A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (7 page)

I felt a little like the new kid in school. People were watching me. They wanted to test me out, although I wasn’t very good, so that didn’t last. Several times during my stay I saw outside pro fighters come in to spar, and everyone lined up to beat their asses. People just got pounded; it was a rough place and you didn’t just walk in there and start sparring because those guys would slaughter you.

A few days into it, I met a guy named Marshall Blevins, a manufacturing engineer about my age who’d been with Pat for two and a half years. Marshall fought amateur kickboxing and has won regional, national, and North American titles, but he joked that he still got nervous before a Wednesday night. He was an easygoing guy with a laconic manner, and very helpful, giving me some pointers. “It doesn’t take long to get pounded out of a Wednesday class if you don’t want to be there,” he said.

“I remember sparring with Jens [Pulver] for the first time; he knocked me out with a head kick. A lot of these guys you don’t want to show them you’re hurt, but you get booted in the head, hit the wall, and slide down…. Well, you shake it off and bite down on your mouthpiece and start swinging again. Most of these guys are like that—you hurt them, they’ll come back twice as hard.” He smiled and laughed.

Though I think they went easy on me mostly because Pat introduced me as a writer, it still was pretty rough. I got hit particularly hard one night and could feel blood running in a thin stream out of my nose. The next day my whole face was swollen. Pat looked at me and laughed. “Did you break your nose?”

“No, no, it’s just bruised,” I assured him. I didn’t break it. No way.

Pat looked doubtful.

I have heard critiques of Pat’s gym, that the sparring is too hard, that people get hurt and don’t learn enough. It is a hard place to learn, and you become averse to taking risks and trying new things when you’re getting beaten on. However, MMA is a rough, rough sport; toughness is critical. You need to be tough, to have overall body toughness to succeed. That night my face in the mirror looked deformed, a tremendous swollen bulge over my nose and between my eyes; the blood settled in a few days to give me two black eyes, like makeup under the skin.

Because I didn’t know any better, I kept at it. I continued to get pounded and thrown around by Tim, by the other heavyweights. I ended up on my ass all the time, but once, halfway through the week, as we were all leaving and I was dazedly collecting myself from the floor, Pat remarked with a laugh, “Sam, you’re going to be tough as hell in two months,” and my heart swelled. I knew he was just trying to keep my spirits up, but it worked.

Team Miletich, or Team MFS (Miletich Fighting Systems), is Pat’s stable of fighters, one for each weight class in the UFC. His team reads like a who’s who in mixed martial arts. Jens Pulver, “Little Evil,” at 155 pounds, is a five-time world champion. Matt Hughes was and still is the dominant 170-pound fighter after Pat vacated the slot, winning six titles; Jack Black and “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler also fight at 170, and with Matt they’re three of the top ten welterweights in the world. Tony “the Freak” Fryklund was a badly underrated 185-pounder, and Jeremy Horn is one of the best in the world at 185 or 205. Of course, Tim Sylvia, the former champ, is still a serious heavyweight (under 265) contender. There’s a second tier, under those guys, of about ten or fifteen pro fighters who are all up and coming, guys like Spencer Fisher, Rory Markham, and Sam Hoger, with impressive records and lesser titles. Of course, the team is a revolving concept, with players changing as their standings go up and down—this was all in the early part of 2004.

It’s a little like walking into a boxing gym where Trinidad, De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., and Lennox Lewis all train together with ten of their friends. It’s intimidating; the guy you’re going to be sparring with is on a poster on the wall. And the second-tier guys are so good, it’s like Tony says, “You can’t get a break,” because anybody in there will give you a hard time, anybody in there on Wednesday night can be a handful.

Pat has somehow welded all these fighters together. They sought him out and moved to Iowa to be with him.

Pat grew up wrestling and playing football and battling with his brothers. He wrestled in college, after his dad, the football coach, died, and moved into kickboxing and boxing afterward. He was lucky in that Davenport, another of the Quad Cities, had an excellent boxing gym; some great pros have come out of it: Michael Nunn, Antoine Echols under Alvino Peña. Pat boxed professionally, studied Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Sergio Monteiro in Tampa and muay Thai with Long Longley in Illinois. He wasn’t just mixing his training; he was finding the best trainers in the country. He was revolutionary in that he combined these fighting elements better than anyone had before. In the UFC, before Pat, people would stick to their one discipline and try to use it for everything, or maybe be able to do a few things well. Pat was one of the first to be able to do everything: He could box, he could wrestle, he had submissions, and he understood how to put them all together—especially the transitions between them, which in my mind is perhaps the most important part of professional MMA. He could find a weak link in any fighter he met. And coming up at a time when MMA in America was in its infancy, he was a self-made fighter. He had to bring the elements together on his own, mixing up in his own “laboratory” the stand-up and ground fighting he liked.

I had two little black eyes, and my whole body was in agony. Often I woke up with my legs, trunk, back, shoulders, biceps, and forearms all screaming.

After grappling one night, my biceps hurt so bad that I thought I might faint. I couldn’t hide the pain; I was “guarding” (that’s an EMT word for unconscious protective behavior, when people with broken necks from car accidents, for example, walk around cupping their neck with both hands). People asked if I was okay, if I’d hurt my arms. There was a lot of camaraderie, but I wasn’t admitted yet. Instead, I eavesdropped and soaked up what I could from the outside. I talked to Pat about my aching biceps and he looked thoughtful and massaged my arm a bit and asked, “Are you sure it isn’t a case of wuss-itis?” and laughed with me. Pat is just so naturally tough—in all his fights he’s never gone down from a punch to the head—that he doesn’t quite understand mere mortals.

Pat did a training program for law enforcement called Controlled FORCE with some police officers he met through MMA. Tony Grano, a policeman and martial artist, was training and cornering a fighter opposite Pat in an MMA fight, and they hit it off. Tony saw that MMA was a considerable resource to tap into, as everything in it had been tested and retested, and discarded if it proved to be impractical.

I flew down to Austin, Texas, to attend a training session with Pat, Tony Fryklund, and the two police officers who run the program, Tony Grano and Donni Roberts. These guys, lifelong martial artists, were teaching a weeklong seminar at Lackland Air Force Base for military police and instructors.

Pat began teaching by saying, “I can’t teach you what I would do in a certain situation, because I’m a fighter who’s been training his whole life. Instead, I’m going to teach you a series of techniques that a 115-pound woman can do to a 250-pound man, provided she executes the technique properly.”

The problems with training police officers in the use of physical force weren’t what you’d expect. Pat said, “It used to be that they didn’t really want to train police officers too much in martial arts because they were afraid of them going around beating people down. The reality is the opposite; a trained officer is relaxed and able to cope with a physical situation without the panic and adrenaline that an untrained officer might fall into, which leads him to beat someone down.”
Black Belt
magazine agreed with him in its March 2004 issue: “Untrained officers, when threatened physically, are three times more likely to resort to deadly force….”

In Controlled FORCE, there are no strikes, only mechanical locks, so only leverage is used. There aren’t any “pain” compliance techniques. The officers learned a series of locks: ways of holding and controlling a suspect through pressure and leverage on his arms and shoulders. The techniques had to be simple—easily remembered without daily training—and effective without actually hurting a suspect. Fat cops who don’t exercise needed to be able to execute the techniques. The training had to take into consideration liability issues and lawsuits. There are no strikes in the basic course; in the advanced survival course there are open-hand strikes because they won’t break your hand, and they look better for the Rodney King video. How much force do you use? The least amount necessary. The instructors stressed having options, locks to fall back on: “These locks are going to fail, but when they do, you’ll be ready to go for the next one, and if that one fails, you can keep going until you get something.” The important thing was to keep moving, keep your perpetrator off balance, and flow from one lock to the next. So you grab his arm and twist it one way, and when he fights it by pulling the other way, you switch and go with him, using his force against him.

It was fun to be part of the team. We kept up a constant banter, everyone basically abusing everyone else, physically and verbally. Pat and Donni wrestled so hard in the van that Pat tore Donni’s ear up and he bled all over the place, and Tony had to yell at everyone. It was a little like being a freshman and hanging out with the cool seniors in high school; everything was a big rough joke and I couldn’t stop giggling.

One morning, at Denny’s over coffee, Pat looked at me and just laughed, a short dry bark.

“What?”

“You broke your nose, you know that? It’s crooked.”

“It is?”

Everyone started laughing. “Yeah, it is,” Pat said.

Back in Iowa I was sicker than a dog, having developed a sinus infection—probably from the busted nose. I’d been there for about a month before I left to spend a week with Pat and the boys at Lackland, and I was supposed to be around for a few more weeks and then fight. Pat had got me a kickboxing match, “to get the ring-rust off,” but on the night of the fight I was coughing, crying, stuffed up, and I hadn’t slept in three days from the infection, so I bowed out. My MMA fight was moved back more than a month by the promoter, a move I was all too happy to accept because I hadn’t felt good in weeks. I went on antibiotics.

My small brown room became a haven. I went to the Bettendorf library and got books and retreated to my bed, under my sleeping bags, and read and watched the clock inch toward the next practice session. This could be torturous on a Wednesday afternoon, when at four-thirty I was just sitting around waiting for six-thirty, watching the minutes crawl by. But afterward, coming home, having survived a Wednesday night was a great feeling, and there was the luxury of getting in the shower for as long as I wanted, then climbing into bed with a good thriller, NPR burbling cheerfully in the background. I listened to so much public radio that I actually gave them twenty dollars when they started their fund drive.

I had two dingy pull-down blinds, which stayed down all night, as a bright halogen street lamp yellowed the night right outside my bedroom. First thing in the morning I snapped them both up to let in the gray light of day. I made coffee and tried to write every morning and waited for the first class at ten. The antibiotics worked and I got better.

I lived on Pat’s “fighter diet,” of which the main rule is no carbs after twelve noon. I boiled chicken breasts and ate them with tortillas and peanut sauce, and I ate salads (a lot of broccoli), and oatmeal. That was it. It was hard to eat at night after grappling or sparring. I was just too tired to even chew my food; even a meal-replacement shake took some doing—I had to muscle it down.

My hovel was a cold, lonely place. One of the two windows had a gutted air conditioner still in place, and a family of birds nested in it; I could hear them stirring before dawn like giant rats in a cage.

Around the time my grappling began to develop, I started to make friends with a few of the up-and-comers, the young pros and dedicated amateurs.

Champions Fitness is a serious place. The weightlifting was run by Dale Ruplinger, a former Mr. America, Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe. The pretty girl behind the front desk, Emily Fisher, with the ponytail and a southern accent, had fought seven times and beaten three guys in MMA. Her husband, Spencer Fisher, was one of the top non-UFC fighters at the gym, with a 10-0 record as a pro, and they were the first husband-and-wife team ever on the same MMA card at the International Cage Competition in Minnesota. The chiropractor, Dr. Mark Schmall, grappled and was starting stand-up fighting when I arrived. I rolled with him sometimes, and he delighted in tying me in knots from the bottom.

I got to know Tony “the Freak” a little better and found out we went to the same junior high; my mom was even one of his teachers. Tony is a character, and there is a notorious image of him from a cage fight in Canada, in which he is covered in blood, raging. He had taken an elbow to the forehead, it bled so badly the ref stopped the fight, and Tony went temporarily insane. He was so emotional he blacked out and didn’t remember rampaging around the ring until Pat and Matt Hughes dragged him down into his corner and covered his face with a towel, like an animal. “I could fight fine,” Tony said. “If I had trouble seeing, that was my problem, you know? It was cosmetic, a scratch on the hood. You don’t throw away the car just because a windshield wiper is busted…. I was so emotional that now I can understand a temporary insanity plea.” He had also been running a fever of 103 and had been puking the night before the fight.

Tony was one of the older guys at thirty-three, and he’d been down a long road to get there. He was in the U.S. Coast Guard as a rescue diver and an EMT; he’d been a safety officer on the Big Dig and a stuntman before his constant training in martial arts eventually took over his life. He fought in UFC 14 and won the first round but lost the second. It took him five years to get back to the UFC (because losing, to Tony, means that you are dead—your opponent has killed you). Eventually, he went down to Atlantic City to watch Jens Pulver fight and met Pat and asked if he could come out to Iowa to train. He busted his ass on the first day, and Pat invited him to be on the team, one of the best things that ever happened to him. Team Miletich isn’t just a word or a gig to these guys; it is an integral part of their identities. As Tim Sylvia said, “A lot of these fighters are from broken homes, and Team Miletich is their family.” For all of them it was a huge point of pride and honor to be asked to be a part of Team MFS. They all have stories about coming to Iowa and the intimidation and fear they felt, but there were no hazings or bad beatings, like the Lion’s Den and other camps are infamous for. Being a part of Team MFS is much more about chemistry and the intangibles: Does Pat like you? Are you showing him your work ethic? Can you get along with the other guys?