Book review: Inside the Cage, by Carl Merritt

Having reviewed Iceman, by Chuck Liddell last week, it seemed only appropriate to review the other book I grabbed off the shelf in a small second-hand bookshop in Nottingham.  Inside the Cage, by Carl Merritt (affiliate links: UK, US) is another autobiography about life as a mixed martial arts fighter.  Where it differs from last week’s book is that these fights were illegal…

Very scary stuff

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Why did you read it again?

I went into Nottingham again recently to collect a kettlebell (I don’t like having the heavier ones delivered because it’s a tedious process).  While I was there, I stopped by a couple of second-hand bookshops to see whether there was anything worth picking up.

Walking into a tiny little store in the Victoria Centre, my eye was immediately caught by the MILO publishing mark on the spine of a small volume in the autobiography section.  Grabbing it, I found myself the new proud owner of Chuck Liddell’s autobiography, “Iceman”.  Next to it was Inside the Cage, by Carl Merritt.

I could have just put it back on the shelf but something about the contents page grabbed me.  For a start, he was from the East-End of London, where my girlfriend was born.  Next, he lived through and experienced some important events in contemporary British history, including the Brixton riots.  And finally, I just couldn’t quite believe what I was reading as I skimmed through it in the shop.

It felt like the prequel to Snatch, only a lot grittier.

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What it’s not and what it is

I feel the need to specify what this book isn’t, because it took me a few minutes of flicking through it to understand.  It’s not the autobiography, ghost-written or otherwise, of a UFC fighter.  There is no fame or adulation involved in this life.

This is the account of one man’s foray into underground fighting.

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Underground fighting?  Can’t you be more specific?

I say “underground fighting” not because I’m dissembling.  I’d like to be definitive and say that it was about underground boxing or underground bare-knuckle fighting or underground kickboxing or even underground mixed martial arts fighting.  I’d even like to say it was fighting without rules, which is probably the closest you could come to the truth using a generalisation.

It is fair to say that the fights Carl entered included boxing, were fought without gloves, involved kickboxing moves and grappling in places.  It is also fair to say that in most cases, there didn’t seem to be any rules, at least none that he was aware of.

So was it fighting without rules?  Well, in practice, probably yes, because nobody ever got disqualified.  But on the other hand, there is the odd statement here and there that makes you realise that none of the fights are the same and sometimes there are guidelines.  In Ireland, for example, Carl is told not to worry at the start of the fight because they’ll signal before the fight begins because “it’s part of the rules over here.”

I am not sure what’s more frightening.  The fact that there were no rules to speak of, or the fact that there were regional rules and that the fighters often didn’t get told what they were.

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What’s different about the fights, then?

It was really interesting reading this book right after Iceman, because I thought that Iceman was violent and that people got really hurt.  I didn’t really know what really hurt meant, though, until I read Inside the Cage.

Bare knuckle fighting, combined with no rules, seems to make a huge difference.  In a matter of minutes, a person could be on death’s door from a beating, bones broken and blood everywhere.  The fighters would quite literally tear each other to pieces.

It made me really think hard about how we must have evolved to avoid such physical confrontations.  I mean, if you look at animals that do establish heirarchy through physical confrontation, they do it in a formalised manner and both parties tend to walk away afterwards.  What this book taught me was that if you put two human males in a cage for a few minutes and give them carte blanche to beat the hell out of each other, then one of them is probably going to die.

It is a very sobering read, as a result.

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What else am I going to find in there?

As I mentioned earlier, Carl lived through some British history and he tells a lucid tale about the man on the street in those times.  He also tells some pretty hair-raising stories about his life growing up in the East-End of London, very much like the ones Paddy Doyle tells in Record Breaker, although that was Birmingham, obviously.

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Will I like it?

Maybe.  It’s not a boy’s book by any means.  You won’t find yourself glorying in any of the fight scenes or dreaming about fighting.  It’s reasonably harrowing and you feel genuinely sorry for the people caught up in the seductive web of those pulling the strings.  If you like having your perspectives challenged, though, it’s well worth the investment.