When I left active service in the Marine Corps, I think I felt a lack of performance of my masculine identity. Being a Marine was (in some ways still is) my masculine identity, and my ideas of competency, worth, and virtue are very much tied up in that.
I started kickboxing right after that, I think as a way to repair my identity, and to engage in a new performance of identity. I have never been anything more than mediocre, but getting in a ring in front of a hundred or so (mostly) drunk people who want to see someone get their ass beat was--is--one of the scariest things I have ever done.
My first fight was before NC got a boxing commision, so there was no real regulation. It was modelled on PKA superfights. I lost a split decision in a brutal fight. We wore 10oz gloves (which is just like a piece of leather over your hand) and those little foamy booties over our feet/instep. We beat each other to a pulp, and the crowd loved it. I know that a big part of my satisfication and my continued interest was the fact that I was performing a "tough guy." Someone with the balls to risk spectacular, humiliating failure, and the physical distress of fighting.
After NC got a boxing commission we started boxing (TuffMan) and did that for several years. I got TKO'd in Christmas of 2003 at a club called "The Frontier Club" (metal detectors to get inside) and decided to hang it up. it was the first time I had lost anything but a split decision, and it felt really crappy.
Competing as a powerlifter (in this case, I've gone from mediocre to teh suck) is an attempt to perform a maculine identity.
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