Violence
In the back of a strip mall in northeast Tucson, the storefront entrance to Rise Combat Sports read FRIENDLY ATMOSPHERE. Inside the gym, the walls were red-painted cinderblock, the air thick and clammy with perspiration and body heat. The amenities were few. This was a place of business: the business of tactical violence.
The group of mixed martial arts and muay Thai fighters who met to spar at eight o’clock on Thursday nights made small talk as they wrapped their hands and began to warm up, shadowboxing and hitting bags. I caught scraps of their conversations: hip control, one-fifty, what are you walking around at, seventy-two.
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As the fighters settled into the rhythmic motions of punches, kicks, and elbows, I curled my legs underneath my body on the small piece of mat space I had staked out for myself on the perimeter of the sparring area. Some of the men were already soaked with perspiration, droplets splashing off their brows and dark wet spots spreading across the chests and underarms of their shirts. Josh Purcell, the fighter I was there to observe, hadn’t started sweating yet.
Josh was one of N’s fighters. I had been closely watching him train and spar with N as they prepared him for the tenth fight of his amateur muay Thai career. We were six weeks and three days out from the date when Josh would step over the top rope of a Thai boxing ring, touch gloved knuckles with an opponent, and fight until the time ran out, one of them became incapacitated, or the referee stopped the match. There was much work to be done in preparation: strength and conditioning, sparring with as wide a variety of partners as possible, drill after drill of tactical actions and reactions, and a weight cut that would slash twenty-five pounds from his already lean frame. These preparations made up what is known as the training camp: an intense, compressed period of time—Josh’s camp was eight weeks long—in which a fighter is molded into the fittest, wisest, and most dangerous version of himself he can become.
N and Josh knew I was writing something about violence, and they had agreed to open their camp and fight up to my project. I was interested in what they were doing athletically because I was in pursuit of answers about sport and spirit and bodies and men. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking to discover, but I had a feeling there were answers here, in these spaces of camaraderie and brutality.
We—it was they, the fighters, really, but I had tagged along, as unobtrusively as possible, or at least that was my hope—had traveled across town to Rise so Josh could spar with a bigger fighter in preparation for his fight. At 5 feet 11 inches, Josh was taller than any of the men in N’s cadre of athletes, and in a sport where feet are flying at temples, this was significant.
Josh was a study in contrasts: the kind of guy people like to call a character. He authored a series of absurdist cartoons he exhibited, guerrilla art–style, in portable toilets around Tucson, but to peg him by his scruffy beard and his sleeve of tattoos as a hipster artist would be to miss the mark badly. He was a white rapper from Chicago with a heavy CrossFit habit who installed roll-down garage doors for a living, and when he wasn’t cutting weight for a fight, he ate apples and peanut butter for breakfast every morning. In conversation, he asked questions more than he talked about himself, and read—accurately—as someone who would stop to help a stranger change a tire.
Even at rest, Josh emitted a low-pitched energetic restlessness. There was a certain quickness to him, something I had felt immediately when I met him. “I always had to be busy,” he said of his life before fighting. “Too much leisure and I start to get itchy. I will get into trouble if I don’t have something to do.” When he spoke, he stared directly, his attention toeing the line between intent and aggressive.
Before there was muay Thai for Josh, there was skating, there was graffiti writing, there was rock climbing, there was CrossFit, each done at what can be fairly described as an extreme level. Before there was fighting in a ring, there was a different kind of fighting, too, the kind that found him in handcuffs at the age of twenty-two, looking down the barrel of a very different sort of life. In all those pursuits, there were the four elements that together populate an obsession for Josh: “danger, luck, skill, and being an idiot.”
I identified the fighter Josh had come to spar with as soon as he stepped onto the mat. He was the largest man in the gym, taller than Josh by at least a few inches, broader and wider too. He wore flashy traditional Thai shorts—shiny black and gold silk emblazoned with tigers—and pulled on python-printed shin guards and padded headgear. Josh was dressed in board shorts and a somewhat ill-fitting black tank top. He put on shin guards—his were black, and one was held together with tape—but when the Rise trainer looked around the mat and barked for everyone to put on headgear, Josh shrugged and said, “I didn’t bring any.”
It wasn’t that he was foolhardy. He didn’t make the mistake of underestimating his opponent, or the potential for grave and amortized damage to his brain and body; that much was clear from the way his face settled into a mask of focus as soon as he pulled his gloves on.
Sparring, his stare went from intense to menacing. The first time I had seen him on the mat, my immediate thought, which came so fast I said it out loud without thinking, was I wouldn’t want to see him in a dark alley, and after watching him train for several months, it felt like I could see him making calculations behind the blank wall of that stare.
I suspected that the more exposed he was, the higher the pressure was. The more he was challenged, the more focus and precision was demanded of him, and that demand was what Josh was there for. Winning a fight or besting an opponent was secondary to all of this. He wanted to win his fight, sure, but Josh’s real reason for being in the ring was to spend time with the outer reaches of his own psyche.
The fighters broke into pairs: four on the mat, one in the MMA cage. I had a hard time deciding where to focus my attention. Josh’s partner, the big man, was a strong fighter, with power in his kicks that I could feel from across the mat, but even to my eye his body lacked the speed and shark-like efficiency of Josh’s. It was difficult for me to determine how much intensity each fighter was giving: this was not a fight, after all, just training, and the men shared a warm and respectful rapport. No one had come here to deliver a beatdown.
Shirtless, with a flushed face and his popsicle-red mouthguard visible between his lips, Josh looked terrifying. His shoulders shrugged up to meet his clean-shaven head; his vulnerable neck vanished in his fighter’s stance. Gone was the easy smile he had walked in with; in its place was a deranged-looking grimace.
On the risers of the steel steps leading up to the MMA cage there were two warnings: NO SHOES IN THE CAGE and ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. N sprang up the steps and entered the cage with a smaller pro fighter named Casey and they began to spar, delivering complicated-looking series of kicks, punches, elbows, and knees, their compact bodies flowing and clashing into and away from each other. They circled each other like animals, and broke into quick grins when someone connected, a duet of admiration as much as a fight.
On the street, two small boys walked up to the storefront, inches away from the cage but separated by the glass. They stopped, transfixed, their mouths open, their eyes peeled wide. I went back to watching N and Casey, and several moves later, I glanced back outside and the boys were still there, still staring, the larger one in a bright green hoodie that ringed his face like a halo. He was perhaps having one of the pivotal moments of his young life, I realized, watching two men toy with violence in such a visibly playful manner.
I thought about how my father had reacted when I told him I was dating a fighter, that I was taking boxing classes myself. It’s just so violent, he said, of mixed martial arts. I can’t watch it. I thought about the people I knew—and there were plenty—who wouldn’t watch fight sports because they were uncomfortable witnessing such brutality. I was deeply suspicious of this squeamishness; it felt conceptually similar to eating meat while maintaining horror at the thought of actually butchering animals. There was hypocrisy there, of course, but there was also something that to me felt more sinister: the idea that by refusing to look at certain spectacles, there can be moral cleanliness from the existence of violence.
We are a culture of euphemism and sanitation: of chicken fingers, of nipple pasties, of boneless breasts. We, too, are a culture of violence: of feedlots, of rape, of roughness systematically applied to some while others clutch their pearls and say I can’t watch that. We lack hunger for truths about the violence we participate in. No one wants to watch the whipping scene in Roots, nobody wants to read exactly how Larry Nassar pushed his unwashed fingers inside children’s vaginas, nobody wants to see the glistening organs of a freshly slaughtered pig. We want, instead, to cringe, to look away, and to affirm our humanity for doing so even as we claim ownership of land made fecund with slave labor, even as we settle into La-Z-Boy chairs to watch the thrilling performances of USA Gymnastics, even as we contentedly wipe bacon grease off our chins.
The boys standing outside the glass will come to know violence, most likely, if they hadn’t already. They will meet it or witness it in their homes, in their schools, in their relationships. “Every day in America men are violent,” the feminist cultural critic bell hooks writes. “Their violence is deemed ‘natural’ by the psychology of patriarchy, which insists that there is a biological connection between having a penis and the will to do violence.”
I wonder what is meant, exactly, when we use the word violence: what bell hooks means, what I mean, what has been carried through centuries of social evolution on the backs of three small syllables. From the Middle Latin, vim: power, energy. The Latin, vis: strength, especially as exercised against someone, also violentus: vehement, forcible. When did the tint of unhinged sadism grow to become the whole color of this word, which in today’s English we understand to mean physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill?
As N and Casey landed kicks and knees on each other’s bodies, I felt glad the boys outside were seeing their power, their energy. If I had a son I would want him to see that strength can be exercised against someone—and we can keep calling it violence, because language is clumsy and leaves great breaches of approximation between shifting and complicated truths—without hatred, without fear, with brutality but without malice. I would want him to see and to know that there are healthy spaces for the call to roughness and body contact I believe lives inside the human animal, that here, in this cage, these men found a model for a different kind of roughness, a respectful violence that appears brutal, but that at its heart is truer and more honest than ways of being that wrap harm with politesse.
Impact
To prepare a Thai boxer for a fight is to receive much force. In a training session, Josh kicked N so hard he left a brownish-purple bruise the size of a butternut squash on the side of his thigh, despite the thick leather Thai pads and shin guards between their bodies. He elbowed him in the right eye socket, leaving another bruise behind, this one a ring of darker purple the size of a slice of peach.
N would bring his body to my home after these sessions, during which he held pads for Josh to punch, kick, knee, and elbow, N absorbing the force of the blows into his own body. He said little of the consequences of all that impact unless I probed, but I could somehow sense the reverberations of everything he had just sustained, vibrating off his body like song from a singing bowl.
To absorb violence, to commit violence: are they reciprocal actions, moving in a circle, or does the flow of effect move ever outward? Josh and N were more than athlete and coach; they were close friends.
Do you carry it with you? I asked Josh, about the rough treatment he must rain down on men he cares about to be ready to enter the ring.
“Someone has to be that person,” he said—the person giving direction, holding the pads, and receiving the impact, that is—“But I try not to take that for granted. I try to take the things he’s saying seriously, to not waste it, to make it as good an experience for him as possible.”
That is the way of combat sport: to prepare for a fight, there is collateral damage not only to your own body, but to those of your sparring partners and coaches, too. The fighters accepted this truth as part of the unspoken contract they entered into when they trained together.
N, a third-generation martial artist, spent much of his younger life training to fight MMA until he was nearly paralyzed in a training accident when his partner spiked his head against the mat, compressing his neck and damaging his spine so badly that he had to recalibrate to a new normal in which coaching took the place of fighting. The health of his spine was hard-won, a decade-long project, and, I feared, precarious. It was sometimes difficult for me to watch Josh kick him.
When I saw N’s body reverberate with the force it absorbed, I was torn. I was the person who loved him, loved his body, wanted his wellness and resilience and knew that the various parts of him would be better off in five, ten, thirty years if he never took another kick to the belly or another elbow to the face. But there was another part of me that was stronger, the part that wouldn’t dare to wish a bridle on a wild horse, who saw in him generations of martial skill and pride, who knew that to fret about a man like him would be to fundamentally misunderstand who he is.
N has trained and coached Josh from his very first day practicing the traditional Thai kickboxing known as muay Thai, long before either of them knew Josh would eventually step into the competitive ring. Josh has never had another teacher, and in this way, Josh was N’s, a fighter molded completely and only according to his design. Elusive by temperament as a combatant, Josh was most comfortable playing a game of evasion, ever slipping out of his opponent’s range, using his fitness to his advantage as he moved inside and outside.
N didn’t fight this way. He had a different instinct, one less evasive, stylistically incompatible with the desire to run or to hide. In raising Josh as a fighter, though, N decided that trying to alter his instinctive style—the personality of his fighting—would be counter to the project of making him the most powerful version of himself he could become. So his persona, his ringcraft, and his ethic were all layered onto that first, truest instinct: his fighter’s heart.
In the three years that Josh had been fighting competitively, he took on nine fights, winning five. His very first competitive fight was in a tournament format, meaning that for as long as he won his fights, he would fight opponent after opponent with mere hours between bouts.
Against his first opponent, he experienced a phenomenon known as an adrenaline dump. Dreaded by fighters, soldiers, and cops, the adrenaline dump begins when a threat is perceived by the amygdala, which triggers the sympathetic nervous system to activate a sudden, intense release of adrenaline—this is commonly understood as “fight or flight response.” If given time to recover in perceived safety, the body recalibrates and returns to normal. But if that threat signal continues to be triggered, the amygdala keeps leaning on the doorbell, overwhelming the body with cortisol and adrenaline and causing a series of nearly immobilizing aftereffects during which the body struggles to recover its functions.
By Josh’s estimate, he felt thirty seconds of superhuman strength during his first fight: limitless in his power, impervious to pain. Then his body began to vibrate, and suddenly he was “watching the fight through the inside of a straw.” This tunnel vision was accompanied by a bodily exhaustion that he had no comparison for. Though he won by judge’s decision, he only watched the tape of the fight once, because he couldn’t bear seeing himself in such a weakened state.
“It was a terrible experience,” he told me, clearly frustrated with himself even in the recounting. “Everything took more effort than I had, I was truly giving 100 percent of my effort. It was not what I envisioned. It makes me cringe.”
Sport fighting is, above all, a game: a bout between players, yes, but also, and perhaps primarily, a test of the self, of the successes and failures of the integration of physical prowess, emotional regulation, and tactical skills. Control of the body, control of the mind.
Contrary to what I might have thought before I came to know these men, there was a marked lack of sadism in the why and the how of their fighting.
“I don’t fight because I’m trying to hurt people,” Josh told me, sipping on herbal tea. “But I’m happy to beat the fuck out of my friends.”
What did this mean, this cheerful enthusiasm for splitting the lips, bruising the ribs, and blacking the eye sockets of people we love? My friend Emma came to muay Thai class with me and kicked me so hard in the belly that I lost all my wind. She did this four times in six minutes, but after the class I felt no complicated emotions, only a clean exhaustion, love for her, and respect for the power of her legs.
I am a person who has hit and been hit under many convoluted and confusing circumstances: in bed, in ritual, in anger, in play; in fear, in desire, in boredom, in rage. Upon request, upon demand, without consent, in terror. I have struck and been struck by enough men enough times and enough ways to feel sure that there is nothing inherently bad or good about rough contact, that context and consent determine the value and consequence of such actions.
In her New Materialist essay on the physics and politics of touch, feminist scholar Karen Barad reminds us that “touch, for a physicist, is but an electromagnetic interaction.” I am far from a physicist, but I have done enough experimenting with and on my own body to understand that what I am feeling is the meaning of a thing, not the essence of the thing itself. The story attached to a sensation alters my experience of it; this is why I once loved getting hit and choked in bed by a person I selected but I am afraid of being hit and choked by a stranger on the street. The electromagnetic interactions might be approximately the same, but the nature of the experience is altogether different, same-looking boxes with unrelated contents. We use our minds to graft narratives onto the things we do to our bodies, and the things that are done to them.
The schism between mind and body that is imagined by philosophy and, until relatively recently, by science can be traced back to René Descartes. I think, therefore I am, he stated, and with the seventeenth century’s understanding of the human organism, he declared the physical structure of the body—limbs, skin, organs, all our warmths and wetnesses—to be separate and divided from that which makes thoughts, emotions, and ideas: the mind.
Neuroscience asks how the contents of our thoughts determine the states of our bodies, and how the states of our bodies determine the contents of our minds. It is perhaps easier to conceptualize the basis for the first question. We understand from our experiences and the common narratives we assign to them that when we are anxious our pulses quicken and our palms sweat. We know the buzzing sensations that arrive as adrenaline floods the bloodstream when we watch frightening movies or experience startle. These links between sensation and emotion are stories we can understand and know how to tell.
But because we can’t see or feel the microbiomes of our guts sending information up our vagus nerves to our brains, we tend to hold on to the Cartesian notion of separateness between how we feel and the autonomic bodily processes that are invisible or indiscernible to us. I think, therefore I am is an easy truth to swallow, but to also acknowledge that I—the I of my gut flora, of my skin movement, of my metabolism, of my hormonal regulation—am, therefore I think: that one takes a bit more faith.
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When I was working as a dominatrix, I hurt a lot of bodies. Men paid me to hurt them in more ways than I could have imagined. There was much striking—“impact play,” in S/M parlance—with objects and with parts of my own body: whipping, flogging, kicking, kneeing, slapping, punching. There was pinching, cutting, slicing, tying. There were medical instruments and hardware store tools and electrical devices that plugged into wall outlets. I sent my clients home with bruises, cuts, abrasions; the impressions of my fingers around their necks in pale purplish pink, vivid striped lash marks on their backs and asses, rope burns around their wrists, ankles, genitals. I knew how to hurt them without leaving a trace, but many of them requested these marks—souvenirs, as it were, of our time together.
I did not, at the time, consider the broader ramifications of the bodily traumas I was inflicting. I considered my work to be self-contained, discrete two- or three-hour chunks of experience in which the effects, like the battering, flowed only outward from my fingers, feet, and fists. Like Descartes, I imagined a split between the acts committed by my body and the contents of my mind, and I did not consider the cumulative effect of these violences, or what might be flowing back into me.
Touch
In fighting, and in training to fight, touch is everything. The narrative of combat sport is built of moments of touch: punching, kicking, kneeing; impact, collision, friction; pull, push, smash. There is gentle touch, too, in muay Thai, the touch of functional care. Fighters wrap each other’s hands, coaches adjust body positions, water is carefully poured into heavy-breathing mouths ringside.
On a date, N and I went to hear a decorated neuroscientist lecture on the sociological importance of touch. I considered how bereft of touch some peoples’ lives are—particularly men, for whom the giving and receipt of touch is often a loaded matter.
“There is a place for touch in healthcare,” the neuroscientist said. There was audible discomfort in the audience’s reaction to these words, a collective intake of breath and a low murmuring of protest.
“I know touch can be abused,” she demurred in response, though she moved on without elaborating. She delivered a long and engaging talk on the brain–body dialogue, the vagus nerve, the limbic and autonomic nervous systems; high-key science distilled into digestibility for the Tuesday evening crowd.
I wriggled my hand into N’s in the dark auditorium and felt the callouses on his palm with my fingers. He rested his other hand on my thigh, and I was immediately a shade more comfortable, full of the warmth and connection conferred by this touch.
When I was a sex worker, more than a few of my clients told me that I was the only person who had touched them in a very long time. They weren’t speaking only of sexual touch, but of any human contact. I remember being staggered by the consideration of that fact. A man who doesn’t have a partner, whose partner doesn’t touch him, or who doesn’t receive bodywork like massage might go weeks, months, even years without the touch of another human.
This, of course, can happen to people of any gender, but because of the instability of masculine identity and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed “homosexual panic”—that is, terror at feeling or being perceived as feeling desire for another man—there is a deep cultural sense, at least in the United States, that touch is not something to be shared between straight men, except in arenas of sport.
Of all the elements of muay Thai fighting, Josh was weakest in the clinch. His long, powerful limbs made him fearsome and confident in the striking moves—punching, kicking, kneeing, elbowing—and his instinct for reading and dodging his opponent’s moves protected him from many strikes that would have landed on a different sort of fighter. But he was uncomfortable at ultra-close range and did everything he could to avoid clinch fighting, which is like stand-up grappling, each fighter trying to gain dominance over the other from a range so close they will both step away soaked in the other’s sweat, cranking on necks and biceps while trying to leverage grip against angles to make space for knees, elbows, and sweeps.
The clinch is intimate. In N’s muay Thai classes, we practiced in pairs. With one of her hands hooked around the back of my neck and the other clamped onto my biceps, my training partner pulled my head down into her shoulder. I could smell her breath, her hair, the salty milk smell of her skin. As we got a few rounds into the hour of drills, I could feel her perspiration through her T-shirt, warm and damp on my forehead. The clinch was the closest contact I had ever been in with another body aside from sex, and the bleeding through of sexuality into this closeness felt impossible to deny or contain. It’s not that I was turned on. It was that this much sweaty full-body contact evoked a visceral association with sexuality that was too big, old, and thorough to sever.
In this posture, we took turns at controlling the clinch: first, she pushed me back, two steps, easily bullying me with her larger, taller frame and superior skills. She stepped her lead foot out to the side of my feet, cranked my elbow skyward, and pulled my neck, which was firmly in her grip, down and around. I stumbled and staggered—the intended effect—and she followed with a sideways strike, her knee making contact with my liver zone that was gentle but authoritative: an announcement of where the hurt would have been placed, were we fighting. My head was still pulled down into her shoulder, and dizziness washed in as she moved me again: two steps forward, this time pulling me, and again the sweep, followed this time by a straight knee to my belly.
I felt safer in the clinch than I did on the street. In the clinch, the contact was explicit and honest, and I had consented to it. As a woman in America, my daily life was inundated with incidental unwanted touch, and I was repeatedly stunned by how much anger and pushback often followed my utterances of Please don’t touch me.
From early girlhood, the social pressure to accept uncomfortable touch in the name of politeness and not making a scene was powerful and pervasive. I don’t know a woman who hasn’t suffered through an unwanted hug because doing so is easier than saying No, thank you. When Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” which includes a scene of a young woman having undesired sex with a date because it is easier than extricating herself from his apartment, made the rounds on the internet, I and nearly all my female friends understood exactly how and why one might make that choice. As a younger woman, I made that choice so many times that the incidents are indistinct in my memory.
The older I get, the more I say Please don’t touch me. I grow less and less comfortable with haphazard touching, particularly from men. I feel embittered toward men as an institution, which can be confusing, because I also love individual men. There is a part of me who is still afraid of being perceived as shrill or uncool; that part tries to find compassion for the truly astonishing parade of men who feel entitled to contact with my body. That part tells me that being touched here and there is not that big a deal. The real truth is that I have become the kind of woman my twenty-year-old self would have rolled her eyes at while paying the tab for her idiot boyfriend. That is to say, I have become a woman who cares to stand up for myself. I want no part of the too-long huggers, the double-hand-handshake grabbers, the upper-arm holders, the lingering cheek kissers. When I receive my change from a purchase, I don’t want my palm caressed along with the coins. The emotion that is attached to the cumulative violence of all this unwanted touch is not annoyance. It is rage, hot and blistering. The rage scares me, so I often tamp it down, reminding myself that many of these men were boys who were not taught the boundaries of other people’s bodies, that culture has told them they can have anything they grab but they must never show need, that they may have no outlet for healthy touch in their lives. I burn anyway.
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I wondered how touch, consent, and violence intersect, and how context and consent alter the effects of violence committed and received, and in seeking answers I returned, full circle, to combat sport. Training to fight is not all violence. There is physical care between men in the practice of martial arts, too. Whether it exists to offset all the roughness exchanged, or whether space is made by these very violences for a culture of touch predicated on tender masculinity, I am not sure, but I do know this: in fighting, embodied conversations take place inside and outside the ring, in which men say things like: I respect you, I trust you, I care about you, I love you. They say these things with graciously absorbed blows, with easy embraces before and after sparring sessions, with acts of service undertaken without request or fanfare.
N answered my questions about the masculinity that exists between men who train and fight together, and told me that in this space, the ego and jockeying for dominance that pervade the broader culture was markedly absent. He talked about the humility that came with a daily practice of being physically bested, and how hypermasculinity, with its inherent precarity, had no room to breathe in the ring, on the mat, in the training camp. Because the exploration and expression of dominance was literal and physical in the ring, all the extraneous cultural baggage and identity politics that orbit the idea of what it is to be a man became moot.
Anyone can wax philosophical, and I don’t know if I would have bought those claims if not for my own experience of N and the men he trains. N is, by an order of magnitude, both the gentlest and the most dangerous man I have ever known. On the mat I saw glimpses of what he could do with his body: how lethal his fists, shins, elbows, and knees would be under the right circumstances. We often went running together at night, and next to him I felt free of fear in a way that was new in its completeness; I knew no one would hurt me when he was there. I had known plenty of rough men: men who became unhinged by their anger and perceived powerlessness, men who were careless with their words and hands. N was not this, not anything close to it. He was something else altogether.
I watched the care and tenderness with which he treated the bodies around him. I saw him reach out a hand behind his young son’s back as he clambered up a slide, offering just enough support, not quite pushing. I watched him with my friend’s small anxious dog, caressing her nervous ears until she nestled in at his feet and turned her belly skyward. I felt him with my own tender parts, which I myself often treated so carelessly, the surfaces of his hands rough with weightlifter callouses but the touch they carried gentle and full of care. My long hair would get pinned under my shoulders when I was lying down in bed, and he would free it without pulling any of it from my head. Even in the boxing studio, where he taught me to punch and threw instructive jabs toward my face, he pulled me close with a gloved hand between rounds and kissed my sweaty forehead.
We can be like puppies together, he told me, about the affection I observed between his team of fighters, because we understand that we are wolves.