NBCsports.com interviews nate quarry

[halozero]

i found this pretty interesting--fascinating insights into the cult known as the jehovah's witnesses

Fight of a lifetime

Nate Quarry never played a sport until his 20s; his next challenge is a comeback

By Mike Chiappetta

NBCSports.com/ufc

Posted: Mar.6, 2007, 3:48 pm EST

Anything is possible.

That's what Nate Quarry believes.

But his mind wasn't always so big, so able to grasp the larger complexities in life that he sees today. Because life is often dictated by those around us. And if they don't tell us when we're young that anything is possible, how would we know?


Nate Quarry didn't know .. not until well after the age where the decision he eventually made should matter. When we dream big as children, friends and family are supposed to tell us we can do it. When we dream big as adults, they're supposed to tell us we're crazy.

What then of Quarry, who dreamed big for the first time when he was already an adult? Excuse him for the late start, but his upbringing probably wasn't like yours. So when he was 24 years old, he was just learning things others had known all along. He'd discovered things about himself, about others that made him question everything in his life. The door of possibility was wide open, and he decided at the age of 24, that it was time to walk through it.

Here's the thing about professional sports. You don't just one wake up one day when you're already in your 20s and decide you're going to be a pro athlete, that you're going to hit Roger Clemens' fastball or chase Tiger Woods up the fairways at Augusta or trade punches with Floyd Mayweather. You're not supposed to be able to accomplish such specific, demanding goals at that late age.

There were a lot of things Quarry wasn't supposed to do at that age, either. Yet each time he did, he learned more that the world wasn’t always what people said it is.

He was 24, had never played an organized sport. Not football, not baseball, not basketball. He'd never been to a dojo, engaged in a muay thai clinch, executed a single leg takedown or threw a left-right combination.

"I had," Quarry says, "a very different upbringing."

He was, in many ways, a blank slate.

Perhaps that's why the impossible seemed so attainable to him. He was questioning everything he'd been told, so if someone told him it was too late to chase athletic stardom, he'd tell them he needed to find things out for himself.

read the rest of the interview here