Trial by Fire: Jose Aldo Feels the Heat

There are reasons fighters have a library of good stories. The profession can take you into odd corners of the world; prior to that, experiences growing up can twist and torque your brain into that kind of career choice. Fighters are not boring people. They all have a book in them.

This is especially true of Jose Aldo, who related to Yahoo’s Steve Cofield this week that he was once tossed into a barbeque pit by his two sisters while horsing around as a toddler in Brazil. Let me run that by you once more: he was tossed into a barbeque pit as a baby.

Tiger Woods, meanwhile, had a formative experience of his own earlier this month: in Shanghai for the WGC-HSBC event, Woods complained that crowds kept taking pictures of him with their cell phones. Haunting. Perhaps he and Aldo can swap horror stories sometime.

This is part and parcel of relative thinking: the idea that nothing you experience in the ring can be as traumatic as what you’ve already gone through. Mike Thomas Brown will not have pyrotechnics Wednesday night, and he cannot do anything to Aldo that might require skin grafts.

A lot of people get hung up on how tough fighters are physically. I tend to think it’s their mental calluses that make more of a difference.