For weeks, trapped in the deep midwinter freeze that gripped New England like an immense, airy python, I kept coming back to the idea of an MMA fight. I’d had my taste of fighting in Thailand, but it hadn’t been enough; it was over too quickly. I hadn’t learned enough; my fighting was still weak and flawed. Training and fighting in MMA would be a chance to round out my skills as a fighter. I was still afraid that there was so much I didn’t know and wasn’t comfortable with. I had just sold the Thailand story to Men’s Journal, and I realized there was a way I could maybe get someone else to finance my training: by writing about it. I decided to approach an editor with some ideas to see where it got me, and surprisingly, he was enthusiastic. He asked me why I was so interested in learning enough to fight in a cage. I told him I wanted to learn the skills, to learn how to fight without rules, but there was more.
MMA fighters are scary in a way that boxers and kickboxers aren’t. They are savage. When you go to the ground, there is a desperation in the struggle for dominance that fuels a ferocity that you don’t get in other sports. I find these fighters frightening in a “monster-under-the-bed” scary way. Shaved heads, bulging muscles, and, above all, anger, eyes snapping with anger. There is no letup; you pour it on until you win. You hit him, he falls back, and you swarm him. And whoever wins the fight, the unspoken signifier of victory is I could have killed you. There are no excuses in the rules. If we were alone, in some back alley or on a deserted island, and we fought without all these people watching, then I could have killed you.
I was lured by the siren song of violence, the dark-faced coin of masculinity. Could I find my own rage? Could I tap into it?
The co-owner and trainer at Amherst Athletic was an African expatriate named Kirik Jenness, a tall, lean white guy who has made MMA his life. He runs the largest MMA Web site in the world and has been training and fighting for thirty years. He had a long list of contacts, but when I asked him where the best place to train might be, he said, “Probably Pat Miletich’s place in Iowa. He’s got some of the best fighters in the world there, and there’s nothing else to do in Iowa but fight.”
I called around and thought about Florida, and Oregon, and some other teams; but what I kept hearing about was Team Miletich in Iowa. I spoke with the legendary Pat Miletich on his cell phone. I was nervous, talking too loud, and he was unconcerned and enthusiastic. “Of course, it’d be fun, bro,” he said. Unhesitating.
So I went.
* * *
I drove out to Bettendorf, Iowa, across a snowy wasteland and crashed in a no-frills motel in the middle of town. Bettendorf is one of the Quad Cities, four little towns that sit on the Mississippi in eastern Iowa and western Illinois: industrial and blue-collar, with the Big Muddy flowing frozen and brown and sluggish as molasses down the middle.
The next morning, I found the Champions Fitness Center. Right as I walked in the door I exchanged nods with a medium-height, broad-shouldered man. He had a wicked set of neatly cauliflowered ears and a pleasant, battered face that maintained a boyish air. Pat Miletich.
Pat Miletich, the “Croatian Sensation,” was born and bred in Iowa (there’s nothing Croatian about him but his name) and became one of the most successful fighters in the UFC—winning five titles at 170 pounds—by being the most technically proficient fighter in the game. He understood before anyone else the need to diversify and borrow from different disciplines, and as a result he is now widely recognized as probably the best MMA trainer in the world.
Pat also has a reputation for being a good guy; as Kirik said, “the nicest guy in the sport.” He shook my hand and gave me a quick tour of the brand-new gym, fresh white paint and new equipment everywhere. We walked under the cardio machines and out into the giant weight room and took a hard right into the heart of the gym. Pat cocked an eye at me, smiling. “You’ve got some size on you,” he said. “What do you walk around at?” He meant weight.
“Something like one ninety-five,” I said.
“Good, you can cut to one eighty-five easily then.” We chatted a little about a piece I was planning on writing for Men’s Journal about MMA, an introduction to the sport. “It’s not for everyone,” he said with a slight pause, a tiny raising of the eyebrow. I got it.
I rented an apartment across from the gym’s parking lot, filthy and decrepit but three hundred dollars a month and the shower got hot. One of those modern indoor flush toilets—what else do you need? I even could see a tiny brown strip of the Mississippi, and Illinois across the bridge. I had no furniture, so I rented a bed and bought a folding chair and table from Wal-Mart.
That night, a Friday, I started training. “Sparring” just means practice fighting, standing up, usually three-minute rounds with thirty-second breaks or five-minute rounds with minute breaks. You wear headgear and big sixteen-ounce gloves, and a cup and mouth guard and shin protectors, and bang on each other. We kicked, punched, clinched, and on Mondays we went for “takedowns,” in which you take your opponent to the ground in such a way that you come down on top. The headgear keeps you from getting cut, but there were still knockouts and plenty of concussions and bloody noses to go around. Miletich’s place is famous for the hard sparring on Monday and Wednesday nights (Friday was light sparring), and I thought I was doing okay until Pat grabbed me and said, “Hey, Sam, come spar the heavyweight champion of the world.” What could I do but say yes?
A minute later, I found myself sparring with Tim Sylvia, six foot eight and 260 pounds. He was so big and strong I couldn’t really get near him, and the few times I did hit him it was like punching into a tree. He was taking it so easy on me that I could actually see and think, which was very nice of him. I knew a little bit about Tim, that he was from Maine, so I tried to talk about Maine between rounds to keep him in a friendly mood. It was a key strategy, because he could have destroyed me easily, if he just decided to let a few body punches go hard. He wore no headgear. His head was massive, forbidding, like a stone statue with jutting brow and craggy jaw. He was a nice guy; he thumped me some, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been.
After practice there was a warm glow in the gym, the air like a sauna from twenty or thirty guys sweating and bleeding their hearts out. People flopped down on the mats, discussing in groups of two or three their sparring mistakes, or fights seen recently on TV. The atmosphere was excellent; although I wasn’t a part of it, I could sense the camaraderie. It made me just a little lonelier as I packed up and limped home across the parking lot and up a set of rickety wooden stairs.
The water out of the tap in my hovel was foaming and leggy, and left a serious rim of scum in the glass. Didn’t taste too bad, though. The light in the kitchen didn’t work. I stumbled around in the dark and showered (that shower was the only good thing in my life for weeks) and made a plate of beans for myself. I forced down a few bites but was too tired to eat.
I was already beat to pieces. This is going to be rough, I thought to myself with a tinge of despair. I hadn’t trained like this in years. I had the suspicion that twenty-nine was going to be way different than twenty-five. Still, I was committed—I was going to fight, so I better get ready.
I tried to get into a routine as quickly as possible. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were sparring days (Monday with takedowns), and on those days I ran and lifted a little in the mornings, while my Tuesdays and Thursdays were devoted entirely to grappling: a basic class at nine, another basic class at five-thirty, and then advanced from five-thirty to six-thirty, when the experienced guys repeatedly tied me in knots, yanked my arms out, cranked my neck.
There is nothing so frightening as being on the ground with a guy who really knows what he’s doing; it’s like being in the water with a shark. You’re struggling, desperate, trying to escape, and suddenly you can’t breathe, you’re smothered, and you can’t see, your arms are getting twisted off, and you “tap” and then it’s all over. “Tapping,” a light tap on your opponent, or on the mat, is how you concede the fight. He’s caught you in a
“submission.” A submission is when you get your opponent in an arm-bar, or a knee-bar, or a choke, or a thousand other things, where you essentially threaten your opponent with a broken limb or being choked unconscious. He can tap instead of actually having his arm broken or losing consciousness because you’re pinching his carotid arteries.
Submission fighting is a huge part of ground fighting. It is at the heart of MMA and one of the reasons the sport has a small, educated following. It’s sometimes hard for uneducated observers to understand that while the two guys were rolling around, one guy could have broken the other guy’s arm and the other guy admitted it. A submission can happen in seconds; the “ground game” is extremely technical and about position and outthinking your opponent; it’s a lot like playing chess.
Having done muay Thai and some boxing, my “stand-up” fighting was okay—not good, by any means, but at least I had a clue as to what I wanted to do. My ground game, however, was nonexistent. I never even wrestled in high school. People sometimes wonder why one of the best MMA gyms in the world is in Iowa, but when you realize that some of the best wrestlers in the world come from Iowa, it starts to make sense. I came to dread the grappling days, and on the mornings afterward I would wake up with my whole body in agony. I started calling this “car-wreck-itis,” that feeling of having been in a car wreck the night before, where everything is strained and black-and-blue, including little muscles you didn’t know existed. Getting out of bed took ten minutes.
The only other time I’ve been beat up like that was after branding. During college I worked a summer on the largest cattle ranch in Montana, and I helped brand for three days, wrasslin’ calves, late in the season when they were getting big. Those calves would run all over you and kick you to shit, like you’d been put in a blender.
During those first two weeks, I often left sparring to staunch a bloody nose, a common occurrence at Pat’s. Somebody was always dashing to the paper towels. People laughed, yelled in faux anger, “Clean up your mess!” and Tim delighted in crowing, “Sam can’t hold his mud.” I sparred with several different people, but far and away the worst was Tim; every time I threw a rear-leg kick he trapped it and dumped me, without fail. His hands were like sledgehammers, and if he had landed some hard body shots, I would probably have died. I hovered between trying to hit him and not wanting to piss him off. He trapped me in a corner and my tiny life flashed before my eyes as I scrambled. He once threw a turning back kick at me, and I leapt aside and it hit the wall like a wrecking ball.I gave him a dirty look and almost stopped sparring: Are you trying to kill me? Afterward, someone told me I was the same height as Andrei Arlovski, Tim’s next fight opponent.
I felt a little like the new kid in school. People were watching me. They wanted to test me out, although I wasn’t very good, so that didn’t last. Several times during my stay I saw outside pro fighters come in to spar, and everyone lined up to beat their asses. People just got pounded; it was a rough place and you didn’t just walk in there and start sparring because those guys would slaughter you.
A few days into it, I met a guy named Marshall Blevins, a manufacturing engineer about my age who’d been with Pat for two and a half years. Marshall fought amateur kickboxing and has won regional, national, and North American titles, but he joked that he still got nervous before a Wednesday night. He was an easygoing guy with a laconic manner, and very helpful, giving me some pointers. “It doesn’t take long to get pounded out of a Wednesday class if you don’t want to be there,” he said.
“I remember sparring with Jens [Pulver] for the first time; he knocked me out with a head kick. A lot of these guys you don’t want to show them you’re hurt, but you get booted in the head, hit the wall, and slide down. . . . Well, you shake it off and bite down on your mouthpiece and start swinging again. Most of these guys are like that—you hurt them, they’ll come back twice as hard.” He smiled and laughed.
Though I think they went easy on me mostly because Pat introduced me as a writer, it still was pretty rough. I got hit particularly hard one night and could feel blood running in a thin stream out of my nose. The next day my whole face was swollen. Pat looked at me and laughed. “Did you break your nose?”
“No, no, it’s just bruised,” I assured him. I didn’t break it. No way.
Pat looked doubtful.
I have heard critiques of Pat’s gym, that the sparring is too hard, that people get hurt and don’t learn enough. It is a hard place to learn, and you become averse to taking risks and trying new things when you’re getting beaten on. However, MMA is a rough, rough sport; toughness is critical. You need to be tough, to have overall body toughness to succeed. That night my face in the mirror looked deformed, a tremendous swollen bulge over my nose and between my eyes; the blood settled in a few days to give me two black eyes, like makeup under the skin.
Because I didn’t know any better, I kept at it. I continued to get pounded and thrown around by Tim, by the other heavyweights. I ended up on my ass all the time, but once, halfway through the week, as we were all leaving and I was dazedly collecting myself from the floor, Pat remarked with a laugh, “Sam, you’re going to be tough as hell in two months,” and my heart swelled. I knew he was just trying to keep my spirits up, but it worked.
Team Miletich, or Team MFS (Miletich Fighting Systems), is Pat’s stable of fighters, one for each weight class in the UFC. His team reads like a who’s who in mixed martial arts. Jens Pulver, “Little Evil,” at 155 pounds, is a five-time world champion. Matt Hughes was and still is the dominant 170-pound fighter after Pat vacated the slot, winning six titles; Jack Black and “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler also fight at 170, and with Matt they’re three of the top ten welterweights in the world. Tony “the Freak” Fryklund was a badly underrated 185-pounder, and Jeremy Horn is one of the best in the world at 185 or 205. Of course, Tim Sylvia, the former champ, is still a serious heavyweight (under 265) contender. There’s a second tier, under those guys, of about ten or fifteen pro fighters who are all up and coming, guys like Spencer Fisher, Rory Markham, and Sam Hoger, with impressive records and lesser titles. Of course, the team is a revolving concept, with players changing as their standings go up and down—this was all in the early part of 2004.
It’s a little like walking into a boxing gym where Trinidad, De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., and Lennox Lewis all train together with ten of their friends. It’s intimidating; the guy you’re going to be sparring with is on a poster on the wall. And the second-tier guys are so good, it’s like Tony says, “You can’t get a break,” because anybody in there will give you a hard time, anybody in there on Wednesday night can be a handful.
Pat has somehow welded all these fighters together. They sought him out and moved to Iowa to be with him.
Pat grew up wrestling and playing football and battling with his brothers. He wrestled in college, after his dad, the football coach, died, and moved into kickboxing and boxing afterward. He was lucky in that Davenport, another of the Quad Cities, had an excellent boxing gym; some great pros have come out of it: Michael Nunn, Antoine Echols under Alvino Peña. Pat boxed professionally, studied Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Sergio Monteiro in Tampa and muay Thai with Long Longley in Illinois. He wasn’t just mixing his training; he was finding the best trainers in the country. He was revolutionary in that he combined these fighting elements better than anyone had before. In the UFC, before Pat, people would stick to their one discipline and try to use it for everything, or maybe be able to do a few things well. Pat was one of the first to be able to do everything: He could box, he could wrestle, he had submissions, and he understood how to put them all together—especially the transitions between them, which in my mind is perhaps the most important part of professional MMA. He could find a weak link in any fighter he met. And coming up at a time when MMA in America was in its infancy, he was a self-made fighter. He had to bring the elements together on his own, mixing up in his own “laboratory” the stand-up and ground fighting he liked.
I h
ad two little black eyes, and my whole body was in agony. Often I woke up with my legs, trunk, back, shoulders, biceps, and forearms all screaming.
After grappling one night, my biceps hurt so bad that I thought I might faint. I couldn’t hide the pain; I was “guarding” (that’s an EMT word for unconscious protective behavior, when people with broken necks from car accidents, for example, walk around cupping their neck with both hands). People asked if I was okay, if I’d hurt my arms. There was a lot of camaraderie, but I wasn’t admitted yet. Instead, I eavesdropped and soaked up what I could from the outside. I talked to Pat about my aching biceps and he looked thoughtful and massaged my arm a bit and asked, “Are you sure it isn’t a case of wuss-itis?” and laughed with me. Pat is just so naturally tough—in all his fights he’s never gone down from a punch to the head—that he doesn’t quite understand mere mortals.
Pat did a training program for law enforcement called Controlled FORCE with some police officers he met through MMA. Tony Grano, a policeman and martial artist, was training and cornering a fighter opposite Pat in an MMA fight, and they hit it off. Tony saw that MMA was a considerable resource to tap into, as everything in it had been tested and retested, and discarded if it proved to be impractical.
Fighter's Heart, A Page 6