Fighter's Mind, A Page 15

  “Once in a while, people crack. On these long things . . .” This was a term David would use often, “these long things,” and he meant the incredible endurance races, or self-tests. There’s something poignant about it, something loose and generic. He could be talking about something else, not a race but some terrible trial, an illness, a war.

  “By and large, once people get into these long things, they don’t stop. They just keep going. It’s not dedication, or mental toughness—you just keep doing it.”

  I asked him about it, the kinds of games you play with yourself.

  “There are two statements that I use,” he said. “The first is simple: this too shall pass. It will end. It can’t last forever . . . because sometimes things will feel that way.”

  David is one of the very few finishers of the Barkley Marathon, an ultramarathon that makes even professional ultrarunners shudder and cross themselves. It’s sometimes referred to as “the race that eats its young.”

  In 1973 Gary Cantrell had been hiking in Frozen Head Park in Tennessee when he saw an ancient trail marked on the map, considered by the park to be impassable. When he went back later, Gary was thinking of the recent prison break of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray, who had made four miles through the woods in fifty-five hours, from a nearby prison. The terrain was too harsh for Ray to make it any farther. Gary thought he could do a hundred miles in that time, even in similar terrain. In 1985 he finally hiked it, and then he started the race the next year.

  The Barkley was born, a one-hundred-mile race through the woods, five horrible loops up steep thorny mountains, over fallen trees, and under bushes, with very little support in terms of aid stations and water. Even the trail is easy to lose. There are eleven books, hidden along the way, and the runners must find the books and tear out a page. It became infamous in the small ultramarathon world as the hardest, baddest, most miserable experience in running. It breaks top professionals all the time, with a total vertical climb of 54,000 feet, trees down crossing the trail, mud slides. David Horton was one of the seven finishers (in under sixty hours), of the 650 who have attempted it since 1986. If you want to enter, you have to write a long essay about “Why I should be allowed to run the Barkley,” even to get a chance to race. As Cantrell once said, “To run the Barkley is to know humility and fear.” Horton had survived and triumphed because of his second maxim.

  “The second one is very, very important: It never always gets worse,” he said, and paused, reverential. He wanted me to think about that one.

  “A lot of people think this way. If you said you just ran ten miles they’d say, “That’s great!,” or if you said you just ran a marathon they’d say, “That’s fantastic!” He sighed.

  “You run a fifty-mile race and they say ‘That’s stupid, it’s crazy!’ Now why is that? The reason is, people theorize, I know how I feel when I run five miles, or twenty-six miles, and that hurts! So fifty miles must be twice the pain and torture!

  “But it isn’t. It never always gets worse. Sometimes it gets worse, but then sometimes, IT’LL GO AWAY!” He seemed boggled with amazement.

  “I’ve been in races where I was trashed, I was dog meat, and a day, or two days, later I felt chipper, I felt good. So when you’re in a bad race, and it’s ten miles into a fifty-mile race and it’s hurting bad right now, what’s it going to be at forty?” he breathed and changed his tone, his voice falling mellow and clear. “It may feel a lot better . . . and there’s only one way to find out.”

  David was a professor at a Christian college and I knew that he’d been saved. I asked him about his faith.

  “To me it’s simple. I’m God’s creation, the Earth is God’s creation, and God gives us different talents and abilities. We’re supposed to use and develop our talents, to get out the mission and the word. My calling, the things I do, God has enabled me—to teach, to run, to do long, long things. To me it’s one ball of wax. I’m a runner and a Christian. I’m running on God’s creation and I’m God’s creation myself.” It made me think of a quote from Zen in the Art of Archery: “For them [the masters], the contest consists in the archer aiming at himself—and yet not at himself, in hitting himself—and yet not himself, and thus becoming simultaneously the aimer and the aim.”

  “Who would ever have thought it? Did I think it would go this way? No, I never did.

  “I think of two verses, Philippians 4:13 and 4:19. I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. If God wants me to do this, his strength is unbelievable. On the PCT I knew I would finish this thing. It was just a question of how long, how much torture and pain. I knew God wanted me to do it. God will supply all my needs according to his riches and glory. What percent of our brain, our strength, our lungs, goes unused most of the time? When you hear about a person lifting a car off a loved one, is that God giving us strength, or is that God allowing us to find the hidden strength we already have? The answer is yes. Both. We have a phenomenal amount of power and He can give it to us.

  “I do know, in every person, Christian or non-Christian, saved, lost, that our bodies are capable of so much more than we think possible.”

  Watching or reading about David finishing the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail is strangely moving, even sublime, although the rational mind understands the endeavor to be absurd, ridiculous, pointless in the practical sense. It seems a twisted form of hapless masochism, yet it is also proof of the power of pure will, of a man’s ability to do so much more than thought possible, and in some way this ennobles us all.

  THE CONSISTENT IMPROVER

  Kenny Florian versus Pat Stevenson.

  (Courtesy: MMAWeekly.com)

  The Ultimate Fighter reality show began in 2005 on Spike TV, an offshoot and feeder for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which had previously only been on pay-per-view. The show—specifically, the free fights—broke MMA into mainstream America. It was part of the reality TV craze, but in all honesty the show’s popularity was due to the fights; at the end of each show, contestants (young hopefuls) would fight an unedited MMA fight. It was the fight that brought the viewers, a chance to watch MMA without paying forty bucks.

  For fight fans, it was sometimes hard to watch, simply because of the inexperience of the contestants. Nerves play a huge role in fighting. Studies have shown (as Pat Miletich said) that a sky-high heart rate affects your thinking, vision, and hearing and that the only way to maintain a reasonable heart rate, in a fight, is by living through it. Fighters make peace with the terror of “fight or flight” and learn to harness it. But it takes time.

  Fighting professionally, on a national stage, requires a tremendous amount of experience to perform well. Any boxing match you’ve seen on TV, most likely the fighters have had a hundred amateur bouts and at least ten or fifteen professional ones. After years of work like that the boxers look smooth and graceful, professional. The fighters on Spike, with the chance to win a shot at the big show, had records that were more along the lines of 4-1, or even 2-0.

  The young fighters went through all the growing pains that often don’t get seen by the public—freezing in a fight or completely abandoning game plans. The fights were very raw, and in some cases exciting. Hard-core fight fans watched (because they were free) but were critical, sometimes without understanding quite why—they just weren’t used to seeing guys this inexperienced on TV.

  Kenny Florian, an underdog on the first show, was a contestant with a Brazilian jiu-jitsu background and only a few MMA fights. He was drastically undersized, but tougher than expected, and he made it to the finals—where he succumbed to nerves and the relentless pressure of a hard wrestler, Diego Sanchez (an experienced MMA fighter with a pro record of 11-0). Kenny was an ordinary-looking college kid, and he was in fact ridiculously small for the 185-pound weight class. He moved down, from 185 past 170, and finally to his natural weight class of 155.

  Kenny looks like somebody I could have gone to school with, a college kid from Boston. But h
e’d found and excelled in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and then MMA. He’d taken two losses—two huge, grinding losses—and somehow come away stronger, come away a better fighter. Those losses had made him.

  I met Kenny on the outskirts of Boston, in Somerville, at Sityodtong, Mark DellaGrotte’s muay Thai school. I worked out a few times with Kenny and his strength coach, Kevin Kearns, and over a few weeks developed a conversation with him.

  Kenny has an open smiling way and a friendly manner, and instantly we were laughing and joking. He’s of the same humor background as I am, we did voices from The Simpsons, and other brilliant repartee. He’s medium height, with a big head and a large, noble nose, maybe some Peruvian Indian in there somewhere, peeking out. Thick black hair and eyebrows, and an instant, open grin that squeezes his eyes to slits, familiar creases on his cheeks— Kenny Florian laughs a lot. His sense of confidence is powerful, nonthreatening but complete. He’s been in deep waters (he’s swum with muscle sharks) and come back alive.

  Kenny’s parents are from Peru, although they’re of European descent. So that nose is Italian, maybe. His father was a surgeon who came to the United States to study and stayed for the opportunities. Kenny talks admiringly about how driven his dad was, how he wouldn’t take no for an answer when it came to going to the medical school he wanted. “He taught me a lot about determination, about proving people wrong—and never being afraid to work hard. Some people accept their limitations, but my dad never saw any reason why you couldn’t be the best.”

  Kenny was recruited by Olympic soccer development out of high school, and he played at Boston College (which is Division 1), but he wasn’t sure there was anywhere to go afterward. Professional soccer in 1999 wasn’t established in the United States, and a hobby was starting to dominate his dreams.

  As a kid he’d seen the first UFC and thought it was awesome. The real deal. Kenny had the young boy’s fantasy that I and so many other American males had, of being Bruce Lee, able to beat up fifteen guys without getting a scratch. “When I was a kid my older brother Edgar would have me fight in what I called the ‘Pankration Olympics.’ He was the Don King in the neighborhood. He’d set up fights between all the kids. He was an instigator—he’d get them to footrace, and then box with the gloves on, and then, ‘Well, let’s see who’s tougher, take the gloves off.’” Kenny laughed.

  It was much later that Kenny and his other brother, Keith, stumbled into jiu-jitsu. They saw Royce Gracie do the unthinkable. “The moves made sense to me,” Kenny said about his early affinity for jiu-jitsu. It became his secret other girlfriend, the one he was thinking about when he should have been thinking about soccer. She was always on his mind.

  Kenny is in many ways a difficult figure for me to reconcile, personally. He’s not a huge, ripped, preternaturally fast guy, and although he’s an obvious athlete he doesn’t seem like one. Instead, he’s a guy who believes in himself, in an interesting way. He makes me embarrassed about my own mental limitations.

  “My goal is to beat the hell out of the last Kenny Florian I fought,” he says over lunch. “I’m going to look at his game and blow him out of the water. You can’t compare yourself to Fedor, to BJ Penn, or to those tippy-top guys. You really want to be as good as you can possibly be. You want to be able to be the most amazing fighter that you could ever be, someone who can do things that Fedor or George St. Pierre can’t possibly comprehend.”

  I always felt like I started too late. I didn’t find muay Thai until I was twenty-six years old, and I’m not a beast, I don’t have great hand-speed or power that can make up for a lack of experience. I would always justify my shying away from turning pro like this: I’m not that good an athlete. I could play and practice basketball every day for my whole life and I’d never be Michael Jordan, right? What Kenny is remonstrating is that, sure, you’ll never be Michael Jordan, but you could be something else, you could be a great professional NBA player in your own style. Maybe a great passer, or a three-point shooter. It comes around to an important facet of fighting: acknowledging your identity and working to make it the best version of you.

  “We all could be great, but we have to open our mind to the way in which we could.”

  This attitude is not something Kenny always understood. He arrived at it over time, and part of it came from the two losses I was interested in talking about.

  Kenny had come into the first season of The Ultimate Fighter with just a few fights and a long history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition. He was a gifted black belt who’d trained in Boston with Roberto Maia, and gone to Rio to train at Gracie Barra. He was the smallest guy on the show, some of those guys probably cut ten or fifteen pounds. Kenny did well in the practice sessions and had his eyes opened to what MMA training was all about. When he won his first fight on the show, it was a bit of a surprise, just because he seemed so undersized and one-dimensional. He made it to the finale, against the much bigger and more experienced Diego Sanchez. Still, he was there as the jiu-jitsu guy, to see if he could win in MMA with his pure jiu-jitsu.

  “I was so nervous. The real ability now is that I’m mastering that fear. I’ve had way more fights in the UFC than locally, so I did my growing up in the UFC, which is a tough thing to do. It was a blessing and a curse. A lot of doubt and fear, and the uncontrol was scary, but now I use that fear. It puts the pressure on me in a good way.” The ability to make fear work for you is essential, and there are no short cuts. It takes experience and time.

  The fights on The Ultimate Fighter had been televised, but there was a crowd of only twenty or thirty people watching in the room. Here, at the finale, was a stadium packed with fans. The pressure and the shock of the new took their toll.

  “During the finale, it hit me all of a sudden. I was warming up backstage, hitting mitts, and fifteen seconds into it I am dead tired. My hands and forearms are cramping, they felt like lead weights, and I started to feel panic. I was trying to pump myself up, but I felt terrible. There’s a camera in my face and Dana White was wishing me luck, and all my friends and family, and the piss test, there’s money—it was this huge blur. I couldn’t understand what was happening. How did I get here? And then suddenly I’m in the Octagon, and I say ‘What the hell?’ to myself. And the fight starts and I’m circling, circling forever, and I think ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and by the time I realize I’m in a fight, and I know what to do, Diego Sanchez is mounted on me. What happened? The fight shouldn’t have been like that—I got beat before it even started.” It was a classic example of the big-show jitters, the nerves, for which experience is the only cure.

  Kenny took that loss hard, but what really bugged him was that he knew he could have done better. He’d done better against Diego in practice, and he’d held his own against all those guys in the gym who were more highly touted. Kenny’s brother and training partner, Keith, said, “The cameras, the pressure, they got him in that fight. He said, That wasn’t me and I can prove it.”

  “After the Diego fight I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna try this.’ It’s not about the contract, whatever, it’s about me really going for this. I can be that MMA fighter. I knew how I did against Diego in training. I performed so horribly in that fight. I need to do this for myself. It became personal.” He used the loss twofold, both as fuel to drive himself and as an instruction on what he needed to fix.

  Kenny felt like he’d let himself down, that he hadn’t performed up to his potential, and it rankled him. He turned it inward and drove himself to become a professional mixed martial artist, as opposed to just the “bjj guy.” He dropped down to the 155 weight class, for which he was still on the small side. Kenny laughs, “I usually end up cutting about two pounds, and I don’t tell anyone because the wrestlers would all make fun of me—that’s not a cut!”

  At 155, Kenny proved a force and strung together a series of victories, and then he fought Sean Sherk for the lightweight title. Sherk, the “Muscle Shark,” has a nightmare style for anyone in the division. He’s a hulking, balli
stic wrestler. He’d been a top contender at 170 pounds but had fallen short against the top few guys. So Sherk dropped down a weight class. He is a titanic lightweight, muscled like a comic-book superhero. He’s a relentless takedown machine with great defense, good boxing, and limitless cardio. Stylistically, Sherk is a terrible matchup for almost anyone at 155.

  I still remember Kenny’s entrance for that fight. He came in wearing full samurai regalia, he was the ronin, the masterless warrior with a domed straw hat and a kimono. It was awesome, the kind of theater that is sadly lacking in the “all-business” utilitarian aesthetic of the UFC. He even had both the swords on, “because only the samurai was allowed to wear both swords.”

  “Before I even fought in UFC, I always had a love for the samurai culture—the warrior mentality. They lived a very peaceful life, they were gardeners, painters and poets, but when they went out and did battle they were fully committed. I said to myself if I ever got in the UFC I would do the samurai thing.”

  The fight went the way everyone thought it would—Sherk overwhelming Kenny with takedowns and ground and pound, although Kenny did land a slashing elbow that had Sherk bleeding heavily the whole fight. Kenny couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t get away from Sherk, but he never stopped looking for a submission, he never stopped looking to win for five five-minute rounds. “I got that determination from the Sanchez fight,” he said. “It allowed me to keep fighting. Even when it seemed hopeless, it never was.” Kenny had gone in with a bad back, a recurring injury, but he never took refuge in that.

  “In the fight against Sherk, I couldn’t adapt to the way he was holding me in my guard. And I thought, wow, I can’t stand up. I should have worked on that. And he’s not giving me enough to submit him. He’s being consistent with his takedowns . . . but it’s too late now. I have to try and open it up, to do something crazy to open the fight up. I didn’t have the tools in place to adapt. I had a hammer and I needed a screwdriver.”