Stay in the Fight: What a Boxer's Lost Toupee Teaches Us

Key takeaways

• Keep the main thing the main thing. A boxer lost his toupee in the middle of a fight, kept his eyes on the goal, and won.
• Embarrassment is common to everyone. Falling, stumbling over a word and getting caught off guard happen to all of us, and they matter less than they feel like they do.
• Everyone needs a locker room. Close people who know you and tell you the truth keep you from chasing the approval of the crowd.
• Do not stop before the win. Celebrating early or quitting early are two ways to lose the fight you are in.
• Identity in Christ steadies you. When you know what Christ has spoken over your life, you can miss a shot and still take the next one.

A conversation that started with glasses

The episode opens with the hosts, Aaron, Gabe and Sanaz, trading stories about bad eyesight, headaches and astigmatism. One of them tried contacts, and after an hour of failing to take them out, the doctor had to come over and remove them. The appointment was rescheduled and then canceled. He decided glasses with a few smudges were not so bad.

From there the group watched a clip that went around social media. A boxer takes an uppercut, and his toupee flaps back and dangles at his neck. Later in the fight he grabs it with his glove and throws it into the crowd. Then he goes on to win the match.

A split second to decide

The hosts agreed the lesson was in the decision the boxer had to make right away. One of them described it as a moment when something small and unimportant to the fight could pull you completely off course. He could worry about his hair or stay in the fight, and he stayed.

Several of them said they would have struggled. One admitted he is so self-conscious and such a people pleaser that he would have needed to change his address. Another pastor said that when he preaches, he remembers every word he stumbled over. His wife told him she had not noticed any of it, because, as he recalled her saying, "we're not listening to you to try to find out how many times you messed up a word."

Sanaz told about falling on an uneven street in Nice, France, during a two-week tour with about fifty people after she finished her master's program. She was mid-sentence, so she got up and finished it. At dinner a woman told her she could not stop thinking about it, and that she struggled with the pressure to never fall. Sanaz remembered answering, "everybody falls. Everyone's tripped."

Find a locker room before you need one

Aaron described a practice he started at the Pomona campus. After a service, the communicators who had led communion, a baby dedication or announcements sat down together and named what they did well and what they missed. He called it locker room talk. Two of them were honest with each other, and nobody took themselves too seriously.

For him, that is the point. As he put it, "If you don't have a locker room, then the crowd becomes your locker room." A locker room is where people are on your team and have your back, so feedback there helps you improve without becoming a verdict on who you are. Without it, he said, we go looking for approval from the crowd.

He tied this to his own daughter, Trinity, who had been baptized the night before along with two friends. The pastors who lead her, he said, will see her weaknesses as well as her wins, and if she ever fails in public she should turn to the people who know her instead of a crowd that does not. The hosts also noted that a house where everyone teases each other, as theirs does, helps children feel secure when strangers say something cutting.

Do not stop before the victory

The hosts also thought about the fighter who threw the punch. One suggested he may have celebrated too early, as if humiliating his opponent had already won him the fight. They compared it to a viral Olympic clip in which a swimmer kept looking for Michael Phelps instead of watching the end of the pool. One host said, "Until they raise your arm in victory, you can't stop fighting."

The group played a second clip of the winning boxer talking about the fight on Breakfast Club, and he appeared with his toupee off. The hosts pointed out that he was getting more attention for not taking himself too seriously. One of them said what the enemy means for evil, God can turn for good.

Another host described a habit of his own. When he is running and falls, his first instinct is not to check for injury but to wonder who saw him. He said that says something about him, and the group laughed that nobody is usually watching.

The crowd that was never in the game

Recording just before the Super Bowl, one host talked about Seattle's "twelfth man." The crowd there is so loud that its noise was once measured as an earthquake on the Richter scale. It encourages the home team and rattles the visitors, and that is how much a crowd can affect a player whose head is not in the game.

He then applied it to the people who comment on our lives. They are not the ones playing, he said, and God has never called them to the position you hold. Yet it is easy to doubt your calling because of what they say you are doing wrong. The question he left was whether your eyes are on the goal or on the crowd.

Secure enough to keep shooting

The last story was about Steph Curry at the Olympics. One host recalled that Curry started slowly, and later took over the final game. In one moment he was triple teamed and still took the shot, and it went in. The host said Curry had spoken about how you miss the shots you do not take, so he is comfortable missing because he knows he is a shooter.

He drew the line to faith: "the more secure we are in our identity in Christ," the less we look to the crowd for validation. If we miss, we do not rehearse how we dressed or how our shoes looked. We go to God, settle again who we are, and then lock in, whether that turns out to be a win or a loss. As another host said, it is how we handle moments of adversity that defines how we bounce back.

What this means for you

You will probably have your own toupee moment: a stumbled word, a public fall, a mistake you replay long after anyone else has forgotten it. The conversation offers two questions to ask when it happens. Who are the people who know you well enough to tell you the truth? And what has Christ already said about you?

You do not have to be flawless to keep going. One of the hosts closed with a line that fits: "Stay in the fight regardless of whether or not your hair falls off."