Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  I flew down to Austin, Texas, to attend a training session with Pat, Tony Fryklund, and the two police officers who run the program, Tony Grano and Donni Roberts. These guys, lifelong martial artists, were teaching a weeklong seminar at Lackland Air Force Base for military police and instructors.

  Pat began teaching by saying, “I can’t teach you what I would do in a certain situation, because I’m a fighter who’s been training his whole life. Instead, I’m going to teach you a series of techniques that a 115-pound woman can do to a 250-pound man, provided she executes the technique properly.”

  The problems with training police officers in the use of physical force weren’t what you’d expect. Pat said, “It used to be that they didn’t really want to train police officers too much in martial arts because they were afraid of them going around beating people down. The reality is the opposite; a trained officer is relaxed and able to cope with a physical situation without the panic and adrenaline that an untrained officer might fall into, which leads him to beat someone down.” Black Belt magazine agreed with him in its March 2004 issue: “Untrained officers, when threatened physically, are three times more likely to resort to deadly force. . . .”

  In Controlled FORCE, there are no strikes, only mechanical locks, so only leverage is used. There aren’t any “pain” compliance techniques. The officers learned a series of locks: ways of holding and controlling a suspect through pressure and leverage on his arms and shoulders. The techniques had to be simple—easily remembered without daily training —and effective without actually hurting a suspect. Fat cops who don’t exercise needed to be able to execute the techniques. The training had to take into consideration liability issues and lawsuits. There are no strikes in the basic course; in the advanced survival course there are open-hand strikes because they won’t break your hand, and they look better for the Rodney King video. How much force do you use? The least amount necessary. The instructors stressed having options, locks to fall back on: “These locks are going to fail, but when they do, you’ll be ready to go for the next one, and if that one fails, you can keep going until you get something.” The important thing was to keep moving, keep your perpetrator off balance, and flow from one lock to the next. So you grab his arm and twist it one way, and when he fights it by pulling the other way, you switch and go with him, using his force against him.

  It was fun to be part of the team. We kept up a constant banter, everyone basically abusing everyone else, physically and verbally. Pat and Donni wrestled so hard in the van that Pat tore Donni’s ear up and he bled all over the place, and Tony had to yell at everyone. It was a little like being a freshman and hanging out with the cool seniors in high school; everything was a big rough joke and I couldn’t stop giggling.

  One morning, at Denny’s over coffee, Pat looked at me and just laughed, a short dry bark.

  “What?”

  “You broke your nose, you know that? It’s crooked.”

  “It is?”

  Everyone started laughing. “Yeah, it is,” Pat said.

  Back in Iowa I was sicker than a dog, having developed a sinus infection—probably from the busted nose. I’d been there for about a month before I left to spend a week with Pat and the boys at Lackland, and I was supposed to be around for a few more weeks and then fight. Pat had got me a kickboxing match, “to get the ring-rust off,” but on the night of the fight I was coughing, crying, stuffed up, and I hadn’t slept in three days from the infection, so I bowed out. My MMA fight was moved back more than a month by the promoter, a move I was all too happy to accept because I hadn’t felt good in weeks. I went on antibiotics.

  My small brown room became a haven. I went to the Bettendorf library and got books and retreated to my bed, under my sleeping bags, and read and watched the clock inch toward the next practice session. This could be torturous on a Wednesday afternoon, when at four-thirty I was just sitting around waiting for six-thirty, watching the minutes crawl by. But afterward, coming home, having survived a Wednesday night was a great feeling, and there was the luxury of getting in the shower for as long as I wanted, then climbing into bed with a good thriller, NPR burbling cheerfully in the background. I listened to so much public radio that I actually gave them twenty dollars when they started their fund drive.

  I had two dingy pull-down blinds, which stayed down all night, as a bright halogen street lamp yellowed the night right outside my bedroom. First thing in the morning I snapped them both up to let in the gray light of day. I made coffee and tried to write every morning and waited for the first class at ten. The antibiotics worked and I got better.

  I lived on Pat’s “fighter diet,” of which the main rule is no carbs after twelve noon. I boiled chicken breasts and ate them with tortillas and peanut sauce, and I ate salads (a lot of broccoli), and oatmeal. That was it. It was hard to eat at night after grappling or sparring. I was just too tired to even chew my food; even a meal-replacement shake took some doing—I had to muscle it down.

  My hovel was a cold, lonely place. One of the two windows had a gutted air conditioner still in place, and a family of birds nested in it; I could hear them stirring before dawn like giant rats in a cage.

  Around the time my grappling began to develop, I started to make friends with a few of the up-and-comers, the young pros and dedicated amateurs.

  Champions Fitness is a serious place. The weightlifting was run by Dale Ruplinger, a former Mr. America, Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe. The pretty girl behind the front desk, Emily Fisher, with the ponytail and a southern accent, had fought seven times and beaten three guys in MMA. Her husband, Spencer Fisher, was one of the top non-UFC fighters at the gym, with a 10-0 record as a pro, and they were the first husband-and-wife team ever on the same MMA card at the International Cage Competition in Minnesota. The chiropractor, Dr. Mark Schmall, grappled and was starting stand-up fighting when I arrived. I rolled with him sometimes, and he delighted in tying me in knots from the bottom.

  I got to know Tony “the Freak” a little better and found out we went to the same junior high; my mom was even one of his teachers. Tony is a character, and there is a notorious image of him from a cage fight in Canada, in which he is covered in blood, raging. He had taken an elbow to the forehead, it bled so badly the ref stopped the fight, and Tony went temporarily insane. He was so emotional he blacked out and didn’t remember rampaging around the ring until Pat and Matt Hughes dragged him down into his corner and covered his face with a towel, like an animal. “I could fight fine,” Tony said. “If I had trouble seeing, that was my problem, you know? It was cosmetic, a scratch on the hood. You don’t throw away the car just because a windshield wiper is busted. . . . I was so emotional that now I can understand a temporary insanity plea.” He had also been running a fever of 103 and had been puking the night before the fight.

  Tony was one of the older guys at thirty-three, and he’d been down a long road to get there. He was in the U.S. Coast Guard as a rescue diver and an EMT; he’d been a safety officer on the Big Dig and a stuntman before his constant training in martial arts eventually took over his life. He fought in UFC 14 and won the first round but lost the second. It took him five years to get back to the UFC (because losing, to Tony, means that you are dead—your opponent has killed you). Eventually, he went down to Atlantic City to watch Jens Pulver fight and met Pat and asked if he could come out to Iowa to train. He busted his ass on the first day, and Pat invited him to be on the team, one of the best things that ever happened to him. Team Miletich isn’t just a word or a gig to these guys; it is an integral part of their identities. As Tim Sylvia said, “A lot of these fighters are from broken homes, and Team Miletich is their family.” For all of them it was a huge point of pride and honor to be asked to be a part of Team MFS. They all have stories about coming to Iowa and the intimidation and fear they felt, but there were no hazings or bad beatings, like the Lion’s Den and other camps are infamous for. Being a part of Team MFS is much more about chemistry and the intangibles: Does Pat lik
e you? Are you showing him your work ethic? Can you get along with the other guys?

  Tony, like many fighters, is without reservation when talking about himself. I think the nakedness of fighting publicly, the exposure for all to see and judge one’s “quality,” makes fighters good interview subjects. They’ll talk about anything. For Tony, “The martial arts are about respect and discipline, knowledge. Fighting is different. Fighting is about ego. When we’re fighting, I’m going to fuck you up. Prove me wrong; prove to me that you’re tougher than me.” And for Tony, ego isn’t the negative “Oh, look at me” ego, it’s more about self-knowledge and total dedication to testing and pushing yourself as far as possible, a way to know everything about yourself.

  One Wednesday night, Tony was sparring with a promising amateur named Kenny, and Tony was getting pissed off because Kenny wasn’t coming hard enough. So Tony would throw his arms wide open and let Kenny tee off and hit him flush and open and unprotected, and then close and punish Kenny until he turned away in fear and hesitation. Then Tony would open up again, half taunting and half enraged, until finally he took Kenny down hard and slammed him in the guts. Then he pulled Kenny back up, embraced him, and they talked a little. Later I could overhear Tony talking about it and he said, “Kenny’s got the speed, the technique, everything, but he lacks a little in confidence. . . . I’ve kind of taken that kid under my wing and am trying to help him. It’s all right if we beat the shit out of each other in here as long as we never lose to anyone outside this gym.” That was the prevalent attitude: You kill each other in the gym, and then the fighting elsewhere is easy. I heard again and again from other amateur fighters that the people they sparred with in the gym were ten times tougher than anyone they ever met in the cage.

  Justin Brown befriended me in a grappling class, because he remembered what it was like to walk in and not know anybody. “People in here were nice to me and took me under their wing, so now I try and help some of the new guys out.”

  Justin was twenty-seven and is 4–0 as an amateur, just getting started. “You gotta have your shit together or you get your face ripped off,” he said, laughing. He was divorced with two kids, five and seven, and held down two jobs—as a manager at a local Hy-Vee (a supermarket chain) and a bouncer at Daisy Dukes, a strip club. He had a very strong sense of the Miletich team and the honor it was to be associated with it. He didn’t want to street fight because it might hurt the gym’s credibility. Justin was from Des Moines and said lightly that in Iowa, the mentality is “fuckin’ or fightin’.” “If you’re not getting laid, you might as well find somebody to fight. You’d be sitting around a bar and someone walks up and says, ‘Let’s go outside and fight’—well, okay.”

  The gym was a remarkably egalitarian place, and once you’d been accepted, it was friendly and helpful. Everyone gave tips to everyone else; if you saw something, you mentioned it. “Keep those hands up,” Tim might call from the sidelines, watching two amateurs spar on their own time. Fighters of all skill levels were in there at all different times, depending on their schedules, and much of the training was done by peers. The pros would stop you and come over and grapple with you—to show you something or give a little lecture on footwork.

  It is one of the more interesting facets of MMA: the democracy. In MMA, there are no grand masters, no belts, no fixed ranking system. Knowledge is shared, so good strikers work out with good grapplers, and they teach each other. Far superior fighters like Tony gave me help all the time, and then, sometimes I would tell him about something I’d seen Thai fighters do in Thailand, and instead of dismissing me, he and the others listened carefully. They were willing to take knowledge from anywhere.

  The grappling nights were the best examples. The gym was rife with judo black belts, under Coach Humphries, but the judo guys all came to the grappling nights to expand their knowledge. Nearly everyone in there had trained elsewhere, and everyone contributed to group knowledge. There were Iowa state champion wrestlers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts, and everything in between.

  Let me try to explain a few of the principles of the ground game, as I understand them. Everyone, more or less, can understand “stand-up” fighting. It’s boxing and kickboxing and muay Thai. You punch, kick, elbow, and knee. Then you lock up and go for a takedown, much like in high school wrestling, often by dropping down, “shooting” in, and snatching up ankles or legs.

  Once on the ground, each man works for position. You always want to be on top; your weight is working for you and you have much more control, although some fighters skilled in ground fighting actually prefer to work from the bottom. The bottom man wants to keep the top man “in his guard,” which means the bottom man has his arms free and his legs around the top man’s waist. It looks a little like the missionary position, but it’s safer for the bottom man because he can control the top man’s hips, the key to the ground game. The top man can punch and look for submissions, but he doesn’t have a decisive advantage. So he looks to “pass guard,” which means he wants to somehow maneuver his legs over the bottom man’s legs until he is “mounted,” or off to the side in “side-control.”

  “Mount” is exactly like what the grammar school bully used to do to you; sit on your chest with his knees under your armpits and rain punches down. It is very dangerous for the bottom man, as the top man can punch with impunity and easily set up submissions. The bottom man has to squirm, buck, and scramble to either reverse the position or at least get back into guard. Side-control is more stable and versatile, and pretty much equally bad for the bottom man—he has to get back to guard.

  When he’s in guard, the bottom man has a lot of submissions he can go for, chokes and arm-bars. He can use his legs to set up a “triangle” choke, where he catches the opponent in a triangle between his legs and uses them (plus one of the opponent’s own arms, pinned helplessly) to cut off breathing. In an arm-bar, he tries to hold one of the opponent’s arms straight and in such a way that he can break it if the guy doesn’t tap out. He can try a “guillotine” choke, a kind of head-lock where he exerts direct pressure on his opponent’s windpipe. Those are just the basics and the ones you see most often; there are hundreds or thousands of variations and methods. And some fighters don’t even try for submissions, they just work for position and try to beat their man into oblivion, the “ground-and-pound.”

  Other fighters prefer to stay on their feet, as it’s a little more exciting for the crowd and they feel more confident on their feet; so those guys just fight standing and train hard to avoid being taken down, called “sprawling”; when a man dives for your legs to take you down, you kick them out backward, sprawling away from him, and land on top of him with your hips, driving him into the mat. This style is sometimes called “sprawl-and-brawl,” and it’s what I was trying to learn.

  I needed to learn to move my head. I would feel the hard stinging impact that jarred my world, the rushing in my ears like I’m underwater, and then I could feel the blood gushing from my nostrils, the droplets spattering my gloves and shirt. I would rush outside to the paper towels, and the gym rats, lifting weights, would stare with a mixture of pity and chagrin. I joked with Pat that I was going to bleed all over my opponents to scare them. And then I mopped up the blood, put my headgear back on, and tried to get back in there, until I got popped again and repeated the whole process. Sam can’t hold his mud.

  I didn’t talk to Jens Pulver much, but he is one of the fighters I most admired, devastatingly heavy-handed for 155 pounds, and he moved like a pro boxer—he had won a few pro boxing fights. He said to me at one point, “You got to find a way to survive in here. We all did. We all found a way to survive in here sparring on Wednesdays, on the Hill, during grappling nights.”

  The Hill. I’d heard about it for weeks now, and finally one morning Pat grabbed me as I was coming to work out. Along with Mike White-head, an up-and-coming heavyweight and a national champion wrestler from Oregon, and Tim Sylvia, who had a fight coming up, we headed out to the Hill.
I still had a persistent, hacking cough, but this was going to “blow out” my lungs, said Pat. We parked on the top of a windy, steep little hill and Pat stayed behind as the three of us headed down to start. There was a slight sense of dread, of imminent doom.

  The Hill is a killer because it is not so long and steep that you can’t sprint it; you can. It just about kills you to sprint it, but you can, just barely. And then you jog to the bottom and do it again, a total of six times.

  So you start pounding up the steep paved road, and you feel okay, and then it twists a little, and you keep pounding, because there’s the corner, and then if you can make that, it teases you, because there’s the finish line, so you “sprint” through (in reality just a short, choppy, painful jog by now) and stand there gasping like you have asthma, wheezing with a high note in your chest. The third one felt like it should be the last one, and during the slow jogs back down the hill my hamstrings and ass were burning like someone had injected the muscles with a syringe full of poison. The fifth one felt like I should be dead, or maybe puke a little, but then there’s just one left—anyone could do one more. . . .

  I ran the Hill once a week, and I was supposed to pyramid up, to do eight and then ten and then twelve the week before the fight. Pat once ran it sixteen times. “I’ve never gotten tired during a fight,” he said. “The one thing I always knew going in was that I had prepared better and harder than my opponent, that I was in better shape. I wasn’t going to get tired, and when a fight runs to twenty-five minutes, that’s really something.” I was reminded of the adage I’d gleaned from watching muay Thai in Thailand: Whoever’s in better shape wins.

  Pat watched me running and dying, and somehow that was where I earned his interest, a little bit, because I left everything I had on the Hill. It wasn’t very much, but it was everything I had, and I noticed from then on that Pat somewhat accepted me into his family.