Iceman (13 page)

I didn't realize it, but in Roppongi, there are people who are scarier than ultimate fighters.

T
HAT SAME NIGHT I BEAT MONSON IN JAPAN, TITO
Ortiz had defended his UFC light heavyweight title against Yuki Kondo. He beat him with a neck crank less than two minutes into the fight.

Tito and I were both repped by Dana at the time, so we often found ourselves training together or sparring against each other. We had similar backgrounds, both having wrestled in high school and college before getting into MMA. I'd stayed over at his house a few times and hung out with him every once in a while when a group of us went out, but he wasn't a confidant or close friend or even a guy I'd want to call to hang out with one-on-one. But since he was the champ and we were occasional training partners, if he needed help, I went to help him out.

A lot of MMA guys—John Lewis, Tito, Tony Desouza, Rico Rodriguez—went to train at a compound in the mountains in Big Bear in Southern California. This was one of Dana's ideas, and the UFC picked up the tab. A lot of the guys felt that they'd get in better shape by training in the higher altitude. I never bought into that. Altitude training is crap. Two days back at sea level and any benefit you gained from being up there was gone. But it was a cool environment for training. All the guys stayed in these huge cabins that had multiple rooms. We had people cooking for us and taking care of whatever we needed while we were there. We had masseuses who kept us loose when we got tight running up and down the steep mountainsides. All we had to do was work out, train, and get whoever was gearing up for his next big fight in shape to dominate.

I went up there after UFC 29, in the winter of 2000–2001. Tito was going to fight again in UFC 30 that February, so were all trying to keep him sharp. It was snowing a lot at that time of the year in the mountains, so it would get cold. Which meant the workouts took on more intensity because we'd be working that much harder to stay warm. This was fierce stuff, like back in my karate days. The guys who were getting ready for the fights would stand in the center of the mat, and people would just come at them for iron-man drills. One after another, we'd move forward with a kick or a punch or try to get low, take him out, and apply a submission move. All of us were doing it to make the guy who had the fight—in this case Tito—a better fighter and more prepared for his title bout. But we all are competitive. Each thought he was the world's best fighter, and no one wanted to let anyone else one-up him.

Then one day we decided to spar, one-on-one. And I gave the “Bad Boy from Huntington Beach” more than he could handle. To be honest, this was usually the case when we were training together. He was the more high-profile fighter because he had been doing it longer, had a bigger personality, and had already won a UFC title. All that would be enough to make me want to kick his ass every time we sparred to prove he had nothing on me. But none of it bothered me. I knew my success would come as long as I was fighting hard and fighting right. When we sparred, I wanted to beat him up because that's how I sparred. We didn't go hard to the head, but full-contact body shots were fair. If it had been one of my best friends—such as Eric or Scott—I would have tried to drop him, too. But on this day in this session I was sparring with Tito. And while he may have been the champ whom we were supposed to be getting ready, it didn't mean I had to coddle him. In fact, I leveled him with a shot to the body. He doubled over in pain. He got up and I threw another punch to the body. He fell again. It happened a few times. I finally put my hands down, looked at Dana, and said, “I am not going to hit him anymore. He drops every time I hit him.” Dana was so mad that Tito was so soft he started screaming at him, “Get back on your feet, motherfucker.” But he wouldn't.

As far as I was concerned, that was the end of the session. I didn't think about whether he took it personally. But I also knew I wouldn't be giving this chump any more help trying to be the champ.

I
BARELY KNEW WHAT WAS GOING ON WITH THE UFC AND
its business. Sure I saw signs that things weren't great. That it had been a couple of years since our fights had been on pay-per-view or were released on DVD was one. But I was always getting paid, and the checks were clearing. As a fighter, that's all I was worried about.

But I wasn't shocked when Dana called me in January of 2001 and told me he and the Fertitta brothers were buying the UFC, and that I would need a new manager. The deal happened fast. Dana saw the league was in trouble, told the Fertittas, and within a month they were the bosses. There weren't three more passionate UFC fans than those guys, and if anyone knew how undervalued the league was, it was them. Before they bought the league they went to a fight in New Orleans just to talk about what they were doing and make sure they weren't crazy for doing it. They sat in the crowd and thought about what they would do differently. “The old owner didn't care about the in-house show,” Dana told
Playboy
in July of 2006. “All he cared about was the pay-television event. He didn't care about selling tickets and building up the in-house show and making it exciting. Lorenzo and I sat there saying, ‘What if we dim the lights when they walk in, play some cool music, and get the fight shows going?' We knew the first thing we needed to do was make the in-house show cool. We believed a lot of revenue could be made from ticket sales, which the old owner didn't care about. We figured we'd start the business from the live show. It ended up being the perfect plan for us. In the early days, when we were just getting this thing off the ground, ticket sales saved our ass.”

They paid $2 million for the rights to the UFC name and the Octagon ring from the owners. They got a sport that was banned in most states; a sport that had been kicked off freaking pay-per-view, which meant TV execs were so afraid of the mixed martial arts they wouldn't even offer you the option to buy it; a sport that had no merchandising rights, DVD rights, or video game rights. It had image problems, economic problems, competitive problems, and management problems. Basically, Dana and the Fertittas bought an idea they believed in. And they'd have to work their asses off to turn that idea into something everyone else believed in, too.

The Fertittas were used to taking plenty of risks. Their father had come to Vegas in the 1960s and started working as a bellman at the Tropicana. Less than two decades later he had built his own casino. The brothers could have had a nice life working in their dad's shop, but instead they struck out on their own and started a vending company, first renting out pay phones, then selling poker machines to bars, then finally just buying the bars themselves. (Since I studied business, I'm always impressed by guys who built their own empire. I read all this about the Fertittas in Business 2.0.) Eventually they combined their business with their dad's casino, renamed it Stations Casino, and took the company public. Now they had serious money. To them, the UFC was a hobby. Although it was one they didn't intend to lose money on.

Dana once told
Boston
magazine that he spent the first three years as president of the UFC telling everyone he spoke to “Screw you” and threatening to sue them. He was working so hard to get back some of the moneymaking rights—DVDs, video games, merchandise—the other owners had sold away. But he had other ideas for making the UFC worth his investment—making the world perceive it as a respectable mainstream sport instead of a no-holds-barred freak show. For a guy who was as big a wild child as Dana, the idea was downright revolutionary: He was going to make the UFC embrace rules and regulation.

When the sport was banned by nearly every state and relegated to outposts such as Birmingham and Puerto Rico, the old owners acted as if they were badasses. Their sport couldn't be regulated, they said; it was truly no-holds-barred. Biting, head-butting, and gouging were part of the allure. If a guy wanted to come into the ring with a boxing glove on one hand and nothing on the other, that was fine, too. They didn't see the value in instituting rules just to appease a few state athletic commissions.

Dana, however, did. He likes to joke that when he and the Fertittas bought the UFC, the first thing they did was run to regulation. He'll tell anyone who will listen that John McCain saved the sport. If he hadn't come after the UFC the way he had, it would probably be out of business. Dana recognized that regulation is good and courted the state athletic commissions like some kid looking to get laid. Eye gouging was banned. Head-butting was banned. Kicks to the groin, banned. Biting, banned. The size of the gloves became standard. The refs were given discretion to stop a fight. A scoring system similar to boxing's was instituted. Doctors were put cageside. The weight classes were realigned. Dana made the safety of the fighters paramount, to the point where we can't even spar for forty-five days after we've been knocked out. Then Dana went on a road show, pitching the new, safer, rule-friendly UFC to every member of every state athletic commission he could find.

He started with Nevada, of course. And it helped that Lorenzo was a former member of the NSAC. Pretty soon the commissioners around the country started buying into what Dana was selling. When the politicians and their appointees came on board, it became more palatable for the public interest groups, and when they were happy, suddenly it was easier to get on TV again. The UFC finally got back on pay-per-view for UFC 33, which was broadcast from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. This was just eight months after Dana and the Fertittas had bought the league. It didn't go off without a hitch, unfortunately. The fights ran beyond their allotted time. The show was kicked off the air in the middle of one fight and before the rest of the card could be finished. It cost the UFC $1.5 million. As Dana has said in the past, “It was a very bad start. And it took us a long time to rebuild.”

The UFC, however, had moved beyond the days when Ken Shamrock was debating the merits of mixed martial arts fighting with John McCain on
Larry King Live
. Not only was Vegas in our corner, but so was New Jersey. And soon Dana would bag Florida and Massachusetts, too. It wouldn't be long before more than twenty states were willing to sanction UFC fights. Now we had ring girls in booty shorts sashaying around the Octagon. We had bold entrances set to music and lights and prefight interviews with the ring announcers. Over those first few years, Dana and the Fertittas spent $44 million promoting the UFC in ways big and small. They were taking it mainstream, turning it around from a sport that used to be the movie equivalent of NC-17 and was now a more commercially friendly R rating.

The UFC always had hard-core fans. Even when we weren't on television and you couldn't buy our DVDs, people recognized us. One night shortly after Dana and the Fertittas had bought the UFC, I was at an autograph show with Dana. I was, as usual, amazed at how committed our fan base was. And I showed my appreciation by telling Dana, “I hate this stupid sport. Every guy on the planet wants my autograph but there is not a chick in here who knows who I am.”

I was kidding, mostly. The best thing about UFC fans is how committed and connected they are to the sport, in a way I don't think is possible with football or baseball or basketball. Most people don't have the talent to make it in one of those leagues professionally. And while most UFC fans know they're not qualified to fight professionally, everyone can relate to wanting to be tough, to being able to knock someone out, and sometimes, just as important, being able to take a punch. It's a visceral, innate feeling that we pick up as kids and never really let go of. When someone challenges you in a bar, your first instinct isn't, I can take that guy in a game of one-on-one or I can throw a football farther than he can. You're thinking, I can take that guy out or he can't take me down. By watching our fights, a lot of fans see themselves in the ring. It's why they are jumping up and down in front of their plasma TVs or in the stands and throwing haymakers in the air. As often as fans ask me for an autograph, they ask me if I'll punch them. Seriously. I was at a bar one night talking to a friend when a drunk kid came up to me and asked me for my autograph. I said sure, just give me a minute to finish my conversation. He turned around, then came back a couple of minutes later, again yelling my name. He didn't want my autograph anymore. He didn't want to fight me either. He was begging me to punch him in the chin for his birthday. He just wanted to see if he could take it. My buddies said to him, dude, how about if I punch you in the chin? But this is what I mean by the connection fans have to our sport. Everyone thinks he's a tough guy. And I'm glad. Otherwise no one would be watching.

That desire to constantly expand our fan base is why, in the same way Dana and the Fertittas were trying to win over one state athletic commissioner at a time, we were also trying to win over one fan at a time. Sellout matches were keeping us all in business, which meant we were on the road a lot, pimping the sport as much as possible. It didn't matter if we were on the local television news, or trading smack talk with a loudmouth shock jock, or, as was the case one night in Boston, winning over fans in the basement of a hotel. Our job was to connect with our old fans and reach out to new ones.

Those first few years no one knew us on the East Coast. I toured Ibiza, Spain, with Dana and was stopped every five feet. But in Boston or New York or Philly, I was just some guy with a Mohawk people crossed the street to avoid. One night we went out after a day of pushing the UFC and wound up at our hotel at around two in the morning. It was a fancy place, not the kind of joint where you'd try to take someone down in the lobby. But the basement, that's another story.

While I went straight back to my room that night, Dana got into a conversation with one of the hotel security guards, who wanted to know what was up with Dana's buddy with the tattoo on his head. Dana told him I was a UFC fighter. The guy's first response was “This is all crap. None of that stuff is real.”

Dana answered, “I got five grand in my pocket and I guarantee that you can't last five minutes with Chuck Liddell.”

The guy took the bet. Then Dana called me down into the lobby. He told me he had five grand riding on me to beat the crap out of this hotel security guard, who used to be a high school wrestler. But I couldn't just beat the crap out of him. I had two minutes to make him tap out. Anything less, and Dana was out five thousand bucks.

Within a few minutes a large portion of the hotel staff and some of the guests were in the lobby of this four-star hotel at two in the morning to see the ultimate fighter take on the hotel security guard. It was like the old days of Vale Tudo fighting in Brazil—we were all part of the circus, just looking to entertain the masses, make a few bucks, and win a few fans. And, in less than two minutes, just as Dana asked, it was over. Before the guard could make a real move, I put him in a neck crank that was so fierce he started yelling, “I can't see, I can't see.” I let him go and he was writhing in pain on the ground. Afterward Dana and I went out for cannolis.

Dana saw the guy the next day and he looked to be in so much pain Dana felt bad and gave the guy some money anyway. Part of him probably did it so we wouldn't get sued. But at least we had bought ourselves another fan.