

I can’t say enough how much it means to me that anyone at all reads what I write. So many editors, publishers and writers have motivated me, guided me, and inspired me to continue chasing this silly dream of mine, and every single person who has read my work has helped me get closer to achieving it. I appreciate all of it, more than I can adequately express. 2016 was a good year, and I’m proud of everything I wrote, but I know there is much work to be done in 2017. I’ll keep working.

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On December 20, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Watching Through the Rearview

“I watched UFC on Fox 22 after it had already finished. I had to work on Sunday morning, when most fight cards are live in my time zone, and after the requisite hweshik — a Korean custom where you go out and drink with your boss — all the hands had already been raised in Sacramento, California.

While I was out, I couldn’t help myself; by the time I rolled home, I knew the who and the how of the event’s winners. I probably could have left it at that and scanned through play-by-plays and post-fight analyses, but there’s a difference between reading about fights and actually watching them. So that’s what I did.

For whatever is lost in the way of genuine intrigue, watching fights through the rearview makes up for it with added clarity. Upsets, bad decisions, surprising performances — they all make more sense when you expect them. The experience is less exciting than not knowing, of course, but it provides a different lens through which to understand what happened.

The strangest part about watching a fight for the first time when you already know the end result is how normal it can be. I assumed Urijah Faber would win, and by the time “California Love” cut through the showers of applause at the Golden 1 Center, I knew he would win. The odd part, though, is that it felt no different than the majority of Faber’s fights for the past 10 years…”

 

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On December 16, 2016 By In essay, surfing

John John Florence and Surfing’s Hawaiian Homecoming

“The Banzai Pipeline is a beautiful and horrific confluence of oceanographic features, the sum of which is one of the most dangerous waves on the planet. Considered unsurfable until the 1960s, the wave has killed dozens of surfers and photographers and injured countless more. The size of the average wave is scary enough—it’s about the height of a basketball hoop and wide enough to park a small car into, if you’re wondering—but even more intimidating is its steep drop, which makes the initial takeoff a split-second, do-or-die decision. If you make it, you have to snake around the rolling crowds of bodies duck-diving around you and the all-too-common surfboard shrapnel—boards ditched by their owners in a moment of fight-or-flight instinct—that can shoot out at you like flying fiberglass guillotines as they crash down the lip of the wave. If you don’t make the drop, you get slammed into the three feet of water between you and lava rock reef. All this for the chance at a few moments of getting barreled.

Pipe has been and still is considered the ultimate proving ground for surfers, professional and amateur alike. For decades, local and international gnar-dogs have flocked to its peak winter swells to test their mettle against one of the most respected and feared waves on Earth.

John John Florence started surfing it when he was eight years old…”

Read more at The Classical

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On December 12, 2016 By In Mixed Martial Arts

A Fighter Forged from Conflict

“You’ve probably never been to Waianae, Hawaii. Though it is only 30 miles west of Waikiki, they are worlds apart. With a population of around 13,000, there are more tourists on the island on any given day than people who actually live in Waianae. A little more than 8,000 of its residents are of Native Hawaiian ancestry — which is not the same as simply being from Hawaii — making Waianae one of the most Hawaiian places on the island. The ethnic composition of the area is a small but important part of its reputation.

At the heart of the ahupuaʻa, or land division, since Waianae can hardly be called a city, is the high school. Waianae High School has held the dubious distinction of having the highest dropout rate in the state for over a decade. Around 30 percent of the students drop out, and nearly all of them are male; graduating classes are around 85 percent female. Of the students who stay enrolled, 70 percent of them qualify for free or reduced lunch assistance. Nearly 30 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, a reality exacerbated by rampant drug abuse, particularly crystal meth. Waianae is home to the oldest and largest encampments of homeless people in the state.

There are a lot of tough, rugged places in Hawaii, but none like Waianae. To represent the hot, dry side of Oahu is a well-understood shorthand in the islands for “don’t [expletive] with me.” To know Waianae is to understand newly crowned interim Ultimate Fighting Championship featherweight titleholder Max Holloway…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

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