Fighter's Heart, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  There were some old friends there to fight; Jens Pulver was there with Jeremy Horn, and also Monte Cox, the promoter who screwed me in Iowa. I don’t hold a grudge—Monte’s a promoter. I can’t blame him for following his nature.

  Jens has been fighting pro boxing (on ESPN2, no less) and winning. He was very confident coming into his fight with Gomi, who was considered one of the best in the world, as was Jens. For little guys, theirs was a marquee fight, coming near the end of the night. As Danillo remarked, Gomi was much bigger; he came down to 160 from 180, and Jens had come up; he’d been boxing at 142. Just the fact that he’d been boxing pro and had won his last four fights made me think that he was going to kill Gomi, whom I’d never seen do anything besides land a lucky knee in a few seconds to a shooting Ralph Gracie.

  Fighting, especially in America, is always about heavyweights, and the money is a reflection of that. Lighter weights are usually better fights, because of the speed and the lightening of punching power. Heavyweights have to be so conservative, as any punch can be a KO, while the lightweight fighters can throw big punches without as much fear of instant obliteration. Even mediocre heavyweights get the big purses if properly hyped. This is true in boxing, and also true in MMA. People just want to see the biggest and baddest guys in the world.

  Fight fans who can understand the technical aspects of the sport usually end up supporting the lighter fighters; in Thailand, where the crowds are very educated, the biggest fights of the night were under 120 pounds (although the Thais are, admittedly, smaller).

  Jens, thirty years old and a five-time UFC champ at 155 pounds, had been dealing with the disparity his whole career. He ruminated that “for lighter guys, the money just isn’t there. I left the dollar value behind. I used to look for the payday, but I don’t anymore. I’m a little guy. Little guys have got to stay active and keep it entertaining—that’s what little guys do.

  “The first few times, the payday thing really got to me; my biggest fight had a payday of twenty grand, and some of these medium-talented heavyweights are getting paid three or four times that much just to show up—not even to win. Why not me? Twenty grand for eight months isn’t that much.”

  Jens was one of my favorite fighters to watch at Miletich’s place—he threw bombs and horribly heavy body shots. Like Bas Rutten, he was a devotee of the liver shot, a hard punch to the liver that can freeze a guy, and end the fight. I asked him about the switch to professional boxing.

  “Boxing is just as tiring as MMA. It’s a whole different world—so fast, so many combinations, you have to let your hands go otherwise you lose. . . . Even if you block everything and slip and move, you still lose the round.” Jens was just trying to keep busy as a fighter and make a living, which in MMA is hard to do. The UFC, the only game in town for most Americans, had eliminated the 155-pound weight class. Jens had been boxing for eight hundred dollars a fight, but it kept the ring-rust off.

  Jens was a short, slender man with a handsome, dark, batlike face and strikingly different-colored eyes. He had a Mohawk for this fight, and he was pale and vampiric. It was his “bad intentions” that gave him the sobriquet “Little Evil,” however: He went into the fight to knock somebody out.

  He was happy to be back at MMA but aware of the complications: There were so many ways to lose. “My first two losses were ankle and feet submissions—who would have thought I had to protect my feet?

  “It’s still small enough, it’s like a get-together every time. You get to see all your old friends. Boxing isn’t like that at all. There is no friendliness, you got cornermen trying to punk you out, all you got is your own people. With MMA it almost sucks to have an opponent because you don’t get to talk to him until the fight’s over.”

  Before this fight, Jens had been boxing at 142, which changed his whole body type because he had stopped lifting weights. He had two months to get up to weight, and he made 160, but Gomi had an advantage because he was coming down from 185. Jens respected Gomi, who had lost to B. J. Penn (whom Jens beat many years before and many think now is the best in the world), but Gomi had been on a tear since then. He was 4–0, and he used his size and strength to ground and pound. Jens was confident that if he could keep Gomi on his feet, however, he could make something happen.

  Jens spoke freely, pausing every once and again to spit tobacco into a cup. “There is so much to know in MMA. You can’t wait for your opponent. You have to ignore him and not preoccupy yourself with what he’s going to do—if you think about all the things he’s going to do, you’ll freeze: You have to focus on what you are going to do to him. Worrying about his offense will hurt yours.

  “I’ll probably have to outwrestle Gomi, but if I can get him standing for two minutes, I have to capitalize on that.”

  Jens had coauthored a book on his own life that was published on a small scale, and in it he detailed a horrific home life with his abusive father. Jens was a little crazy. The joke at Miletich’s place was “Whenever you’re sparring Jens, he thinks you’re his father, and Jens hates his father.”

  But at thirty, in a hotel room in Tokyo, Jens sounded remarkably sane to me. “I don’t need to be scared to death to fight hard; I just want to perform well. If a guy wants to fight me in the street, well, I got nothing for you.” He shook his head.

  “It’s not aggression. Aggression will get you beat. Those guys who have to black out to fight, or who get nausea . . . I just want to know that my skills are better.” This was Little Evil, so I wasn’t sure whether I believed him. I had seen how emotional he could be when he won—he was crying when he first took the UFC lightweight title.

  Jens thought Gomi was a momentum fighter. Momentum fighters get so broken when plan A fails that they can’t get to plan B: “You can see a momentum fighter lose it. You can see it slip out of his eyes, until he’s so beaten he can barely take a sip of water.” I could remember in my MMA fight when I was too gassed to drink water.

  Jens paused in his rambling monologue, thinking aloud. “Ten more seconds is all I ever ask. That’s the good thing I learned about being KO’d twice. You don’t see it coming—it’s like death—you don’t plan for it, so don’t wait for it. So many people are afraid of getting KO’d that their hands stay home, but not me. I got to go out there and shoot the lights out and fall down.”

  Jens spat, and offered one more nugget as I stood up to leave.

  “Rulon better be ready. That’s the thing with wrestlers is that they don’t like getting punched. He better be ready to trade punches and get hit.”

  When Fedor walked in at the prefight press conference, Rodrigo quickly turned to watch him—not nervous but curious. The appearance of the “Other,” as Joyce Carol Oates might say. George Plimpton wrote in Shadowbox, “No sport existed in which one’s attention was so directly focused on the opposition for such a long time—except perhaps chess—so that the matter of psychological pressures was certainly in effect.”

  Fedor was so relaxed that I felt sure it was an act, mere posturing. He and Rodrigo sat in front of banks of cameras, at high tables covered in microphones, like UN envoys. There were maybe two hundred journalists in the room, only two or three of whom weren’t Japanese. Fedor and Rodrigo spoke through their translators, and the conversation went from Portuguese to Japanese, from Japanese to Russian, and then back. I could barely follow what was being said, but when a reporter asked Fedor about what he wanted to do after the fight, he said, “Visit Brazil,” and that got a few delayed laughs. Rodrigo gave Fedor his big smile and said, “You should come down for Carnival.” Fedor was in a tracksuit; Rodrigo wore Armani and Diesel.

  Their fight had the potential to be a classic. Rodrigo was the technical submission specialist, renowned for his ability to take a punch and stage miraculous comebacks to submit his opponents. Fedor was the feared striker, the heavy-handed athlete who was so slippery, whose hips were so good, that he appeared unsubmittable. Styles made fights.

  They both weighed in shirtless, and neither w
as large for a heavyweight, each around 230 pounds. They had both beaten much heavier fighters, guys who weighed fifty or even a hundred pounds more. Rodrigo was lean and muscular, while Fedor was slightly beefy, with the Russian heaviness that was so deceiving. Fedor laughed at his own chubby physique, but no one thought for a moment that he was out of shape.

  The tightness of control at Pride was legendary. They didn’t really know I was there, although the Pride office in Los Angeles did, and they couldn’t have cared less. Pride existed for the Japanese, and although the overseas market was tremendous, there was little catering to foreign reporters.

  Zé was instructed not to talk to reporters, and more than that, not to interact with any Japanese people. Picture taking and autographs were to stop. The reasoning behind that was never made clear, although Zé suspected it may have been about the ratings war on New Year’s Eve with K-1, the other major fighting event in Japan. K-1 was having a slightly smaller show in Osaka the same night. It was a Japanese tradition on New Year’s Eve to stay in and watch TV all night with the family, and the ratings wars were intense.

  Late one night at Sizzler, Rodrigo was posing for pictures with fans, and someone from the Pride organization actually came over and made them stop.

  Eventually, the day of the fight arrived. There was an ugly hum, a tenseness, a buzz that ran through all of us as we scrambled to make sure every last thing was ready.

  It was cold and getting colder when we climbed into the bus, and the snow had been picking up all day. I’m not quite sure how snow can be Japanese, but this snow had a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, falling like a heavy, quiet haiku. The roads were slippery and slow with traffic and accidents; the bus fishtailed once and the Brazilians oohed. The windows fogged up and cocooned us in a white silence, strange buildings looming in the fog and vanishing.

  When we arrived, there was a tangible excitement in everyone, and you realized that that was why these guys get addicted to this; not just the fighters, but everyone around them—it’s a way to feel something. Inside the arena it was cold and concrete and brightly lit.

  We found our room and began to soldier in for the long wait, running reconnaissance missions, wandering the halls—trying to stay calm. We arrived at around three in the afternoon, and we would be there all night. Rodrigo was not yet there; he was fighting last, so he planned on coming a few hours later.

  We went up and found the ring, wandering like kids in a new playground. The ring seemed tiny in the cavernous stadium, and I watched Jens bounce and weave on it, his footsteps surprising both of us with their thuds. The floor had a little compression in it, and the canvas was fairly soft. Jens was out warming up in a baseball hat and overlarge T-shirt, and he slashed the air in the corner with his fists, fixed and flickering.

  Another fighter (who shall remain nameless) was also warming up, and the steroids had thoroughly ravaged him—his face was like thick, rubbery leather. The chemicals, all that raging and fighting, had just worn him down like old shoes. He was still bullet-headed and enormous, absolutely exploding in all directions with muscle.

  I was told that there was drug testing, and Rodrigo did piss into an open Dixie cup that a kid in a Pride staff shirt took away.

  The show was about to start, and the Pride event staff needed Rodrigo to be up on the massive stage that was built for the introduction. Problem was, Rodrigo still wasn’t there. Without a second thought, they got his twin brother, Rogerio, to do it. He did it with a little trepidation, his hat pulled down and his hood up, and I don’t think anyone caught on. You see what you expect to see.

  Rodrigo was having his own troubles. The snow had shut the highways down right after we had come through, and although he had tried to get on the road at three-thirty, it was impossible; by taxi on a normal road it was going to take three hours. So they went to the train station to catch the bullet train. But the bullet train wasn’t running, because of the storm, so they went to catch the normal train, and that wasn’t running either. Rod ended up spending two hours in a cold train station trying to get to the arena.

  Danillo, Murilo, and I escorted Rogerio-pretending-to-be-Rodrigo out through the halls, with the cameras turning and twisting and snaking with us, a crew of three or four Japanese staff around us, scuttling and scurrying. I was trying not to laugh, trying to look fierce. Danillo was doing a better job, and of course Murilo was unflappable. He should really play poker.

  After we dropped Rogerio off, Danillo and I walked around the main arena, out in the darkness and the presence of the crowd. The cheapest bleacher seat was $150, and everyone there was in a festive mood. Many of the women, especially around ringside, wore shimmery party gowns, ready to ring in the new year.

  Danillo was leaping and shouting as the show began, a low hum of anticipatory music, and then bursts of Japanese narration. The drums began with Pride’s signature dum-dum-dumdum repeated and growing, and a whole carefully orchestrated series of traditional drummers, drumming hard and theatrically, and a massive electronic display. The crowd was so excited, the tension filled the arena with a crackling electrical energy, and this translated to the fighters. When their time came to fight, they could barely control themselves.

  The drummers kept moving and changing it up during the introductions, with the announcer Lenne Hardte shrieking and calling, her madwoman voice shimmering and wailing and playing the crowd, a different clarion call for each fighter. Danillo and I whistled and cheered as they called Rodrigo, laughing because it was Rogerio hiding under his hood and hat. It was completely electrifying,

  Danillo and I stayed for the first fight, a quick finish of a good-looking Dutch kickboxer, Leko, by a tough Japanese fighter named Minowa (he won the “Quick” award, an extra ten grand for finishing the fastest). Minowa chased him around, rushed him, went after his legs, and caught him with a heel hook on the ground like wow. Danillo rolled back his sleeves to show me his goosebumps.

  Anderson Silva, a fellow Brazilian who shared the locker room with us, lost his fight early on the card and had a smile of relief on in the ring—at least it was all over—and that gradually shifted to a thousand-yard stare in the dressing room watching the rest of the fights, a glazed wetness. We all studiously avoided eye contact. We had to focus on Rodrigo anyway, to turn and give our energies to him, to pour our attention in the form of strength into his vessel.

  A Pride staff member came by with a series of envelopes; fighters here are always paid directly in cash. I don’t know how much Anderson stood to make, but Rodrigo would be carrying around two hundred grand in cash at the end of the night. In his early days, he used to get twenty-grand bonuses for submitting an opponent.

  Rodrigo was sitting up watching the fights when we came in, but he quickly lay down on the tatami mats and rested his head on a muay Thai pad and covered his eyes with a rag, trying to get some rest. We all sat quietly and watched the fights, which became the constant background for the rest of the night, a TV going in every room and hallway.

  Eventually, Rodrigo got up and started walking around, shaking out and rolling his shoulders for a few minutes in front of the mirror, then sitting back down. This is always the bad time, I think, the building slide of events. I was desperately glad it wasn’t me—I could just relax and enjoy the show—but at the same time I was envious of that pure excitement Rodrigo was living in.

  He would stand and blow out his nostrils, exhaling hard to clear them, and slap his legs and arms a little, and power stretch, bouncing. There was tension in everyone except Anderson. Anderson was calm, resigned, and depressed, but okay—he was still a pro. He was lost in his own world, in an endless replay of what had gone wrong, the grief of losing beginning to set in.

  The Rulon Gardner fight started with the national anthems for both parties, full of unbridled nationalism, flags and gold medals on all the TV screens. Watching the fight was a little like watching a bullfight; there was a sense of the restrictions of both parties. The two Olympic ground fighters stood and s
truck because they were unwilling or unable to go to the ground, which made for a very awkward stand-up fight. Even a mediocre heavyweight boxer would have destroyed either of those guys; but if either of them had been fighting a straight boxer, they would have had him on his back in about two seconds and torn him to shreds. It was because they both were so good on the ground that they were forced into a standing fight, which was the weak spot for both of them; it just favored Rulon a little more than Yoshida.

  It was interesting to watch Rulon learn as the fight went on—he realized what was happening, what he could and couldn’t do. He relaxed, his confidence grew, his face got shinier with understanding. He had a straight hard jab that worked well on the smaller man. He won a decision by essentially taking Yoshida out of his game, and although it was in no way a demonstration of wrestling versus judo, Rulon did win the fight. It was a little slow, like watching soccer players play basketball.

  The next fight was Pulver-Gomi, and it was a stand-up war, to my surprise; Gomi, looking much bigger, knocked Jens out in the second round. I had had no idea that Gomi could do something like that. I was flabbergasted, but Jens, true to his word, went down swinging.

  The night progressed, slowly, ineluctably, and Rod got dressed. He got taped and they were putting his gloves on and no one had inspected the tape, and I was thinking to myself, Jesus, no one looks at the tape? Are you kidding me? You could turn your fists into casts, you could even add weight—but then two slim young Japanese employees in clean white polo shirts came in and pulled the gloves off and inspected the tape and signed it, so that was okay. In the room, just before we left, we all huddled tightly together, our arms around one another, and prayed “Our Father” in Portuguese.