Fighter's Mind, A Page 9

  There is a fear of the unknown, and imagined disdain. I know the Brazilians, brimming with machismo, often will say after they lose a grappling match, “You wouldn’t beat me in MMA.” I’m sure Marcelo has heard that one a few times.

  Marcelo is adamant. “I want to show I can fight, equally. I have proved it before, but they still say I can’t do it.” Incongruously, his favorite fighter is Wanderlei Silva, the “Ax Murderer.” Silva was a dominant champion in Japan, an intimidating monster, overwhelming in his ferocity—without showing much of a ground game (although he has a black belt). He was a little like Mike Tyson in his prime; he projected an aura of savage invincibility. He’s a polar opposite of Marcelo in terms of intimidation. Silva had a staredown that was psychotic and terrifying on the TV screen. He really looks like an ax murderer. Marcelo said, “I never bother getting angry. I don’t need it. I don’t confuse angry with intense. I think being angry makes you tired. I perform at a high level without it.”

  Reflecting on what Liborio and Marcelo talked about, I’m struck again by how humble these guys are. How nice. How pleasant to be around. I used to think it was a product of being great—that the truly great fighters learned humility in the process of becoming great. But suddenly I am struck with a “chicken or the egg” question—which came first? Listening at length to Marcelo, Liborio, Eddie Bravo, and Sean Williams talk about jiu-jitsu, I start to think that maybe it’s the other way around, that you can’t be great without humility. The most humble guys, who are the most open and willing to learn, are the ones who become the best. Maybe you can’t be great at jiu-jitsu without it.

  Don’t get me wrong—you need a certain type of arrogance to fight. You have to have the secret in your heart, that you will beat his ass. That you are too tough, too technical, too strong for this guy. You have to believe in yourself more than anything.

  But it needs to be tempered with humility outside the ring or the cage. You have to learn from everyone; if you aren’t growing you’re dying. BJ Penn, the “Prodigy,” will sometimes roll with white belts and analyze the awkward, new positions they end up in—not that they’re necessarily good ones but there might be something in it. All of the best grapplers have become eternal students, even the mestre. Perhaps it is this need that makes great fighters humble: they’ve been forced to learn it, from the very start, to become great.

  Marcelo, when he said “I just love it more,” was giving me the secret that there is no secret. His strength was in his joy in the game.

  FRIENDS IN IOWA

  Rory Markham and Pat Miletich prepare for Rory’s fight against Brett Cooper. (Courtesy: Zach Lynch)

  It’s easy to do anything in victory. It’s in defeat that a man

  reveals himself.

  —Floyd Patterson

  My introduction to MMA was a rude one, chronicled in A Fighter’s Heart. I went out to Pat Miletich’s gym in Bettendorf, Iowa, to train and fight an amateur MMA fight and write an article for Men’s Journal. I ended up getting the snot kicked out of me on dozens of occasions.

  The choice of gym was an easy one. I chose Miletich because of his reputation. Pat is the prototype for the modern MMA fighter, one of the first champions who could do everything. Most fighters of his day (the early, below-the-radar days of MMA in the United States in the mid to late 1990s) were one thing or another—either they were strikers or they were grapplers. Pat was the first guy who could do it all; he had submissions, great takedowns, he moved like a pro boxer, and he knocked guys out with head kicks. He was balanced and this led him, eventually, to the top. He was a five-time UFC champion at 170 pounds, but this was during the “dark days” of the UFC, when the promotion nearly slipped into oblivion. He had many of his early fights in the days before weight classes.

  Pat made his bones as a coach. He is on the short list of best MMA trainers in the world. His camp, called Team MFS (Miletich Fighting Systems), was the dominant camp in the sport over the past ten years, with at times three UFC belt holders on the mats. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy—all the best guys were training with Pat, so everybody wanted to come train with Pat. Even in the modern MMA world, with the explosion of huge, stacked fight camps, Team MFS is still in the top tier.

  In the early days of MMA the fight camps were filled with tough guys and infamous for the beatings and hazings. The Lion’s Den, Ken Shamrock’s gym, was well known for it, as was Chute Boxe in Brazil; guys who wanted to train had to survive vicious beatings and absurd workouts. MFS in Bettendorf was always the real deal, a place where anybody who showed up would get the living shit kicked out of him for weeks and months on end, but it wasn’t hazing. That was just life at MFS. A great part of the success of the camp has to be attributed to that intensity, the highly charged atmosphere that Pat created by combining all the insanity of wrestling workouts with the damage and viciousness of hard boxing sparring.

  I’ve written a lot about Pat, and we’ve gotten to be friends, which makes me feel like A) I’ve said it all before and B) I don’t see him so clearly. Pat’s a good guy and a good friend. He’s funny, friendly, maybe a little burned out after so many years and so many champions, but he’s still scheming. He’s a fighter, and a freakishly tough human being. I’m plagued by a recurring rib injury, but when I cry off a sparring session Pat never believes me—he thinks I’m being a big baby and he suspects malingering. In his whole career, street fights included, he’s never been put down from a punch to the head.

  I remember Freddie Roach saying that great fighters are “special people,” by way of an excuse for any silliness, any diva behavior or eccentricities. Freddie was talking about James Toney. But it’s true with a lot of great fighters—you can hem and haw, say this and that, but they’re just stronger, denser, tougher, and faster. People talk about Rodrigo Nogueira’s otherworldly grip strength, or how Fedor Emelianenko’s bones seem to be much heavier and thicker than normal, or how Randy Couture’s lactic acid levels drop when he’s exerting himself during a choke. Pat’s like that, he’s special. As Jon Wertheim documented so well in Blood in the Cage, there really is a “cult of Pat” in the gym: he’s charismatic, funny, and maybe a little crazy.

  When I arrived at MFS in ’04, another young fighter had made the move out from Chicago to give professional MMA a shot, a twenty-one-year-old kid named Rory Markham. Rory was powerful, with all-American GI Joe looks and an explosive boxing style. He had the same sense of humor as I did, and we got to be friends.

  Rory’s clean-cut looks were marred only by his hands, which were stubby and white with scars. He’d been a very serious street fighter in high school on the South Side of Chicago. He told me he dutifully went out and got in a fight every Friday and Saturday night for about two years straight. He’d been obsessed with fighting from an early age, and he had his share of demons hidden under a layer of gregarious ease.

  Over the years we kept in touch, and sometimes I went to see his fights. He was a big 170-pounder, having to cut from 195 or more, and the first few cuts were tough on him. Rory started as a striker, pure and simple, a banger who nearly always had to eat a few to give a few—but Rory had a good chin that he trusted. He loved to fight, to get in there and mix it up. Still, the more we talked, the further his career went, the more he started to think about the rest of the game. He took a loss here and there, which gave him pause. When he looked at the top of the division, the monsters up there, he knew his physical gifts and striking weren’t enough, because those guys could do everything. Rory was a talented, tough fighter but right on the edge in terms of natural gifts. He was fast, strong, and tough enough to blow through most guys in the bottom or middle tier, but he was well aware (from sparring at Pat’s over the years) that he wasn’t going to be able to do that with the best guys in the world. He had trouble with head movement; he would do it religiously during shadow boxing but almost never during a fight, nearly always getting tagged a few times. Still, even though he knew better, his evolution as a fighter continued mostly in one
direction, striking. It was what he loved.

  The New England winter afternoon was already growing dark as I boarded the bus to Mohegan Sun. It was the now defunct International Fight League’s (IFL) Grand Prix, the end-of-the-year event. I was there for a few reasons—it was close by (I was wintering in Massachusetts), Pat was there, and Rory was fighting on the undercard.

  I got on the bus with Pat, Rory, his assistant coach Steve Rusk, and L. C. Davis, his fighter at featherweight who would be competing later for the title. The bus rolled away into the darkness and I was struck by how much MMA history was on board—along with Pat, Zé Mario Sperry, Randy Couture, Carlos Newton, Frank Shamrock, Matt Lindland (Bas Rutten and Renzo Gracie would show up later)—all giants of MMA, all disowned or persona non grata with the UFC, which was having a competing event that night, to which we stood a distant second. Pat, in particular, was feeling the sting as Matt Hughes, his former protégé, was fighting for his career in the main event at the UFC. Both Matt and Robbie Lawler had left Pat for lucrative offers to start up their own gym, and Robbie had been like a son to Pat.

  Rory claimed to be feeling good; he was ready and anxious to get this over with. He was fighting second, which was early for him. His opponent, Brett Cooper, was an unknown. Nobody knew anything about him. That happened frequently in MMA, though less so at this level, but it always made me uneasy. Rory had made weight. He’d done an hour and a half workout the day before, the morning of weigh-ins, which sounded funny. Wasn’t that a little long? I thought the whole point was to sauna and sweat it out, that last seven pounds of water, without exercising and burning into your reserves. But these guys were professionals and I was sure they knew what they were doing.

  Mohegan Sun is a good venue, with steep walls that pack the crowd in around the ring, and it was a full house. Brett Cooper looked small—he’d weigh in at 168, whereas Rory made 170 but put at least ten pounds on overnight—yet he was determined; he had his game face on and long shaggy hair. Pat wanted Rory to jump all over him. To start fast.

  When the bell rang Rory went right to him, and Brett, being a little longer, caught him right off the bat. That is standard for his fights—Rory always gets hit. He dug down and started banging. Rory has real power and quickly he had Brett hurt. He even caught him with a head kick. The crowd yelled and it looked all over. Rory tried to finish, but he “fell in” on top of his punches, he got too close, fell into a clinch, and Brett managed to take Rory to the ground. Brett was buying himself valuable recovery time. Rory slipped on a triangle from the bottom, a basic choke (catching the opponent and choking him in a triangle between your legs and one of his arms). He nearly had it—they fought in that triangle for what felt like ten minutes. It looked like it was over, the triangle was on so tight. But Brett didn’t tap. Finally, Rory gave it up. He thought about a transition to an armbar, but he didn’t believe in it himself. It was half-assed, and Brett pulled out easily. The fight went back and forth briefly before the round ended. Rory, in the corner, was bleeding from several small cuts—but then he always is.

  In the second round, Brett was still pretty game and he caught Rory a couple of shots, a grazing knee, and then Rory covered up and ate an uppercut and went down, stunned. Brett leaped in to finish. That was it. The ref waved it off. Rory was TKO’d.

  Contrary to popular belief, the first thing, the very first thing a fighter sometimes feels upon losing is relief. It’s over. The stress, the hatred, the desperate battle for survival—it’s finished. “When you’re knocked down with a good shot you don’t feel pain,” Floyd Patterson, the “Gentleman of Boxing,” once told the Guardian journalist Frank Keating. Floyd had been the heavyweight champion after Rocky Marciano retired (he’d beat Archie Moore for the interim title) in 1956, and was almost too nice a guy for it.

  “Maybe it’s like taking dope. It’s like floating. You feel you love everybody, like a hippie I guess,” said Floyd.

  I remember seeing Anderson Silva lose to Ryo Chonan, and seeing the smile of relief on Anderson’s face backstage. I’ve seen that relief gradually giving way to grief, as the fighter comes to grips with months of life feeling wasted, of the career and financial implications. “The fighter loses more than his pride in the fight; he loses part of his future. He’s a step closer to the slum he came from,” Patterson also said. Floyd lost a few of his biggest fights under intense national scrutiny, and once he even wore a disguise—a wig and fake beard—in order to get out of the stadium unseen after a loss.

  The fighter has lost a part of himself, the part that believed in his own power and invincibility—because what a fight is about more than anything else is will. When you’re knocked out, I can do whatever I want to your unconscious body. Your ability to make decisions, to master your own fate is destroyed when you lose a fight. You’ve been dominated, and to a male of the species there is nothing worse. It violates every genetic principle in your body.

  Kelli Whitlock Burton and Hillary R. Rodman wrote an essay entitled “It’s Whether You Win,” for a book called Your Brain on Cubs, about the psychological underpinnings of baseball and fandom. They discuss experiments with lab rats that showed a male being defeated by another male actually has permanent changes in his brain. “Evidently, social defeat is highly effective in producing a state analogous to psychological pain,” they wrote. “Social defeat sets in motion a number of brain processes that lead to increased sensitivity to subsequent stressful experiences . . . the hippocampus actually changes after repeated defeat experiences . . . the hippocampus is well known to be crucial for the formation of memories of specific experiences . . . in addition, the hippocampus is one of the few structures that make new nerve cells in adulthood.” The research shows that repeated social defeats not only can affect the hippocampus’s ability to make new cells, it affects serotonin levels and is probably linked to depression.

  What could be a worse social defeat than losing a fight in front of thousands or millions of people? It’s so bad it can permanently change your brain. Those same tests also showed that it was worse if the rats were caged alone—if they had companionship they sometimes didn’t show any effects. “Subsequent social support is crucial to the defeated rat in returning to a normal state of mind.”

  The team can save you.

  I stood behind Rory and had a hand on his shoulder as the outcome was announced. I could feel all the emotions; the animal still wanted to do something, vainly wanted to affect the outcome somehow, to not give up.

  Rory was shocked, and then disappointed—he’d lost before; he knew what it was. He started grieving, mostly for the lost time and missed meals. He’d been cutting weight hard all through Christmas and the very first thing he said was, “I’ll never fight this near the holidays again.” He was grimly embarrassed. Here was a nobody, a guy he was supposed to blow right through, and he almost had, but that nobody had come back to knock him out. I wasn’t so dismissive of Brett Cooper. He’d shown a granite chin, and good striking, and excellent submission defense. He’d impressed me. Rory had clobbered him with a head kick and he’d shaken it off—the kid was obviously tough. But we should have known that. It wasn’t that Rory was arrogant but he went in unprepared. Brett had the advantage of having seen plenty of tape on Rory, and knowing that it was his first fight against a name guy and taking it as the biggest fight of his career. Rory tried but subconsciously he didn’t see Brett as a threat. In prefight interviews, Rory had maintained he was training hard because he thought he deserved a shot at the welterweight title and that, of the two fighting for it, one might get hurt, drop out, and Rory could step in and fight for the title. That hadn’t happened—neither got hurt—and Rory definitely had been looking past the immediate task.

  A pet peeve of mine is when fans start griping about a fighter who lost making excuses. Of course he’s making excuses. This is his profession, he’s going to get back in there, and for his sanity and mental strength he needs to have a reason he can point to for his loss. If he didn’t m
ake excuses, if he didn’t have a reason to think he can win next time, how could he ever fight again? And this is a guy who’s dedicated five, ten years of his life to this. When fighters don’t make excuses they’re pandering to the crowd, because in their heart, and in private discussions with their trainers, they have reasons they lost and reasons they can win the next time. The public line may be, “It just wasn’t my night,” but there are reasons to hope your night will come.

  I have my own experience with loss. I lost my first (and only) MMA fight. I have tons of excuses, believe me, and the worst part was that it was stopped from cuts. It leaves you with questions in your mind. Being a thin-skinned white boy, I bleed easily. (I once heard a trainer discussing an opponent say “he bleeds during the national anthem”—that could be me.) The loss wasn’t so bad but the days and weeks after, and getting stuck with a bloody postfight picture as the cover of your book, try living with that. Yeah, I have excuses.

  The defining moment for a fighter isn’t victory, but the way he deals with defeat. George Foreman suffered one of the most momentous defeats in fighting history, when, as the heavy favorite, he lost to Muhammad Ali in Zaire. It was a crushing, mind-numbing loss. If you haven’t seen the documentary When We Were Kings, you should.

  After Zaire, Foreman wouldn’t fight for a year. He fought a couple times, and then he had another tough loss and a terrific attack of heatstroke and exhaustion in the late rounds—he felt he nearly died. George had seen his own mortality and had had enough. He retired from boxing and became a preacher. Then, ten years later, in 1988, Foreman started his comeback, fighting in small shows as an old man at the age of thirty-eight. He was grotesquely overweight, a blimp at 270 pounds, and boxing writers looked the other way in embarrassment. George was humiliating himself. But George kept fighting, five, eight times a year, against mostly unknown guys, gradually losing the weight. When he’d won the title as a young man, Foreman was a physical specimen and a devastating puncher, but he would almost always gas in the late rounds. Now, as a washed-up old man, he was doing better. He said it was because he was fighting without the nervous tension that had exhausted him.