I shadowboxed hard, hit pads a tiny bit, and then, as we were close, just paced, shaking my arms slightly. I felt good. I was mentally ready to beat the shit out of someone. Brandon did an excellent job as a corner; he realized that my mental state was strong and left me alone.
Then we were nearly there. I saw my opponent backstage, and I thought, Man, he looks big for 185. I wasn’t going to have any real reach on him—he was probably six-one or six-two. Oh, well. Nothing to be done now but go out there and see what happens.
I paced around, just kept moving, and again took stock. I wasn’t 100 percent fresh, as I had been dehydrated all day, but I was good. I’d been drinking water since six and was finally pissing again. The “Why am I doing this?” thoughts had come and gone. This is what we do.
* * *
Over the P.A. system they announce the next fight: “Weighing in at two hundred and five pounds . . .” and I don’t hear the rest. Wait a minute, this can’t be my fight—someone must have given me the wrong fight order. But then I hear the end of the announcement, “. . . his opponent from Amherst, Massachusetts, Sam Sheridan, one hundred and eighty-five pounds.” I could scarcely believe my ears. Two hundred and five! Are you shitting me?
I first think of all those lovely meals I’d skipped the last two weeks, all those nights going to bed on a protein shake with my stomach rumbling. Man, I could have eaten like a king these last two weeks and been fine. I am giving up twenty pounds.
My mind flashes back to Thailand, and I think, They’ve done it to me again. The promoters have fucked me again. I can see Brandon’s angry face, and he is arguing with the promoter, but I’ll fight anybody right now.
Then I am up in the cage and aware of my opponent. He is a little bit shorter than me and not bulging with muscles, which is something. He isn’t overly nervous, though; he’s calm and ready to go, watching me back without animosity.
The ref, Rich Franklin, a fighter I recognize from the UFC, checks me out, asks me if I have a cup on, and then it’s time to go. I come out and offer my opponent an outstretched glove and he blinks, and we touch gloves (to show respect) and it’s on.
The first exchange is clear; we trade hard jabs and I think I hit him a little harder than he hits me. And then it’s into the swirling maelstrom.
I pursue him around and take plenty of hard shots to the head for my troubles, but they don’t hurt at all. Here’s the secret: It’s fun. You don’t feel any pain, adrenaline takes care of that—you’re just getting into it. I am having a blast, but I am also eating punches.
I hit him, he catches me. We go into a clinch a couple of times and I land a few knees and so does he, but I barely feel his knees. When my knees go into his soft stomach, I think, Go down, go down!—like the guy I fought in Thailand had gone down.
This guy is tough, though. I rock him with a hook and blast a kick into his side and he actually goes down, and I step forward to try to finish but he’s back up, and I realize two things: He’s tougher than I want him to be, and I am running out of gas already, in the first round. In just three minutes.
As the round ends, I know I am bleeding from the nose. I walk over to the corner and Brandon is talking to me, but it doesn’t really matter; I am breathing too hard, I am already “gassed.” He offers me some water, but I can’t take it. I bend down to listen to him and he tells me to punch my way in, and I’m not crisp enough, my legs are gone and I’m already in survival mode—and the only way I know to survive is to attack.
The round starts back up, and I go after him again. He catches me with a few good shots, and I am staggered this time. I go backward and manage to get him in a clinch, but I lose my mouth guard. He’s rocking me, though I never feel like I’m in danger of getting knocked out.
I am trying still to get through to him. I can hear my own grunts as I throw knees in the clinch, and they sound as if they are coming from someone else.
Then the ref stops the fight to look at me, and the EMT comes out, and I can hear them conversing right in front of me like I’m not there. I feel nothing. If they let the fight go, I’ll keep fighting. If they stop it, I’ll stop. I know I’m bleeding a lot, there is blood on my chest.
“His pupils are different sizes,” says the EMT, and that makes the decision for the ref. He waves the fight over. I can hear them announcing my name and that I am a journalist as I leave the cage, and it’s embarrassing: He’s not really a fighter, but look, he tried.
I was dully furious about the weight difference, though not about the fight. The fight was fun. The other guy deserved to win. I had fought stupidly and not dodged or slipped a single punch as I had been training to. Instead, I’d come straight at him, whether from anger or frustration I don’t know. I think I have a fatal flaw; when I get hit, I just want to hit back, without rhyme or reason.
I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself, and it made me laugh; I was covered in blood, like something out of a horror movie.
As I was taking stuff off, the local paramedic came and checked me out, and he pronounced me okay, and told me not to worry about the pupils until tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t need stitches.
One of the promoters came by and said to me, “That was a great fight. Anytime you want to fight in one of my promotions, as an amateur or professional, you let me know,” and I looked at Brandon with confusion: Did he just offer me a pro fight?
It turned out I was something of a crowd favorite, basically for bleeding all over the place and standing in there and taking my licks. People kept telling me it was the fight of the night, things like that. As my eye started to swell shut, I thought, yeah, well, great. I still lost.
Monte tried to explain the weigh-in mistake as a miscommunica-tion and hoped to make me feel better by telling me what a good fight it was, but I just stared at him. I believed him that it was an honest mistake (Monte had a bunch of other shows going on in different cities, he was working with other promoters, and he was careless), but it still annoyed me to no end. He said, “It’ll be a great story for the magazine,” and I thought, Don’t do me any more favors, Monte. The bottom line is that promoters don’t care about fighters; they just want asses in seats. As a fighter, you trust the promoters, and it makes you vulnerable. I think Monte just had no idea of my real abilities, and I know he didn’t know anything about my opponent. Monte figured I was working out with Pat, so I must be a badass.
The vendor gave me a free hat and T-shirt, and various people shook my hand as I drank my beer. I watched the rest of the fights and realized what a terrible venue this was; the lighting was horrible, and the white cage made it extremely hard to tell what was happening inside. Only the fighters and the ref could really tell what was happening in there, which I guess is the way it is anyway.
I chatted with my opponent, Jason Keneman, while we watched the fights and drank a few beers. He was a nice guy. He’d done some muay Thai, and this had been his first MMA fight. He hadn’t wanted to go to the ground at all, and neither had I because of my rib. The rib . . . after all that mental anguish, it had barely bothered me during the fight, even though he’d landed a long body shot right on it. I found out Jason had been training for four years; he had a record of 9–1 in muay Thai. I thought he had seemed pretty calm out there. My one muay Thai fight was nearly four years ago, I had been training about three months since then, and I gave up twenty pounds and had still given him a decent fight—at least I’d pushed the action. That’s what training with Pat’s guys can do for you—it can make up for a lot.
I hadn’t been knocked out or anything. They’d stopped it, and I had definitely been losing on points anyway, even though I had done some damage and had him down once. Getting my mouth guard knocked out . . . that’s not good. That means you’re getting the shit kicked out of you.
The dilated pupil that had frightened the EMT turned out just to be a “bruise” and was normal a few hours later. The doctor I spoke with later—who was also a fight referee—said the fight never should have
been stopped. In medical terms, the mechanism of injury—a punch—isn’t going to cause the brain damage that would result in different size pupils. That would take a car accident or big fall, a more serious impact. He also gave me grief about keeping my hands up while he stitched my eyebrow (he disagreed with the paramedic).
What was most interesting was how much fun it had been. Being in there, bouncing around, pasting him, getting blasted, whatever—it had all been remarkably fun and exciting. Nothing hurt. I didn’t feel any pain at all during the fight. Sure, you know things are bad, like, Oops, that shot was bad, but it didn’t hurt. It was the week, the day of the fight that had really sucked. All that starving and worrying and dehydrating for nothing.
For that, more than anything, I was pissed at Monte and the show. Because I felt that if I had been fresh, and 194 pounds, and crisp . . . well, who knows? It would have been a better fight. As it was, I pressed the action the whole time. I chased him around. When he inadvertently kicked me in the nuts and the ref gave me time to recover, I didn’t take much because I knew my opponent was more tired than I was (I wasn’t hurt at all; the cup had worked fine). I think if I had been going strong into the third round, I might have been able to get to him. It’s all wishful thinking, but it’s the way I felt. Of course, that’s part of fighting, you’ve got to hold on to your ego, win or lose.
What embarrassed me wasn’t losing the fight, it was coming back to Pat’s looking like I got my ass kicked, even when I didn’t. My face was all swollen up, my eyes were bruised; driving back, when we stopped at gas stations, people would fastidiously avoid looking at me, like I was a burn victim. I dreaded walking into the gym because my fighting credibility was gone—I was just a journalist “having an experience.” That’s the feeling I hated, that I was playing, and I got my hand slapped for it. And no matter what people might say about how good a fight it was and that I gave nearly as good as I got, it doesn’t really matter, because without a win I felt like I besmirched the Miletich name. That’s why I didn’t put on my Miletich T-shirt after the fight; I didn’t want to associate losing with MFS. I let Pat down. One look at my face and he’d know I fought a stupid fight, that I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, which was slip and move and stay outside. It was written all over my battered face: Here’s a stupid fighter, betrayed by a stark inability to move his head.
* * *
My ribs were killing me. Sharp shooting pains. I certainly reinjured them. I found out about four months later, when I finally got an X-ray, that there was a “healing fracture” on the floating rib.
I thought about how much happier the homecoming would have been if I’d won. Sure, I was giving up twenty pounds in the fight, but Tony had done that and won. Mike French, another friend from the gym, was 147 and beat a guy who was over 190. Pat fought a guy who weighed 260. And won. That stuff just happens, especially at the amateur level in MMA.
I got out of Bettendorf fast, as I was embarrassed to be walking around the gym. I had some good friends there, but now I didn’t want to face them. I had learned a few things, like what was needed for a knockout; neither Jason nor I had put together enough punches. And that MMA is not a place to learn to fight; I should have ten amateur boxing and kickboxing fights before I get back into the cage.
It was fun. All those blows, the ribs, everything. At least I’d been in a real brawl, finally. And I hadn’t gotten killed. The fight had been stopped, I hadn’t been knocked out. Who knows what might have happened if we’d been on a desert island? I might have outlasted him in the end, all those Hills might have borne fruit.
Driving home, through a steaming Chicago, Tony called to see how I was doing. I asked him how he was doing, as he’d lost a decision in Hawaii to Matt Lindland that same night, and we had been commiserating. He was fine.
“It just sucks to lose,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but there’s a lot more to it, to doing what we do, than just the fight. If the fight was all there was to it, then it wouldn’t be worth it.”
I thought about what Brandon and I had talked about at length on the drive home from Cincinnati, the meaning of clout. It’s not really about the admiration or respect of others; it’s about self-respect. We have an innate hatred of fear, and we climb into the cage and prove to ourselves that it is nothing to be afraid of. Even this extreme situation, this death match in a cage in front of screaming fans, is nothing to be afraid of.
After I got home Pat sent me an e-mail. He said, “I just wanted to let you know you can fly our colors anytime you want. You showed a lot of heart and 90 percent of the fighters who come here do not last as long as you did.” He closed by saying, “You are without a doubt a fighter.”
Pat Miletich said that about me.
3
THE RIVER OF JANUARY
Brazilian Top Team. Kneeling, left to right: Bebeo, Murilo Bustamente, Zé Mario Sperry. Standing in the center is Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, to his right is his twin brother, Rogerio.
At AABB Gym, Rio de Janiero. From left to right: Milton Viera, Zé Mario Sperry, Eduardo “Mumm-Ra,” Emerson “Sushiman,” November 2004.
Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.
—Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, referring to fighters
Rio de Janeiro is a city unlike any other, improbably built into cliffs and mountains and around the lagoons and beaches of a wild tropical forest. The urban sprawl, Zona Norte (the North Zone), stretches away in mile after mile of rough and vibrant city, decaying and rising from the decay. From the top of Sugarloaf, one of the rock promontories that rear like titanic fingers from the sand of Zona Sul, you can see everything. The sheer cliff mountains that emerge from the hotels and apartments look like God’s chess pieces. The favelas, the slums, have crept up the sides of the steep mountains like moss, and at night they twinkle like stars.
In the heart of Zona Sul, on the edge of the lagoon, Brazilian Top Team trains. They train to fight vale tudo, “anything goes” in Portuguese—the same thing as MMA—and Top Team is one of the most famous teams in the world.
The gym is luxurious, filling a city block, with swimming pools, tennis courts, workout rooms, and restaurants under a leafy tropical bower. The sun beats down through the giant trees and vines and cuts stark patterns on the mosaic floor. The gym, the Athletic Association of Bank of Brazil (AABB), is a gentlemen’s club, and it is an indication of the high social standing of jiu-jitsu players.
Inside the main training room, just a big padded space, about thirty men of different colors and sizes (but a similar overall powerful shape) are grappling and sweating in the tropical heat. The mats swim with sweat as bodies flow and twist against one another, sinuous as snakes. Everyone has orelha estourada, the wickedly cauli-flowered ears of lifelong jiu-jitsu enthusiasts, and most wear multiple tattoos and knee braces. They are all training for vale tudo fights, but a select few are also training for Pride, the biggest MMA event in the world, held in Japan.
Martial arts have always been rife with mythology; warriors will boast, and men will make legends of their heroes, teachers, and fathers. Every martial art has its own path to victory, to invulnerability, to freedom from fear. If you study with this teacher, and practice the moves ten thousand times, no one can defeat you; you will never need to be afraid again. The secrets of the ancients, the death touch, the one-inch punch; stories of mystical teachers who can move people without touching them. It’s hard not to walk out of a Bruce Lee film feeling as if you could fight fifteen guys at once. Mysticism and martial arts go hand in hand, and every school mythologizes its instructors.
Modern MMA has been a testing ground for those myths, a stepping-off point for thousand-year-old traditions; as Pat Miletich said, “Everything gets better, cars get better, watches get better, computers. . . . Why should fighting be stuck in the Middle Ages?”
In the United States, before the inception of MMA, karate and tae kwon do had been dominant—fueled by the “karate boom” in the sixti
es and seventies, itself fueled by the chop-socky tradition of Chinese filmmaking. The highly stylized kung fu movies from China were cult fads that influenced mainstream ideas of fighting and martial arts. The Olympics had developed judo (since the turn of the century) and tae kwon do into very sporty forms and distanced them from “real” fighting. Boxing had evolved into a beautiful, elegant war of attrition.
In 1993 Ultimate Fighting, with its “no rules” cachet and promise of blood, was a pay-per-view hit in the niche market between boxing and pro wrestling. The contests were organized in part by Rorion Gracie, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert who was intent on bringing his family’s art and style of fighting to the United States. These vale tudo fights had been happening in Brazil for nearly a century, and Rorion’s slender young brother Royce Gracie, with the benefit of all that experience, won three of the first four UFCs. He won those fights by bringing his opponents to the ground and submitting them off his back—something the American audiences had never seen. The achievement was real. Royce was a tremendous fighter, and the point was not lost on the U.S. viewers: Ignore ground fighting at your peril.
Ultimate Fighting was pretty much an extension of the “Gracie challenge” that had already existed in Brazil: Bring all comers and the Gracies will defeat them. Carlos Gracie, to promote his fledgling school in the twenties, took out an ad in O Globo, the major national newspaper: “If you want your face smashed and your arms broken, contact the nearest Gracie jiu-jitsu school.”
When Commodore Perry opened Japan in the 1850s, Americans and Europeans were exposed to both jiu-jitsu1 and sumo wrestling, and competition between European boxers and Japanese fighters must have existed. From the turn of the century on, Japanese wrestlers would travel to fight exhibition matches, sometimes against other wrestlers and sometimes against boxers.
Fighter's Heart, A Page 11