Fighter's Mind, A (17 page)

“He was looking for something conventional,” Virgil said. “Was Mike Tyson really a killer because he went out and got you in two rounds, or did he just punch well and he was scared? We found out later on in Mike’s career. He fired his weapons out of fear. When you fire out of fear there’s a demolition effect—it’s crude, panicky. When you fire out of calculation it has a slower effect. That’s what I’m getting at with Andre. They haven’t woken up to the fact that he’s a killer in the ring.”

Opinions on Andre vary in the boxing community, but many critics agree with
Ring
magazine, which named him “the most protected prospect.” This is just fuel for Andre and Virgil.

Andre said, “Fernando Vargas and David Reed, both good friends of mine, went for title shots early, after twelve or thirteen fights and it didn’t turn out good. The thing is, at this weight class, guys can be as fast as a welter but hit as hard as a heavyweight. At smaller weights you can take more chances. Look at Pavlik—it took him eight years to get his title shot, and he was ready. He made it to the Olympic trials and lost to Jermaine Taylor . . . but because I made it a little further in my amateur career, I’m supposed to go twice as fast as a pro? You want me fighting for a title in two years?” Andre smiles and shakes his head. He’s sure he’s on the right track. As of this writing, Andre is still undefeated, with a pro record of 17-0 and the WBO NABO super-middleweight title. He’s been developed in an old-school way, brought along slowly, exposed to different styles, without chasing a big payday. But now he’s in his prime, and ready, and looking to fight the best guys in the world.

Virgil later told me why the critics and the press have a hard time with Andre.

“It’s hard to recognize what you’re watching, at first,” he said. “He’s developed into a fighter who kills in stages, like the lethal injection. You know, with multiple shots. One goes in and sedates you, the next one shuts down the nervous system, the next one stops your heart. It’s not a firing squad.

“That’s what’s unfolding. People go to fights and look for the wrecking ball, but instead you have this totally helpless person. I watch the ref watch the other guy. After the second round the ref never looks at Andre again—he starts watching the other guy closely. He’s getting steadily blasted and he can’t do anything back, and he’s starting to shut down. The ref sees and feels it first. I watch the faces of people around the ring, and there isn’t much cheering or yelling. It’s almost somber, like we’re witnesses to an execution.”

Virgil leaned back and looked at me. “And they ask me if he can do that to everybody. And I say,
yes
. To everybody. It has nothing to do with their skill. I saw it back when he was getting whipped by Glen, back when he was ten years old. He was never afraid. He couldn’t wait for the day when he could do it back.”

 

Randy Couture

—Yagyu Munenori

 

 

Greatness in sports is born in the moment. It is situational. It’s not inherent to the athlete with the most ability, or the most dominance, and it’s not just about the championship (though that added pressure is essential). It’s about the pure moment, the transcendence of time and place, when an athlete or a team performs miraculously under the most intense pressure, against insurmountable odds. The situation rises out of sports but speaks to universal truths and emotions, an attainment of the divine, touched by grace (indeed miraculous). The moment steps out of time, into history; it becomes important to everyone. Perhaps it’s silly for sports to aspire to the grandure of history but it happens to us here in the twenty-first century. It’s what we’ve got. And in the end fighting is more than a sport.

The television announcers aspire to that moment and they pretend to see it everywhere. They try and force it, hoping for some lucrative historical sheen. But it can’t be faked, or repeated. UFC commentator Mike Goldberg, calling “Down goes Franklin” in an attempt (perhaps subconsciously) to recall the iconic Howard Cosell chanting “Down goes Frazier!” doesn’t cut it. That guy who yelled, “How much more can you give us, big Mac?” when Mark McGwire hit his seventieth home run in 1998 didn’t really nail it. It has to be genuine—like art, it requires sincerity.

The first true, “gee whiz” moment of modern American MMA is Joe Rogan calling out “That man is my hero.” He was talking about Randy Couture, maybe the greatest MMA fighter to date.

Randy is not the best fighter we’ve seen, or even the most unexpected. And he would almost certainly disagree with my characterization. Nonetheless I will stick with it. Randy is the first Great American MMA fighter. He earned greatness in the moment, not through hype or hyperbole, and not through dominance; his record is 16-8. He’s had his share of defeats. Randy earned it with upsets. Randy goes into fights as a serious underdog with regularity, and he pulls off genuine shockers. He does it often enough to make it familiar, and feel inevitable as you see it unfold—yet each fresh time, it seems he must succumb, and we relearn his greatness.

 

My background, such as it is, is in striking. I have learned a little jiu-jitsu late, and never really liked wrestling. But the deeper I got into MMA, the more I realized how important wrestling is. At first, when I saw the good wrestlers doing well, I thought it was because of their athleticism and ground control. They don’t have a professional avenue open to them after college, unless they’re huge and can go into the WWE or the NFL. It made sense that wrestlers would be great ground fighters, and they’re already practiced at cutting weight.

After several years of MMA, I gradually came to the realization that, in fact, of all the disciplines wrestling is probably the most tactically important—for the simple fact that if your wrestling is better then YOU decide. Meaning if your wrestling is better than your opponent’s, you can either A) take him down, or B) prevent him from taking you down. So you decide where the fight goes, and you can make that decision based on where you feel strongest. Randy uses his wrestling—his trapping clinch, dirty boxing, and filthy Greco—to put fighters where they least want to be and then absolutely smothers them. He drowns fighters right before your very eyes.

I realized from Dan Gable and Randy and all these other wrestlers that there is another great edge that elite level wrestlers bring to the MMA world—mental toughness and conditioning. Mental toughness is a dominant factor in wrestling, and wrestling practices are the hardest in sports. Wrestling has such a huge conditioning factor that the guys who excel have developed extraordinary mental toughness—indeed, much of the training is focused on pushing through internal walls of exhaustion and breaking your opponent. Wrestling is by design a “game test,” a test of will and conditioning. It’s harder than fighting in some ways, because there are so many fewer options; it’s man on man and muscle against muscle for the whole match.

 

Randy Couture was an all-state high school wrestler, and he married young, after high school. Struggling for work, he joined the army and wrestled on the army team. Still, the athletic path was a rough road. Randy was never given anything; he worked for every little step. Eventually he became a student at Oklahoma State, he was an NCAA all-American, and then he coached at Oregon State, but all the while he fought to make the Olympic team in Greco-Roman wrestling. Greco-Roman (as opposed to freestyle) is all upper-body takedowns and clinches—no attacks on the legs. Randy struggled for eight years in the international wrestling world, often ranked number one but never quite winning the right tournament to earn a spot on the Olympic team. He lost critical matches through overtraining or overconfidence.

I talked to him at his gym in Las Vegas, Xtreme Couture, a mecca for fighters. Randy’s got a genuine goodness about him that even the cameras pick up—an honesty, an openness. He has a craggy, noble face that creases into a smile like an old cartoon of the sun.

When Randy started fighting, it was almost an afterthought—let’s see if I can do this, have some fun. The Olympics had been an albatross around his neck, a crushing weight of expectation and disappointment. He didn’t put any pressure on himself in fighting; that was saved for the big wrestling meets. Fighting was just a gas he was doing on the side, and he performed better than anyone thought possible. He was so good they called him “the Natural.”

Randy arrived at the UFC at the ripening age of thirty-three, and after one fight he upset the seemingly unstoppable Vitor Belfort. He beat Mo Smith for the title in only his third fight. This was for the heavyweight title, which topped out at 265 pounds. Randy had a contract dispute and was stripped, but he won the title back two years later. Randy then lost to the much bigger wrestler Josh Barnett, and the heavyweight division was full of guys who had to cut weight to make 265 while Randy fought at 220 or so. Feeling the squeeze from these behemoths, Randy moved down to light heavy (205 pounds) and beat Chuck Liddell, another upset. Then came the biggest fight of his career, against Tito Ortiz, when Tito was at his peak, the young, unstoppable killer who would bound nearly out of the cage in his prefight warm-up. Randy was forty years old and he dominated Tito for five rounds in a win that solidified his myth of defying reputation. Overnight, his nickname changed from the Natural to “Captain America.”

Randy then lost twice to Chuck Liddell, who had adjusted his style to perfectly counter Randy. After the second loss, Randy retired from the sport, working as a commentator. He couldn’t stay away, and after watching Tim Sylvia defend the heavyweight title in what he felt was lackluster fashion, Randy came out of retirement at the age of forty-four. The six-foot-eight, 265-pound Sylvia seemed a lock to destroy Randy and fans worried for Randy’s health—until the first few seconds of the fight, when Randy (with the perfect game plan) knocked Tim Sylvia on his ass and put it on him for the rest of the fight. Randy defended his new title once against Gabe Gonzaga, with a clinic on how to use the cage as a tool, and then resigned from the UFC. He was chasing the biggest fight in the world, with Fedor Emelianenko, the Russian heavyweight, who was somehow (essentially) unbeaten in MMA and was generally held as the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time. The UFC, with its restrictive contracts, couldn’t sign Fedor but wouldn’t let Randy go, and hung him up in court until Randy was forced to come back. No organization will let its heavyweight champ fight someone it doesn’t have a contract with. What if their champion loses? What’s the belt worth then?

For his “welcome back, champ” fight, he was matched for the title against Brock Lesnar, a wrestling goliath who outweighed him by fifty pounds. Lesnar is a huge man, built like a silverback gorilla, and a terrific athlete, an NCAA wrestling legend. The first round was classic Couture, Randy in control, chipping and scrapping, and the air was pregnant with the possibility of a further demonstration of Couture’s greatness. But it was not to be; in the second round Randy got caught. Brock is unreasonably fast for a man his size, and Randy’s head movement had slowed down that last little tick, putting him in reach. Brock punched and Randy moved a second late, got clipped behind the ear, and went down.

Maybe at forty-five the end is finally on Randy, but it should never detract from what he’s accomplished, and when he fights again don’t bet against him.

 

“One of the things about being an underdog, there’s no pressure. Nobody expects you to win. It frees you up to go out and compete. We often complicate things with fear of failure, all that baggage of winning and losing. Being an underdog is freedom.” This knowledge hadn’t come easy to Randy; he’d earned it. We sat in his office at Xtreme Couture, the Vegas sun spilling like liquid gold outside on the pavement.

“I realized I get way more nervous for wrestling than for fights. Way more keyed up. When I realized that, I thought,
That’s odd
. This guy could kick my head off, but I’m not worried about that at all. I’m having fun, I’m enjoying learning all this new stuff. I stopped and thought,
Why the hell am I so nervous for the wrestling matches?
I’d lost perspective, and I was putting all this pressure on myself. It came down to one match—everything hinged on it—so I’d forgotten that I loved to wrestle and why I started wrestling—because it’s fun.”

Randy had been dealing with the systemic pressure that elite athletes face, the overwhelming pressure to succeed. The Olympics is particularly grueling in that respect—there are no seasons, no multiple game series, not many chances to fail. When you’ve worked every day for four years (or a lifetime) for a goal, and all that work comes down to the next ten minutes, it’s hard not to feel pressure—shattering pressure. But it is precisely how you deal with that pressure that dictates your chances of success. It is the catch-22 vise for Olympic athletes.

Randy has found his way through. He’s regarded as the strongest mental competitor in MMA. He develops uncanny game plans and sticks to them. He knows in his heart that he has as good a chance to win as his opponent.