The Laws of the Ring

by Urijah Faber

  Both of my parents were remarried at this point, my mother to Tom and my father to a nice woman named Marrian. Both had their hands full. Pops was still recovering from a mild stroke he had suffered the previous summer, and my mom and Tom had Michaella, who was almost four.

  But of course my mom snapped to attention and called the family Ryan had been renting from. Yes, they said, it seems like something’s wrong. Ryan had moved in with some of his church friends earlier in the year, but had recently called the family and asked to move back with them.

  Concern turned to panic. My mom, stepdad Tom, Pop, and stepmom Marrian left Michaella with me and drove seven long and anxious hours to Los Angeles to find Ryan. My mom had his ex-girlfriend’s number and pieced together where he would be. They found him at a New Year’s Eve party for the LAICC. It was on the college campus at Cal Poly SLO. When they finally found the ICC New Year’s Eve party, Ryan was nowhere to be found. They looked relentlessly, asking various people if they knew or had seen him. Finally, my mom spotted him. Ryan was sitting by himself in a fetal-type position on a section of one of the lawns on campus. His arms were wrapped around his legs with his head almost in his lap.

  “Ryan, is that you?” my mom asked. He looked up.

  “Mom?” Ryan said faintly. My mom was horrified. It was him. Ryan was skin and bones, almost unrecognizable. He was so gaunt and starved-looking that you could see the outline of his teeth through his skin. It was as if he had been locked up as a prisoner of war. There was another church member standing nearby, just watching him as if not to let him out of their sight.

  My mom and pop said, “Come on Ryan, we’re taking you away from here.”

  He said, “I have to tell my discipler first and make sure it’s okay.” My parents were fuming by then, and my mom said, “What? You have to ask someone if you can leave with your parents? Who is your discipler?” My mom couldn’t wait to be face-to-face with this person.

  “Steve Burger.”

  “Okay then, let’s go talk to Steve,” my mom said. She said that when she met him, she could not believe this was a religious leader. He wore a white button-down dress shirt, almost completely unbuttoned to be sure everyone could see his chest, a gold chain, and a diamond earring in one ear. Mom said he looked more like a pimp. My mom had some very choice words with him, and my parents then took Ryan for a walk until they could convince him that they would just take a short ride.

  Of course, they were kidnapping him, without much protest other than his mumbling attitude about needing to tell his discipler he was leaving. You could see the relief on his face as they drove off—he was very hesitant and scared but also relieved. They drove directly to the house where he was staying with his fellow church members, went to his room, packed up his belongings, and drove back to Lincoln. My mom called me at the house in Lincoln and gave me a warning: “Honey, I’m just letting you know your brother doesn’t look good, we’re driving home right now. We have all of his stuff.”

  I walked out front when they pulled into the driveway of my mom’s house. Ryan walked up and a chill went through me. He looked like a shell of a person, devoid of emotion, completely emptied out of any trace of the Ryan we knew. Ryan is nearly six feet tall and weighed a lean and in-shape 165 pounds in high school; now he was maybe 120–125 pounds. Less than me. As I walked up to him I forced a smile and said, “What’s up Ryan?” but he didn’t even lift his arms to hug me back as I reached up to give him a hug. He was mute.

  He lay down on the couch and slept for three days straight. And when he did wake up, he didn’t stay awake long. It was obvious that he had been severely sleep deprived. He wouldn’t eat at all and my mom feared that he would die. She finally got him to eat only by feeding him herself. He wouldn’t talk but wrote, “They told me I am debaucherous.” A word my mother had never heard of. “I am afraid of what they will do to my family if I talk.” All of our lives were changed from that day on.

  Almost immediately, my mom’s life went from having two successful boys and a beautiful new daughter and enjoying our successful Lincoln business, the Morning Glory, to being obsessed with finding out what was wrong with Ryan. The quest consumed her. She took him to doctors. Psychologists, spiritual healers, and psychiatrists. More appointments than you can imagine. She even sought out experts of every kind, including cult experts and deprogrammers. She took Ryan to the nation’s leading cult abuse expert, now deceased, Margaret Singer. She flew another cult expert from the East coast for about five days and then she flew with Ryan to Boston to work with Steve Hassan, another leading cult abuse expert and deprogrammer. She was determined and obsessed with finding answers. I am sure she spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to help Ryan find his way back to himself.

  It was my senior year when he came home, smack in the middle of wrestling season. I had been previously consumed by college prep, but now the only thing going through my mind was hoping Ryan could get better. When it came time to sit down and do my college applications, I had no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go. My girlfriend Michelle sat down with me and helped me fill out applications, but we were all preoccupied with Ryan.

  Ryan was one month away from his twenty-first birthday when he came home that night. The diagnosis was all over the place when he was first home. It seemed that with the help of these fanatical people he had pushed his strict lifestyle with food and sleep deprivation too far, which had caused some sort of mental, spiritual and emotional breakdown. Ryan went through all types of schizophrenic-like behaviors, acting out from intense fear that the cult would come and get him and his family. I would take him out to drive around and he would swear people were following us, constantly looking back in fear.

  There were times when I would look into Ryan’s eyes and his pupils would take up his whole eyeball, fluctuating big and small, big and small over and over again. He would be overcome with a glazed look. Completely dissociated as if out of his body, he didn’t seem to even know we were there. Often strange behavior followed. To my mom, the behavior was the explanation and expression of the abuse and trauma that caused his breakdown. He would get real quiet, barely speaking for days and weeks on end. He would appear catatonic, even standing on one foot for hours at a time, oblivious to anything around him. He often behaved as if he were drugged and having withdrawals, especially at certain times of the day, though neither Ryan nor any of us had ever had drugs in our bodies. Other times he would sleep for days on end or stop eating or refuse to go to the bathroom. He wouldn’t take showers without his clothes on.

  He would spit out random words one after another, exhibiting sometimes shocking and scary behavior. My mom is convinced that something horrific happened to him, and that it was all hints of the trauma and the abuse he experienced. It was like his mind was rebuilding itself after a total breakdown, his way of processing what he had been through and trying to make sense of it and cope in the best way he could.

  One day passed, then months, then years. Progress still seems to be two steps forward and one step back, but there is always progress. Ryan has a place in our family, has had relationships and friendships and has worked for stints, but he is constantly battling the riddle of unpredictability. He is haunted—by what, we are to this day not really sure, and we don’t know if we will ever know what happened. It is still a mystery.

  There have been some really great times for Ryan, some scary ones, and a bunch of funny stories despite the misfortune of the situation. After fourteen years of dealing with the new adjustments brought about by Ryan’s illness, any sadness or anger or disbelief has lain dormant and life just goes on. If you ever meet my brother, be prepared to laugh. Sometimes the comedy is by design, and other times it’s accidental. He had a great sense of humor even before his breakdown, perhaps inherited from our great-grandfather Ford Leary (Jackie Gleason’s understudy, and the trombonist and singer for the Larry Clinton Orchestra back in the day). He stil
l has his brains and his wit, but you just never really know how it’s going to come out. Over the years, occasionally Ryan’s problems have caused situations where the police have been involved. The lack of understanding and appropriate training with regard to people like Ryan, who have had severe trauma, has caused misunderstandings. Thankfully, Ryan’s behavior in these situations has always been innocent and explainable.

  Suffice it to say, Ryan’s illness completely changed our family dynamic, and this is true fourteen years later. Michaella, who is nineteen as I write this, never got a chance to meet the guy that I grew up with, but they are close, and she knows his great heart and what a sweet person he is. Michaella has been an important part of Ryan’s life and healing. She has immense compassion for those in need and suffering. In a way she was born into this situation, because she was too young to remember how he was before this tragedy happened in Ryan’s life.

  He is someone I have looked up to my entire life as a mentor, as an athlete, a scholar, and a leader. Now I look up to him for different reasons. For being a fighter against a battle tougher than the ones I will ever face; fighting against the unpredictability of life and keeping a great attitude; never giving up and making the best of a situation he didn’t get to choose. He has been a teacher to our family in many ways.

  Millions of families deal with similar mental or emotional-health issues. Like us, they cope with the lack of services and true understanding. Mental illness is not a broken leg or a sprained ankle, where a cast or a limp makes it obvious there is something wrong. There’s nothing Ryan did to bring this on, and there seems to be nothing he can do to completely rid himself of these problems and dilemmas he is faced with on a daily basis. My mom gets upset when I call it mental illness. She says it is unresolved emotional and spiritual dilemma, and that finding resolve has been the most challenging thing she has ever been faced with. It is particularly difficult because Ryan has never told us the full details of his trauma. Nor does he seem to be able to.

  I’m proud of Ryan. He has worked harder and shown more courage than anyone I know. He is a vital member of our community, right next to me under the umbrella, but taking care of him has been a shared responsibility. I remember driving around the campus shortly after I was accepted at UC Davis, and feeling guilty for thinking I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and come to live in this new, exciting place. The truth is, my mom has shouldered the vast majority of the burden, but we all try to do our best to give her a break.

  Ryan is one of my biggest fans, but the emotions and energy surrounding a fight can be a little much for him to handle at times. He hasn’t attended all my fights, but we have had some good fight stories together over the years. My fifth fight took place at the Soboba Casino near Palm Springs, where I fought against Rami Boukai in the fall of 2004. This was still at the beginning of my career, when money and accommodations weren’t what they should have been. Ryan was staying with me at the time and drove the nine hours from Sacramento with me and my friend Virgil Moorehead to watch the fight.

  I won by decision, but was disappointed because I couldn’t finish the fight. Rami was a good jujitsu fighter, and he got my back for two minutes of the last round and was holding me as I was punching at him behind me. I eventually reversed position and ended on top of him and won the fight.

  It was my first fight in King of the Cage, and I walked away a winner, but afterward, Virgil—my harshest critic—who had been drinking, kept riding me.

  “You couldn’t finish him, you blew it. You shoulda KO’d his ass!”

  “You don’t have any power, and that was on pay-per-view.”

  Virgil was getting on my nerves more than usual. I was used to his heckling—it’s kind of our unique way of communicating—but jeez, was he irritating. Virgil is a great friend, and usually his brand of honesty is something I appreciate, but he wasn’t helping matters on this night. Ryan was with us, and although I knew this wasn’t an ideal thing to do, he was coming with us to the bars to celebrate.

  Anyway, we walked down the strip in Palm Springs—me, Ryan, Virgil, our friend Reed Shelger, and two of Reed’s friends, who were bouncers from a bar in San Diego’s Pacific Beach. Virgil, as it turned out, forgot his ID, and he couldn’t get into a club. Our San Diego bouncer friends took over, talking to the Palm Springs bouncers as if there was some bouncers’ code that supersedes California law.

  “We’ll vouch for him,” they said. “He’s with us.”

  The guys at the door were having none of it. No ID, no entry. Simple as that. Virgil and our bouncer friends weren’t accepting this answer. They thought an exception could be made. I was tired, ready to get out of there and go somewhere else. They weren’t. This had become an ego thing, and it escalated into a fight. My hands were swollen. I had a check for fifteen hundred bucks in my pocket. The last thing I wanted to do was have to get into a brawl outside a club with a bunch of bouncers, drunk Virgil, Reed, and my brother.

  So I stayed out of it. The fight was between the two sets of bouncers, and as far as I was concerned, it could stay that way. Ryan was out of it, Reed was mostly just talking from the margin, and Virgil—to this point—was just watching.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t last long. Virgil jumped into the fight, trying to help the bouncers who were trying to get him into the club. Virgil was going after one bouncer while the other, standing next to me but behind Virgil, reached down and grabbed a rope stanchion that was separating the lines to enter the club, primed to hit Virgil over the head.

  So much for me staying out of the fight.

  I hit him with a straight right to the jaw that he never saw coming. His feet stayed exactly where they were, the stanchion dropped harmlessly to the side, and his body slid to the sidewalk, out cold.

  Virgil turned around and looked at me, his eyes wide.

  “I told you I have power,” I said.

  Just as I was showing Virg how I saved him and proved him wrong, we saw a female Palm Springs cop jogging up the street wearing Daisy Duke shorts. “Hey you, come here,” she said, pointing at me. I made a quick dumb decision to flee the scene rather than face the consequences, so I took off from the group, ducked into an alley, and sat there in the dark. My hands hurt like hell. I didn’t know where anybody was, but figured they were all together. I was thinking that I would sit in the alley for a bit and then go find the group. Virgil was good with Ryan, so I didn’t think much damage could be done in the next half hour before I rejoined them.

  After about twenty minutes, I peeked out of the alley and saw a bike cop sitting about ten feet away scanning the area. It was clear the cop had seen someone run into the alley. Then I looked about fifty feet down and a cop car was sitting there also. They were surrounding the block and weren’t going anywhere, so eventually I came out to face the music.

  “What are you doing, why did you run?” the bike cop asked.

  “My friends got in a fight, and I ran because everybody ran.”

  “Why are your hands messed up?”

  “I’m an MMA fighter, and I fought tonight in the casino.”

  He either didn’t believe me or didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I pulled the check out of my wallet and showed him.

  I was handcuffed and arrested for obstructing an officer from duty (running from the scene of the fight). I was in the back of a paddy wagon and was able to get my cell phone out of my pocket, so I put it on speaker and I called Virgil. Having my hands behind my back didn’t help. I could hear someone had answered the phone and so I was yelling, “Virg, I got arrested! Make sure you take care of Ryan!” I was panicked and pissed, and knew Virgil had been drinking. I was worried about Ryan, but felt like my friends could all handle the situation until I was released. I spent the night in a cell (the drunk tank) for the first and only time in my life, and at five in the morning they called my name and let me go. I rushed back to the hotel, but I had no id
ea what room we were in. I simply couldn’t remember. I asked the front desk and they refused to tell me. Finally, I had to give the guy thirty bucks just to tell me the room number, and the first thing I saw when I got there was a hole in the wall roughly five feet two inches above the floor—Virgil’s height.

  There were my friends sprawled out around the room. Nobody made it to the comfort of the two beds in the room. Virgil was there sleeping. Ryan was not in the room. I woke Virgil.

  “Where’s Ryan?”

  “We thought he was with you.”

  “Me? I was in jail! I told you that!”

  I was flipping out inside, but Virgil looked utterly clueless and quickly realized this was pointless. I took Virgil’s keys and drove his pickup downtown. Panicked that I’d lost my brother forever, I drove from one street to the other until I suddenly saw Ryan. There he was, disheveled, sprinting across the street in my path then plopping down on a park bench, and looking at me like where in the hell have you been. I’d never been so happy to see him.

  I rolled down the window and yelled over at him. He gave me the annoyed what-the-heck? gesture with his hands, and hopped on one foot to the street, a sign that he was stressed. I pulled the car up next to him.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I asked him.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he replied.

  Good point. “Get in the car,” I told him as I reached over and opened the door. Ignoring my gesture, he did a three-step hurdle into the bed of the pickup, landing on his back. “What the heck are you doing? Get in!” I barked. He was pissed and just yelled back “Go!”—so I drove back to the hotel and we exchanged stories in the parking lot. He had just walked into the bar during all the commotion, ignoring the confrontation, and been on his own for the night. My friends had no idea I had been picked up by the cops and had all found each other after the senseless battle at the bar. Ryan spent the night roaming the main drag of Palm Springs. I couldn’t help but laugh at how bitter he was about the situation, but I was more relieved than anything that I didn’t have to face my mom without my big bro by my side.