Matt Hamilton: A Fighter’s Tale

Today’s post is by Matt Hamilton, a MMA fighter, coach, and co-owner of Westside MMA in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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Mark asked me to write about something very important and life changing for his MMA anthology. I told him how lucky I was, that everything in my life was so good I just didn’t have anything to write about. Unfortunately that just changed. It’s a coincidence that he asked me to write something for a book about fighting and then the opportunity to tell such a fighter’s tale makes itself available.

About 20 years ago my mom went on a business trip and contracted a very rare form of food poisoning that shut down her kidney function. Up until a few years prior it was an almost certain death sentence. Fortunately some really smart guy had invented a process which made the odds around 60%. At that point my mom lived and won her first big fight.

As Mom got older her genetics started to kick in and her heart began to give her trouble. Her father had died of a heart attack in his 40s. Unfortunately the medicines that helped my mom’s heart were too hard on her kidneys, which she had recovered minimal function of over the years. So the doctors were always just kind of playing Mom’s treatment by ear since they had never had a case as delicate as hers.

Over the years Mom suffered mild heart attacks and strokes. Every time she’d go down she’d always get right back up. I vividly remember her going to the hospital for one of her heart attacks and she looked so out of it and so done I was terrified. But when the doctors and nurses started to touch her, she immediately regained her senses and began detailing her medications and history. When I told her about it later, Mom said “If they don’t know what they are doing with me they might kill me just trying to help and I’m not ready to go yet.”

The last few years Mom had been having plenty of heart problems and of course her kidneys had finally stopped working and she was on dialysis. But to keep her strength and stay doing what she wanted to do, she had been training with me at my gym 3 days a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday like clockwork my mom and dad hit Westside MMA for some cardio, weights, and mobility work. It was that time and work that gave her such incredible quality of life (all things considered) after she should have already been dead. Those three hours a week over the last few years are some of the most important times in my life because not only did they help my parents but they allowed us to spend some quality time together.

For her last week in the gym, Mom was doing the bike, lifting weights, and performing mobility exercises with 95% artery blockage. I knew something was wrong as she was just so winded but she would always smile and get that last set, after teasing me that I was a mean trainer.

Mom needed surgery once again so I went to the hospital the night before to spend some time with her. My dad had been there all day and I didn’t want her to be alone at night. We had a great talk. I knew by looking at her that she was weak but hell she had always made it so I assumed she would again. I felt like I was 8 again, making her reassure me she would be okay. She promised me that she wasn’t like some old people that are “ready to go.” She said as long as she was in her right mind she would fight to live and not just give up and go peacefully.

The next morning she was putting on a strong front before surgery started. She said goodbye and assured me she would be back. She made it through her surgery and was breathing on her own just like the fighter I knew she was. The next day I got a call from my dad that things had went south and we should go to the hospital.

Over the next two days Mom fought for life like she promised me she would. Her heart was too weak for dialysis and her kidneys weren’t cleaning her blood as they should. I’m thankful that Mom never regained consciousness to feel the fear of losing the biggest fight of her life. And I’m proud as hell of the fact that she stayed alive for two days fighting to keep her promise to me. In the end we had to allow her to pass or her stubborn body was just going to go septic and she would have died from total organ failure. So we had to tell the docs to stop giving her any assistance and the fight was over.

I’m sure somewhere someone in Mark’s book will say something like “once you have fought, everything else in life is easy.” I’m here to tell you that if that’s the case then you are a lucky man. In reality that’s just some melodramatic bullshit that people say to sound more important than they are. I’ve fought all over the world. In my day I fought the best in the world and I promise you that nothing at all compares to losing your mom.

I want to close by thanking Doug & Shirley Hamilton for everything positive about who I am as a person and was as a fighter. All the good qualities in my life and in my career were reflections of my parents. In life: compassionate, loyal, humorous. And in the ring/cage: tenacious, hard headed, and a little mean. All that is good in me is just the DNA they handed down and the lessons they taught. Everything bad about me is just a lesson I didn’t learn or something I picked up somewhere else.