Iceman (16 page)

T
HIS WORLD WAS GETTING KIND OF CRAZY NOW
.
The money was bigger. The fights were bigger. I was getting more popular. And thanks to my sperm donor, I had seen what kinds of people can come out of the woodwork when you start getting attention. It makes you nervous. How can it not? I'm an open guy, I trust a lot of people. If you walk down the street and want to start a conversation with me, then I'll stop and chat and take a picture and sign an autograph. But, at the same time, I needed to surround myself with people who didn't care if I was on the way up in a growing sport or bartending back at the Library.

In 2002 I had bought a house—a perk of the job and something I had never thought about doing. Because of my training and travel schedule (it seemed I was always on the road either pimping the sport or fighting), I needed help managing stuff in my life. My brother Dan lived with me for a while. And I invited my friend Antonio Banuelos to move in, too.

Antonio loves to fight. He grew up in a big Mexican family in Fresno with gangster cousins, and every weekend one of them was beating the crap out of another. As Antonio says, “You get boozing and see your cousins fighting in front of you, then something is going to go down.”

The dude's only about five-three, which means, as a brawler, he's perfectly built for wrestling. He was a stud in high school, then wrestled at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo about ten years after I did. I met him through a bunch of friends there. He wanted to train with Hack and then get into the UFC, and I offered to help him out. The guy is intense. One of Hack's drills is swinging a sledgehammer into a tire. He'll have you do it close to two hundred times in one session, switching arms back and forth. Afterward, it's difficult to lift a toothpick. Your arms are burning, your back is tight, your shoulders feel as if they were carrying anvils, and your forearms bulge like Popeye's. It's nasty. But Antonio doesn't let up on that tire. He's a punk-rock kid at heart, and a sound track of that stuff must be playing in his head all the time, because he'll be pounding the tire harder at the end than he was at the beginning, pushing the guys he's working out with to finish as strong as he does.

Antonio's an animated guy, literally. He's got tattoos from his neck to his back to his legs. He gets one after every one of his fights. Hack and I had to make him stop getting them above the shoulders in case he wants to open a gym one day. Tats on the forearms don't scare away customers as much as snakes wrapping around your throat. And he doesn't just tell a story; he's usually jumping a few feet in the air to get his point across. He finishes off with a lot of “Bam!” and then the sound of his fist punching his open palm. He's also fiercely loyal—a scary, wouldn't-hesitate-to-take-someone-out-and-go-to-jail-for-me-if-he-felt-I-had-been-wronged loyal. To me, loyalty is everything. You can get away with saying and doing a lot more to me than you can to one of my friends. You've got to do right by the people closest to you. My mom can remember back in fourth grade watching me run across the playground when I saw a bully picking on one of my buddies. I stood up to him and said, “You can't do that. If you've got a problem with him, you've got a problem with me.” My brother Dan is six-five and knows how to hurt people, but if I see someone starting with him, my first instinct is to be protective.

I know I can handle myself in a fight and that I don't mind getting into one. But that's not true for everyone. And if someone I'm close to—someone I know isn't all that interested in throwing punches—is getting into some trouble, I'm going to step in. I'd like to settle things down. But if I can't, so be it. That doesn't mean you can't tell friends when they're being idiots and asking for trouble. But if things go down, you've got to be ready, too.

Not that you can't make exceptions. When I was around twenty-six, a buddy asked me and Dan to drive with him to Bakersfield so he could confront a guy he thought was dating his ex-girlfriend. On the way there Dan and I realized our buddy had lost it, he was basically stalking her. When we got out of the car to knock on the guy's door, I looked at Dan and said, “I can't do this stuff anymore.” So we turned around and left. The point is, if your buddy is stalking a chick, don't help him beat up the guys that she's dating. You've got to know where to draw the line.

Seriously, though, who wouldn't want a guy as loyal as Antonio on his side? I needed people around I could trust, who had known me before the UFC started going mainstream. Since I was starting to take off and Antonio was just getting his career started, I made him an offer: Come live with me and Dan in my new digs, help me out as my assistant, and you can focus on training and fighting. He accepted. And then his fight career started rolling. He won nine straight mixed martial arts matches. Now when people deliver pizza to the house, he answers the door and gets recognized as a fighter.

That's as rewarding as anything I can do in the ring.

Of course, no one knows me or Antonio if they don't see our fights. Dana has always liked to say that the Trojan horse for the UFC, the one thing that would knock the door down and turn this from a fringe sport with hard-core fans into a mainstream event with the pageantry and hype of boxing in the old days, was television. And not just pay-per-view, which we were on and doing well with in just the first year Dana and the Fertittas had owned the sport. He was talking about the stations you get whenever you sign up for cable. Finally, in June of 2002, he got the interest that he needed.

Lorenzo and Dana had been working David Hill, the president of Fox Sports, to get UFC fights on the air. Hill is one of the most innovative and risk-taking execs in sports. He carries around a notebook that only he is allowed to touch that has every idea he has ever thought of for television, beginning with his days working for Rupert Murdoch in Australia. I'm pretty sure he never had an entry in there that began, “Sign up mixed martial arts.” Yet he did just that. At first it was taped shows with UFC highlights and fights. But the numbers were through the roof, something they hadn't expected. It gave Dana the balls to push for bigger and better exposure.

Fox's
The Best Damn Sports Show Period
had been building the exact audience that loves UFC fights. Young guys in college who like to tell raunchy jokes, get messed up, and see guys beat the snot out of each other. The show had Chris Rose and a bunch of jocks and comedians mixing it up. They riffed on everything from the day's scores to the pros who were acting like jerks. And it was the first show to really embrace mixed martial arts. While ESPN and other networks ignored it for years,
The Best Damn Sports Show Period
was airing UFC highlights, the best, most cringe-inducing ones they could find. The show treated ultimate fighting like a legit sport, talking about the winners and losers and contenders with the same seriousness they talked about the Patriots winning the Super Bowl or the Yankees contending for the World Series.

When the producers were putting together their
Best Damn Sports Show Period
“All Star Summer Celebration,” they decided to try something different. They hadn't been losing viewers with UFC highlights, people hadn't been complaining, and they had hours of programming to fill. Besides, Dana was in their ear 24/7 about putting some fights on the air and making an event out of it. Dana is the kind of guy I would hate to fight in the ring. He'd never stop coming. You could rip his arm off and start beating him with it and he'd still keep trying to take you down. That's the kind of energy and passion he was bringing to those early days of his reign in the UFC. He was a man possessed with making this thing happen. The network execs had been happy to run the highlights because they knew it played to their audience. But they were skeptical about how an actual fight would play on TV, not just with people watching who only knew of the UFC's brutality, but with skittish sponsors. In the end, they took the shot to make it a part of the show, but I think it was partially just to get Dana off their back.

The fights came together at the last minute, which is why it was called UFC 37.5. But, even though most of us had less than five weeks to train, we all wanted in on the showcase. The card for UFC 38 in London had already been announced. Even the posters for UFC 38 had been printed. UFC 37.5 is not the greatest name in the series, but promotion isn't a pretty business. UFC 37.5 was a six-match card in which me taking on Vitor Belfort was the main event. Dana had been told when he bought the UFC that it would never get back on pay-per-view. When it did, they told him he'd never get on basic cable television. Now they were showing taped fights on Fox, and they told him he'd never get on live TV because the UFC was too unpredictable—you could never know what was going to happen. Only now, it was about to happen. Free TV reaching millions was the opportunity the sport had been waiting for.

Leading into our match, Vitor had already made his name internationally as a fighter. He was Brazilian, of course, and had earned his jujitsu black belt at nineteen training under Carlson Gracie. He was one of the best grapplers in the world because he had learned from one of the best grapplers in the world. In his first MMA fight he knocked his opponent out twelve seconds into the first round. In his first UFC tourney he had such an easy time taking guys out he was nicknamed the Phenom. By 2001 he was considered the top light heavyweight contender, ranked ahead of me even, and was in line to fight Tito in UFC 33. But an injury prior to the fight knocked him out. Now he was trying to make his way back into contention. And beating me in UFC 37.5 would put him there.

As usual, I got a lot of calls from Dana heading into the fight, reminding me how huge this fight was, how important it was for me. As much as I tend not to get too hyped up about these things, he was right. If I won, it was one more way for me to make sure Tito couldn't avoid me in a title fight. Heading into it, a lot of people had me as the underdog.

It was also the last deal of my contract with the UFC. I was getting $35,000 guaranteed just for stepping into the cage. Winning earned me another $35,000. I can live with $70,000 for one night's work that won't last any longer than the fifteen minutes it's sanctioned for. But Dana was also reminding me how huge this was for the sport. It had never been this close to being accepted by the mainstream media. Less than two years earlier, pay-per-view broadcasters weren't even giving fans the option of buying the fights. Now we were going to be on for free. I know—and I knew—my success is only as great as the UFC's. We are tied together, and I wasn't about to let this chance slip by. This had to be done right.

Because it was such a last-minute deal, the fights were held in a freaking hotel ballroom. But it didn't diminish the atmosphere. We came out washed in a crisscross of white, green, and pink lasers dissecting the room. Close to four thousand fans were packed in there, and we walked in on ramps that were raised above the crowd, like models on catwalks. Vitor was a few inches shorter than me but was just as heavy. He was pretty cut, and unlike a lot of jujitsu guys, he wasn't afraid to stay on his feet and punch it out. He liked to box, had terrific hand speed and a big left, and was good enough to win fights without ever hitting the ground. I expected him to be aggressive and come at me, which is exactly the way I want to fight. I'm not a guy who sets up combinations to knock you out. I've got a lot of power coming up from my legs and through my hips. The torque I can generate to throw my punches is unlike that of most other fighters. I want guys coming at me aggressively and leaving themselves exposed as they get closer so I can surprise them with a devastating overhand right.

Belfort and I traded kicks, but I got him in the end.

One thing opponents rarely try to do with me is kickboxing. I've won national championships as a kickboxer. It's just not a strategy I often see. But Vitor came out looking to kick. He actually caught me with a couple of head kicks, which surprised me. And thrilled me. If a guys wants to stand and kick, I'll do it all day. Even though he caught me with a couple, it didn't really impact me. I train against that all the time, I come from that background. Kicks in the head clear out the cobwebs, they're not about to knock me down. Besides, with him kicking, it gave me the chance to kick. And I caught him pretty good, especially one spinning kick that landed right at the top of his ribs, which made him buckle for a minute.