Beyond the Fight: Guillard vs. Miller
Scary Moments
Jim
Miller always prepares for the unexpected. | Photo:
Sherdog.com
‘You don’t want to have just one plan.’
“The big thing that scares me would be an inability to protect my family if they needed it. That’s really the only thing that scares me. That’s one reason why I started fighting -- is because I wanted to learn to defend myself because I would never be able to … I don’t know how I’d live with myself if I allowed anything to ever happen to my family.
“As a kid, early teens and stuff like that, both of my older brothers, they had moved from eighth grade into the high school. So I had both my brothers [in high school] when, like, the school shootings happened, like, Columbine and stuff like that … My initial thought is, ‘Well, I could hide. If something happened, I could hide.’ I’ve always run through these types of scenarios and stuff like that in my head, even when I was little. But, then, what always got me was … say I do hide and I hide in the closet or something like that. Then, as I’m leaving, I see one of my brothers, you know, on the ground. That scares you, that chokes me up right now, that ... I would not be able to handle that. I made the decision pretty early that if I ever got in a type of situation like that, where I needed to react quickly, that I’d rather go down swinging. So I figured I better learn how to fight and up my chances of at least hopefully surviving.
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“You know, things happen, man. You’ve got to have at least an idea of how you might approach the situation. You don’t want to have just one plan. You’ve got to have many plans, ’cause stuff’s going to change.”
‘It still haunts me to this day.’
“When Katrina happened, I seen some of [the] biggest, baddest drug dealers -- some of them probably were killers -- and they were scared. I seen grown men crying, like they were terrified. And I’m, like, look at this s--- here. That’s the stuff I saw. And I’m, like, how can they call themselves men?
“I was trapped on a bridge actually for six days and seven nights. I rescued three older people, in particular, and I watched three older people die because they didn’t get insulin dropped to them.
“People have that stigma about black people can’t swim. That was a true statement on that bridge, man. I seen hundreds and thousands of black people that could not swim, even law enforcement. I was one of the only ... maybe me and three other guys were actually good swimmers and swam and had little floating devices that we could bring stuff back. For me, at that point, my mind went from, like, a natural disaster to it’s, like, my dad taking me camping and I’m out her living, camping.
“The sad part was, when the ignorance kicked in, I would have to step in and be a little aggressive. I would come back with food, but the small group that I was with, we had two infant babies. I was, like, I’m going to help our group first and whatever I have left I can disperse to everyone else. People were so ignorant they started to come over towards us like they’re going to take stuff from me. I was like, dude, hold on. I just told them straight up: if you take this from me, I promise I’m going to throw you in the water and watch you drown. I had to lay the law down really quick. People were stressing, people were panicking and I was one of the only calm people on that bridge that kept everybody calm.
“I just use it to make me stronger. A lot of people, they see my attitude show in fights ... People don’t know where I come from; they don’t know what I really saw. I woke up one morning on a bridge and saw an infant baby floating in the water because girls were panicking and someone actually threw their baby away. The infant baby was floating beneath my feet under the bridge. It still haunts me to do this day.”
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