Fighter's Mind, A (21 page)

Kenny had come into the first season of
The Ultimate Fighter
with just a few fights and a long history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition. He was a gifted black belt who’d trained in Boston with Roberto Maia, and gone to Rio to train at Gracie Barra. He was the smallest guy on the show, some of those guys probably cut ten or fifteen pounds. Kenny did well in the practice sessions and had his eyes opened to what MMA training was all about. When he won his first fight on the show, it was a bit of a surprise, just because he seemed so undersized and one-dimensional. He made it to the finale, against the much bigger and more experienced Diego Sanchez. Still, he was there as the jiu-jitsu guy, to see if he could win in MMA with his pure jiu-jitsu.

“I was so nervous. The real ability now is that I’m mastering that fear. I’ve had way more fights in the UFC than locally, so I did my growing up in the UFC, which is a tough thing to do. It was a blessing and a curse. A lot of doubt and fear, and the uncontrol was scary, but now I use that fear. It puts the pressure on me in a good way.” The ability to make fear work for you is essential, and there are no short cuts. It takes experience and time.

The fights on
The Ultimate Fighter
had been televised, but there was a crowd of only twenty or thirty people watching in the room. Here, at the finale, was a stadium packed with fans. The pressure and the shock of the new took their toll.

“During the finale, it hit me all of a sudden. I was warming up backstage, hitting mitts, and fifteen seconds into it I am dead tired. My hands and forearms are cramping, they felt like lead weights, and I started to feel panic. I was trying to pump myself up, but I felt terrible. There’s a camera in my face and Dana White was wishing me luck, and all my friends and family, and the piss test, there’s money—it was this huge blur. I couldn’t understand what was happening. How did I get here? And then suddenly I’m in the Octagon, and I say ‘What the hell?’ to myself. And the fight starts and I’m circling, circling forever, and I think ‘What am I supposed to do?’ and by the time I realize I’m in a fight, and I know what to do, Diego Sanchez is mounted on me. What happened? The fight shouldn’t have been like that—I got beat before it even started.” It was a classic example of the big-show jitters, the nerves, for which experience is the only cure.

Kenny took that loss hard, but what really bugged him was that he knew he could have done better. He’d done better against Diego in practice, and he’d held his own against all those guys in the gym who were more highly touted. Kenny’s brother and training partner, Keith, said, “The cameras, the pressure, they got him in that fight. He said,
That wasn’t me and I can prove it
.”

“After the Diego fight I said to myself, ‘I’m gonna try this.’ It’s not about the contract, whatever, it’s about me really going for this. I can be that MMA fighter. I knew how I did against Diego in training. I performed so horribly in that fight. I need to do this for myself. It became personal.” He used the loss twofold, both as fuel to drive himself and as an instruction on what he needed to fix.

Kenny felt like he’d let himself down, that he hadn’t performed up to his potential, and it rankled him. He turned it inward and drove himself to become a professional
mixed
martial artist, as opposed to just the “bjj guy.” He dropped down to the 155 weight class, for which he was still on the small side. Kenny laughs, “I usually end up cutting about two pounds, and I don’t tell anyone because the wrestlers would all make fun of me—that’s not a cut!”

At 155, Kenny proved a force and strung together a series of victories, and then he fought Sean Sherk for the lightweight title. Sherk, the “Muscle Shark,” has a nightmare style for anyone in the division. He’s a hulking, ballistic wrestler. He’d been a top contender at 170 pounds but had fallen short against the top few guys. So Sherk dropped down a weight class. He is a titanic lightweight, muscled like a comic-book superhero. He’s a relentless takedown machine with great defense, good boxing, and limitless cardio. Stylistically, Sherk is a terrible matchup for almost anyone at 155.

I still remember Kenny’s entrance for that fight. He came in wearing full samurai regalia, he was the ronin, the masterless warrior with a domed straw hat and a kimono. It was awesome, the kind of theater that is sadly lacking in the “all-business” utilitarian aesthetic of the UFC. He even had both the swords on, “because only the samurai was allowed to wear both swords.”

“Before I even fought in UFC, I always had a love for the samurai culture—the warrior mentality. They lived a very peaceful life, they were gardeners, painters and poets, but when they went out and did battle they were fully committed. I said to myself if I ever got in the UFC I would do the samurai thing.”

The fight went the way everyone thought it would—Sherk overwhelming Kenny with takedowns and ground and pound, although Kenny did land a slashing elbow that had Sherk bleeding heavily the whole fight. Kenny couldn’t stand up, he couldn’t get away from Sherk, but he never stopped looking for a submission, he never stopped looking to win for five five-minute rounds. “I got that determination from the Sanchez fight,” he said. “It allowed me to keep fighting. Even when it seemed hopeless, it never was.” Kenny had gone in with a bad back, a recurring injury, but he never took refuge in that.

“In the fight against Sherk, I couldn’t adapt to the way he was holding me in my guard. And I thought, wow, I can’t stand up. I should have worked on that. And he’s not giving me enough to submit him. He’s being consistent with his takedowns . . . but it’s too late now. I have to try and open it up, to do something crazy to open the fight up. I didn’t have the tools in place to adapt. I had a hammer and I needed a screwdriver.”

It was a hard thing to swallow, and Kenny was depressed for a while after the fight. But it led him to rethink his approach. He had to become a complete professional.

“You need to have a brutal honesty with yourself. Did I do everything possible to win that fight? What didn’t I do? And analyze honestly, without bias, from a technical standpoint. And then ask yourself, ‘Did I do everything in my training to prepare?’ It’s about moving forward. We plague ourselves with stupidity, with bad thoughts. We put our brains in that prison. You can carry that fear with you, inside you, and it can keep you from changing for the better.”

Kenny continued, “That loss drives me. Any loss I’ve had drives me. I don’t think there’s a day when I haven’t thought about the Sherk fight. I never want that to happen again. It drives me in training. I changed a lot of things since that fight. Training happens all the time, every day, even without a fight in the future. It was a huge hole in my game. I didn’t have a full-time strength and conditioning guy, and I needed to close that hole. Sherk was a real professional and I wasn’t.”

Since then, Kenny has worked with Kevin Kearns, his strength and conditioning coach, and made tremendous progress—he feels much stronger and more explosive. The injuries that plagued him have been rehabilitated. Against fighters that are supposed to be stronger than him, a deceptively stringy Kenny has shown plenty of pure strength. He’s won several fights in a row, finishing all of his opponents. But Kenny’s permanently dissatisfied, even in victory.

“I hate my wins, I just hate my losses more. I enjoyed the Sam Stout one—it was a coming-out party. He’d just beat Spencer Fischer, and I knew I could beat him easy and I did it. But I look back two weeks later and I think
that sucked
. That fight was a nice clean fight, no mistakes. But I don’t think about the past too much. When I look at tape and I think,
That sucks, what am I doing, my hand is up here, I’m ducking all weird
. . . it’s not pretty.”

 

Kenny went to Afghanistan in 2007 to train with some of the troops, as part of a program to boost morale that a company called ProSport MVP put together, originally with baseball players. The troops had requested UFC fighters, and Kenny answered the call. He thought it’d be interesting. Like any true student of the game, Kenny learned more from those he was teaching and interacting with than they from him.

What impressed Kenny the most was “the guys with beards,” the Special Forces soldiers who grew beards to better fit into Afghan society. The real, hard-core killers.

“They had the scars, the look in their eyes. They had seen the shit. But they were very professional about it.” Kenny tries to verbalize the impression he got. “This is the reality, and we accept it. We’ve been killing a lot of people and we’re satisfied with the job we’re doing . . . they were matter-of-fact and passionate.

“They told me about their weapon loop: how you go to your rifle, then the enemy’s rifle, then the sidearm, then your knife. In a fight, that’s game plan A, to B, to C, but in terms of life and death.”

“I looked around and thought,
These guys must be on alert twenty-four-seven,
they must be on alert
all
the time. They have to be. You see guys you know get killed and how does that affect your intensity? I walk into a cage and get it, but they’re out there every single day with it. I thought about it a lot, that kind of mental focus and clarity.”

Kenny remembers talking to Rob Kamen (a former muay Thai superstar fighter) about it. They were discussing the “selfprogramming.”

“I’m nastier than I used to be. And the closer to a fight, I get worse. I feel that I need to go out there and do a serious job. I want to take him out, I want to literally beat him—not just win. It changes me. And it must change them [the soldiers] a lot.”

Kenny mused aloud that it must be hard to come back to normal society after functioning on that level for so long. He can offer only his own example.

“I’m not the most fun person to be around, especially near a fight. You prepare your mind to suffer and inflict suffering. You delete a part of your compassion. There’s a certain amount of brutality—to offer violence. Or you’re vulnerable. I didn’t always feel that way. Before the Sherk fight it was always just part of my job, just compete. Now I want to kill that guy. Whatever I can do within the rules with the utmost brutality. I won’t hesitate. Every fight there’s more wood on the fire, more bad intentions the closer I get. I’ve been programmed.” Because without it you’re a sitting duck.

Kenny recounts the conversation with Rob Kamen. Rob had trouble deprogramming after he retired. He’d beat up the guys he was training with the pads, or he’d knock them out sparring. He couldn’t shut down the intensity. His students, who were paying him for training, couldn’t handle him—he kept fucking them up.

Rob told Kenny, “Certain people have it or they don’t, but you have to feed it. The fire may be there but it needs fuel. Some people don’t have that spark, and you need it or you’ll get hurt.”

Kenny remembers one guy in particular, a Special Forces soldier who approached him for an autograph with his arm in a sling. The guy’s eyes were so incredibly intense and his energy was so focused, and they just bullshitted, but the guy made an impression. His eyes, his aura stuck in Kenny’s mind. Afterward, Kenny found out the guy was a war hero.

I remember Dan Gable talking about the intensity “in the room”—you had to have examples of it. For fighters to know what is possible, you need to have examples. These soldiers had shown Kenny a different kind of focus, and he’d soaked it up.

“For them it’s life on the line, and I thought about that for my next fight—it’s either him or me. Being ready to die, going back to that samurai mentality. Today is a good day to die. You have to be ready for that, to leave everything out there. I think I had some understanding of the mentality, but going into that fight now, I know I need to kill him before he kills me. It’s life or death. I’m gonna destroy him.”

 

I see some of this intensity in sparring, when Kenny becomes another person entirely: savage, focused, and explosive. His will is palpable. He seems like the biggest guy in the room. But afterward, relaxed and laughing, Kenny makes something clear.

“I focus on destroying him, but emotions have no place. They can be good or bad, but emotions always run out. You can’t fight on emotion or adrenaline. At the end of the day, you have to have a love for it, something that lasts forever, because that will carry you. You can only be mad for so long. It can help you, but anytime you make decisions based on emotions you’ll make a decision without all the information, it’s inconsistent.”

He continues, “Whereas if I’m just focused on the techniques and strategy of the fight, on the fluidity of the fight, on what needs to be done tactically, then I’ll make the right decisions. Instead of just being mad, ‘Oh, he punched me, I’ll punch him.’ That changes things. You need to be able to stay calm. Okay, I got hit. That hurt, but I got to find the right way to hurt him back.”

Kenny confesses a secret to me toward the end of our last day. It goes back to our shared youth, the infatuation with action heroes and the perfect fight—where all your punches and kicks land cleanly and none of his do. Kenny confides that “being the champ would be great but, for me, I got into this and it’s grown into a monster. It’s about me doing the perfect technique. Doing something beautiful, like a painting. With accuracy, speed, power, timing—the best kick, the best punch, the purest and best technique. Like the old Bruce Lee stuff, but real. I’m so far away from that, and it’s bigger than the sport, bigger than a title or fans or anything. With that in mind, I’d much rather go for it with all my heart than run the clock out to grind out the win. I wouldn’t feel good about the win, it wouldn’t feel real.”

I asked Kenny what is the last thing he thinks right before the bell rings and he’s staring across the cage, and he smiles. He loves that moment. “I just get excited. Here we go, like I’m a painter with a blank canvas.”

Since we spoke, I watch Kenny fight with newfound interest and respect, because he consistently improves so much. He is a fighter who changes dramatically from fight to fight. In his last fight, with Joe Stevenson (a fight I thought would be really tough for him), he dominated—and looked beautiful doing it, graceful. His footwork was smooth, his punches and kicks crisp and lightning quick, and his ground game simple, pure, and inexorable. And he knew it. The moment the fight was through he covered his face with his hands, one step closer to painting his masterpiece.