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- 🦬 Dog Fighting
🦬 Dog Fighting
Stetson Stallworth
June 28, 2024 • Reading Time:3 minutes
Quick favor…
What I’m about to share is one of my favorite motivational metaphors in the world.
So if you enjoy it - or if you just enjoy this newsletter in general - please forward it to a friend and tell them to subscribe! It would mean the world and would enhance the mission of You Da Man, which is to create an environment where men help each other become “da man” in their own life!
Now without further ado… let’s talk about dog fighting.
Life will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
A little known fact: the primary sport in medieval England wasn’t jousting or archery or anything you see in the movies. It was dog fighting.
The participants would bet huge amounts of money, their estates, and even their wives on their dog killing the other.
But the sport was still young, and no one was entirely sure which breeds of dog would be best for fighting. Sure, some breeds were bigger than others, but which dogs had heart…? Which dogs had the will power to stay in the fight…?
Well, they developed a system to find out…
Take two dogs and throw them in the ring. Whichever one wins gets thrown into the very next fight - back-to-back. And if he won again, he’d be up for the third time in a row.
But the third fight was different...
Before the third fight the owner would draw a line in the dirt halfway across the arena. This was called “the scratch.”
And if the dog, who at that point would be beat to hell and was surely going to die, stepped across that line, or “answered the scratch,” then that breed was considered to have the heart necessary to be a good fighting breed.
This process of back-to-back fights would continue until the dog died.
Why you should care…
Now go back and reread that story, but imagine you are the dog… and instead of literal fights to the death, the battles are the everyday struggles of life.
Life sucks sometimes. We get beat down. In the words of Rocky Balboa, “life will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.”
But what kind of dog are you?
Are you the dog that is going to tap out when you’re beat up and all hope seems lost?
Or are you going to keep your chin up and fight until you can’t fight any longer?
See, just like the fighting dog, you are going to die. We’re all going to die. But right now, it’s time to fight. We must fight.
You were born for this. Keep going. Keep fighting.
Today and everyday… answer the scratch.