Lessons from the Arena: Life in Anecdotes (My Champion Series)

He won Olympic gold. This is what it actually cost.In 1992, Herb Perez stood on the top of the podium in Barcelona, a gold medal around his neck and his country's anthem playing for him. Twenty-eight years earlier, he had been a five-year-old in a Queens courtyard, watching his mother drag him back to the boy who had just beaten him so he could fight him until he cried or quit. The two moments are the same story.Lessons from the Arena is the unflinching memoir of one of America's first Olympic taekwondo champions — a story that begins not with a medal but with a Greyhound bus out of New York on Christmas Eve, a Lutheran rectory in the rain, and a forged signature on a nine-year-old's first Taekwondo registration form. Across twenty chapters, Perez tells the truth about what it actually takes to become elite at anything: the mission that eliminates choice, the penance that makes losing painful, the kick he didn't throw in the first thirty seconds of the Olympic final, and the gentleman's code he is still — at sixty-six — learning to live by.Each chapter pairs a true story from his life with the lesson he actually took from it. Some of those lessons saved him. Others took fifty years to outgrow. All of them are offered honestly, in the voice of a man who has finally stopped trying to soften his own story for the comfort of his reader.For anyone building a hard thing, parenting a hard child, or carrying a hard past — this book is for you. Read more