Richard: Sam is my firstborn \u2013 my only child with Lisa. I later remarried and had three more children. I think we get better as parents as we go along. Sam might feel like he broke me in for his siblings. As a kid, he was very sporty, very social and very engaging. From my point of view, he has always been great company. To this day, one of the joys of my life is hanging out with Sam.<\/p>\n
All my kids learnt how to play golf at a very young age. Sam became a good golfer \u2013 really good. Much better than me. He might have felt that I was disappointed when he gave up the idea of playing professionally. I mean, yes, a little. But I could see that it was really frus\u00adtrating for him, trying to get to the place he wanted to get with golf.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s something confronting about your child telling you they\u2019re going to do mixed martial arts. I definitely had questions. First, is this dangerous? Obviously, one has a concern about head injuries. But according to Sam, the sport regulates that side of it pretty rigorously. There are risks of other injuries \u2013 broken limbs and the like \u2013 but you could get those playing footy or a range of other sports.<\/p>\n
Secondly, I wanted to understand, where does this lead? And I\u2019ve felt comfort in the \u00adanswer to that question as well. Sam loves the world of mixed martial arts and, in that world, he\u2019s making a living. What pays the bills for him is running classes and working in the gym. It\u2019s a job that makes him happy: how good is that?<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m absolutely \u00adyelling and screaming at the screen, \u201cYOU BEAUTY!\u201d \u2019<\/p>\n
Richard Marles<\/p>\n
I spent election night at St Albans Football Club [in north-west Melbourne]. We\u2019d arranged that there was an area I could go to, in a \u00adcorner, to watch Sam\u2019s fight. This was, unquestionably, the biggest fight of his career. He went in as the underdog and I was feeling nervous for him. I knew how hard he\u2019d worked, and what winning the fight would mean to him.<\/p>\n
Loading<\/p>\n
Halfway through the final round, I\u2019m thinking this thing is really in the balance. Then Sam knocks the other guy down. I\u2019m absolutely \u00adyelling and screaming at the screen, \u201cYOU BEAUTY!\u201d Everyone else at the event is \u00adlooking at our corner and thinking, \u201cWe\u2019ve obviously won some booth somewhere.\u201d They thought I was calling the election in that \u00admoment because I was totally losing it. But for me, the election was way off in the distance.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, the extent of Labor\u2019s win \u00adstarted to become apparent, and the euphoria of that started mixing with the euphoria of Sam\u2019s fight. I woke up the next morning and thought, \u201cI just had the most awesome dream.\u201d Then I realised it had actually happened. A really, \u00adreally great night.<\/p>\n
People say, \u201cWhat\u2019s it like, having a son who does mixed martial arts?\u201d I say, \u201cWell, one thing it proves is that you have absolutely no say over what your kids do. Or at least, I don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Richard: Sam is my firstborn \u2013 my only child with Lisa. I later remarried and had three more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-65802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}