A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (6 page)

I left Thailand a week later. My visa had run out, and to be honest, I was sick of training, bored of no booze and no girls and the monotony of hitting the pads and pounding the bags. Norman Mailer captured the tedium of training in his book
The Fight,
an account of the legendary Ali-Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”:

 

Just as a man serving a long sentence in prison will begin to live in despair about the time he recognizes that the effort to keep his sanity is going to leave him less of a man, so a fighter goes through something of the same calculation. The prisoner and the fighter must give up some part of what is best in him (since what is best for any human is no more designed for prison—or training—than an animal for the zoo). Sooner or later the fighter recognizes that something in his psyche is paying too much for the training. Boredom is not only deadening his personality but killing his soul.

 

A few weeks before I had to leave, my friend Quentin Oram had e-mailed me from Australia and asked if I would help him and his girlfriend (also a great friend of mine), Florence Bel, take his ’38 Hans Christian cutter across the Indian Ocean. We had all met working on a yacht in the Caribbean.

So I flew back to Darwin, and we spent five months crossing the seven thousand miles. Quentin is English and Florence is French, and they refought the Hundred Years’ War during the passage. We touched in Durban, South Africa, and I happily got off the boat and wandered around for four months. It was restful after the long, tedious anxiety of the passage, except for being chased by a young bull elephant near Kruger and stroking the fin of a great white shark off the southern coast. When I was alone and unobserved, I would shadowbox a little, and my unused limbs would flash and spin. I missed fighting, and I thought about how much better I’d be if I were still training and competing. I would sometimes talk about it, but people’s reactions were weird; they didn’t know where to put me, or whether they believed me.

Finally, I flew back to the States and started temping in Boston, a little panicked to be twenty-six years old and without a career. But I felt like I was in disguise wearing a tie on the subway, like I was pretending. I hated my job. I worked at a law firm and found myself turning into a nihilist, an anarchist, hiding files, sleeping in closets; soon I would work half an hour and then take an hour break. I asked my brother-in-law, a computer systems manager, to write me a virus, and he clapped me on the back and laughingly shook his head. I wanted to tear down the financial district. I worked out and found some guys to hit Thai pads with, but I was so far out of fighting shape that it felt like a joke. There was a black guy with a wicked lead-leg kick who had fought in New York, and he was surprised at how good I was for just six months of training. “You might be something if you put in a few years,” he said.

When people asked me about my muay Thai experience, the stories began to feel distant and dreamlike. Friends shook their heads (usually affectionately) or gave me puzzled looks. I guess it was a strange thing to go do, although at the time it didn’t seem that way. I was frequently asked, “Why? Why fight?” I could argue that the fear of fighting drove me to fight, but I’m not afraid of being hurt, and the thought of getting knocked out doesn’t faze me. What I am afraid of is being made a fool of, of dishonoring myself.

But that’s not all of it: I am afraid of confrontation. I don’t like it when anyone gets mad at me, and I try to avoid angering anyone. It’s not big scary men, or women, or anything in particular. I don’t like pissing anyone off. I am afraid of the anger of others.

By doing something repeatedly, though, and understanding it, you can diffuse and defuse the fear. This is true for sailing, riding motorcycles, asking girls out—even getting hit in the face by a man who wants to kill you.

I thought that I could walk away from fighting, having taken the test. But fighting is never over. I hadn’t been tested, I had been given an easy victory without any kind of struggle. I hadn’t
learned
enough to be done. I had the problem all boxers and fighters have: They never want to quit, they always are looking ahead to the next fight, when they’ll do better. I was broke, though, all the sailing money long spent. I didn’t have the background to be a professional fighter—I started too late and wasn’t a genetic freak who could get away with it—and I wasn’t sure that just training was enough stimulation.

In the summer of ’01, I nearly joined the Marine Corps again, this time to fly helicopters, and I was breaking in my boots for boot camp when, on some desperate whim, I took a job doing construction for Raytheon in Antarctica, at the South Pole. The National Science Foundation pays for the operations there and contracted out to Raytheon; they were building a huge year-round station to hold the large numbers of scientists and visitors that the Pole gets these days—around two hundred in the summer and thirty to fifty people in the winter.

Ahh, Antarctica. You had to be there. It was 70 below zero without windchill the first week down there; with windchill it hit 118 below. That’s brisk. We were working outside for ten hours a day, and even during “summer” it was usually 20 below.

I remember when summer ended and the temperatures began to drop again, one of the crane operators said to me cheerily, “There’s a nip of fall in the air today.” It was 50 below. When I wasn’t working, I lifted weights and ran on a treadmill, and there was a heavy bag in a little gymnasium that I would pound on. I felt like I had just scratched the surface of fighting, and the depths beckoned, but I needed money.

While down in Antarctica I met Cheri Dailey, a beautiful, tall, strong girl who was one of the few female smoke jumpers in the world. I thought smoke jumping sounded about right. I asked Cheri how I could be more like her, and she hooked me up with her old hand crew (a twenty-person firefighting team) in Washington State. I couldn’t have had a better recommendation. There is a legend about Cheri Dailey, and it goes like this: One of the fitness tests that smoke jumpers take is humping a hundred-pound pack for three miles. Out of a class of about sixty, Cheri came in first, beating all the men—and these guys are Division 1 football players, total badasses. Cheri smoked them all. She also had a tongue stud.

I left Antarctica in January as winter was settling in, the sun beginning its monthlong set, and traveled around New Zealand for a month before coming back to the States. I bummed around L.A. and New York again, then headed out west in the spring to join a firefighting crew.

The Ahtanum 20 was a state crew where the average age was about twenty-two. I was twenty-seven and made a conscious decision to “out-young-man” the young men on the crew; I would be more enthusiastic, run farther, work harder, race around more. It was the best way I could see to handle the situation of being the old guy who was a rookie. We had a good time, fighting fires and roaming Washington, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful place. I was the weird old dude who hung punching bags in the trees around camp and hit them barefoot. The Ahtanum 20 was a type-2 crew, which meant we couldn’t do certain dangerous jobs that called for type-1 crews, called Hotshots. I remember watching Hotshot crews head into the worst parts of the fires and thinking,
Man, I got to get on with those guys.

In the winter I came back east to get my EMT certification, and the following spring I headed out to interview with Hotshot crews. I drove all over the country and was picked up by the Gila Hotshots in New Mexico. It was a considerable honor to be hired by them, as Gila is considered one of the best crews in the country. Up at the camp, high in the Gila National Forest, I found a heavy bag and hung it with some carabiners, to pound on in the afternoons. At the time, I wouldn’t have said I was going to fight again, but the idea still lurked.

Fire, especially big fire, is awesome. Sometimes when we were doing big burnouts on gnarly fires, working in and among acres of flames, seeing clumps of trees torch out fifty or a hundred feet into the sky—there’s a lot of adrenaline there, too. When the heat hits like a wall and drives you back without conscious thought, the straps of your backpack so hot they burn you through the Nomex shirt—we all suffer from a touch of pyromania in the business. Our primary weapon against fire is fire, and burning was my favorite job. Being on big fires at night, watching the behavior of intense heat and flame, can be indescribably beautiful.

After the season, I applied for a position with the North Cascades smoke jumpers in Washington State and got a new tattoo on my left forearm, a tattoo of my life, with the motto
“Mundis Ex Igne Factus Est,”
which means “The World Is Made of Fire” in Latin, a quote from a Helprin book
(A Soldier in the Great War)
that I had read maybe five years earlier. It captured the idea that life is born of struggle and striving, that true joy and understanding do not come from comfort and safety; they come from epiphany born in exhaustion (and not exhaustion for its own sake). Safety and comfort are mortal danger to the soul. No good painting ever came easily to me: The good ones were battles. I got the tattoo so that I would always see it there and be reminded.

Though I had applied to be a smoke jumper (and got hired), somewhere, in the dark wilderness of my heart, I still wanted to fight. I had promised myself when I went to Thailand that I would get ten fights, and then stop; because ten fights would be enough to know what fighting
really
is. I had quit after one—and I had never been tested. If only I could find a way to get it to pay for itself—that’s how I had done all my traveling before. It’s a part of my philosophy: You can always get it to pay for itself somehow.

Fighting is a way to feel, an anti–video game, a way to
force
something to happen. That’s what brought me back to it, because when I’ve fought someone, I know something has happened. How many days of your life pass you by that you could take or leave? When nothing really happened?

During college, I had lived and studied at the Slade School in London for a year, and I became involved in the trance club scene—the Fridge, Escape from Samsara, Return to the Source—and what became apparent was that these thousand kids tripping balls on ecstasy just want to
feel
something. They just want to feel as though everyone in the room understands them, and belongs, and that they belong, and, most important, that something is happening.

All those experiences—sailing around the world, Antarctica, firefighting—I chose them because they were the best options I had going. All I am is persistent, and willing to entertain many ideas. I’ve done drugs; and I used to drink like it was my job. I wasn’t a college athlete; in college, I was a painter who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. I’ve done things that maybe I should be ashamed of, but I’m not.

You have a specific responsibility to existence, to God if you like, to taste, touch, and smell what there is to experience. You have to do everything. If given an option between doing something and not doing it, you have to do it; because you’ve already done the “not do it” part. This can be juvenile and dangerous, I realize, and there are a lot of things I have chosen not do, for a million reasons. I was raised polite. I’ve never hurt anyone, except guys I was sparring or fighting with. And I don’t take needless risks. The idea is to make it through intact; “safety” is my middle name. But I feel that you owe it to the world to be curious. Somebody asked me if I was looking for something. I am looking for
everything.

Part of my responsibility, while I am strong enough, lies with fighting—not just to get as good as possible, but to understand it, and I maintain that to understand something, you have to do it, and do it more than once. I thought I had closed the door on fighting when I left Thailand, but I hadn’t. Four years later it was still there.

So I set out to explore and explain the world of fighting, to myself and to anyone who would listen—not everywhere in the world, and not everything, because that would never end—to try in some small way, with some logical progression, to understand it.

It’s not something he can do anything about, being a bleeder, any more than a guy with a glass jaw can do something about not having a set of whiskers.

—F. X. Toole,
Rope Burns

 

It started when I walked into the back room of the Amherst Athletic Club in Amherst, Massachusetts, a little college town in pastoral New England. I was back at home, visiting my mom after a fire season with the Gila Hotshots. December and January in Massachusetts were record-breaking cold, down in the negative 40s at night.

The Amherst Athletic Club had a dark, small room with mats on the floor and rows of gloves and shin pads and various martial arts training gear. The Sheetrock was caved in with human silhouettes where people had been mashed into the wall. I was curious. I asked around, and started training a little bit there, and was shocked to discover how far Mixed Martial Arts had come.

Nearly everyone has heard or seen clips of the Ultimate Fighting Championships (UFC), started in the United States in 1993, held in the infamous Octagon, a high-walled, chain-link octagonal cage for the fighters to battle in. Ultimate Fighting was marketed as the answer to the questions that had persisted since the karate boom in the sixties: Which style was more effective? My tiger-crane kung fu is far deadlier than your Okinawan karate. Well, now you could prove it. Who wins when a good boxer meets a good kickboxer? When a wrestler fights a kung-fu expert? We can answer those questions by fighting with “no rules,” evoking old gladiator contests, and satisfying the crowd’s bloodlust. Since then, the UFC has moved through various incarnations and venues, has added some basic rules and the use of a referee, and has come under political fire and had management problems. For a while it wasn’t even on cable TV. But the UFC survived due entirely to a grassroots fan base that also trains, and more important, fights.

This is a fan base that fights. It is interested in and drawn to fights, fistfights, action movies, who’s the toughest?–type questions. It is considered “white trash,” and, judging from the crowd shots at the UFC, it is primarily white, male, and tattooed—the disenfranchised, burning to test their manhood, angry at their father or situation or
something
—in short, my people.

The first UFCs were dominated by a slender Brazilian named Royce Gracie, who won by taking the fight to the ground and using Brazilian jiu-jitsu to control his opponents. Royce and his family’s jiu-jitsu stood the American martial arts world on its head. All these guys who had been doing karate for twenty years, who had their own schools, suddenly realized they had a glaring weakness: the ground. If a fight went to the ground, and they often do, their vaunted kicks and punches were ineffective. People scrambled to learn Brazilian jiu-jitsu. What evolved was a style known as mixed martial arts, or MMA, where practitioners “mix” the various martial arts to make a complete fighter. You mix boxing and kickboxing and muay Thai with freestyle wrestling and jiu-jitsu, maybe a little judo, whatever you want. Just make sure it all works.

Though I knew the UFC was still around—I’d occasionally catch ads for it on television—finding it in my hometown in western Massachusetts was hard to believe. I soon discovered that it was everywhere. There are several hundred all-amateur events a year in the United States. This isn’t like amateur boxing with headgear; this is serious. Your only protection is a mouthpiece, a cup, and some little fingerless gloves so you can punch your opponent in the head and not break your knuckles but still be able to grip and wrestle. This is real fighting, and you can get pounded in there. Although it is sometimes called NHB for “no holds barred,” there are some things you can’t do: head butting, eye gouging, fishhooking (when you hook a guy’s mouth with a finger or two), punching the back of the head. Other than that, it’s pretty much all fair game; you can knee and elbow, you can choke, you can crank his ankle until he submits.

For weeks, trapped in the deep midwinter freeze that gripped New England like an immense, airy python, I kept coming back to the idea of an MMA fight. I’d had my taste of fighting in Thailand, but it hadn’t been enough; it was over too quickly. I hadn’t learned enough; my fighting was still weak and flawed. Training and fighting in MMA would be a chance to round out my skills as a fighter. I was still afraid that there was so much I didn’t know and wasn’t comfortable with. I had just sold the Thailand story to
Men’s Journal,
and I realized there was a way I could maybe get someone else to finance my training: by writing about it. I decided to approach an editor with some ideas to see where it got me, and surprisingly, he was enthusiastic. He asked me why I was so interested in learning enough to fight in a cage. I told him I wanted to learn the skills, to learn how to fight without rules, but there was more.

MMA fighters are scary in a way that boxers and kickboxers aren’t. They are savage. When you go to the ground, there is a desperation in the struggle for dominance that fuels a ferocity that you don’t get in other sports. I find these fighters frightening in a “monster-under-the bed” scary way. Shaved heads, bulging muscles, and, above all, anger, eyes snapping with anger. There is no letup; you pour it on until you win. You hit him, he falls back, and you swarm him. And whoever wins the fight, the unspoken signifier of victory is
I could have killed you
. There are no excuses in the rules. If we were alone, in some back alley or on a deserted island, and we fought without all these people watching, then I could have killed you.

I was lured by the siren song of violence, the dark-faced coin of masculinity. Could I find my own rage? Could I tap into it?

The co-owner and trainer at Amherst Athletic was an African expatriate named Kirik Jenness, a tall, lean white guy who has made MMA his life. He runs the largest MMA Web site in the world and has been training and fighting for thirty years. He had a long list of contacts, but when I asked him where the best place to train might be, he said, “Probably Pat Miletich’s place in Iowa. He’s got some of the best fighters in the world there, and there’s nothing else to do in Iowa but fight.”

I called around and thought about Florida, and Oregon, and some other teams; but what I kept hearing about was Team Miletich in Iowa. I spoke with the legendary Pat Miletich on his cell phone. I was nervous, talking too loud, and he was unconcerned and enthusiastic. “Of course, it’d be fun, bro,” he said. Unhesitating.

So I went.

I drove out to Bettendorf, Iowa, across a snowy wasteland and crashed in a no-frills motel in the middle of town. Bettendorf is one of the Quad Cities, four little towns that sit on the Mississippi in eastern Iowa and western Illinois: industrial and blue-collar, with the Big Muddy flowing frozen and brown and sluggish as molasses down the middle.

The next morning, I found the Champions Fitness Center. Right as I walked in the door I exchanged nods with a medium-height, broad-shouldered man. He had a wicked set of neatly cauliflowered ears and a pleasant, battered face that maintained a boyish air. Pat Miletich.

Pat Miletich, the “Croatian Sensation,” was born and bred in Iowa (there’s nothing Croatian about him but his name) and became one of the most successful fighters in the UFC—winning five titles at 170 pounds—by being the most technically proficient fighter in the game. He understood before anyone else the need to diversify and borrow from different disciplines, and as a result he is now widely recognized as probably the best MMA trainer in the world.

Pat also has a reputation for being a good guy; as Kirik said, “the nicest guy in the sport.” He shook my hand and gave me a quick tour of the brand-new gym, fresh white paint and new equipment everywhere. We walked under the cardio machines and out into the giant weight room and took a hard right into the heart of the gym. Pat cocked an eye at me, smiling. “You’ve got some size on you,” he said. “What do you walk around at?” He meant weight.

“Something like one ninety-five,” I said.

“Good, you can cut to one eighty-five easily then.” We chatted a little about a piece I was planning on writing for
Men’s Journal
about MMA, an introduction to the sport. “It’s not for everyone,” he said with a slight pause, a tiny raising of the eyebrow. I got it.

I rented an apartment across from the gym’s parking lot, filthy and decrepit but three hundred dollars a month and the shower got hot. One of those modern indoor flush toilets—what else do you need? I even could see a tiny brown strip of the Mississippi, and Illinois across the bridge. I had no furniture, so I rented a bed and bought a folding chair and table from Wal-Mart.

That night, a Friday, I started training. “Sparring” just means practice fighting, standing up, usually three-minute rounds with thirty-second breaks or five-minute rounds with minute breaks. You wear headgear and big sixteen-ounce gloves, and a cup and mouth guard and shin protectors, and bang on each other. We kicked, punched, clinched, and on Mondays we went for “takedowns,” in which you take your opponent to the ground in such a way that you come down on top. The headgear keeps you from getting cut, but there were still knockouts and plenty of concussions and bloody noses to go around. Miletich’s place is famous for the hard sparring on Monday and Wednesday nights (Friday was light sparring), and I thought I was doing okay until Pat grabbed me and said, “Hey, Sam, come spar the heavyweight champion of the world.” What could I do but say yes?

A minute later, I found myself sparring with Tim Sylvia, six foot eight and 260 pounds. He was so big and strong I couldn’t really get near him, and the few times I did hit him it was like punching into a tree. He was taking it so easy on me that I could actually see and think, which was very nice of him. I knew a little bit about Tim, that he was from Maine, so I tried to talk about Maine between rounds to keep him in a friendly mood. It was a key strategy, because he could have destroyed me easily, if he just decided to let a few body punches go hard. He wore no headgear. His head was massive, forbidding, like a stone statue with jutting brow and craggy jaw. He was a nice guy; he thumped me some, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been.

After practice there was a warm glow in the gym, the air like a sauna from twenty or thirty guys sweating and bleeding their hearts out. People flopped down on the mats, discussing in groups of two or three their sparring mistakes, or fights seen recently on TV. The atmosphere was excellent; although I wasn’t a part of it, I could sense the camaraderie. It made me just a little lonelier as I packed up and limped home across the parking lot and up a set of rickety wooden stairs.

The water out of the tap in my hovel was foaming and leggy, and left a serious rim of scum in the glass. Didn’t taste too bad, though. The light in the kitchen didn’t work. I stumbled around in the dark and showered (that shower was the only good thing in my life for weeks) and made a plate of beans for myself. I forced down a few bites but was too tired to eat.

I was already beat to pieces.
This is going to be rough,
I thought to myself with a tinge of despair. I hadn’t trained like this in years. I had the suspicion that twenty-nine was going to be way different than twenty-five. Still, I was committed—I was going to fight, so I better get ready.

I tried to get into a routine as quickly as possible. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were sparring days (Monday with takedowns), and on those days I ran and lifted a little in the mornings, while my Tuesdays and Thursdays were devoted entirely to grappling: a basic class at nine, another basic class at five-thirty, and then advanced from five-thirty to six-thirty, when the experienced guys repeatedly tied me in knots, yanked my arms out, cranked my neck.

There is nothing so frightening as being on the ground with a guy who really knows what he’s doing; it’s like being in the water with a shark. You’re struggling, desperate, trying to escape, and suddenly you can’t breathe, you’re smothered, and you can’t see, your arms are getting twisted off, and you “tap” and then it’s all over. “Tapping,” a light tap on your opponent, or on the mat, is how you concede the fight. He’s caught you in a “submission.” A submission is when you get your opponent in an arm-bar, or a knee-bar, or a choke, or a thousand other things, where you essentially threaten your opponent with a broken limb or being choked unconscious. He can tap instead of actually having his arm broken or losing consciousness because you’re pinching his carotid arteries.

Submission fighting is a huge part of ground fighting. It is at the heart of MMA and one of the reasons the sport has a small, educated following. It’s sometimes hard for uneducated observers to understand that while the two guys were rolling around, one guy could have broken the other guy’s arm and the other guy admitted it. A submission can happen in seconds; the “ground game” is extremely technical and about position and outthinking your opponent; it’s a lot like playing chess.

Having done muay Thai and some boxing, my “stand-up” fighting was okay—not good, by any means, but at least I had a clue as to what I wanted to do. My ground game, however, was nonexistent. I never even wrestled in high school. People sometimes wonder why one of the best MMA gyms in the world is in Iowa, but when you realize that some of the best wrestlers in the world come from Iowa, it starts to make sense. I came to dread the grappling days, and on the mornings afterward I would wake up with my whole body in agony. I started calling this “car-wreck-itis,” that feeling of having been in a car wreck the night before, where everything is strained and black-and-blue, including little muscles you didn’t know existed. Getting out of bed took ten minutes.

The only other time I’ve been beat up like that was after branding. During college I worked a summer on the largest cattle ranch in Montana, and I helped brand for three days, wrasslin’ calves, late in the season when they were getting big. Those calves would run all over you and kick you to shit, like you’d been put in a blender.

During those first two weeks, I often left sparring to stanch a bloody nose, a common occurrence at Pat’s. Somebody was always dashing to the paper towels. People laughed, yelled in faux anger, “Clean up your mess!” and Tim delighted in crowing, “Sam can’t hold his mud.” I sparred with several different people, but far and away the worst was Tim; every time I threw a rear-leg kick he trapped it and dumped me, without fail. His hands were like sledgehammers, and if he had landed some hard body shots, I would probably have died. I hovered between trying to hit him and not wanting to piss him off. He trapped me in a corner and my tiny life flashed before my eyes as I scrambled. He once threw a turning back kick at me, and I leapt aside and it hit the wall like a wrecking ball. I gave him a dirty look and almost stopped sparring:
Are you trying to kill m
e? Afterward, someone told me I was the same height as Andrei Arlovski, Tim’s next fight opponent.