The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (34 page)

And then buh-
bomb
. I throw the double jab.

He eats it; a look of bewilderment on his face. Thas right, suckah. ChaCha’s got some
hands
now. He’s got some better coaches and some better strategies. My boxing coach, Clayton, has been amazing. He should be working for NASA. He’s turned this pumpkin into a horse-drawn coach, conveying my opponent to a place called Lump Town. Yep. Buh-
bomb
, the two jabs land again. Lumpy brings his hands up;
enough of that
, his body language eloquently says. He throws his own double jab, a predictable attempt to serve me with my own sauce, to pay me back in my own currency. To generate and deliver energy with his punches, he has centered himself and concentrated his weight. His feet are glued to the floor for the briefest of interludes, almost too brief to be noticed or capitalized on.

Almost.

“Almost” becomes obvious to my opponent as he feels himself become disconnected from the ground and lifted toward the lights overhead, as he hears the crowd roar. With his tendons and muscles aflame with adrenaline-drenched survival instinct, his hands, a mere second ago clenched, now open and grab desperately at the fence, at the air, at my hunched form, which is hard at work, in the process of completing the mission of throwing him to the ground. And not just throwing him down, but successfully acquiring a solid, inescapable position, utilizing leverage, weight, and geometry to form a mechanism that keeps him down.

An old wrestling coach of mine once told me something brilliant, and it applies to every fight I’ve won and, sadly, every fight that I’ve lost: “Chael, you can tell when a guy breaks.” And you
can
, even (nay, especially) when it’s you.

But this time it’s
not
me. And as I concentrate my full weight upon him, as I consolidate and arrange the physical forces that portend his destruction, I feel him break. It’s not a real big thing, but once you’ve felt it or done it, it’s unmistakable. Just a fleeting second of semi-relaxation as his body tells his mind, “I gave
you
a chance to win. It’s now up to
me
to survive.”

Behavioral scientists in France coined a term that applies to circumstances like this when the world doesn’t operate the way you thought it did—
l’idée fixe
, or “fixed idea.” It’s why you feel a little sense of weirdness, a sense of something being out of place, when you walk up to a set of nonfunctioning escalator stairs. There’s absolutely
no
difference in the physical architecture of a set of escalator stairs or regular stairs—platform, riser, platform, riser—but it feels a little peculiar to
walk
up escalator stairs because your mind, through experience, has created a mental trellis that your behaviors grow on. Your brain erects a ladder of symbols that it instructs your body to climb, and when that ladder functions in a nontraditional manner, we freeze. So my opponent’s body, accustomed to being upright and active, with an able, experienced, and tested captain (his
mind
) at the helm, has now been waylaid and dragged into the shallows by a junta it has no worthwhile defense against; that junta being
what I do better than he does
.

Once he realizes that, there is a moment, that infinitesimal unit of time, when he
breaks
. His body accepts the inevitability of the outcome. It’s now like we’re two bad actors in a scene, and we’ve both stolen a peek at the last page of the script and have made an unspoken, unavoidable pact to get to that page as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to save time and avoid mutual embarrassment.

And so, when that moment comes, I take advantage. But not in my usual way—not by using technique, position, and conditioning to slowly usher my opponent to his loss, almost Socratically allowing my actions to ask his body questions, which it answers itself, drawing ever closer to solution. Nope. That was the
old
Chael. The
new
Chael has no time to lose. I think back to a line I heard from a from a dear friend of mine in New York, a man in a very dangerous, physically demanding line of work. I remember asking him how he adjusted to the demands of his profession, and its attendant risks, as he got older. He told me, “ChaCha, when Nolan Ryan, the best fastball pitcher in the history of the game, got older, he actually had a better curveball than fastball.” So now comes the curveball. No long, drawn-out, ground-and-pound. No more emulating John Henry and delivering countless hammer strikes. I’ve got guys on my side, guys who are teaching me, and I am
learning
.

Ready to get out of here, opponent?

Let.

Me.

Help.

So we make a deal.

The submission is on, and tight. Like the pronouncement of every hack actor on the cardboard bridge of a fake spaceship,
resistance is futile
.

I don’t hold submissions any longer than I hold grudges.

Tap. Great. We’re done.

OK, c’mere ya big lug. Great fight. You got nothin’ to be ashamed of.

You and me got more in common than we got to fight about. We both engage in the complete destruction of ourselves for the entertainment of strangers. We go about it in different ways—but
you
need
me
, and
I
need
you
, like the devil says to God in
Paradise Lost
.

But for right now my paradise isn’t lost—it’s
found
. Here, in the middle of the Octagon, amid the screaming hordes of MMA fans, the energy radiating around the building like a cloud of electrified argon gas, my adrenaline and endorphins sharpening my senses to a degree that only people who engage in high-risk activities like MMA fighting, or its real, and truly deadly template, actual warfare, ever feel.

Here comes Rogan. Now I have to speak. My parasympathetic nervous system stretches my vocal cords like one of Jerry Garcia’s banjo strings as he and Grisman tune up for “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” so if I don’t calm down and concentrate, I’m going to sound like a hick version of Minnie Mouse. But concentrate I must; I’m a fighter, and even though I just
won
, my work is far from done. I now have to convince all the fans to tell my bosses to let me fight again, real soon, for the championship. So that’s what I’m going to do. But taking the microphone from Rogan is like grabbing a crack pipe away from Charlie Sheen; he’s got a white-knuckle grip on the damned thing, so I hafta crane my head into his personal space to wedge in a filibuster for my next job. Jesus, Joe. Let the damned thing
go
. I worked on this material for
weeks
. Is it
glued
to your hand?

So I give my pitch, I say my piece. Rogan’s like Sinatra. He gives you your solo, and then he wisely snatches the microphone back before you start playing the same notes and boring the paying customers into watching
The
Black Swan
on IFC. And then, an inspector in a dodgy blazer unceremoniously throws me, and my ecstatic functionaries, out of the cage, so two other guys can get in there and realize their dreams or have them crushed.

I’m going to give you one final peek behind the curtain, boys and girls.

Nothing would please me more than to have a big finish, like Beethoven or a successful porn star, but, alas, of all the things I owe you for buying this book, the last one should be a vivid depiction of the postfight scene.

Off to the dressing room area backstage. Followed, and watched carefully, by the same inspector who threw me out of the ring a few moments ago. No dressing room, shower, or privacy just yet. There’s the little matter of the postfight urine sample. This ritual has a rather desperate relevance for Ol’ ChaCha, as you can imagine, in light of the circumstances in which I found myself in California. But here we go. I just sweated enough liquid out to float a battleship on, and now I have to find just a little more for that plastic jar with my name on it.

Then it’s off to the showers, where I begin to experience the inevitable adrenaline dump. It starts as a sense of quiet satisfaction, a kind of counterfeit serenity. I use the word “counterfeit” after much reflection and consideration, since I know the few moments of the dump are simply a chemically-induced respite from the restlessness, anxiety, and dissatisfaction that define most of my life, and which defines the lives of fighters in general. The whole “Peaceful Warrior/I Consider This a Sport/I Have No Anger” act is a complete fraud, a construct; it is as artificial as a Mardi Gras parade float, and just as fragile.

Peaceful people do peaceful work.

Peaceful people dig wells in third-world villages.

Peaceful people become Doctors Without Borders.

Fighters
fight
for a
reason
.

If you have no anger, if you have no rage, it is next to impossible to fight successfully against people who
do
have anger and rage.

All you fighters out there playing that “nice guy” angle. …

You can fake the funk all you want to get sponsorships. You can give the fans that whole “aw shucks” bit, and smile like a bashful schoolchild taking his class picture. But in your head, you’re just as much of a beast as I am.

I can’t tell you why. Nobody beat me with a belt or held my hand on a hot light bulb or starved me when I was a child. Nobody, and no thing, or event, or syndrome made me fight. But I was
compelled
to fight. I was drawn to combat, even as a child. I wasn’t a bully or a terror in school. I was just someone who made a decision, based on factors that I felt without understanding, to
fight
. So fight I did.

Which is why the time postfight can be the worst. Imagine doing what you’re best at, what makes you feel most alive, only twice a year. Imagine being a great chef, and being allowed to cook only two dinners a year. Imagine being a falcon, genetically engineered for flight and hunting, and having only two mice to swoop down on each year. Think about standing in that kitchen full of cooking implements, sharp knives, colanders, and copper skillets, and watching them lie there unused. Or imagine yourself perched high up in your favorite tree with a perfect view of the forest floor, as you watch mice and voles scurry about, and not being able to swoop down to grab them.

Imagine the sense of furious, helpless waiting for that chance to cook or hunt or fight.

Now consider this:

Of those two meals you get to cook, or those two mice you get to hunt, imagine burning the roast or missing the mouse.

That sense of helpless, bitter rage is what consumes you when you lose a fight. You get only so many chances to fight, and winning is great. But winning means waiting to fight again, which is torture for someone who fights.

But losing. …

Well, losing a fight is simply the worst feeling. It is a curse and a torture, a sense of time wasted, opportunity squandered, and future prospects dimmed.

It represents the possibility of a financial downturn, but any fighter who tells you that losing affects him because of its economic impact is a damned liar.

Losing a fight hurts because it affects your ability to fight in the future.

And for me, and people like me, fighting isn’t what we
do
; it’s who we
are
.

*
No, I don’t advocate the misuse of alcohol, you boozer. I didn’t say that it had to be alcohol; I just said a suitable drink, meaning one that isn’t going to interfere with your retention of highly valuable information. If you’ve recently woken up with a Sharpie-drawn Hitler mustache or
anything
fat and anonymous, chances are you’ll want to reach for some iced tea. So don’t go whining to the publisher that I forced you to drink until you threw up on your UFC action figures. And if you’re under 18, read this book in the presence of a reasonably responsible adult. Consider this your disclaimer.

*
Though I could write a manifesto on chair-stacking that would undoubtedly prove more beneficial than
The
48 Laws of Power; Rich Dad
,
Poor Dad;
or
The Art of War
. But the only people who read motivational, self-help, or instructional books are weak people (i.e., people who cannot figure out how to boil water on their own), and I refuse to believe that anyone insightful enough to follow Chael Sonnen (i.e., worship Chael Sonnen) needs coddling (i.e., breast-feeding).

*
As I wrote this last sentence, it just dawned on me that I could have called housekeeping and simply asked for more blankets. Yes, even Mr. P has moments of stupidity.

*
Or the world’s next delusional militant dictator. It’s a gamble, really, but remember, Adolf isn’t just the name of a German Fascist. It’s also the name of the guy who invented the contact lens, who was mentored by his uncle,
another
Adolf, who invented the tonometer (look it up). So, yeah, a little encouragement could lead to someone finding the cure for blindness.

*
I had a hard time deciding upon “land of Nod” and “Land of Nod.” The former is dreamtime, per Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, and the latter is the place Cain ended up after killing his bro. Pick whichever meaning you want based upon your disdain for hippies.