I Am Fight Gone Bad

by ZAGARINO

In six years I’ve never stood up and taken responsibility for the Fight Gone Bad fundraising event. I thought it would be just calling attention to myself. I realize this morning it’s not. Fight Gone Bad is just an extension of what’s in my heart about my world, my community and my friends. In CrossFit I found kindred spirits. I found a group of people, small at first, huge now, who felt the way I felt. People who cared about excellence. Who cared about getting it right. In Coach Glassmen I found a voice that, no matter whether people wanted to hear it or not, said there is a right way to do things. From Miami to Maui CrossFitters can recognize each other across a crowded room, because we share our suffering and our ethic (not to mention t-shirts).

We support our soldiers because it’s right to say thank you. We encourage the new guy, we don’t laugh at him or her. We show up when we know that showing up is going to hurt, but it’s going to make us better. That’s why I started Fight Gone Bad. It isn’t an event, it’s an extension of who we are, who I am. I don’t have a choice about sharing that because I will have betrayed everything I believe in if I did, I’m compelled to share it. Some would say I’m obsessed with sharing it. Kindred spirits? I consider every CrossFitter, whether your first WOD was yesterday or ten years ago, my friend. When I started Fight Gone Bad I wanted to create a way to gather my friends together and share all of these gifts, but as Shakespeare said, “Therein lies the rub.”

To make Fight Gone Bad work I had to ask my friends, and a lot of my friends said no. I’m just human, and not very good at asking for help in the first place because it hurts when I ask and people say no. But CrossFit is about courage, and courage is about risk. So now I’m risking looking foolish, I’m risking having people I care abut telling me they don’t care about this thing, I’m risking failure. I’m risking it because I can’t do anything else. people are hurting, I can help them, and if I turn my back on that I’m not what a CrossFitter is, and that’s who I want to be.

I may be Fight Gone Bad, but I need 100,000 more people to be Fight Gone Bad too. There are 12 days to go and by my standard I’ve failed. I go to bed every night asking myself what I could have done better, what I did wrong, could I have done more? There are hundreds of thousands of us, yet I’ve only been able to have a small fraction of my kindred spirits say yes and fundraise. Every day a box owner tells me that they’re doing Fight Gone Bad, but they’re not fundraising. I get an email from a Soldier or Marine stationed in the Middle East telling me how much they’ve raised followed by a call from New York, Boston, or Los Angeles telling me that the economy is just to tough to raise any money in, and although I act pissed off, I only feel hurt. I take it personally. I want to shout out, “Don’t you see it? There are people who need our help. Soldiers, families, children, cancer victims, people in real pain that we can help by giving back a small fraction of what we’ve been given. That’s why I’m taking the risk of writing such a personal note.

I need, more than air, for my friends to say “Yes, we’ll help you.” I need, in these last couple of weeks for my friends to stop what they’re doing, go to their computers and take a risk and make Fight Gone Bad a symbol of what CrossFit stands for. For getting it right. For giving back for what you get. For the vision that Coach had all those years no one was listening. More than anything I don’t want to fail the inspiration that became Fight Gone Bad, the inspiration that turned me into Fight Gone Bad, because at 54 years old this is the best thing I’ll ever do with my life and if, in a community of hundreds of thousands I can only produce a couple of million dollars when there were millions more right there, then I’ve failed.

I’ve failed the one more kid we could have sent to college, the one more veteran we could have sent to camp, or the one family we could have saved from a child drowning. If I have to live with that, so be it. But I’ll live with it knowing that I wrote this last letter asking for help. I’ll live with it just like I’ve tried to live with every other time I’ve tried and failed. I’ll live with it in the knowledge that there’s nothing I could’ve done that I didn’t, even it if meant being the Fight Gone Bad that might have been, rather than the one that rocked the world.

If any of this resonated with you, or made you see Fight Gone Bad the way I do then for the last time this year I’m asking you to help me help these people. Follow these steps Fundraising Tips and then on the 17th, suit up, show up, go all out and be Fight Gone Bad with me. So there it is. That’s my Fight Gone Bad with a staff of two. My crazy, loyal wife and I. 3-2-1…GO!