The Roughhouse - Snap Classic

A man washes up on shore in Sitka, Alaska and finds himself in the middle of an underground boxing show. It’s a place where you might duke it out with the bartender, the locals, or your own troubled past. This episode contains violence and strong language. Sensitive listeners, please be advised. Thank you, Jaed “The Stone” Coffin, for sharing your story with us! For more about Jaed’s story, check out his memoir Roughhouse Friday. https://www.amazon.com/Roughhouse-Friday-Memoir-Jaed-Coffin/dp/0374251959 Produced by Bo Walsh, original score by Doug Stuart, artwork by Teo Ducot Snap Classic - Season 17 - Episode 42 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Speaker 00

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• 0:53Speaker 00

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• 1:28Glynn Washington?

  Okay, so I grew up not much of a fighter guy, more of a flee the hostilities, go read a comic book type of guy. But if they make you do something often enough, you get better. And growing up, as the only black kid in rural Michigan, I get plenty of practice. And the first rule that you learn about street fighting, not talking about boxing, you know, man cave fights or any of that stuff. The first rule is never, never fight a twin. Never, under any circumstances. Why? Because they grow up with their own personal aspiring partner from the womb. That's why. Forget 10,000 hours of practice. They have a whole lifetime.

• 2:11Glynn Washington?

  And if you do manage to somehow, some way, to beat up a twin brother, 90% of the time, do you know who's standing right there? The other twin brother. So now you gotta pull two miracles. No, no, avoid. The second thing you learn is that 90% of the time, whoever throws the first punch wins, right? So when you know the fight is coming, when there is absolutely no way to avoid it, when the evil bully is telling you to meet him down by the Cascade Farm at such and such a time, no, for what? So he can gather up his buddies? So he can find something hard to hit you with?

• 2:54Glynn Washington?

  No, the time is now, right now. Buck up, lean in, smile, and then swing as hard as you can. And you swing again and again.

• 3:09Glynn Washington?

  Now you're dancing, you're dancing. And if you're lucky, you catch that surprise. If you're quick, you might even get three strikes in before his confused behind starts swinging back. Now he's failing wild. Not you. You're surgical. As surgical as you can be in the middle of the madness. And make no mistake, every single fight is madness. It's primal, it's raw. And knowing all of this, anything can still occur. There are no guarantees. But if it is going to happen, as a public service, today on Snap Judgment, we proudly present The Rough House.

• 3:52Glynn Washington?

  Not only was it in Washington, one last tip I always remember and never forget, triplets are even worse than twins when you're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 4:17Glynn Washington?

  Our story today on The Rough House episode has some violence and maybe even a little bit of language to go with it. Of course it does. And we begin in the summer of 2002 with Jed Coffin, a recent college graduate from Maine. After saving up his money, working on lobster boat, Jed takes off on a solo road trip across the country before winding up in the Pacific Northwest, wondering what to do next. Snap Judgment.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  I'd been driving around for about six months. I still really didn't know where I was headed. I just knew that I had this nervous energy to keep searching for a place to be. And I wasn't going to go home. By then I'd realized I couldn't go home again. And really, in a matter of a day or two, bought a sea kayak for about a thousand bucks. And I just decided that I would follow the map north. And so off I went.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  For the next several weeks, I just paddled along the coast and sometimes camped out in city parks or next to roads. I know I was losing some weight, but I was also getting really strong and really comfortable in my boat and very happy spending every evening by my little fires, cooking fish, and just watching the sunset and paddling all day. But at the same time, I was definitely going a little crazy in my head. I was clearly at odds with something. Some days I would be paddling in really rough water,

• 6:22Speaker 02

  maybe against a current or some tides. And I just found myself like digging my paddle blades into the water with an almost violent level of aggression, like the waves were trying to hold me back from something that I was meant to understand. Toward the end of the summer, I finally paddled across the US/Canada border into Alaska. The rains of the fall had started and it wasn't really paddling weather anymore. And so I think by necessity, I just felt like it was time to stop. And sometime toward the end of August, washed up in the town of Sitka.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  After I'd been living in Sitka for about a month, I'd heard that there was a college, Sheldon Jackson College on campus. There was a weight room and a gymnasium. So I started going there every night to lift weights.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  One night while I was lifting, I just heard this sound coming from down the hallway. It just was like whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, over and over and over again in these different tempos. And I didn't think much of it at first and I just started lifting weights again. And then suddenly I just started hearing it all the time, like whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, you know? And almost like music. And after I had heard it for a while, I just followed it down the hallway to this door of a little utility room at the end of the hall.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  And inside I saw kind of a boxy, square-shouldered guy. And it occurred to me that he was a boxing trainer and that he was training fighters in a little boxing club. There was a focus and a seriousness to what was going on in that room. So I stayed at the door and watched until the training session ended while I watched the trainer stuffing boxing equipment into a duffel bag. And then without really thinking about it, I just said, "Do you ever take new guys on?" And he seemed very hesitant. He looked around the room and said, "It's a small room and I just don't have any time

• 8:45Speaker 02

  to take any new guys on." And I thought, okay, fine. You know, it was kind of felt a little bit precarious to invite myself into the room in the first place. So I was glad to have an out. So I turned around to leave. And then with my back turned to him, I heard him call out, "Have you ever done any fighting before?" And I said, "Yeah, I have, in fact." When I told Victor that I had some fighting background, I was full of shit. And he said, "All right, cool. Well, why don't you put a sparring helmet and some gloves on and we'll give it a shot, see what you got." I thought, "Yeah, let's do it. I'll just walk into this gym out of nowhere and fight a man who I would later find out

• 9:30Speaker 02

  had been given the title, 'The toughest man in southeast Alaska.'"

• 9:37Speaker 02

  The beeper went off and we just kind of circled for a moment. Somehow, I just started putting punches together and trying to hit him. And I couldn't hit him. Every time I jabbed or threw a left hand, he would just slide away. And then he just started hitting me. I had no idea where the punches were coming from. They just seemed to get harder and harder. Some jabs would land in my nose, snap my head back. And he was hitting me with all sorts of interesting punches from different angles. Disappearing, popping up, landing, hooks, right hands, uppercuts. At a certain point, I just felt like totally defenseless.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  The weird thing was is that like as vicious as the impact was, I kind of liked it. It was scratching some itch that nothing else in my life had ever scratched. My nose was bleeding. My teeth had kind of bit through a part of my lip. I remember there was a lot of blood running down the front of my shirt. I think the man looked at me and was like, alright, you know, this will kind of convince this guy that boxing's not for him. And he said, we're done, right? You know, that's it, right? And I just kind of was like, no, like, let's keep going. I want more. Whatever it is that this is, I want more of it.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I just felt like this guy who I'd met 10 minutes ago had allowed me to reach down and grab hold of something inside of me that was waiting to come out. There's always something inside of me that, a feeling, a condition, some sense of loneliness or melancholy mixed with anger that I never really had the words for and I never really knew what to do with the feeling and I never really knew the place that it should or shouldn't have in my life. I felt like for the first time, that feeling was finally in conversation with something.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  As we parted ways that night, he said, you know, most guys come into my gym and I beat the shit out of them and they never come back. And I just got to find some way to figure out who's serious, you know? What I'm doing in here is training fighters. And he said, but we're in here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 6 o'clock. If you want to come back.

• 12:13Glynn Washington?

  Don't go anywhere. That's just one round, snappers. Will Jed make it to the final battle? Stay tuned.

• 12:37Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Rough House episode with the strong language and the violence because of the punching and the kicking and the shoving when last be left. Jed was initiated into a local boxing club and found a trainer that just might make him a contender. Snap Judgment.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  After that first night, I went back every night. And while Victor gave most of his attention to the fighters that he was preparing, you know, every once in a while, he'd give me a chance to step in and mostly act as a sparring partner. There was a couple other men who he was training for what he called the Rough House Friday Boxing Show. It was a fight show in an out of town bar where people off the street with very little fighting experience got paid to punch each other in front of about 500 fans. I thought of it as this kind of like backwoods brawling situation where, you know, based on my experience, I really had no place.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Even though I was getting my ass beat every night, I was inflicting some of the pain on a heavy bag or a sparring partner that I had absorbed over the last 20 years of my life. I think it's fair to say at the heart of that anger was family history. I grew up in a house with my mother and my father lived five hours away in northern Vermont. My parents met in Thailand in 1969 while my father was stationed at a base during the Vietnam War.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  They got married and then came back to the US. And shortly after I was born, my father left our family to live with another woman and her five kids and leave my mother to raise my sister and me in America alone. I don't know how well I understood the complexity of race and marriage and war and what it meant to be a kid from two different cultures, growing up in Maine, that my dad, as a white man in America, was going to live a really different life than the life that my mother had lived and that I would probably live.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And my dad's departure from our family, that decision would go on to affect so many other things about my life. And he'd never really had to answer for any of it. About the time I headed up to Alaska, I was starting to put those things together. I was 23 years old and I felt really aware that I was not by any means a man. And I don't really know what idea of manhood I was holding myself against, but I'd always seen my dad as this masculine hero.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  Sometimes he'd be like off doing pushups or karate sequences, taekwondo forms on the sidelines of my soccer games, really performed kind of toughness. I think in my mind, I really thought he might be like a Green Beret or something, when in fact, he had been a therapist for soldiers coming home from war. After two or three more weeks of training, Victor came up to me and said, you know, I talked to the promoter of the Rough House Friday Boxing Show, who was the same promoter who had made Victor a Rough House champion.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  And he's got a show coming up in November and he asked me if I had any new fighters. And I told him about you. I said, you were green, but that you were pretty tough. And I told him the story of the first night that you walked into the gym where I kind of beat the shit out of you and he wants to know if you want to fight. And then Victor told me the deal. He said that I'd be going into a bar and if I won, I'd get paid 150 bucks. And then he warned me, he said, you know, but it's no ballroom. Basically, you walk into a bar, take your shirt off, get into a ring and show everyone how much of a man you are.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  And, you know, as serious as I'd been about learning to fight for the last couple of weeks and as eager as I'd been to be in that violent moment with another person, the thought of doing that, of walking into a bar, taking my shirt off, getting in the ring and showing everyone how much of a man I was, was totally horrifying. And I told Victor that, you know, I wasn't ready and that this isn't something that I was really prepared to do. So a couple of weeks went by and, you know, I just kind of sat with the invitation. And I just remember waking up one morning and feeling kind of mopey and flat and feeling like, no, like, I actually do need to go fight in a bar.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  In most cases, when faced with confrontation, I had chosen to walk away. That's how I operated. That's how I was taught to operate. Theoretically, there were like better things on the other side of walking away from a fight. And, you know, it was one thing to walk away from violence, but it's another thing to walk away from a confrontation with a part of yourself that needs to be addressed. So I went back to the gym that Monday night and I just told Victor, I said, sign me up. I'm in. And Victor was really pumped. That night after training, he said, now you got to pick a nickname for yourself. I said, what about the Stone? And I said, what do you mean?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  It's like, I don't get it. The Stone? He said, you know, the first night you came in here, I beat the shit out of you and you act like it didn't hurt. You were just kind of stone cold. What about the Stone? And I said, alright, Jed the Stone Coffin. Let's do it. And I remember running home that night, feeling like I'd been knighted with a new name. If I couldn't figure out who I was, at least I could be this version of who I was as a fighter, as the Stone. By then it was late November and Victor came into the club and said that the promoter had an opponent for me. This young man was from the village of Hunna.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  He was a high school basketball star who had gone on to be a wrestler in college, an exceptional athlete who'd won a couple fights already. Victor looked at me and said, you don't have to fight him. You've been training for what, five weeks? And I asked Victor, what do you think? Like, what would you do? And Victor paused and just kind of looked me in the eyes and said, well, if you want to be the fucking man, then you got to fight this guy.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  I remember the morning we left for that fight. We had to leave really early in the morning at like 5:00 AM to catch the 6:00 AM service from Sitka to Juneau on a little plane. The Rough House Friday show had been around since the late 90s. It took place in this bar called Marlin Tini's in the capital city of Juneau, about 90 miles east from Sitka. It was one Friday a month throughout the winter season, when it was kind of lonely and quiet in town, when all the cruise ships had gone south, the tourists were all gone, and it was just locals. It was a place to gather, to watch some stuff go down, and had drawn a big following

• 20:37Speaker 02

  in southeast Alaska because it drew on all the old rivalries between villages and fishing communities along the Inside Passage. Some of these rivalries were really old. They went back, in some cases, hundreds, thousands of years to tribal differences. Sometimes it went to old high school sports rivalries. People like to see local people kind of come out of the woodwork and go from being ordinary people walking around to fighters. You know, you got a schoolteacher fighting a bus driver, or a fisherman fighting a cop. Sometimes it was your next-door neighbor. These were ordinary people doing somewhat radical things in front of an audience.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  We walked into Marlin Tini's that night, and the barroom was packed. And, you know, I was 23, but I hadn't spent that much time in bars in my life. So they were still pretty intimidating places, where I felt kind of like a child walking into a bar. It was a Friday night in Alaska in the early winter, and people had been drinking pretty heavy. And I followed Victor through the crowd, and Victor seemed to know a lot of people, and people were like patting him on the shoulder, like, "What's up, champ?" Recognized him as a former champion. I felt really good following him. Then, for the next, you know, hour or so, I watched the first six or seven fights of the evening.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  And they were kind of horrifying. The bell would ring, and guys would just go nuts for like 30 seconds, hit each other as much as they could, typically gas out. It was kind of a street fight that just happened to be in a boxing ring. I remember I heard the promoter call me into the ring. And he's just in that perfect, growling promoter's voice. He said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's Rough House Friday." And the crowd just went wild. They loved it. And he said, "You know, this next fighter, he paddled a sea kayak all the way from Washington State up to Sitka, Alaska." And there was a mix of cheers and bullshit and whistles and boos, because no one liked

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Sitka. And he said, "Jade the Stone Coffin." You know, and I remember raising my fist and just realizing that, like, no one really cared who I was or was paying attention to who I was. Then it was time to fight the Huna Hooligan. He looked like a badass, and he carried himself with a swagger that I didn't have. And he showed up with an entourage. And seeing a kid coming from his own community, I think the Hooligan really understood what it meant to be a fighter. And a lot was riding on his prominence as a Rough House fighter. I remember this chant started picking up, the name of his village.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  "Huna, Huna, Huna." And no one was chanting for me. So the bell rings, and within the first minute, he just lit me up. He hit me probably seven or eight times, you know, without even me being able to get my hands on him in a clinch. He was fast, and I just chased him around the ring while he hit me. And the second round went kind of the same way. And then, you know, I remember looking at Victor before the third round, and he just didn't have any answers. He was like, "This kid's a badass. He's fast." So in the third round, things got pretty ugly. And at one point, we wrestled each other out of the ring, onto the scorer's table. And the crowd loved it, and everyone was going crazy. You know, it was just a raucous scene.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And somehow, I slipped an uppercut in between his elbows, but it landed super flush, right on his chin, popped his head back. And I was able to drive him back to the ropes with three or four punches. And the crowd loved it. And suddenly, you know, after the bell rang, the crowd, they weren't just chanting for the Hooligan anymore. They were starting to get behind me. And the judges read their scorecards, and in the end, the first round went to the Hooligan. The second round went to me. And then, in the third round, because I'd snuck in in the last 10 seconds, that uppercut sequence, two of the three judges gave me the fight, and I was the winner.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  I felt ashamed of myself because I felt like I kind of knew that I'd lost the fight. I went over to Victor's corner, and he knew that I lost the fight. And the crowd was just booing the decision and not happy. And the Hooligan was pissed. His entourage was pissed. And Victor was like, "Let's get the fuck out of here. Like, we don't need to be hanging around with this crowd." That was the beginning of what would become a rivalry between me and the Hooligan. Victor had put in the local paper that I'd won my fight in a small column. I remember someone from town just came up to me on the street and was like, "Hey, The Stone, you're the fighter, The Stone, right?" And I remember thinking like, "Uh, yeah, I guess.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Like, yes, that is me. I am the Rough House fighter that fights for Sitka."

• 26:08Glynn Washington?

  Coming up, Jed begins to understand what he's really fighting for. When Snap Judgment continues, stay tuned.

• 26:35Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. I'm noted lover and non-fighter Glenn Washington, and you're listening to our Rough House episode. When last we heard from Jed, he had just discovered a new home in the squared circle of underground barroom boxing. And as I've said, this story, of course, contains the fighting and violence and language and all of the good stuff, because that is the point of the ring. But Jed, Jed still had to confront his past outside of the ring. Snap Judgment.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  My dad was someone that I had always talked to on the phone. In some ways, I was more comfortable talking to him on the phone than I was hanging out with him in person. And so, my dad would call, and I'd get him caught up on what was going on in the gym. He'd get me caught up on stuff that was happening back east. During that time, I also knew that every time I hung up the phone, there was something really big that we weren't talking about, that we never talked about. It was easy to talk about punching someone, but what was really difficult was learning how to explain what I was feeling. But when I tried to talk to my dad about that, I found that, like, my words were gone.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  My next fight was going to be another fight against the Hooligan, because people wanted to see it. The Rough House crowd fucking loved the fight we put on. Like, we put on a show, so let's do it again. For the next couple of weeks, we doubled down on training. I was waking up in the middle of the night, kind of crazy in my head, doing push-ups and sit-ups, shadow boxing incessantly, and just working out long rounds on the mitts and sparring with Victor. My second fight with the Hooligan was happening in mid-January. And we flew over, and the Hooligan, he just kind of showed up alone this time. I remember watching him walk into the bar, and it just seemed like his heart wasn't in it.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  So we get in, the bell rings, and the hooligan just comes out and hits me like four, five, six times, pretty hard, right on the chin, and drives me back into the ropes. And the crowd's going wild. And then, I don't know, I guess I just had more confidence, like the fright of being in with a fighter who was faster than I was and more probably talented than I was, it was kind of gone. So it was like, I sort of knew what I was in for, and I was ready to go. And I just kept pounding him, and was just kind of chasing him around the ring. And, you know, almost to the point where, in the third round, I felt like I didn't really need to even keep hitting him. I just, I had the fight in the bag, you know? It was so obvious to me that, that I was running the ring at that point.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  The final bell rang, we came to the middle of the ring, they called out the judges' cards, and the decision went to the hooligan. And the same thing happened. People started booing the decision, and I was pissed. And I was like, what kind of game are we in, you know, where like, you win a fight, and you lose, and you lose a fight, and you win? I'd been talking to my dad over the winter, and there was this weird tension that existed between us that kind of haunted our conversations. Sometimes I would hear my dad say stuff on the phone, either about how he understood what it meant to be a man, maybe he'd like,

• 30:11Speaker 02

  offer some wisdom or some values that he felt were important to pass down. And every time he'd do that, I just felt this like sting of hypocrisy running through me, you know? Like that he was just so full of shit. The feeling of hearing him talk started to drive me crazy, you know? It was like, I remember hanging up the phone and just feeling like I needed to go run into the woods or hit something. I spent the rest of the winter and spring really just fighting whoever the promoter

• 30:50Speaker 02

  could throw at me. Old Rough House veterans, a mine worker, a guy from Fairbanks. And at that point, I was so charged up on becoming a Rough House champ, that none of them really stood a chance against me in the ring. I felt like I became a low-level celebrity, you know, at Marlin Tini's. And it felt great, you know? It felt like I was being known for something that I was proud of. A lot of times, people would buy me drinks, or people would come up to me while I was getting a drink at the bar, and just shake my hand.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  By mid-season of the Rough House show, I'd passed through a certain threshold where anger was doing something good for my fighting, where there was no fear about getting in the ring, very little nervousness about being in a fight.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  The Southeast Showdown is the big tournament at the end of the Rough House season, where fighters from across Southeast Alaska all congregate in Juneau for a weekend of Rough House fights. The winner of the Southeast Showdown, historically, was called the toughest guy in Southeast Alaska, and was given a belt. I remember Victor showing me one night the belts that he had won, and saying that, "You win one of these belts, and you'll never forget it. You will forever be a Southeast Showdown champion." My dad called me a couple days before the Southeast Showdown and said, "I'm meeting soldiers

• 32:35Speaker 02

  somewhere in the Midwest." And, you know, he said, "But I'm looking into rerouting my flight through Juneau, so that I can catch your fight." So I show up in Juneau, and get off the plane, and my dad's standing there. And I think he wanted to really be a part of this highly masculine journey that I was on. So we're getting ready to go over and fight, and I just felt like I was warming up in front of the mirror. And while I was warming up in front of the mirror, I could feel him watching me, and I could feel myself kind of performing this new version of me, that

• 33:16Speaker 02

  frankly, I just wanted him to be afraid of, that I wanted him not to be able to understand. My dad liked to talk about being a worrier, but he's not a fighter.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  So, we go over to Marlin Tini's, and I want to warm up for my fight. And I ask my dad to hold the mitts for me. So he's holding up the pads, and I start lightly hitting them. And as I go, I start putting a little more power into my punches. And my dad's not really able to keep pace with my punches, but I wanted to get ready for my fight. And at one point, I started throwing left hands kind of hard, and one of the mitts bounced back and hit him in the face and knocked his glasses off. And he looked kind of pathetic

• 34:13Speaker 02

  to me. And I remember looking behind the mitts, which were the only thing that separated us, at my dad. And he seemed kind of afraid of me. So, he was like, "No, I can keep going. Like, I just, I'll just put my glasses on, and, you know, you can, you can keep warming up." And I just looked away, and I was like, "I'm all good. Like, this is not for us. This is for me."

• 34:46Speaker 02

  The Southeast Showdown is a couple fights. You fight two or three times in a weekend. But my division had basically thinned out at that point, because there weren't many middleweights that would really give me a fight at that point. It was a tournament, so you had to fight a first round to get to the final round. I walked right through my first opponent, and the hooligan walked right through his. I have a feeling the promoter figured we'd both end up facing each other anyway. And he was right. For the title, it was the hooligan and me. So the next morning, we had some time to kill. And, you know, we're sitting there at breakfast,

• 35:30Speaker 02

  and at the forefront of my mind, like hanging in the air between us, is this swirl of emotion that had been building up for the last nine months that I'd been living in Sitka. And somehow, we stumbled onto our past, my childhood. And that's when I just felt like overcome with this necessary desire to just crack the vault wide open. We couldn't dance around the center anymore. I began asking my father all the questions I'd never known how to

• 36:12Speaker 02

  ask. I wanted to know why he left. I wanted to know why he went to war. I wanted to know why he thought falling in love with a Thai woman, as a white man essentially occupying a country during a war that I would learn to hate, why he thought that was okay. After bringing this woman to his world, and having a child with her, why he felt that that child should honor him in any way, you know, after leaving us. After I just kind of pummeled

• 36:52Speaker 02

  my dad with questions, I remember my dad just kind of looked down at his hands, and my father just had no answers.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  And that's kind of where we left off before I went in that night to fight the hooligan. When I got in the ring for the Southeast Showdown title fight, it was like the most neutral I'd felt that season. Like, almost as if I'd expended all the anger I should have held up in the fight, I'd expelled it all in the diner that morning. I came out of the gates pretty fast, but things felt different that night than they ever had in Marlin Tini's. And then in the third round, you know, I had this really out-of-body experience where

• 37:46Speaker 02

  I swear I could like see myself fighting. And whatever images of masculinity had been swirling around my brain, that my dad had put in there, we're all kind of just in a big scrap with one another. I think in a weird way, I understood that the experience of fighting someone, in most cases, at least for me, had very little to do with my opponent, and everything to do with what was going on inside of me as a person. And that you stepped into a ring with another person just to understand something about yourself. I don't think I

• 38:28Speaker 02

  had the answer. I just knew that I had a shot at figuring it out.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  At the decision, this woman came into the ring with the belt over her shoulder and asked me to hold my hands up and wrap the belt around my waist. It was the Southeast Showdown belt, given to the toughest guy in Southeast Alaska. And walking out of the ring, I just, you know, I knew that as my dad watched me, I don't know, I don't think it was that he was impressed that I'd won the fight. I don't think he was proud of me in that like weird voyeuristic way that some fathers seem to take great satisfaction in watching their children become great athletes.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  I think my dad was just really aware that there was something that I was going through that was fundamentally gonna separate us in a way, and that the belt was maybe an emblem of that. The morning after my fight, my father was flying home, and I remember we were in the airport together, and I had my backpack and I had the belt in it, and he had his suitcase or whatever, and he was heading back east. And I just, I watched him walk away to board his plane, and it struck me that, you know, I'd seen that happen so many times in my life, that feeling of having a weekend with my dad and then seeing him walk away.

• 40:28Glynn Washington?

  Raise his hands up high, the champion's here. A huge Snap Judgment thank you to Jed "The Stone Coffin." Thank you very much, thank you very much Jed. For more about this story, check out Jed's memoir, Rough House Friday. You'll find links to it on our website, snapjudgment.org. And the original score for this piece was by Doug Stewart, it was produced by Bo Walsh.

• 41:07Glynn Washington?

  See what I mean? I say it all the time, if you're gonna get punched in the face in an underground boxing match, best to do so vicariously. Save your pretty smile. Follow Snap Judgment on any podcast platform for more incredible stories from all over the world. That's right, more Snap Judgment journeys on your phone, device, podcast thingy. Snap is brought to you by the team that always straps on some gloves to step into the ring, except of course for the Uber Blue service, Mr. Mark Ristich. He just straps on Crocs. There's Nancy Lopez, Pat Massey Miller, Anna Sussman, Renzo Goryo, Shayna Shealy, Taylor

• 41:46Glynn Washington?

  Decot, Flo Wiley, John Facile, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Davey Kim, Bo Walsh, Dave Exane, and Annie Nguyen. On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. And this is not the news, no way is this news. In fact, you could talk a big game about who's about to catch these hands before you see who your opponent actually is, and then get real quiet once he shows up.

• 42:27Glynn Washington?

  And you would still, still, even then, not be as far away from the news as this is, but this is P R X.