He was about as pumped as you could get, a dark spade beard above a thick neck that sloped down to enormous shoulders, his muscled arms looking oiled even outside the ring. Beside him was his wife, a very pretty Angelina Jolie-lookalike with puffed lips and the most astonishingly poreless skin, completely flawless under camera-ready foundation.

With them were two delightfully normal little girls. Seeing the parents and then looking at the kids was like seeing two pictures photo-shopped together. But they were fond and casual parents and the girls were sweet, and we all ended up talking.

This was in Nashville, in Bridgestone Arena after a Predators hockey game, when we were hanging around in the VIP suite soaking up the show. Our travelling hockey team was in town for an international rec-league tournament. Some of us had got tickets to the game, along with passes to the VIP lounge arranged by our coach. Our team had played in three previous international tournaments, in Iceland, Las Vegas and Arizona. But while we loved Iceland and Arizona for their beauty, and Vegas for its weirdness, Nashville stood out because of the people we met–particularly this classic American man with his classic American story, every other sentence something you’d never hear in Canada.

The guy was a boxer, he told us, and he wrestles and fights on the mixed martial arts circuit as well. He told us his name—even showed us a youtube clip on his phone of a recent fight, his elder daughter craning in for a look. But I’m not going to give his name since he didn’t know I’d be writing about him. I didn’t know I’d be writing about him, and didn’t take notes for exact quotes, although I remember some of what he said precisely. Not that’s he’s famous, but if you google him, he’s got a profile that I’m not going to add to miscellaneously.

There were four of us hockey players at the game, and my teammate Kate had been the one to start talking to the fighter, asking  why he got into MMA. How his career began.

Well, he said, he came from a little town that was really country. Not like Nashville, which was a big city where people wore hats and thought they were cowboys. He played football back in high school, and he was pretty popular and he had friends who thought he should have tried for a career. But he decided to join up and serve his country. (Going quiet when answering Kate’s question.) Afghanistan. Iraq. Couple of tours.

And you come out, he said, and they do nothing with you and nothing for you. And I drifted, got into… And then—showing part of an enormous tattoo of angel wings on one arm and shoulder—I found Him and I found fighting.

You could tell he’d done a few interviews, and that most probably led toward the moment he became a Born-again Christian. But he occasionally wavered off message. (“They do nothing with you and nothing for you,” in that quiet voice, half to himself) And there were jumps.

Without warning, the man started telling us about doing high-level security work, talking about meeting presidents—and President Obama he’d always speak of highly even though he doesn’t agree with all of his policies, as he will of President Trump.

Because you respect the office, Kate said. Our Canadian presumption.

Because I love my country, he replied.

Another quiet addition: “Even if it don’t always love me.”

But President Trump, you know, he said, catching himself. The media lies about him, because he always says it genuine: How are you? How’s your family? Really meaning it, you know? Because you’ve got to pull yourself up, the fighter told us, not saying that it’s racism and all that keeping you down.

As if hearing what he’d said, he looked around quickly to see if anyone else was listening. There wasn’t a person of colour in sight, and he seemed reassured. All four of us were white, and he seemed to think we’d agree with him.

You’ve got to pull yourself up like President Trump says, he told us more firmly. You’ve gotta do it. No one’s going to do it for you.

Last year, during our hockey trip to Arizona, we had another strongly American encounter. Our team was heading for the dressing room before one of our games and passed two or three paramedics walking away from a player with his leg on a chair and a bag of ice on the leg. I thought he couldn’t have been badly injured if the paramedics were leaving him at the rink. But one of our players heard him say to his son, We’ve just got to wait for one of the guys to get off ice to drive me to the hospital. I can’t afford an ambulance.

Now here was our fighter, another wounded warrior whose country didn’t take care of him: in this case a veteran of foreign wars, a fond father, a firm Christian (not just the tattoo, but his mild vocabulary), a Trump supporter whose attitude towards Black folks doesn’t bear scrutiny, and a fighter trying to battle his way out.

Echoing in my head was Paul Simon’s classic song, The Boxer.

I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

We didn’t say goodbye, separated by the crowd, but I’ve been thinking about him ever since.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel, Far Creek Road, revolves around a man who came home wounded from the Second World War. It’s available here.