In the months after my father’s death, I seek encounters with nameless men in sports halls. I sign up for Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) competitions. I show up at half-empty venues, weigh in and wait around all day to roll around on floors, trying to strangle and not be strangled. As I step off the scales, competitors queue behind me and junior matches break out like temple dances on the plush white mats. When I enter the locker room, the air is stiff with the scent of energy drinks and nervous shits. Two of the toilets are blocked, so I join a ministry of men in tight, surfer-style rash guards staking out the disabled toilet.
Competition rules dictate that matches be fought over five-minute rounds. Matches can be won by submission; otherwise, the person with the most points wins. Points are scored for takedowns, pins and control. Competitors must be in place in an enclosed area known as the bullpen at least 30 minutes before a match. Then they take to the mats.
> _WES BROWN (Granite Gym, Rochester, Kent)_
> _Men No-Gi/Intermediate/Above 18/>__100 kg_
> (The adult men’s intermediate ‘no-gi’ bracket – Brazilian jiu-jitsu without the traditional jacket-and-belt uniform – capped at about 100 kg, or 220 lbs.)
My opponent is bigger, stronger and higher ranked than me. His eyes stare back at mine above a full beard and dreadlock topknot, his gum shield bulging. We circle, our hands pawing for grips, trying to find an angle. It is eight days since Dad died. The loss is on a cellular level – I can feel his death all over me. Its hideous truth. Another man’s weight on mine, a shadow play as real as the struggle with my opponent, whose strength is overwhelming. His vitality flows over mine; I am drowning in his life force, an intimate energy of muscle and coconut oil, zesty detergent and sweat choreographed into a system of violence. He sweeps my heel, lifting my leg in the air and driving me to the mat.
It’s easy to echo Roger Murtaugh in _Lethal Weapon:_ ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ But my opponent is 39, only a year younger than me. The difference is he trains five times a week, and he is also more talented. I am a hobbyist struggling to train more than twice a week, half-orphaned and desperate not to be a loser.
My intention was to win the match; the grief meant losing was not an option. I would win my first gold and point to the sky, as if Dad was watching. It would heal a psychic wound. Instead, I find myself with my opponent’s dreadlocked topknot pressed against my face while he runs through a frantic flurry of submissions as if he’s trying to pick a lock. He traps my arm, I defend my arm. He cups my neck; I frame against his chest. I try to hip escape, and he slides his arms around my collar. Every escape presents a problem worse than the last, I am trapped in a _zugzwang_, already defeated but fighting for pride to extend the time I’m alive before ego-death. After a few minutes, energy fading and breathing hard, his muscle-tearing grip begins to suffocate me.
My teammates, my coach and other competitors are watching from the sidelines, my _lack_ on public view. Some of them yell instructions, but I’m too cooked to follow them. I’m not sure what chokehold he has on me, a D’Arce? An Anaconda? I can feel the sinews of his arms cranking my neck, the light narrowing into pitch darkness, I buck and kick and fight and pry at his arms but the more I resist the tighter the noose becomes, and I tap before the lights go out.
**\*\*\***
Since I turned 40, there’s an advert that keeps appearing on my timelines: SHRINKING BALLS.
The writing is in bold print beside a pair of raisins, which seems an odd way to advertise testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). ‘It might happen,’ the advert warns, ‘but we can treat it.’
‘Manopause’ – the male menopause – involves the symptoms of declining testosterone, usually affecting men starting in their 40s. Unlike menopause, which is a more rapid hormonal shift in oestrogen and progesterone levels in women, the decline in testosterone is slow and gradual. For the past few years, I’ve woken feeling increasingly like I’d been beaten-up, exhausted but telling myself I’d slept badly. I put my neutered libido down to stress. The soft fat around my chest I blamed on lifting lighter weights.
At breakfast, another advert appears on my timeline, this one selling TRT as a ‘cheat code’ for life. The five symptoms to look out for include low energy, no motivation, anxiety, loss of strength and muscle mass – I have all of them. Why not take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole goes?
These are champions weighing hormones against world titles. My accounting is smaller
I go into my garage for a mid-morning workout. It’s when I feel best and apparently when men’s testosterone levels peak during the day. Between rounds of kettlebell swings and presses, I play a Joe Rogan podcast with the American BJJ champ Gordon Ryan and before long they’re talking about the lack of drug-testing in the sport and Rogan’s own use of TRT.
In the world of elite BJJ, even champions like Ryan are open about their steroid use. Jiu-jitsu has been promoted on the premise that a smaller, more technical competitor can defeat a larger, less skilled opponent. The same can be said of old and young. This combination of guard-play and TRT means that athletes like my idol, Brazil’s Vagner Rocha, can remain competitive with the world’s best at 44. Rocha recommends younger athletes stay clean but has ‘no shame’ about those over 35 using hormones to stay in the game.
These are champions weighing hormones against world titles. My accounting is smaller. I am always tired. My brain is fogged. And I have been released from the cycle of desire to the point where I have become a repressed heterosexual. My mood is chronically low. I am anxious for no apparent reason. My libidinal energy, what Sigmund Freud might have termed _Eros_, has diminished to the point where, despite being a grown man with a bald head, beard and muscles, I feel sexless and fearful.
I have been trying for another child with my wife, Becki, since shortly after the birth of our last one, eight years ago. She has been checked out and now it’s my turn. A blood test shows my testosterone levels are pre-pubescent.
But supplementing with TRT is not a simple fix. It can increase libido, energy and muscle, but it can also shut down the body’s natural production of testosterone and reduce sperm production – exactly the problem when you are trying to have a baby. The risk of not taking TRT for men like me is its own kind of twilight: living in a body that feels as if it is dying faster, with greater risk of bone fractures, heart problems, obesity and erectile dysfunction.
The referral letter to the urologist from my doctor says: _This lovely_ _40 years old_ _gentleman c/o no libido and feels tired all the time. He is trying to have a baby with his partner for_ _5 yrs_ _without any success. They have 1 child together in the past. His blood test shows low Testosterone level and I wonder if that is contributing to his symptoms._
Hemingway was using boxing as evidence of manhood. I am using jiu-jitsu the same way
There has long been a strong association between testosterone and vitality in popular culture. The word ‘testicle’ originates from the Latin _testis_, meaning witness: a word that came to bear testimony to the virility of manhood. Even today, to have balls, bollocks or _cojones_ means to be manly. It was Ernest Hemingway who imported the Spanish term _cojones_ into the English language in _Death in the Afternoon_ (1932). Speaking of a bullfighter’s balls in the same allegorical way that the Romans did, as representing courage, manliness and bravery, he wrote: ‘it takes more _cojones_ to be a sportsman when death is a closer party to the game.’
In 1929, Hemingway bragged to the American writer Josephine Herbst: ‘My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.’ Yet Hemingway, by many accounts, was a terrible boxer. The same year, when he learned that the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan had boxed as an amateur, he invited him to spar. In one early session, Callaghan caught Hemingway – a much taller, heavier man – with a jab that split his lip; Hemingway, bleeding and furious, spat blood back in Callaghan’s face. Later came the more storied bout, with F Scott Fitzgerald on hand as timekeeper. Hemingway charged forward, throwing wild, wayward punches, walking onto shots and wiping blood from his mouth with his glove. Careless with exasperation and embarrassment, as Callaghan put it, with having Scott watch on, Papa got folded, lights out, sprawled on his back. How serious is Hemingway? What does it mean to confuse virility on the page with ability in the ring?
Hemingway was using boxing as evidence of manhood. I am using jiu-jitsu the same way. It’s not even about winning or losing. On the mat, that brief brush with defeat – being pinned, choked, almost put out – is also where I feel most alive. Or I did, until a blood test told me I had the testosterone levels of a 12-year-old boy.
In the evening, I climb into bed with Becki and lie awake while she sleeps. I am Wes’s inflamed sense of rejection, I am Wes’s shrinking balls, retreating into a pre-pubescent shadow of myself. But like Demi Moore’s fading-star Elisabeth Sparkle in the body-horror film _The Substance_ (2024) – whose one rule is that the old self and the new self must remember they are one – I have learned that the fountain of youth is not a legendary spring on a mythical island. It is a lifetime supply of synthetic testosterone arriving by mail order.
**\*\*\***
> _WES BROWN (Granite Gym, Rochester, Kent)_
> _JONNO HESELWOOD (Miah Bros MMA Gym, Newhaven, East Sussex)_
> _Men No-Gi Absolute/Beginner/__Above 18_
> (The adult men’s beginner ‘no-gi’ bracket and with no weight limit.)
After a stalemate of hand fighting, I pull him to the ground and wrap my legs around his waist. I try to find an angle to secure his chicken-wing arm but he fights to remain upright. He tries to escape my guard, but I scissor him with my legs and sweep him onto his back, where I cup his head in my arm and crush my shoulder into his face, pressing all my weight downward as if I’m under the force of a giant cartoon magnet. I gain three points for passing his guard. He bucks with all his animal weight – this being the ‘absolute division’ with no weight categories – and I surf the shockwaves of a much bigger and younger athlete until the clock runs out. Still in the game: you’ve still got it! You’re the man!
On the day after Christmas, I got a call from the hospital. Where was I? Could I come? He might not have long. Dad had sepsis caused by an open wound on his shoulder and it was spreading to his heart and lungs. The doctors said he wouldn’t last long. I broke down. I knew the day would come but had no idea how it might play out, what it might _feel_ like. To have this huge figure disappear, to no longer have a dad.
I was glad to feel the pain – so physical and irrefutable in its force. Had I been a good son? Had I done enough? He had the signs of early onset dementia. His consciousness had begun to fade. He could be grumpy and tunnel-visioned, only half-aware. Had I been forgiving of his flaws?
Sometimes he would disappear for weeks at a time. I knew he was in his care home, but he did not
By the time I got there, racing the 224 miles to Leeds, he was sitting up in bed, talking to the nurses. ‘Nice of you to join me,’ he said when I walked in.’ I told him what the doctors had said. ‘Really fucking showed them, didn’t we?’
He had been in resuscitation for three hours. Now, with a breathing tube coming out of his nose, he was talking, laughing, very much himself and absolutely still alive. Despite having given orders to not resuscitate, he _had_ been resuscitated and was still with me.
We spent a day and a half together in full lucidity. After that, the phone calls became more sporadic. Sometimes he would disappear for weeks at a time. I knew he was in his care home, but he did not. Sometimes he forgot how to use his mobile. Sometimes he forgot who he was. He never, as far as I remember, forgot who I was.
We took a selfie, our bald heads lined up next to one another like a before and after at different ages: same eyes, same smile, same drunken joy in his aliveness.
_**\*\*\***_
> _SOHAIL CHOWDHARY (Limitless Martial Arts UK, Southampton)_
> _WES BROWN (Granite Gym, Rochester, Kent)_
> _Gi/Male/White Belt/Master 1/Medium Heavy (Max_ _88.3 kg)_
> (The men’s white-belt gi division with traditional jacket and belt, for competitors over 30, capped at 88.3 kg, or 195 lbs.)
At 6.30 am, I jump in a van with a teammate named Aron and race down the motorway toward Brighton and the competition. The sea is a stony grey, slapping at the cold shore, Viking weather. We meet our other testosterone-depleted middle-aged stablemates in the carpark. They smoke. I look at the pensive early morning skyline.
‘You nervous?’ I ask Aron, another bald, beardy BJJ dad who manages a mobile phone pipeline by day and rolls around playing murder-games in pyjamas by night. An amateur explosives enthusiast, who de-stresses by blowing things up. He has never competed before.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m just here to see what it’s like.’
It’s different for me. I am here to win. I’ve won silver and bronze before, never gold. My ultimate ambition is to stand on the podium with a medal around my neck and post it on social media.
But jiu-jitsu is not supposed to be only about winning. No-gi jiu-jitsu, fought without the traditional jacket-and-trousers uniform, is faster, more wrestling-oriented and more openly associated with performance enhancement. Gi jiu-jitsu, fought in the kimono, carries more of the ritual and discipline inherited from judo and Japanese jujutsu. In both versions, no matter how good you are, there is always someone who can smash you.
He catches me in a choke, my skull crowning between his thighs like a newborn
Because there are no punches or kicks, players can spar hard without the same risk of injury as other fighting sports. Competitors often start deliberately from bad positions. To improve, you have to experiment with new techniques, testing each one to failure until something works. To play jiu-jitsu is to be constantly humbled. The addiction is in the difficulty: the physical puzzles that push body and mind to their limits, and the camaraderie of those who keep coming back to solve them.
In the lead-up to the match, I have checked my opponent’s page on Smoothcomp, the cloud platform we use to see a fighter’s age, weight, gym affiliations and win/loss records. I deduced from Googling him and finding a name matching his on social media that my competitor, Sohail, was the _same_ Sohail who was a candidate on season 17 of _The Apprentice_ (2023) and was fired in week 7 after his pirate-themed ‘treasure chest’ lunchbox failed to impress buyers. Since then, he has been running his own martial arts gym. I’ve been getting a master’s degree in creative writing. My Smoothcomp page makes for less impressive reading than his. He is 31 years old with 12 wins. I am 40 with two.
The match starts and we circle crabwise. I see the whites of his eyes, the speed at which he explodes toward me with a primal vigour, desperate to throw me to the floor. He yanks me in by the lapels. I sidestep and point a toe to the sky, tripping him. But as he falls, he pulls me over with him. I land on my back and wrap my legs around his waist.
But he jumps up and circles like a cyclone, his energy ferocious. Already exhausted, heart pounding, lungs choking, my body turns heavy and loose, lolloping like deadweight as I try to regain focus. I reach for his leg and pull myself out between his knees, but he catches me in a choke, my skull crowning between his thighs like a newborn.
I escape the choke only to find myself under another wave of attack. Now I am simply surviving, slowing the inevitable defeat by a couple of minutes. He takes my back. I defend, pushing against the choking arm, shrugging my shoulder to my ear, hiding the vulnerable flesh of my neck. As I turtle onto my knees, he grabs a fistful of collar, falls back across my body and hooks a leg over my shoulder. Then he pulls the lapel tight, strangling me with my own kimono.
Match one and I am already defeated. The day is over. We come back to our feet, shake hands, and the referee raises his arm. I am bent double, breathing hard. Afterward, we embrace and praise each other’s performance.
What am I here for? Sometimes it feels as though, if I could only exert my will over another man – especially a younger one – I might roll back the decline of age. Yet here I am, fighting the inevitable in pursuit of an impossible dream: the oldster at the nightclub, the journeyman who doesn’t know when to stop, the man who will not accept that his time is up.
**\*\*\***
The only thing my father left me when he died was a funeral to organise and a tube of testosterone. We used to joke, at least I think he was joking, about wanting a Viking funeral. His body would be pushed out to sea in a burning boat. In Norse mythology, the Valkyries chose which battle-slain warriors would be taken to the Goddess Freya’s meadow to rest and which would be taken to Odin’s great hall of heroes in Valhalla. There they would be kept in fighting shape, until Ragnarök, the apocalyptic battle that ends in the death and rebirth of the universe. It wasn’t quite the Viking ceremony he joked about, but we did scatter his ashes in the Thames on a sweltering day near the Berkshire village where he used to swim and play as a child. The remains clouded the water like a dark shoal, then dispersed into the tide.
Dad didn’t believe in an afterlife. When you were dead, you were dead. And now he was dead. Martin Amis described the passing of his father Kingsley as the loss of an ‘intercessionary figure’ – the man who stands between the son and extinction. Without my father, death felt closer. I was more aware of being a father to my own children – including Edward, aged 15, my stepson for 10 years – of being the one who now stands between them and death. Jiu-jitsu became an expression of that urgency: the place where I felt life itself coursing through my veins.
Several years before he died, almost inexplicably, Dad sent me a mail order of testosterone and messaged me to confirm: ‘I posted you something to try. I get it from the doctor. Recorded delivery. You rub it on your inner thigh.’
‘For fucks sake,’ I replied. ‘I don’t have time for that. I don’t want testosterone. I’m natural.’
Dad was a geriatric Terminator touring Vietnam in camouflage vest and cargo shorts, bald head gleaming
I put the tube in a cupboard and left it there for years, until a blood test revealed very low levels of testosterone and my fertility test confirmed I was no longer capable of becoming a dad again.
At the age of 19, I’d caught mumps. I remember being pushed down a corridor in nothing but a gown. The virus had spread from the salivary glands to my testes. Doctors arrived to weigh my balls and held a conference at my bedside. There was damage: I might have fertility issues in future. Their solution was to pump me full of steroids for two weeks.
Dad had been taking testosterone recreationally for years. As an eccentric, he had been ahead of the curve. A pro wrestler and early adopter of tattoos, steroids and bodybuilding on the American West Coast in the 1960s, his subcultures had now become mainstream. In his later years, testosterone became part of his own hedonistic anti-ageing protocol. He had his shoulder replaced. A new kneecap. His heart reset. He was half-bionic, at least partially invincible, unkillable, a geriatric Terminator touring Vietnam in camouflage vest and cargo shorts, bald head gleaming, firing Kalashnikovs on shooting ranges, testosterone-powered and telling his tales to anyone who would listen, the old sailor with the glittering eye.
Sometimes, in the later years, I’d argue with Dad. He was autistic and had no filter. His timeline was a constant stream of photos from his pro wrestling days, his holidays in Vietnam, his big belly out, one tiger-tattooed arm around beautiful women in bikinis.
I worried that he was being taken advantage of. Sometimes he could be mind-blind and too trusting. I told him posting endless pictures of bikini-clad women wasn’t a good look. But a day after he died, I got a message from one of the women in his photographs. She was an Australian model running a non-profit protecting women and children. She told me they had known each other for 11 years. Initially, she had avoided him, thinking him another creep until she was followed home one night by two large, predatory men. Dad was standing at the other end of the alley and got rid of them fast.
What I felt was not vanity exactly, but grief with nowhere to go: grief for my father, my fertility, my youth, my body
I needed a second blood-test to confirm whether my testosterone levels were consistently low or the last one was an aberration. Secretly, I wanted to get on it either way and take my levels beyond normal, somewhere near where I was in my 20s.
‘Do you think I should get on it?’ I asked Becki a few days later at home, scrolling through my blood work on the NHS app.
‘It’s one thing if there’s a medical need,’ she said. ‘But if not, wouldn’t it just be to make you feel more attractive? More manly?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Would it be any different from me getting Botox?’
It was debatable how many men needed TRT. Digital clinics had sprung up in the grey market, selling the idea of a ‘male menopause’ and pathologising normal ageing as something to optimise away. A strange kind of equality: the beauty industry had found men at last.
Compared with my hysteria, Becki’s understanding felt almost unbearable. Why was she so tolerant? Why wouldn’t she take the harsher view I took of myself? What I felt was not vanity exactly, but grief with nowhere to go: grief for my father, my fertility, my youth, my body – all the things I was losing at once.
**\*\*\***
> _JONNO HESELWOOD (Matoi BJJ UK, Newhaven, East Sussex)_
> _WES BROWN (Granite Gym, Rochester, Kent)_
> _No-Gi/Male/Beginner/Master 1/Medium Heavy (Max_ _88.3 kg)_
> (The adult men’s ‘no-gi’ bracket for medium-heavyweight beginners over 30, capped at 88.3 kg, or 195 lbs.)
Sometime after our first match, Jonno and I take a selfie and swap numbers, a meet-cute for a tough-guy bromance. A few weeks later, he messages, inviting me to another comp. He has changed gyms. He has cauliflower ear and another stripe on his belt. He sends pics in side profile of his mangled ear, and it looks like a hunk of chewed-up meat, bruised and sore, barely attached to his head.
Earlier that day, I’d lost to Sohail and this is my chance to avoid total defeat. As the smaller man, my strategy should be to move. Instead, we lock up collar-and-elbow, gridlocked like a pair of Roman marble sculptures. He’s taller and heavier than me, and I can feel the last of the life draining from my body’s energy bar as I try to shrug his elbow, duck under, find an angle, but he outmuscles me every time. Under his weight, it feels as though my balls are working overtime to fuel the desperation.
When I get home, I am exhausted. My kids have had busy days. Edward has been pro wrestling training. Eliza is drawing; she draws me through her eight-year-old eyes, something like an egg, with a scribbly beard, dotted stubble hair and a baseball cap.
‘Did you win?’ she asks.
‘No, I didn’t win.’
The testosterone in the cupboard begins to occupy me. Why not become a better version of myself?
There’s no disappointment in her eyes. It was the same with Dad. One of his favourite adjectives was _monster_. You knew you were doing well if you sent him big lifts in the gym or clips from sparring and he said you were becoming a monster.
I find Becki in the kitchen and she knows not to ask. ‘Did you have fun?’ she asks. ‘Do you think you’ll compete again?’
‘No, I think I’m done,’ I say. For a while at least, it’s time to prioritise my family and not indulge in my version of Dad’s Vietnam.
Over time, the testosterone in the cupboard begins to occupy me. Why not rattle it down and become a better version of myself? More vital? A better dad? In body-horror stories like _The Substance_, the promise is transformation. Take the substance and become younger, stronger, more alive. The danger is that the new self does not simply replace the old one. It reveals something that was already there.
That is what frightens me. Not only what testosterone might do to my body, but what it might release in me. I can feel myself moving toward it anyway. Not taking it feels like surrender. Taking it feels like becoming someone I may not be able to control.
Then another advert pops up in my timeline: _Men get hormonal too._ Feeling irritable? It might be low testosterone. I look into the research: male testosterone levels have been in decline across populations since the 1970s. Diet, microplastics, sedentary work, smoking – no single cause has been confirmed. Some explanations have a more political edge: men are being socially feminised, and biology follows suit.
Remember this as he mauls you in his arms: the monster whose substance is stronger than yours
Sometime later, a stylish box arrives from the backstreets of the internet_._ The branding is sleek. A monosyllable company name that means nothing. Inside are instructions promising a science-based solution to the eternal quest for youth. _Another Step Toward Lasting Change_, the packaging promises, the first step on your hero’s journey, except you’ve skipped the road of trials and gone straight for the cure_._ It is easy to imagine taking the substance, then later finding your old body and self unzipped down the spine and, as in the film, discarded on the bathroom floor.
Men on the websites advertising TRT describe looking back on their previous lives as if they were shadows of themselves. Maybe the next time you go on Smoothcomp to sign up for a competition, you’ll recognise your opponent: yourself, remade. No longer a perennial loser. Given a new lease of life by TRT: the cheat-code version. The one with shrunken balls who has infinitely more cojones. The one who’s gone all-in on black-market peptides, because, why the hell not?
> **WES BROWN (Granite Gym, Rochester, Kent)**
> **Gi/Male/White Belt/Master 2/Medium Heavy (Max** **88.3 kg** **– pushing** **195 lbs)**
He may appear more muscular than you are now. Leaner. More confident. He may be living the life you can only dream of. Train more. Lift more. Smile more. Recover faster. Wear your clothes better. Raise your children. Smash your records. Sleep with your wife. Become, in some ways, more like your father. Eros coursing through his veins. Drunk at the fountain of youth.
REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE
Remember this as he mauls you in his arms: the monster whose substance is stronger than yours. You want to remind him what it cost him. You want to tell him that his _cojones_ do not come from his shrinking balls, but from the chemical that replaced them. But by then he has already taken your neck. His arms close around you. The light narrows. Your coach is calling your name from the edge of the mat, but you are already slipping into the dark.