Fighter's Mind, A (13 page)

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 make 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.

George took it all the way to the heavyweight championship and Michael Moorer, who’d just won the title. Teddy Atlas was training Moorer at the time, and he wrote about the fight in his book
Atlas
. Moorer was the heavy favorite to win, but Teddy remembers feeling pangs of misgivings—he even threw up. “[Foreman] wasn’t running from his ghosts . . . A guy who was able to face the truth that way was a dangerous guy. That was why I had thrown up on the day of the press conference. I had recognized that about Foreman,” Teddy later wrote. When Foreman came jogging down to the ring, Teddy saw he was wearing the
same shorts
he’d worn in Zaire as a young lion—and now he was a battle-scarred old bull. To wear those same shorts, the ones that had been worn when he suffered the biggest defeat in boxing history—meant that George
couldn’t
be stopped. His mind was too strong now. This was his night.

Moorer, the smaller, faster man, took it to George for nine rounds. But he was making small mistakes, standing in front of Foreman for a little too long. Teddy recounted afterward the ploy, “I’m an old man, don’t worry about this, don’t worry about this slow jab . . .” Moorer maintains that George got lucky. There is no doubt that George was working on something all night, laying a trap, or more like manufacturing a slim opportunity. Moorer maybe got a little cocky. He was putting on a boxing clinic at George’s expense, and then he got caught with a one-two in the tenth, a left jab followed by a right straight. It got through, and you can see on George’s face just the gleam of understanding, and he instantly dropped another one-two through Moorer’s guard. Not big huge punches, but Foreman was a big huge man and a born puncher, and then the second right hand was “on the button” and Moorer was knocked out. Teddy Atlas would later say, “I got angry afterward at people who said Michael quit. They didn’t understand. Neither did the people who said Foreman got lucky. He didn’t get lucky. He spent twenty years preparing to throw that punch, learning what he needed to get to that precise moment in time.”

Foreman won the heavyweight title at the record-breaking age of forty-five, the oldest ever to win it. He knocked out the twenty-six-year-old Moorer. He turned the tables on Zaire—he had made himself the hero of the story, the bigger hero of history.

 

With Rory bleeding from some tiny cuts and an eye swelling shut, we headed back into the locker room. Rory was swinging from acceptance into despair and back again, a sort of common, obvious thing. He wanted to talk about what went wrong, what he needed. Pat said very frankly, “Wrestling, dude . . .” and it was true. Rory needed to be able to defend those takedowns with his life. When he had his man hurt, he had a window of opportunity that he needed to keep exploiting. Brett’s takedowns had bought time to recover.

In the dressing room Zé Mario Sperry, a jiu-jitsu expert and a cofounder of Brazilian Top Team, asked Rory incredulously, “What happened, man? That triangle looked very tight.” He was commiserating but curious, professional. Rory shrugged. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t finished Brett with the triangle, but he blamed that long struggle in part for his loss—when he finally gave up squeezing, he’d burned his legs out. He’d squeezed and squeezed and felt totally gassed afterward. I think that the manner in which he’d dried out, the one-and-a-half-hour workout from the day before, probably made him susceptible to this, but it is a danger—go for a submission too early in a fight, when your opponent is still strong and he defends well, and you burn yourself out (muscularly) squeezing. Submissions have a much higher success rate later in the fight, when your opponent’s already tired. They’re rarely perfect in a real fight, but imperfect submission can still work. Now it’s about squeezing everything, making his life horrible and depressing until he taps just as a way out, just to get it to stop. If he’s already a little exhausted then he might be more prone to look for a way out. (The downside is that when a guy is slippery with sweat he has a better chance of pulling out of submissions.) When he’s fresh as a daisy and full of beans he won’t quit or believe he has to.

I later looked up Brett Cooper’s history and saw he’d fought and won a decision against Conor Heun, who I knew was a good wrestler and a favorite student of Eddie Bravo’s, a “rubber guard” practitioner. I never saw that fight, but I could draw some conclusions—that Conor had either taken Brett down or got taken down at some point and worked the rubber guard with skill and confidence. Conor was pretty good on the ground, so I could safely assume that Brett had some decent submission defense or he’d have been submitted. Maybe I would have told Rory not to burn out looking for submissions. Of course, no one had done his homework and looked up Brett Cooper.

Zé talked to Rory for a second and then demonstrated a little thing—a refinement of the squeeze—that Rory could have used to finish. Getting someone to submit is a question of convincing him that he has no options other than tapping. A part of getting a submission is mental; convincing the guy that he’s caught, it’s over. You make everything tight, squeeze everything down, and it’s so horrible that he taps. Rory had the triangle sunk but had squeezed on only one axis, giving Brett a little room to keep breathing. And Brett had known enough to wait in that space, that he could wait Rory out from there. He didn’t panic. Zé showed Rory the other axis he’d had to squeeze on, scissor his thighs together as well as pull everything down and tight. Rory, face bloody and swelling, leaped down on the mat to try it. “Jeez, Mario, I wish we’d rolled beforehand,” he said with a glimpse of his old humor returning.

 

I went out to lunch with Pat a while later and set out to pick his brain.

“Careers go through cycles,” he said. “Rory had great results from blasting people, he had so much power. But as he moves up a level, he runs into some hard things, learns some lessons, and he’s realized he needs to adjust his game. Now he has to concentrate on his grappling and wrestling and I’ll bet you he gets pretty good on the ground.”

The example that shines is George St. Pierre. GSP was the UFC titleholder at 170 pounds and a spectacular fighter. He’s a perfect physical specimen, poised to be a dominant champ, a pound-for-pound great. But GSP never wrestled in high school or college. MMA is rife with spectacular NCAA champion wrestlers, and the conventional wisdom is that if you didn’t have it by now you wouldn’t get it.

Wrestlers are born and bred in programs in the United States, and they wrestle fanatically in junior high, high school, and college, going to summer camps in Iowa or Oklahoma, a near religious fervor running through the acolytes. If you didn’t get in on the ground floor—if you didn’t wrestle year-round starting in about sixth grade—you could never come near those top guys.

GSP, though, took to wrestling like a fish to water. He applied himself as an adult, picked it up, and used his newly learned skills to
outwrestle
some of the top 170-pound fighters who had absolutely stellar wrestling backgrounds. George outwrestled Josh Koschek and Matt Hughes, both former Division 1 all-Americans (Koschek had been number one in the nation). John Fitch was captain of his Purdue wrestling team, and GSP was too much for him. This from a guy who never wrestled in high school or college? Conventional wisdom held that this was impossible.

Pat continued, “Jens Pulver used to outwrestle people. He’d take them down and outwork them and scrap—but then he used a low back injury as an excuse to just stand and trade with people. He became a crowd pleaser but, to me, that’s bullshit. It’s about winning fights. Jens is eating punches and kicks, getting knocked out. Then he beats Cub Swanson with a guillotine and he’s back on track.”

Pat was talking about a creeping, insidious problem in fight sports, in MMA in particular. Fighting in the UFC is entertainment—it’s “asses in seats.” That’s the bottom line for promoters. People want knockouts, vicious exchanges, and bloody wars and not necessarily the best fighters in the world. Especially the casual fans; they just want to hear that they’re watching the best in the world. So do you fight exciting or fight to win?

“Win win win is from boxing and wrestling,” said Pat, “but that whole mentality is starting to leave the MMA thing now. Pride [the Japanese promotion] understood that and guaranteed flat fees, so go out and be exciting, you’ll get paid anyway. You could lose three and get another three-fight deal.”

The more I start to think about the problem, the bigger it gets for me. Do you want to see the most exciting fighters on TV, or the best? Aren’t the best boxers more fun to watch? Would you rather watch Floyd Mayweather (the best) or Arturo Gatti (the more exciting)? When Floyd and Arturo finally fought, Floyd demolished Gatti in six rounds without getting hit. Is it pro wrestling, all about the spectacle, or is it fighting?

Pat finished his coffee and said, “In this sport, nobody wins a world title undefeated. You have to lose fights to get better, honestly. Rory likes to bang and put on a show. He had the guy hurt, the guy put a takedown on him, survived him, and turned it around. It was a good experience for Rory.”

Pat thought a minute, then continued, “A loss is sometimes just the thing to bring a guy back to earth. Some guys will be on a roll and turn into complete assholes.” He smiled. He’d seen that scenario, having had so many champions, so many ups and downs.

Pat is a wrestler at heart, that’s where his sympathies lie and where his philosophies about training are grounded.

“In my MMA career, I tried to follow Dan Gable step by step. Gable was a workhorse. His ethic and aggressiveness made everyone he wrestled with better. He made everyone around him better through his tenacity. As a coach he beat the shit out of everyone on his teams well into his forties. Having great training partners kick the shit out of you makes you better, that’s how Gable did it; he kicked the shit out of everyone. The ones that toughed it out got great. Those guys toughened up the new guys, and it creates a team of killers.” Pat grew up here in Iowa and wrestled, firmly in the grip of the cult of Gable.