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Ryan Hockensmith
MARK “THE HAMMER” COLEMAN sleeps with a night light. The 6-foot-2, 250-pound five-time UFC champion has bad dreams. Lots of them.
In many of them, the 59-year-old is arguing fiercely with friends, and in many others, he’s running from the police and doesn’t know why. He’s not the kind of guy who analyzes his dreams. He feels scared, he wakes up and he looks to his night light. Resets. The dream is there, in the dark. The night light is here, where he wants to be.
Tonight, he doesn’t have his night light. He and his rottweiler, Hammer, are two hours from home at his parents’ house in Fremont, Ohio. Dan and Connie Coleman are in their 80s now and slowing down fast. They used to travel all over the globe to watch him wrestle and fight, so he figures the least he can do now is help them clean the garage every once in a while.
Coleman lays down to sleep in his childhood bed around 10 p.m., like he always does. He runs hot and frenetic during the day, and his nights tend to feel choppy, blurry, very awake and then very tired. He gets up at midnight to go to the bathroom, and then Hammer wakes him up at 2 a.m., and again at 3 a.m. Coleman goes to the kitchen for some cookies. His mom always has the best goodies.
An hour later, a rumble underneath his bed scares him. It’s Hammer. He’s making a hell of a racket. He’s not barking, but he is thrashing around, upset about something, and Coleman sits up.
The heat immediately slams him in the face. He wishes he had his night light because he can’t see anything, almost like there is a kind of fog surrounding him. Hammer keeps making noise under the bed, and Coleman’s groggy mind suddenly puts all the pieces together.
That’s smoke.
I see orange. The house is on fire.
My parents are asleep.
I need to get up.
Go.
How can air be so hot?
I can’t see.
Get up. Use the wall to guide you.
The wall is so hot.
The doorknob.
Find Mom and Dad.
What’s that sound? Like coins falling.
Oh god, that’s glass. The windows.
Move. Get to Mom and Dad’s room.
“Mom! Dad!” They’re just lying there. Are they dead already?
“What, Mark?”
“Get up! The house is on fire. We need to f—ing go.”
They’re moving too slowly.
“You take Dad’s hand. I’ll take his hand. Form a chain.”
I can’t see their faces.
How can air be so thick and hot?
Stay alive. Move.
If I die, they die.
Move. Get to the garage.
Ten more feet.
We did it. We’re out.
Cough. Cough. Cough.
Dad’s out.
Wait … where’s Mom?
MARK COLEMAN WAS BORN two hours north of Columbus, in Fremont, Ohio. He was a nonstop energy baby, and then a nonstop energy kid, and he has just kept going like that for 59 years. Wrestling was perfect for him, because it’s an exhausting sport that rewards the inexhaustible, and Mark Coleman could not be worn out.
He accomplished everything a great wrestler could hope to — state champ, NCAA champ, Olympian. His parents helped push him to become a great wrestler, and he says he’d be on the mat in Minnesota or Mongolia and hear his mom’s raspy voice yelling, “Come on, Mark!” When he talks about them, it’s obvious that he loves them immensely, that he realizes everything they’ve done for him and that he would have been heartbroken if they didn’t survive the fire.
But this is also one of those topics that Coleman doesn’t go deep on. He doesn’t say much about the fire now, about the prospect of losing them. It’s not that he isn’t capable; it’s that he chooses to go forward only, all gas and no brakes. He is a propulsive person, seemingly more concerned with getting his lawn mowed and trash cans out than trying to unpack that night or reflect on his upbringing. He loves them a lot. What else do you want to hear?
After the 1996 Olympic trials, Coleman caught a UFC fight on TV and thought that maybe he wouldn’t mind beating people up. It speaks to the bygone grassroots era of MMA 28 years ago when I tell you that Coleman won the UFC heavyweight title on the first night he ever fought.
Coleman debuted at UFC 10 in 1996, in the days when the UFC still held one-day tournaments in which someone who was 0-0 could enter. He swept through three opponents that night in a total of about 21 minutes, including a stoppage over MMA pioneer Gary Goodridge where the final decision read “TKO: exhaustion.” Coleman’s inexhaustibility could win in the Octagon, too.
His debut changed the UFC. His style was easy to dismiss because of its simplicity. He called it “ground and pound” — which kind of speaks for itself, right? A hammer fighting a bunch of nails. He rained down endless violence, including then-legal head-butts, in a way that seemed elemental. He wore wrestling shoes (also allowed back then) and tiny black shorts, so when he started a fight and began torrents of power and fury, he sometimes looked like a guy who’d just run out of his house at midnight in his underwear to fight.
“No one had seen that style before, especially with the head-butts. It was a game-changer,” says UFC legend Matt Brown. “At his best, there was nothing anybody could do to stop him. He was unstoppable.”
He won UFC 10 and 11, then fought UFC Hall of Famer Dan Severn at UFC 12 in a superfight of early MMA superstars. They both had impeccable wrestling credentials, so in theory, their grappling would cancel each other out. Severn was 14-2 and a master strategist, facing off with a guy who’d only fought five times.
Except Coleman is almost strategy-proof. He fights like he lives and his Mark Coleman-ness can be too much for people. When the fight began, Coleman’s fast-twitch brain and physical horsepower overpowered Severn almost immediately.
Opening bell.
He’s backpedaling.
Punch. Punch. Punch.
Takedown attempt.
He’s desperate already.
I’m gonna win.
Sprawl. Block the shot. Squeeze his head.
Squeeze harder.
Up to our feet.
He knows I’m going to hurt him.
Another desperate takedown.
Sprawl on him again. Squeeze.
Hip blast to his face. Keep punching.
Head lock. Squeeze.
Make his head pop.
He can’t do anything but try to gouge my eyes.
He’s flailing. Pop his head like a pimple.
He’s tapping.
It’s over.
Right near the end of the fight, as Coleman vices Severn’s head up off the mat, the broadcaster says, “The key is to not panic,” and it’s an accidental laugh line. Because Coleman is panic. In fights, in conversations, in life, in fires. Panic. Severn panics and taps out at 2:47.
He created a team of fighters like him (Kevin Randleman, Wes Sims, Phil Baroni) and named it “Hammer House.” People would sometimes ask him where Hammer House trained, and he’d say, “Wherever the f— Mark Coleman is.” There was no gym. Coleman and his fighting style were an idea more than a physical location.
This is the point in Coleman’s story when life begins to get messy, and it stays messy for about 20 years. He loses his next three fights and leaves the UFC for PRIDE, where he loses his first fight to fall to 6-4 in his career. He begins drinking heavily and stops taking care of his body, two problems that will stay with him for the rest of his career.
Coleman fought another 10 years, to the incredible age of 45, and went 4-6, still battling the best of the best and keeping up. But his drinking had become an issue, and even he eventually got exhausted. He retired in 2010, exhausted, which kicked off a 10-year slide that ended with him locked in an extended stay hotel in Columbus, alone, his toilet, sink and shower clogged, his bed surrounded by an avalanche of beer cans. He refused to tell friends and family what room he was in. “Do not come in — ever,” he told the hotel staff.
By then, Coleman was divorced with three daughters, Kenzie, Morgan and Skylar. The two eldest kids, Morgan and Kenzie, were at Ohio University, living together and worrying every day about getting that call about their dad. The hotel he was staying in was such a dump that people would refer to it as “The Jerry Springer Inn,” because every room seemed to have its own episode of daytime TV hiding inside.
A year into the COVID pandemic, Coleman found himself barely leaving the hotel room, his daughters all inching further and further away from him. His old Hammer House protege, Sims, eventually demanded to know his room number and showed up. He couldn’t believe what he saw. For long stretches of his life and his fighting career, Coleman’s philosophy of living right here, right now, had sustained him. He decided early on that the only thing he wanted to understand about himself was that he didn’t need to understand himself.
But his hotel room showed the tax on that way of living. He had no money to speak of but managed to get beer every day, burning relationships with his daughters yet periodically pulling them back in, suffering immensely yet finding a way to do it again the next day without dying. The panic was aimed at himself this time.
Sims spent six hours cleaning out cans, pill bottles and cereal boxes. Bag after bag after bag. He took photos, and one is of Coleman sitting on the bed, surrounded by his bottom. He’s 55 years old, but he looks like a tragic 80-year-old mall Santa whose life went off the rails.
Sober people often say when an alcoholic finally breaks and seeks help, they must be feeling incomprehensibly demoralized. The photo is of Coleman, incomprehensibly demoralized, surrounded by the rubble of the 2010s. As Sims bagged up the mess, Coleman sat silently on the hotel bed. Sims suggested rehab, and Coleman agreed.
He was there for 30 days in early 2022 and hasn’t had a drink since. When he was released, he needed a place to stay, and an unlikely person stepped forward: Matt Brown. Coleman had become a fixture at Brown’s gym in Columbus, even during his heaviest drinking. Coleman was often disruptive and appeared to be drunk.
Young fighters there gravitated toward him. Coleman hated himself and his life, yet was able to relentlessly boost up others. So Brown asked him to stay with him after rehab, just until he got some momentum going for himself. Coleman took him up on it. “He’s a hero of mine,” Brown says. “He’s one of those guys that just constantly has a powerful presence. I wanted to be around him.”
For six months, Coleman lived in Brown’s basement — one day at a time, one foot in front of the other. He kept to himself for the most part, but Brown saw a change in him. They’d watch fights together and Brown liked having Coleman close to him when he was training for one of his own fights. “He’s the best hype man ever,” Brown says.
During that time in 2022, Coleman kept his sobriety and began working out. He felt alive again, and after six months, he told Brown he was moving out. His new roommate? His oldest daughter, Kenzie, who’d just graduated from Ohio University with her education degree.
All three Coleman kids witnessed huge growth from their dad in his six months without booze, but Kenzie initially felt the strongest pull back toward him. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the northwest corner of Columbus that spring.
“It’s been the best thing, for him and me,” she says. “I love living with my dad. I love it because I feel like we lost so many years and I don’t have to worry about him.
“I can keep an eye on him.”
Coleman picked up some work training fighters, and he sold a lot of his UFC memorabilia, including his championship belts. He made a little money doing appearances, too, but he mostly kept working on himself. He’s not someone who grows by meditating at waterfalls about seeking closure or manifesting abundance. His growth relies upon less thinking and more plowing ahead. He took long walks around Columbus, sometimes in shorts about as tight and small as the ones he used to fight in.
On several occasions, the police arrived to investigate a report of a giant, barefoot man marching around town, eating a gas station sandwich. “I like to stay grounded,” Coleman says. “So it helps to not have shoes on.”
About a year ago, life was on the upswing for the Coleman crew when he responded to a friend’s Facebook post about a litter of rottweiler puppies. Coleman commented that he wanted one, and, despite Kenzie’s initial reservations, they eventually welcomed a tiny little rott into the apartment and named him Hammer.
Coleman needed Hammer more than he realized. He was about to enter a six-month span where he had four surgeries to try to repair his ravaged hips — wear and tear from his career that Coleman never sought treatment for. When he was down for the count, Hammer’s nonstop fountain of happiness cheered him up. When he could start moving around a little bit, Hammer would pull him toward the door. His physical rehab sessions were pretty much run by Dr. Hammer Coleman, who dragged him all over Columbus. There were no shoes and no shirts — just two Hammers grounded to the earth.
Looking back, Coleman thinks about those two years of his life — going to rehab, fixing his hips, getting fit again, adopting Hammer — and he believes he was building toward a moment when he had to be 100% healthy. “I just kept feeling like something big was going to happen, and I needed to be ready,” Coleman says. “I had no clue what it was going to be.”
Kenzie needed Hammer, too. He became the glue in the father and daughter’s still-healing relationship. Kenzie and her dad would spend an hour some days just talking about the wild little dog’s exploits. And she smiles now when she points over to her bedroom door, which she used to close at night to keep Hammer out.
The entire bottom of the door is clawed halfway through the wood, and the carpet in front of the door is torn up in a perfect half-circle shape where Hammer used to whine and scratch and lick until she’d open up the door and let him sleep on the bed with her. By March of this year, Hammer was 11 months old and officially a Coleman — and he was about to save the lives of some fellow Colemans.
Find Mom.
Where’d we lose her?
It’s getting worse.
Gotta move.
Where are the fire trucks?
Probably doesn’t matter, anyway. The house is gone.
The air is so hot and spiky like it’s carving me up inside.
Wait, this is her. I feel her.
Mom!
Get her hand and go.
We’re closer to the garage than I thought.
Pull her.
We made it.
Fresh air. Breath.
Wait, where’s Hammer?
I can’t let him die. I’d rather die.
We’d already be dead if he didn’t wake me up.
My lungs feel like I swallowed barbed wire.
I’ve been in too long already.
Can’t go back in.
Have to go back in.
Cough. Get the smoke out. Cough again.
Breath. Again. Breath.
Go.
Garage … hallway … my bedroom.
Maybe he’s under the bed.
Come on, Hammer.
Buddy?
Reach all the way back.
Stretch
Nothing.
Can’t breathe, need to go.
Buddy, reach your paw out.
Please.
TWO HOURS AWAY from the fire, Kenzie and Morgan Coleman get a call that their dad has been rushed to the hospital and that their grandparents are OK. But Hammer had been found under the bed, probably inches from Coleman’s grip as he ran out of time in the smoke. “It just looked like he was sleeping,” Kenzie said.
She falls apart. She loved Hammer as much as her dad did, and she loved what he represented between her and her dad. And now he was gone.
Both women feel like they can’t drive themselves. So they call an old Hammer House friend to drive them: Wes Sims, the man who’d cleaned out Coleman’s hotel room. Now he’s driving Coleman’s daughters to come watch him fight for his life. Coleman’s daughters feel two contradictory things on the drive. First, fear — Coleman is in a coma. But deep down, they’re also sure he will be fine. They believe Mark “The Hammer” Coleman is indestructible. Everybody does.
“They need to study his body at a university,” says Brown, one of the UFC’s toughest, most durable fighters ever. “If he had taken better care of himself, he’d live to 200 years old.”
In the hospital room, Kenzie lies on the ground in the corner and starts to cry. She can’t stop for hours, as Morgan works with the medical staff to figure out what’s going on with their dad. He’s in critical condition and is placed in a medically induced coma as they try to stabilize him.
The diagnosis is rough. Coleman’s eyes, ears and nose are scorched, and his hands look like somebody put white gloves on them from the skin getting burned off. The biggest problem is his lungs — one nurse has a wide-eyed look when she tells Morgan that she’s never seen so much soot and black gunk suctioned out of a person’s lungs as they pulled from Coleman.
After about 36 hours, Coleman has, remarkably, recovered enough that the staff dials down his sedation levels. He still is intubated when he comes to, and Coleman immediately signals for Morgan. He takes her hand and traces three letters onto her palm: D-O-G. Morgan looks over at Kenzie and she gives her a look that only a sister would understand. “We’re still not sure what happened with Hammer,” Morgan lies. “We’re still looking for him.”
Later that day, Coleman is removed from the respirator. He feels the tube rake up through his windpipe and out of his mouth, and the first time he tries to talk, he can feel the effects of all that smoke. “What’s going on with Hammer?” he asks. His daughters can’t keep it from him anymore.
They tell him Hammer didn’t make it, that the fire crew removed him in a body bag and took him to be cremated. Coleman starts crying, a groan coming up through his damaged lungs, and his daughters tear up at the sight of their unbreakable dad’s heartbreak. Hammer had been his best friend during those long walks and long nights, an endless source of joy with his rowdiness and goofball persona.
But he’d almost meant something much more existential to Coleman. Hammer had been the glue of a bumpy new reboot for his life. Coleman had found hope in the way Hammer brought him close to Kenzie, which helped him get close again with Morgan and Skylar. The healing all branched off Hammer.
So in that hospital room, less than 24 hours after waking up from a coma, Coleman wipes the tears away from his face and smiles at a realization that hits him: In just 11 months as a Coleman, Hammer had saved him — twice.
COLEMAN MAKES a remarkable comeback over the next five days and gets sent home. On the ride home, Morgan sees him struggling in the passenger seat. She’s concerned it’s another heart attack. So, they end up back at the hospital before they even make it home from the hospital. The problem? Coleman’s compromised lungs had contracted pneumonia. He stays for two days before — finally — is released and heads back to the apartment he shares with Kenzie.
Coleman has a hard time the minute he walks in. They miss talking about Hammer. They miss the scratching and licking and wild play. They miss everything about him. “He was James Dean, baby,” Coleman says.
When his ashes arrive from the vet’s office a few days later, something clicks for both of them: They can move on. They’d honor their best little buddy with a photo and a jar of his ashes, but they are ready to direct their dog love into a new life, to carry it forward. Ten days after the fire, Coleman gets another dog, a rottweiler puppy that looks exactly like Hammer. He names him King Martello, which is Italian for Hammer.
As he tells that part of his story, Coleman stands in his apartment living room. Kenzie is on the couch, and Martello is gnawing on a toy on the floor. Isn’t 10 days a little soon to bring home another dog? Didn’t he need some time to mourn?
Coleman shrugs. He’s not a mourner. “I just thought there might be another dog out there that needed love,” Coleman says, “and why come up with a random amount of time to wait? I’ll never love Hammer less.”
Kenzie nods in agreement. She and her dad have scars on their hearts from losing Hammer, and yet, they’re choosing to push right through. No pondering, no monthslong exploration of feelings. Just moving full speed ahead.
Later, we’re at dinner with Coleman and his three daughters, and I ask him about the cause of his parents’ house fire. It’s an obvious question that anybody would have asked, right? Not Coleman. He seems like he hasn’t spent five seconds thinking about it. He’s planning on speaking at local firehouses about the need for better fire prep. But otherwise, he’s moving on. “Why would any of that matter?” he asks.
It’s a hard question to answer. Why would it matter? So that everybody would know who or what to blame, he wonders? Would everybody be mad at one of his parents? At the smoke detectors that didn’t seem to work? The batteries in the smoke detectors? How exactly would that rebuild the house or bring Hammer back?
As he talks, I feel an electric burst surge go up through my spine. It’s that I am seeing a guy who doesn’t wallow, who doesn’t sit with his issues but runs through them. And I am seeing the exact guy that I need to see at this point in my life.
RIGHT BEFORE I WENT to visit Coleman, I’d gotten to a dark place about my health. Years ago, in 1999, I contracted bacterial meningitis as a college student, which put me in a coma for a week. When I woke up, I found a body that had been ravaged by sepsis, especially my feet. Most of my toes were black and dying, with bone sticking out in a few places. I eventually had the ends of both feet amputated, and I began a 25-year stretch of trying to live with pain, both physical and emotional.
Chronic pain can swamp you. It is the ocean — patient, unrelenting, overwhelming, with unpredictable waves that ebb and flow. Pain is ever-present in a way that makes you existentially fall apart. I sometimes can’t stop thinking about how my feet hurt right now, and how they hurt yesterday, and how they hurt 30 days ago and 300 days ago and 3,000 days ago, and that must mean they also will hurt for the next 3,000 days. There’s hurt in front of me, hurt in the rearview mirror and hurt in between.
For many of the 20 million Americans living with chronic pain, no surgery or pill will completely solve the issue. I tried for two decades to find a solution to my problem. Painkillers got me an all-expenses paid front-row seat at a New Jersey substance abuse rehab in 2008. Physical therapy, special orthotics, seeing a psychologist, podiatrists and pain management doctors … all helped a little. But the pain wakes up with me every day, and it doesn’t let me go to sleep on many nights.
A couple of years back, my primary care doctor said something that rocked me and has stayed with me. “The solution might be that there is no solution,” he said. “Your feet are going to hurt.”
He was floating the idea of giving in to the pain. Not figuring it out. Not wondering how I got sick in the first place. He was suggesting surrender, accept, go forward. I had to do that with drugs and alcohol to get sober — the hows and whys of my alcoholism and drug addiction don’t have much to do with how I stay sober today.
But I have had a harder time admitting I am mostly powerless over my feet and my life is sometimes unmanageable because of them. I’d been doing pretty well with that fact until March, when I got hit with some other bad health news unrelated to my feet. I have a bumpy year coming up, and I’ve started doing all the things that us worriers do.
Will I be OK? What if I’m not? Do I have enough money? Have I lived a good life? If my body feels like it is falling apart right now, how bad will it be in 10 years? 20 years? Forever? One day after I get back from Coleman’s house, I’m supposed to take my wife and three kids to Disney — what if I can’t go or my feet wreck the whole trip?
I’m a big therapy guy (I have a psychiatrist and a psychologist) and I find it incredibly helpful. But I’ve found there are certain times when there is tremendous value in having the same muscles that Mark Coleman is stacked with … the ability to just careen forward. Don’t think about the past or the future, just live now — go, go, go.
I feel a little bit like I am at the Church of Coleman in his apartment. I sit on the ground playing with King Martello as Coleman talks for about an hour and a half, with Kenzie occasionally telling Martello to calm down. He is a little guy with about 50% less energy than Hammer. He’s solid and low to the ground but he’s got a feisty personality — he’ll nibble on just about anything that comes near his mouth, including hands and feet, and then he collapses and sleeps on the floor. He seems to have already adopted the same kind of short-burst philosophy as his dad.
It’s early April, and Coleman looks great considering that he survived a fire and pneumonia in the past three weeks. He’s standing in the same spot in his living room where he shoots and posts Instagram Reels almost every day. He’s usually doing a workout that only Mark Coleman would do, like balancing on a ball while lifting dumbbells with both arms and stretching his neck and yelling “Hammer House for life!” — all at the same time. The contrast between the guy in the hotel room photos to now is shocking; he looks like he’s aged backward 20 years from the images Sims captured at The Springer Inn.
Kenzie shakes her head as Coleman talks about how much he likes to work out every part of his body. She says her dad now has an exercise for every muscle, including clamping down his jaw and teeth in the car to boost his mouth muscles. “There’s a lot you can do in the car,” Coleman says.
They have a very funny dynamic. Coleman speaks loud and fast, with his booming Macho Man-like voice, and Kenzie has learned how to merge into that traffic. Every time, Coleman gets irritated and starts to argue with her for butting in. At first, it’s jarring. But this is their flow. They half-heartedly bicker in raised voices — “Like an old couple,” she jokes — and there’s no real anger or menace underneath. It’s two people who love each other so much that tone doesn’t matter. It’s so personal for them that it’s not personal at all.
We make plans to meet up that evening at Coleman’s favorite restaurant, Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse. At first, it was going to be Kenzie and Coleman. Then Coleman says Morgan can come, too. When he arrives, he’s got Skylar, 9, along, too. Coleman is full of surprises. He’s the kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy you probably don’t want managing your 401(k) or overseeing a home redesign plan … but he’s a hell of a good time. “He’s the only sober guy I’ve met who might be more wild and fun when he’s not drinking than when he was,” Brown says.
That night, Coleman sits on the outside of the booth, nearest a piano player who has a beautiful voice but is about 25% too loud for the setting. Skylar sits to his left and spends the next three hours chiming in once or twice but mostly just hanging back, smiling as her dad rumbles through the story of his life. Kenzie, 26, and Morgan, 25, sit side by side and are equally bemused by their dad.
They’re excited on this night because a Mark Coleman movement has begun. UFC 300 is two weeks away, with Max Holloway and Justin Gaethje fighting for the BMF (Bad Motherf—er) belt. Holloway mentioned at a news conference leading up to the event that the winner of the fight should have the belt put around his waist by Coleman, and Gaethje quickly seconded that idea. The UFC agreed, and within a few days, Coleman, Kenzie and Morgan were booked for Vegas.
In the steakhouse, Coleman is talking about how much he loves his kids and how nice it is to have them back in his life as the piano player starts “I Will Always Love You,” which seems a little on the nose for the dinner’s soundtrack. He and Kenzie say they love living together so much that in July they’re planning on moving into another apartment complex in Columbus … a few doors down from Morgan’s place in the same complex.
Coleman talks through the story of the fire as his kids intently listen. The server also seems to be riveted every time she stops by. He orders a big steak and some appetizers for the table. At one point, he sketches out his parents’ L-shaped house as some food arrives. He lays out, John Madden-style, what happened during those terrible eight minutes in the smoke-filled house, and the server stops by again with his steak. By the end, his drawing is a blur of backtracking lines and confusion, just like the actual night.
He keeps rolling for another half hour when the server asks if anybody wants dessert. The answer, of course, is yes. Coleman orders ice cream and cheesecake. When the dessert arrives, it becomes clear that the server has caught quite a bit of Coleman’s story. “I almost started crying walking by here earlier,” she says. “You’re a hero.”
Coleman smiles and tries to brush it aside. As she puts the dessert plate down, she points at the bottom of the plate. There, in red icing, is a phrase spelled out for Coleman: “Staying alive.”
A WEEK LATER, I go to Disney World with my wife and three kids. Disney occupies a special place in our hearts, and not just because Disney pays my salary, which allows me to pay Disney back a giant chunk of that salary every year or two.
My oldest daughter is a high school senior, and I’d spent too much time recently wondering how many more times we’ll go on a trip together as a family. As we stood in a long TSA line, my feet were killing me and I started to think about my health, too, and how even if my whole family could get together down the road, would I be able to physically handle it? Not a great start to what should have been a joyous adventure.
But a funny thing happened on the trip. On our flight to Orlando, I started transcribing my interview with Coleman, and by the time we landed, I was ready for the pain. His raspy voice and message of just bulling through the tough stuff was like some kind of Macho Man/Tony Robbins TED talk to get me ready to stop thinking about the future. Why would any of that matter? I heard Coleman say.
For the next three days, I go hard. I make it about three hours before I wobble back to the hotel room, rest and then rejoin my family later that night. I rest when I need to but do zero wallowing, per the Coleman doctrine, and it’s awesome. As I’d wait for the bus or ride on the Skyliner, I’d listen to more of the Coleman tape. At one point, I listen back as I press him on not being more contemplative, that maybe he’d avoid some of the pratfalls of not looking backward or into the future more if he truly sat with things. “There’s no other way that I’d rather live than the way that I am,” he says.
“Go forward. Always go forward.”
On the third night, my feet are bothering me so much that I finally tap out and go back to the hotel by myself. As I walk to the Skyliner, I am limping badly when I see a poster for “Inside Out 2.” I laugh thinking about what Coleman’s operating board would look like in the “Inside Out” universe. I imagine he’d have all the same emotions that Riley has — Anxiety, Joy, Anger, etc. But I also think his mainframe would be set up a little differently.
Those normal emotions would all sit way in the back of the room, offering input but ultimately ceding control of Mark Coleman to … I wasn’t sure what emotion would be running the whole operation. Ferocity is an emotion. So is enthusiasm. Zest? Passion? Zeal?
The answer ultimately punches me in the head: Go. Technically, Go isn’t even an emotion. But I think Mark Coleman’s “Inside Out” brain supervisor would be Go, a big green gas pedal with a scratchy voice, a bald head and tenacious eyes. Go would listen — briefly — to all the other emotions but past memories would be locked in a vault three floors down and worries about the future would be wood-chipped before they get near the circuit board.
I end up in my own Skyliner car, so I kick off my shoes and feel some immediate relief. But then I notice some blood in my sock.
My feet are scarred up stumps that are half the size they should be and cannot afford any kind of open wound. In this case, I’d overdone it. Too much Go.
I spend the next two days mostly lying in the hotel bed, my foot raised and hurting. When I venture out for dinner at the park or a ride or two, the trips are short and extremely limpy. On Saturday night, I teeter back to the room at the same time as my exhausted family. They head to bed, and I lay on the bathroom floor all night so I can watch UFC 300. Even in pain, I have to see the Colemans do some BMFing.
It’s about midnight when Coleman walks to the cage arm-in-arm with Kenzie and Morgan as the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” blares through the arena. The crowd roars, and then Holloway and Gaethje put on a good fight with one of the all-time memorable final five seconds in UFC history. When Bruce Buffer announces the official result, Holloway raises his arms, and Coleman swoops in underneath to stretch the belt across his waist. One BMF to another.
The next morning, we head back to Connecticut. My life would now be turning the page into a new chapter. I have a major health fight coming up — I’m not ready to be more specific yet — but it will require a certain significant daily dosage of Colemanism. I know I have days, weeks and months when I will have to just push through. No overthinking. Just show up and do the next right thing. Lots of needles for bloodwork, lots of scans for this and that and also this other thing … and I’ll just have to keep traipsing onward.
It doesn’t take long, though, before I feel the effects of spending time with Mark Coleman wearing off a bit. One morning, I get an email that an upcoming medical appointment had been scheduled. Then another email. Then another. They’ve scheduled my entire summer — about 40 visits to hospitals and doctors in 90 days.
My life had just been launched into orbit around a Hartford hospital for the next three months, and I’d been told that was just the beginning. Taking my wife and three kids anywhere this summer? Practically impossible. Work meetings? July Fourth parties? All those conversations ended with “unless I need to be at the hospital.”
As I stared at that online calendar, I knew I had to get back to that Go mentality, so I texted Coleman and told him my diagnosis. “Love u brother u fight and u win believe the lord is working u will get through this,” he texted back, with a flurry of emojis afterward. He’s an emoji guy — in text, in conversation, in everything. It’s all balled-up fists and flexed biceps.
I start adding my appointments to my family calendar. As soon as I begin, though, I stop typing at the sight of a name that appears over and over again as a medical provider on my charts: “K. Martello.”
Wait, K. Martello? Can’t be. What are the odds that I’d be wondering how to move into this battle with a little bit of Mark “The Hammer” Coleman in my back pocket … and now one of my main medical team members would have the same name as the dog that has helped Coleman move into a new chapter of his life?
At my first appointment, K. Martello walks into the room. Her full name is Kayla Martello, and she is a fierce young physician’s assistant from New Jersey who seems to take crap from no one.
“I know the schedule looks daunting,” she says.
“But it’s not 100 appointments that you have to worry about. It’s one appointment at a time.
“You just keep moving forward.”
It’s like she is channeling Coleman.
She’s right.
It’s time to fight.
Stay right here.
Forget yesterday. Don’t worry about tomorrow.
Go.