I was in a hotel room in Brasov, Romania. It was about 7 p.m. I was sitting on the bed and I was due to commentate on an MMA show at 9 p.m.
My phone rang. It was my Mum. I picked it up and she said, “Your Dad is dead”.
I said, “Okay, I'll call you back”. I hung up.
A girl who was in the room with me at the time. She said, “What happened”? I said, “My Dad died”.
Tristan was on the other bed. He said, “Dad's dead?” I said, “Dad's dead.”
And then we just sat there quietly for about 10 to 15 minutes.
And then I said, “Tristan, let's get ready and go do this show.” He said, “Are we still doing it?” I said, “Yeah.”
I didn't see the advantage of cancelling our commentating contract, when they flew us there from England.
We commentated on the entire show. After the show, we went back to the room. The girl I was with was like, “Oh, is there anything I can do?” I was like, “No.”
I was very irritable. She kept asking me if I was okay and it was pissing me off.
I was like, “Can you just sleep somewhere else? Just leave me alone. You can't resurrect my father and you just keep asking me questions and you're pissing me off.”
She left the room.
Dad died of a heart attack in a chess tournament. Literally died on a chessboard. Best way to go for a professional chess player.
Tears ran down my face, but I did not cry.
There were tears in my eyes, but I don't know if sad is the right word for how I felt.
I felt more anxious.
Imagine every police officer on the planet just evaporates. You’d be like, “Well, what happens now?" You're nervous, on edge, scared, worried.
That's how it felt. I didn't feel sad. I understood mortality well enough. It was more like, “Okay, well, Dad's gone.”
So now what? Like, “T, what do we do? Dad's gone. We're the bosses now. We don't get told what to do anymore.”
This is weird. That's how it felt. A strange anxiousness.
And the weirdest thing about this is that the day before he died, I had messaged him.
I was in a nightclub in Brasov. We talked on Facebook every few days. I messaged him randomly:
“Dad, my chi feels off. Are you here?”
It's the last message I sent him. He never read it.
And then he died.
The next day I woke up and my inbox on Facebook was flooded with stories from people who knew my Dad. It was very nice for me to read these stories of people I'd never heard of.
People were like, “Hi, you don't know who I am, but I was in the military with your father.”
“I met your father at a chess tournament.”
They told me all these amazing stories of my father doing incredible things.
A guy sent me a message saying, “Nobody is going to understand when you tell people how smart your father was. But I just want to tell you a quick story that when I joined the military, I was already fluent in Russian, and I lived with my Russian wife. And within two weeks, your father was correcting my Russian.”
It was the Air Force record for the fastest assimilation of a foreign language.
It was incredible. Everyone called him E-T, like an alien. They told me all these stories.
A kid in Africa contacted me, said, “I can't get hold of your Dad. He's not responding.”
I'm like, who are you? “Your Dad was sending me money and paying for my chess lessons.” I didn't know my Dad was sending this kid money.
So I sent this kid some money.
It was sobering but refreshing for me to read all these nice stories about him. To know that he made an impact on so many people's lives.
And the fact that he died while playing chess gave me huge solace. I was happy that he died at a chessboard. That's how he should have died.
A hero’s death. A warrior’s death. That's the best death I could have ever hoped for him. On the battlefield.
Now I want to affect as many people's lives as possible and die a hero's death.
I would hate to die peacefully in my sleep. I can do better than that.
If this story ends with me pissing off the government so much that eventually I get drive-by shot somewhere, I wouldn't be disappointed with that ending.
