After about a month and a half, I fought an informal boxing match down at the local bar’s Friday Night Fights. One could drop in around eight p.m. and sign up to fight. They asked me if I’d fight a 220-pound guy, and I looked at the guy and said yeah, because he looked big and soft and had been drinking. Three one-minute rounds, fun for all, headgear and gloves. Tim and Tony were there and cornered me enthusiastically, but the guy was a spaz and came out swinging and I stood there and flailed away with him; he caught me and I caught him, but my punches were straighter. Tim between rounds said, “Now you see why a spaz is hard to fight,” and it’s true; very unconventional fighters can pose problems to amateurs like me—you get sucked into their spazzy world. “Don’t trade, jab,” said Tim (meaning don’t stand there and trade punch for punch with him, but work the jab instead). I started doing that the second round, and the guy quickly ran out of steam and waved me off.
Later that night, as my nose swelled again, I realized I still had no head movement. I’m not seeing the punches coming, and I’m leaving my head still. I sat next to a cute twenty-year-old student chiropractor who wasn’t listening and said, “I don’t think I have the violence in me for this.”
But in a sense, I was kidding myself. I knew that I would probably fall into the trap of humanity: naked rage fueled by self-preservation and ego, the opposite of empathy, closing oneself off to the pain of another.
The following Wednesday night I stayed away from the heavyweights and sparred the little guys and did much, much better. Because I’m tall, I would always stand with the heavyweights, but they all outweighed me by thirty or forty pounds. So instead I sparred with lighter guys and towered over them, but, hey, that made my life easy. I could survive; my nose didn’t bleed. I started keeping people on the end of my jab, where Pat wanted me to, too far away to hit me back.
Afterward, after eight three-minute rounds, we jumped rope, and I felt a little bit like I belonged, like I could stay there and train forever.
Two guys from Team Miletich were fighting in the next UFC in Las Vegas, Robbie Lawler and Tim Sylvia. Tim was making his big comeback after being stripped of the title for testing positive for steroids, and Robbie was a heavy favorite.
I flew into an overcast Vegas on a Thursday afternoon and went to the hotel and found the guys. We took the long walk down to the Events Center. People would first stop Tim, and then they’d grab Matt and Robbie as they recognized them. All of Team MFS navigated their minor celebrity with natural, unforced grace, shaking hands and taking pictures and enjoying themselves without getting too slowed down or frustrated.
The weigh-in was crowded, several hundred people around, and the ring girls and the announcer, Michael Buffer, and some rowdy fans. Over the P.A. I heard that Tim was not going to fight. He had trace elements of banned substances in his system and his most recent test hadn’t come back yet, so the Nevada Gaming Commission wouldn’t let him step on the scale. No scale means no fight. My mouth hung open. I had planned on shadowing Tim for the night, but now that was out. Luckily, I still had Robbie Lawler, a welterweight (170 pounds) contender and one of Pat’s prodigies, twenty-two years old, explosive, heavy-handed, and a heavy favorite (5–2) over Nick Diaz. Robbie was a UFC fan favorite, because he threw bombs—heavy, knockout punches—which makes fights exciting. Robbie looked good at the weigh-in, muscular and heavier than his taller and slimmer opponent.
Tim was disappointed about not being able to fight but not crushed. I asked him if he was coming out for a few beers and he shook his head, “I’m in great shape. Why would I come drinking now?” He’d be able to fight again in two months. In a way, it was as though he hadn’t quite accepted the fact that he wasn’t fighting, or his body hadn’t. His body and spirit had been bent toward that fight for so long that it would take them some time to disengage, even if his mind acceped it. Tim is intelligent and remarkably sensitive—not that he cries at sad movies, but he is aware of his surroundings and the people around him and how they are feeling. During training he can be a bully and will punish you if you stand up to him, but outside of the gym he’s friendly and open.
As for his steroid use, he must have gotten some bad advice. In his statement to the press, he said he wanted to look better on TV, and I believe him; it’s the kind of thing that would secretly bother him. The night after the weigh-in, the night of the fight, his test results came back negative, but it was too late.
Afterward I found Pat and the boys and we jumped in an SUV limo to go to break Robbie’s weigh-in fast at Olive Garden, creeping through Vegas rush hour. Any UFC fight fan would have given his arm to ride in that limo, with Pat Miletich, Jeremy Horn, Matt Hughes, Tony Fryklund, and Robbie Lawler. It was fun being with those guys and seeing them recognized for the stars they are, by fans in the know. In Vegas, around fight night, they were mobbed for autographs and photos just about everywhere, and they dealt with it well, smiling and shaking hands and taking photos. Their patience seemed endless, and they had fun with it. A drunk kid accosted Pat and said, “I’m coming to live and train in Iowa with you guys. I’ve got twenty grand and six months.” Pat laughed and said to him, “Make sure you buy a round-trip ticket ’cause you won’t make it through two training sessions,” and burst out laughing, with the kid as much as at him.
Dinner was lively, everyone talking and laughing; ribald and blasé humor abounded. The guys were laid back and friendly and willing to be entertained; they asked me about firefighting, and everyone weighed in on movies and girls, occasionally breaking into extremely technical and detailed discussions of fights that had happened here, or in Japan, or in Korea. Except for the scar tissue, they could have been mistaken for slightly dangerous frat boys on a break, but there was an air of professionalism that would make you question that conclusion. You could see people trying to figure them out, slightly wary of their confidence and roughness. In the limo, someone farted, and there was much yelling and hallooing and covering of faces with shirts, gasping theatrically out of open windows at the gritty Vegas air. It was that kind of night.
Robbie was probably the quietest, and not just because he had a fight, but because that’s the way he is; he’s not a loud talker. He’s solid and dark—he looks Filipino but is only half. He was relaxed and happy there among his friends and brothers. Team MFS is like a band of brothers with Pat as a sort of father/uncle/eldest brother who is expected to know everything—a role Pat occasionally resists, as he just wants to be a kid sometimes.
Matt Hughes, on my right, was well known and a six-time UFC welterweight champ, an Iowa farm boy who struck me as the most professional and relaxed of anyone there. He seemed unflappable and confident. Sure, he’s lost fights, you could hear him say, but that stuff happens. He’s still one of the toughest guys in the world.
Jeremy Horn, across the table and recommending the Tuscan sausage soup, was perhaps the most interesting of Pat’s boys, because of his record (something like 112–6, an unreal number of fights) and his poise. He fights all the time, every month, anywhere against anybody. He’ll fight at 205 pounds or 185, although 185 is a little more natural for him. Most guys who fight at 205 walk around at 230; Jeremy probably walks around at 210. His ground game is considered one of the best in the world; he’s fought the best fighters and beaten some of them, and I’ve watched him spar and bang with Tim without any problem. What’s so funny is that he is the most unassuming and normal-looking guy in the crowd. If you ran into him at a bar, you wouldn’t look at him twice; he looks as if he could be selling Bibles or running for student council. Yet listening to people talk around the gym, most are more afraid of him than anyone else, and most people say he’s the best guy they’ve ever rolled with.
I kept maintaining to anyone who would listen that this sport is being marketed wrong. They try to spectacle it up, make it like pro wrestling with smoke and fireworks, when really they should be emphasizing the technical aspects of it. The blood will sell itself; everyone knows how rough it is. What should be sold
is the technical side. It’s perceived as a pro wrestling type of thing, when in reality it is a very serious, technical sport. It can be hard to watch because the ground fighting can be slow and methodical, each man extremely careful, as any tiny slipup can mean the fight; it’s similar to how cautious heavyweight boxers can get with their constant clinching, because any punch can be a KO.
The bloody part is incidental; you have to look at it as a part of a greater whole. Noses and lips bleed when they get hit; it’s not a big deal. The guy on the bottom getting pounded and getting bloody isn’t necessarily in a great amount of trouble. He can be bleeding, yet most of the blows are meant to distract him and keep him from thinking while the man on top sets up either more serious blows or submission holds. The tiny gloves mean knockouts and bad cuts happen all the time, and one slipup and a good jiu-jitsu player will have you in a submission and tapping before you even know what happened. Yes, it’s a rough sport, especially now, when many people grow up so distant from fighting and blood. But it wouldn’t have been considered rough a hundred or two hundred years ago, and before that, MMA would have seemed mild and overly refereed.
After you watch the fights for a while, you start to see how amazing some of these guys are, not just as athletes but in their composure and their technical thinking. Of course, Pat’s right: It’s not for everyone. But there can be no denying that it is a legitimate sport, a contest of wills, an arena for excellence on a par with any sport in the modern world. Fighters go into the arena stripped to their core, naked for the world to see and judge. They go in the face of a highly trained man whose goal is to break them down and destroy them.
After the Olive Garden, Robbie went to bed and everyone else went out; and we fell or were picked off by the Vegas evening, one by one, until we were all gone.
Fight day in Vegas was rainy and grim, and no one stirred before noon. Around four o’clock that afternoon we came together to walk Robbie down into the arena. He was quiet and relaxed; the rest of us were a little more keyed up. I overheard Matt saying that he finds it more stressful to be in the corner than to fight.
We headed through the cool, quiet, carpeted halls and into the dense casino. The crowd was thick with fight fans in black T-shirts and tattoos calling after Robbie, and we tried to keep moving. Robbie stopped sometimes and shook hands or signed, but we moved quickly, across the casino floor and into the dark depths of the Events Center.
We found our private locker room, and Robbie sat in the corner. I went to find some water and took a look out through the heavy black curtains. My press pass was a shield against the angry glares of the ushers and security guards. The Events Center was a steep stadium, not huge but with seats for twelve thousand, and it was maybe half full before the preliminary fights began. I found my name printed on a seat at the press table, just like a real journalist. I headed back to Robbie.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Blood Rites is a fascinating attempt by an admitted layperson to understand some of the roots of violence and its “nobility.” She posits a gem of an idea: Homo sapiens, for most of his evolutionary history, was prey. He’s weaker, smaller, slower, and without natural weaponry like fangs or claws. His natural inclination was probably toward group survival, like the monkey’s: throw rocks, keep watch, and run and hide up trees when predators approach.
As Ehrenreich writes, “No doubt much of ‘human nature’ was indeed laid down during the 2½ million years or so when Homo lived in small bands and depended on wild animals and plants for food. But it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves.”
However, Homo sapiens, with his big brain and his tool building, has become the ultimate predator on the planet, by a thousand times. Ehrenreich argues that this is a social and learned change, as opposed to an evolved one. Man learned to hunt in packs, to build better and better tools. He has moved to the apex predator spot relatively recently, yet his “wiring,” his natural inclination, is to act like prey.
Fear is part of our lives—fear of the dark, the unknown, of strangers—especially at a young age. Fear of being eaten is the rudimentary evolutionary concept that we all share. All of the old gods required sacrifice, forms of which exist today: Thus the ritual of sacrifice reveals an almost universal attribute of the archaic deity to whom sacrifices are offered: He or she is a carnivore.
What Ehrenreich argues so interestingly is that man has to undergo a change; he has a euphoric release from fear (it’s hardwired in) as he realizes his place as predator. This euphoria is what leads to the sacralization of war. She talks at length about initiation rites and “manhood” as boys become hunters. It’s all about realizing that you’re the predator, not the prey, and the savage joy of survival. Why do little boys always play with guns and swords? Because they contain in themselves the schematics to overcome the prey status.
Joyce Carol Oates explains in On Boxing that “man’s greatest passion” is not for peace, it’s for war. Men, as the evolved protectors of the tribe, are wired to be more passionate about war than peace because the more warlike men were more successful in the darker ages of human prehistory.
Sporting events reflect this learned change from prey to predator. When a boxer wins a fight, he thrusts his hands into the air and the crowd goes wild. He has proved himself to be the predator, not the prey, and the crowd is vicariously identifying with him. How many sports fans, when talking about the team they support, identify with it to the point of saying “We”? As in, “We had a shot at the Super Bowl but had too many injuries.”
I always feel like saying, “What ‘we,’ motherfucker? Are you on the team?” but the fan’s emotion is an honest one. Everyone wants to be the predator and feels ecstatic emotion when the predator status is confirmed. It boils down to a refashioning of “We will not get eaten today.” It’s a survival mechanism that is out of place in the modern world, where survival is not threatened on a daily basis. So it finds a fit with sporting events, and it fits the best with fighting.
The backstage private locker room was small and white concrete, with several showers and little lockers and free soap and towels. Robbie was very calm, and Jeremy and Matt maintained an easy flow of conversation. We had time. A couple of Nevada Gaming Commission inspectors in red jackets joined us and sat watching our little TV and talking about free food and how to get more from the caterers. About forty minutes before the fight, an older black man with an event uniform vest came in and taped Robbie’s hands with professional ease. He’d been taping boxers for a hundred years. The taper asked Robbie something, and Robbie said, “Don’t worry about the grip, I’m not trying to grab,” and everyone laughed. I asked the inspectors what they were looking for, and one of them told me a story from a year back, when a fighter was caught with several pounds of tape on his fists, essentially turning them into clubs. The taper signed Robbie’s wraps, smiled, and went to the next dressing room.
The mood was light. Another photographer commented on it: “Man, you can tell a winner’s locker room,” he said. “Some of those other guys are acting like somebody died.” The ref came through, and there was a brief discussion of the rules. We were getting closer, and Robbie shadowboxed, sometimes commenting to Pat, “If this one lands, it’s a life-or-death situation,” and “I think this is the right he might walk into.” Matt and Pat pulled his gloves on, a tough struggle with the little gloves that protect the hands and allow fighters like Robbie to throw big punches.
Now we were almost there. Robbie hit the focus mitts with Pat, sparred a little with Jeremy, did some standing grappling with Matt called “pummeling,” to warm up and loosen up. They were careful not to tire him, as soon, essentially, he’d be fighting for his life. Only two cornermen, Pat and Matt, could walk out with Robbie, so I left to find my sea
t.
The crowd presence hit like a wall, a massive entity in itself. The place was dark and crowded, a narrow canyon of teeming humanity. It was a warm monster that surrounded and buffeted us with its heat and noise and mood; it actually breathed a hot wind on us. My front-row press seat was amid a sea of journalists and laptops. I edged past and through to my seat, annoying the journalists, and pulled out my two-inch notepad and pen and tried to look professional.
The music was deafening, different death metal for each fighter. Nick Diaz came out first—a slender, dark-haired, goateed kid with an aristocratic Spanish face. He didn’t look nervous. The music changed and Robbie was making his entrance, and with a roar the crowd let us know who the favorite was.
The fight took place in the Octagon, a wide arena fenced in with a high chain-link fence that at first seems campy but is actually important. When fights go to the ground in the ring, there is always a danger that the combatants will spill out. In Japan, where the Pride and Pancrase fights—also MMA—are held in rings like boxing rings, the referee has to stop the fight, bring the fighters back into the center, and try to restart them from the same position, which not only disrupts the flow but gives a winded fighter time to recover and can change the fight. Conversely, fighters in the UFC can use the cage as a weapon—something that certain UFC champions have excelled at.
Robbie and Nick bounce and eye each other across the wide space, the corners shout last-minute advice, and the ref gives his final instructions. Suddenly, the fight is on and the crowd is roaring with anticipation. They want to see Robbie knock this kid out with his trademark ferocity.
Robbie begins backing away, looking for an opening, letting Nick pursue him, and angling to land big—somehow he’s a little hesitant. He’s been so confident up to this point, but suddenly, maybe, there is some doubt in there. He had hurt a rib two weeks before, rolling with Matt, and since then he hasn’t done anything but work on his cardio. He claimed it wasn’t bothering him, but the first thing I think when watching him back away is that he is hurt.
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