To those outside my sport, I don’t expect you to understand
much of what I tell you here, but read on and take a small peek into one of the
nuances of fight culture…
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I recently read an article about an Ancient Roman statue of a pugilist. (He is referred to as a boxer, but I have a feeling he was more
like an MMA fighter… check the gloves.)
One of the most fascinating things about this statue is the presence of cauliflower ear. It was particularly
striking to me because my first thought when seeing the picture was “Beautiful!” That’s a far cry from the thought I had when
I first saw the ears of the grappling coach at my first gym, which was “EWWW!”
Cauliflower ear is gross. Not only does it look gross, it’s basically
blood and other fluid that separate the cartilage and then gets hard. Gross.
It hurts like hell for weeks after you get it, then it just gets hard
and you kind of forget it’s there. Yep,
I too have a bit of a thick spot in my left ear. You don’t notice until I point it out, but it
was enough to scare me in to wearing ear protection (the only and most inconvenient
prevention). I must admit that I’m a
little proud of the fact that it’s there, it puts me in a club with a lot of
elite wrestlers and martial artists.
I think it’s something like neck rings of the Kayan women or the binding of feet in Imperial China, it’s a standard of beauty that is lost
on most people outside the culture. Mine
came along by accident, but I had a training partner tell me he’d been trying
to get some cauliflower ear since he began wrestling at 6 years old. Yes, people (usually fighters and wrestlers)
TRY to get this deformity.
Having “puffy ears” tells the world you are a fighter. Everybody has UFC and TapouT gear now, but this
is a symbol of hard training, someone who had had significant pain and
deformity and never gave up. It can be
drained with little damage if treated soon enough, most repeat cases just let
it go… again, I know from experience. I
think that’s why it’s so beautiful to me.
It represents the fighter, the pain and triumph, the moments I
experience in the gym that change my life, the camaraderie that fighters share, and mostly the courage it takes to make that step into the cage. I share all of that with the statue too,
it is beautiful.
I know it doesn’t quite sit well with most of the
population, and my perspective may not please the medical community. The same can be said for most pugilistic activity too,
but we wear it proudly.
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