Fighter's Mind, A Page 4

  I asked Freddie to describe how he sees the job of the trainer, in terms of the mental side of things, and he answered simply, in his Boston accent. “My job is to get inside their head. I want to get to where I know what they’re thinking, and they know what I’m thinking. Trust in me. When they have complete trust in you, then they’ll listen to you in the corner, better than some stranger. Make the connection.” That’s all Freddie is going to try to do—connect with his fighter. It’s something he saw the legendary Eddie Futch do, both as a fighter under his tutelage and, later, as an assistant. “Eddie could communicate. He got his point across. He got fighters to trust him.”

  It’s probably why world champions consistently seek Freddie out. They know he isn’t going to give them a lot of grief, that he’s going to get them ready in a professional manner and let them run their own mental show. He wants to get in their head but not to change anything, just to help them see some things that he sees. He’s learned from his own mistakes.

  “I skipped the fear because I started so young,” Freddie muttered to me one afternoon, his voice just barely audible, sometimes hoarse, but clear. “I never had fear in a fight until after the first time I got knocked out. Because I had a hundred and fifty amateur fights and twenty-seven pro fights before I got knocked out. I was never even hurt by anybody—I was invincible. Then one day I never saw the punch coming, and I woke up on the floor.” Freddie laughs, smiles, and eyes me sideways through his thick glasses. “I got up, the guy rushed me and put me down again, and fuck, and then the ref stopped the fight.” He shook his head, deeply amused by his younger self’s chagrin. “From that point on, I knew I could be knocked out and that changed my whole game. My attitude. Before that, I would go in reckless. I would take a couple to get mine off, too. But then I knew what could happen, and it made a huge dent in my fighting career. I wasn’t fearless anymore. It put a question mark in my head.” Freddie maintains that was the beginning of the end, the start of the downhill slide of his fighting career. He also broke his hand and had a long layoff, which led to his living a less pure lifestyle, furthering the decline.

  Freddie contrasts this with the example of Manny Pacquiao. Manny is one of Freddie’s most famous charges, a Filipino lightweight with a dynamic style. Manny is the most popular person in the Philippines by far, bigger than any celebrity or politician. He’s considered a national treasure. In an interview, the Philippines’ secretary of the environment said, “Manny Pacquiao is our greatest national resource.”

  Manny’s amazing, an “action” fighter: explosive, strong, ripping fast. His body is a piece of Filipino iron, taut, whiplike. He came to Freddie years ago with a lot of ability, but raw, and Freddie polished him into a gleaming gem, the pound-for-pound king. The bewildering technical display he put on against Oscar de la Hoya showcased all his tools, a master in his prime. And Manny has been stopped, earlier in his career.

  Freddie said, “Manny, he’s been KO’d and he just says ‘There’s always a winner and a loser, tonight just wasn’t my night,’ and that’s a pretty good attitude to have. It didn’t hurt Manny. It made him better. He learned from it, he knows it could happen, and most guys don’t think it could ever happen.”

  Freddie was talking about himself. I asked him more about it, trying to get at the root of it. Why did a loss for Manny become a positive thing and a loss for Freddie become a negative one?

  Freddie said, “Well, first thing is my defense was my offense. When I’m punching you, you can’t punch me. I was a hundred percent attack. When I got knocked down and hurt, when I lost that fight, I just couldn’t accept it. For me, losing is unacceptable. I won’t even do sit-ups in the ring because you’re never supposed to be on your back in there. I had a fighter who once wrote ‘Oh Shit’ on the bottoms of his shoes—so if he got knocked out you’d see it on TV—but I could never do that.” It was the beginning of the end for Freddie. He went about fifty-fifty for the rest of his professional career as a fighter. Stylistically, defense wasn’t part of his game.

  “Manny, he’s more accessible, he can accept when things don’t go his way,” Freddie said.

  “I think maybe it’s about the Philippines, the lifestyle there. They’re pretty passive in a way. I mean, the traffic is bad and the street is filled with horns, but nobody gets road rage. I was watching basketball and I’d see fouls that would lead to a fistfight in the United States, and they would laugh it off. Manny knows that every fight has a winner and a loser, and sometimes it’s not his night. But for me it was unacceptable. For me, there was only a winner.” There’s something very durable about that fatalistic acceptance of third world survivors. Manny’s father abandoned the family when he was twelve, and he grew up dirt poor in the Philippines. Even today, when they go to Vegas for a big fight, Freddie stays in his hotel room alone and Manny has ten people living with him in his suite. It creates strength, a buffer of home and country. You can watch him relaxed and at ease with the distractions of his extended family around him.

  “Manny took that stoppage, he dealt with it, and he learned from it. It just wasn’t his night. Now, he works his abs religiously so he never gets knocked out by a body shot again. They found a weakness in him, so he works to take it away.”

  Freddie discussed how Ray “Boom Boom” Bautista, another fighter of his, was dealing with the same issue: coming back after being knocked out. Freddie peers at me through the long tunnel of his thick glasses and drawls, “Is he going to come back as a better fighter or is his career over?”

  “So how are you going to help him?” I asked.

  Freddie says, “You give him a lot of positive reinforcement, tell him it could happen to anybody, ‘You’ve knocked out a lot of guys.’ Fighters are hardheaded, and when they’re stubborn and doing something wrong but keep winning, they can always fall back on that ‘winning formula’ thing. But now, with one loss, I got some clout. When you lose I got some ammo.” Freddie will use the loss to work on some fundamental things that he had been trying to get Boom Boom to do. He’ll work on the little things, but the little things add up.

  A tall, good-looking older man with long blond hair, wearing a casual, tropical suit came in the door and Freddie’s eyes lit up. It was Donny Lalonde, a former world champion who’d knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard in the fourth round (although he’d lost in the ninth). Donny was into real estate in Costa Rica. That was the thing about Wild Card—it was chock-a-block with celebrities, and anybody could wander in. Donny shook hands and leaped into the conversation. I told him I was looking into the mental aspect of fighting, and Donny chuckled and said, “You’ve got to have already done the thinking in the gym. In the fight, you can’t have your mind wrapped up. You can’t be thinking instead of fighting. It’s about reacting.”

  Freddie told us a funny story about the purely mental side of things, about Steve Collins fighting Chris Eubank for the middleweight title in 1995. Collins had very publicly gone to a hypnotist to make him stick to Freddie’s game plan. Whether or not that made a difference was sort of besides the point, because his opponent, Eubank, thought Collins was inhuman now, just a fighting machine. Freddie laughed, “So the bullshit worked and the hypnotist took thirty-three and a third for the next three fights!” He means that the hypnotist took that much of Collins’s purse, which is a lot more than a trainer gets.

  This topic led us to the “Rumble in the Jungle,” when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. Ali, one of the great psychological warfare practitioners in boxing, had local witch doctors “hex” Foreman, and Foreman, somewhere in his heart, believed it had worked. Which means it had. Just the shadow of doubt can spell doom.

  Freddie weighed in on an eternal boxing debate: “Everyone always asks, ‘Ali or Tyson?’ Well, Ali would have fucked with his head and made Mike a mess going into the fight. Pure power for power, Mike would have knocked him out, but Ali could have gotten to him mentally, and I think he would have, because Mike was so weak mentally.”

  Josh
Waitzkin, a chess prodigy and martial artist (and whom I’ll write more about later), wrote a book called The Art of Learning, and in it he describes the different types of chess kids he was teaching. He discusses at length “entity” versus “incremental” forms of learning, so classified by developmental psychologists. “Entity” kids think their chess skill is born of natural and innate ability, a pure talent, while “incremental” kids think they learned chess incrementally, step-by-step, and that hard work pays off.

  Josh would give his students impossible problems, well beyond their level, that no one in the class could solve. So all the kids would fail that problem. But then, when he gave them other, manageable problems afterward, the entity kids would struggle; they had broken mentally, and were unsure of themselves. The incremental kids would just go back to work, slogging away. Entity kids were brittle; when they lost, their faith in their talent was shaken. The incremental kids, who believed in the power of labor, would keep digging in the trenches, even if faced with insurmountable problems.

  It reminded me of Gable talking about a wrestler on steroids: make him do something that wasn’t perfect and he’d crumble. Maybe that was the steroid trap—it would make you physically stronger but mentally weaker, prone to breaking.

  When Freddie Roach lost, his world was shaken and he never fully recovered. He knew his skill had come from hard work, but he was convinced his invincibility was a pure thing, a part of the universe, and when that was revealed to be untrue it had hurt his game.

  One of the old boxing truisms is “Frustrate a puncher and he’ll fall apart.” A “puncher” is a fighter who hits hard, with a big punch. It’s a natural gift that coaching can help, but you can’t teach power. The puncher relies on his big punching. He hits guys and they go down. As he works his way up through the boxing ranks, this is the law of the land—he hits them and they disappear. Now, he gets to his first title fight, his first big fight, and he hits his opponent—boom—and the guy is still there. The guy can handle the punch and keeps coming. So the puncher hits him again, but the other guy is still there. Now comes the crucible for the puncher. Does he go to pieces? Or does he buckle down and keep fighting? Can he find another way to win? Mike Tyson, one of the greatest punchers of all time, rarely fought past six rounds. If he hit you and you were still there, he’d mentally break. He’d bite your ear off, to foul himself out of the fight, or not answer the bell.

  Successful fighters have things that work for them, and work incredibly well, but the great champions are those who can accept, internalize, and understand defeat. Waitzkin’s tai chi teacher, the renowned William C. C. Chen (whom I studied with briefly), called this “investing in loss,” and it means study your defeat without ego, let defeats happen in practice without reverting to your old habits, and then grow from it. It’s an essential skill, for even during a fight the fighter needs to be able to understand—and accept—when he is losing, and change his game plan. In order to win.

  THE TENTH WEAPON OF MUAY THAI

  Mark DellaGrotte making weight in Thailand. (Courtesy: Mark DellaGrotte)

  I dutifully followed my annoying, oblivious GPS through the ice-black back streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, into Somerville. Somehow that little box knew what it was doing and I ended up where I was supposed to be, on the broad street of Broadway. The gym nestled underneath a lawyer’s office, on a street littered with dive bars, dry cleaners, and lawyers. I walked to the small, nearly hidden side door, and as I pulled it open a wave of humidity roiled out into the cold winter air.

  I had been to Sityodtong Academy before, to shoot an interview for the Boston Globe, but the place had been empty. Now it was packed. Sityodtong Boston (the other is in Pattaya, Thailand) is a tiny gym with astoundingly low ceilings—just when you think they couldn’t get lower there’s a beam that is even closer to your head. There are several places where if I bounced too hard I might ding the top of my skull. There was a dense crush of humanity—all men, almost all young, nearly all Massholes, and the air was swampy with their breath. There were three different levels of muay Thai going, and there were probably a hundred guys training in a gym that was crowded when it had thirty guys in it. It felt like a slave-ship hold, or a submarine. If there was a fire about five people would make it out and the rest would burn or suffocate, bodies stacking up, jamming the door . . .

  Mark DellaGrotte came out and shook my hand, and he was warm and welcoming in that Boston way. He laughed and said with his heavy accent, “I feel like we know each other although we never met,” which was true because I had seen him fight and watched him coach on TV, and he’d read my book.

  Mark is a young, pleasant-looking guy with dark hair and an easy smile, an obvious Italian background. His eyes are bright and watchful, often underneath a Kangol cap, a little old-school Boston street. Mark’s been extremely successful with adapting muay Thai for MMA; he’s become known as one of the best pure striking coaches in the game and a great tactician. The fighters he coaches were on a vicious winning streak in the UFC, something like 9-0 when I showed up. He’s doing something right.

  He set me up with one of his coaches, a guy who was smaller than me and “with great control,” just to mess around, and we had a good time, just playing. I thought of how things had changed since MFS, when Pat had thrown me in with Tim Sylvia. Of course, every now and then someone might land a clean leg kick, which would garner a harder kick in return, but we kept it pretty civil. Mark wanted me to have fun and be happy—but he also wanted me to be out of the way, not to get mashed by his top guys or spazz out and hurt someone with fights coming. He was everywhere at once, listening to complaints, hollering advice, keeping time. I was a little amazed about how extended he was, doing everything himself, but he seemed to thrive on it.

  Over the next couple of weeks I hung around and talked to Mark when I could, and I got to know him a little. His gym is in the basement of his father’s law office, and he grew up right in the area. He talks about his youth with a little reservation. “I grew up with a bunch of rough kids. A lot of them are either dead or in jail, and I was on both sides of the fence. I had friends who were troubled, but we weren’t broke and we were raised well. Every time one of my friends got into trouble, I’d go hide in the gym.”

  Mark credits traditional martial arts with keeping him straight, “on the right path.” Mark met guru Guy Chase and studied the “Inosanto curriculum.” Dan Inosanto was Bruce Lee’s greatest student, and his curriculum is a combination of many arts: jeet kune do (Bruce Lee’s hybrid fighting style, which combines a dozen traditional arts with Western boxing), pencak silat (an Indonesian hybrid martial art with a lot of weapon aspects), shoot wrestling (ground fighting, a precursor to modern MMA), and kali eskrima (Filipino stick fighting). Mark’s initial exposure to martial arts, with a broad background and the philosophical tradition of “borrowing what works best” from different places, would prepare him well for MMA.

  Mark originally opened a Multicultural Martial Arts center in the same place where the muay Thai gym is now. This was in 1992, a year before the UFC started and vale tudo was still a relatively unknown Brazilian tradition.

  Mark still wanted to fight, and he discovered and fell in love with muay Thai, spending time and fighting at the famous Sityodtong Camp in Pattaya, Thailand (for a long time, Sityodtong and Fairtex were the only camps that took on foreigners). It turns out we may have overlapped in Thailand, although we never met.

  Mark had been bit by the Thailand bug. “I went back to Boston, and two months later I was homesick for Thailand.” He trained hard, and fought well, and earned a place in the camp. Eventually, he was welcomed into the Sityodtong family by Kru (teacher) Yotong.

  In 1998 he turned his martial arts center into a Sityodtong muay Thai academy. Kru Toy, Kru Yotong’s son, would come and visit for a month at time.

  But Mark found another trainer who would have far more impact. He heard rumors of a Thai boxer who was working on some shady visa in a Vietnamese
kitchen on Newbury Street. This was Ajarn Thong, with the fighting name Satsit Seebree, who had been a successful Thai boxer and whose family owned and ran a small camp in northern Thailand. Mark brought the Thai boxer into his home to live, and he laughs about it.

  “I had Thailand right here. I lived it in this little basement apartment in Somerville. Ajarn moved in with me and Marie [Mark’s long-suffering girlfriend and now wife]. I learned the language, he held pads for me every day, and I lived Thai style. The sink would get clogged and I’d find chicken feet in it, so I’d yell at Ajarn, ‘You can’t throw food down here, we’re below the street,’ but he’d swear he didn’t do it.”

  Mark is laughing hard now. “What, I don’t eat this, Marie don’t eat this, how’d it get in here?” It almost sounds like a sitcom setup.

  Mark continued to go back and forth to Thailand regularly. He fought in the world famous Rajadamnern stadium in April 2003 and won with a second-round TKO, on a low kick. “That was a high point for me, and Kru Yotong urged me to semiretire. I wasn’t going to go that much further, and I was more important as a teacher now, for preserving the art. I’m a conservator of muay Thai traditions and techniques.”

  A few years later, though, when Mark was back at Sityodtong, training and relaxing, something odd happened. “I’d been at the beach all day. I had a belly full of rice and a sunburn, and when I got back to camp I noticed all this commotion—and I knew somebody was fighting that day.” Turned out the somebody was Mark, fighting a Thai in an “exhibition” bout for Songkran, the water festival. He hadn’t been training to fight but he was assured repeatedly that it was only an exhibition.