Fighter's Mind, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  George took it all the way to the heavyweight championship and Michael Moorer, who’d just won the title. Teddy Atlas was training Moorer at the time, and he wrote about the fight in his book Atlas. Moorer was the heavy favorite to win, but Teddy remembers feeling pangs of misgivings—he even threw up. “[Foreman] wasn’t running from his ghosts . . . A guy who was able to face the truth that way was a dangerous guy. That was why I had thrown up on the day of the press conference. I had recognized that about Foreman,” Teddy later wrote. When Foreman came jogging down to the ring, Teddy saw he was wearing the same shorts he’d worn in Zaire as a young lion—and now he was a battle-scarred old bull. To wear those same shorts, the ones that had been worn when he suffered the biggest defeat in boxing history—meant that George couldn’t be stopped. His mind was too strong now. This was his night.

  Moorer, the smaller, faster man, took it to George for nine rounds. But he was making small mistakes, standing in front of Foreman for a little too long. Teddy recounted afterward the ploy, “I’m an old man, don’t worry about this, don’t worry about this slow jab . . .” Moorer maintains that George got lucky. There is no doubt that George was working on something all night, laying a trap, or more like manufacturing a slim opportunity. Moorer maybe got a little cocky. He was putting on a boxing clinic at George’s expense, and then he got caught with a one-two in the tenth, a left jab followed by a right straight. It got through, and you can see on George’s face just the gleam of understanding, and he instantly dropped another one-two through Moorer’s guard. Not big huge punches, but Foreman was a big huge man and a born puncher, and then the second right hand was “on the button” and Moorer was knocked out. Teddy Atlas would later say, “I got angry afterward at people who said Michael quit. They didn’t understand. Neither did the people who said Foreman got lucky. He didn’t get lucky. He spent twenty years preparing to throw that punch, learning what he needed to get to that precise moment in time.”

  Foreman won the heavyweight title at the record-breaking age of forty-five, the oldest ever to win it. He knocked out the twenty-six-year-old Moorer. He turned the tables on Zaire—he had made himself the hero of the story, the bigger hero of history.

  With Rory bleeding from some tiny cuts and an eye swelling shut, we headed back into the locker room. Rory was swinging from acceptance into despair and back again, a sort of common, obvious thing. He wanted to talk about what went wrong, what he needed. Pat said very frankly, “Wrestling, dude . . .” and it was true. Rory needed to be able to defend those takedowns with his life. When he had his man hurt, he had a window of opportunity that he needed to keep exploiting. Brett’s takedowns had bought time to recover.

  In the dressing room Zé Mario Sperry, a jiu-jitsu expert and a cofounder of Brazilian Top Team, asked Rory incredulously, “What happened, man? That triangle looked very tight.” He was commiserating but curious, professional. Rory shrugged. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t finished Brett with the triangle, but he blamed that long struggle in part for his loss—when he finally gave up squeezing, he’d burned his legs out. He’d squeezed and squeezed and felt totally gassed afterward. I think that the manner in which he’d dried out, the one-and-a-half-hour workout from the day before, probably made him susceptible to this, but it is a danger—go for a submission too early in a fight, when your opponent is still strong and he defends well, and you burn yourself out (muscularly) squeezing. Submissions have a much higher success rate later in the fight, when your opponent’s already tired. They’re rarely perfect in a real fight, but imperfect submission can still work. Now it’s about squeezing everything, making his life horrible and depressing until he taps just as a way out, just to get it to stop. If he’s already a little exhausted then he might be more prone to look for a way out. (The downside is that when a guy is slippery with sweat he has a better chance of pulling out of submissions.) When he’s fresh as a daisy and full of beans he won’t quit or believe he has to.

  I later looked up Brett Cooper’s history and saw he’d fought and won a decision against Conor Heun, who I knew was a good wrestler and a favorite student of Eddie Bravo’s, a “rubber guard” practitioner. I never saw that fight, but I could draw some conclusions—that Conor had either taken Brett down or got taken down at some point and worked the rubber guard with skill and confidence. Conor was pretty good on the ground, so I could safely assume that Brett had some decent submission defense or he’d have been submitted. Maybe I would have told Rory not to burn out looking for submissions. Of course, no one had done his homework and looked up Brett Cooper.

  Zé talked to Rory for a second and then demonstrated a little thing—a refinement of the squeeze—that Rory could have used to finish. Getting someone to submit is a question of convincing him that he has no options other than tapping. A part of getting a submission is mental; convincing the guy that he’s caught, it’s over. You make everything tight, squeeze everything down, and it’s so horrible that he taps. Rory had the triangle sunk but had squeezed on only one axis, giving Brett a little room to keep breathing. And Brett had known enough to wait in that space, that he could wait Rory out from there. He didn’t panic. Zé showed Rory the other axis he’d had to squeeze on, scissor his thighs together as well as pull everything down and tight. Rory, face bloody and swelling, leaped down on the mat to try it. “Jeez, Mario, I wish we’d rolled beforehand,” he said with a glimpse of his old humor returning.

  I went out to lunch with Pat a while later and set out to pick his brain.

  “Careers go through cycles,” he said. “Rory had great results from blasting people, he had so much power. But as he moves up a level, he runs into some hard things, learns some lessons, and he’s realized he needs to adjust his game. Now he has to concentrate on his grappling and wrestling and I’ll bet you he gets pretty good on the ground.”

  The example that shines is George St. Pierre. GSP was the UFC titleholder at 170 pounds and a spectacular fighter. He’s a perfect physical specimen, poised to be a dominant champ, a pound-for-pound great. But GSP never wrestled in high school or college. MMA is rife with spectacular NCAA champion wrestlers, and the conventional wisdom is that if you didn’t have it by now you wouldn’t get it.

  Wrestlers are born and bred in programs in the United States, and they wrestle fanatically in junior high, high school, and college, going to summer camps in Iowa or Oklahoma, a near religious fervor running through the acolytes. If you didn’t get in on the ground floor—if you didn’t wrestle year-round starting in about sixth grade—you could never come near those top guys.

  GSP, though, took to wrestling like a fish to water. He applied himself as an adult, picked it up, and used his newly learned skills to outwrestle some of the top 170-pound fighters who had absolutely stellar wrestling backgrounds. George outwrestled Josh Koschek and Matt Hughes, both former Division 1 all-Americans (Koschek had been number one in the nation). John Fitch was captain of his Purdue wrestling team, and GSP was too much for him. This from a guy who never wrestled in high school or college? Conventional wisdom held that this was impossible.

  Pat continued, “Jens Pulver used to outwrestle people. He’d take them down and outwork them and scrap—but then he used a low back injury as an excuse to just stand and trade with people. He became a crowd pleaser but, to me, that’s bullshit. It’s about winning fights. Jens is eating punches and kicks, getting knocked out. Then he beats Cub Swanson with a guillotine and he’s back on track.”

  Pat was talking about a creeping, insidious problem in fight sports, in MMA in particular. Fighting in the UFC is entertainment—it’s “asses in seats.” That’s the bottom line for promoters. People want knockouts, vicious exchanges, and bloody wars and not necessarily the best fighters in the world. Especially the casual fans; they just want to hear that they’re watching the best in the world. So do you fight exciting or fight to win?

  “Win win win is from boxing and wrestling,” said Pat, “but that whole mentality is starting to leave the MMA thing
now. Pride [the Japanese promotion] understood that and guaranteed flat fees, so go out and be exciting, you’ll get paid anyway. You could lose three and get another three-fight deal.”

  The more I start to think about the problem, the bigger it gets for me. Do you want to see the most exciting fighters on TV, or the best? Aren’t the best boxers more fun to watch? Would you rather watch Floyd Mayweather (the best) or Arturo Gatti (the more exciting)? When Floyd and Arturo finally fought, Floyd demolished Gatti in six rounds without getting hit. Is it pro wrestling, all about the spectacle, or is it fighting?

  Pat finished his coffee and said, “In this sport, nobody wins a world title undefeated. You have to lose fights to get better, honestly. Rory likes to bang and put on a show. He had the guy hurt, the guy put a takedown on him, survived him, and turned it around. It was a good experience for Rory.”

  Pat thought a minute, then continued, “A loss is sometimes just the thing to bring a guy back to earth. Some guys will be on a roll and turn into complete assholes.” He smiled. He’d seen that scenario, having had so many champions, so many ups and downs.

  Pat is a wrestler at heart, that’s where his sympathies lie and where his philosophies about training are grounded.

  “In my MMA career, I tried to follow Dan Gable step by step. Gable was a workhorse. His ethic and aggressiveness made everyone he wrestled with better. He made everyone around him better through his tenacity. As a coach he beat the shit out of everyone on his teams well into his forties. Having great training partners kick the shit out of you makes you better, that’s how Gable did it; he kicked the shit out of everyone. The ones that toughed it out got great. Those guys toughened up the new guys, and it creates a team of killers.” Pat grew up here in Iowa and wrestled, firmly in the grip of the cult of Gable.

  Pat ruminates on the MFS slip from the preeminent position in the MMA world. Whereas MFS used to have three UFC titleholders and a half dozen contenders, now there are only contenders; his champions have aged and fallen from the number one spots. Some of it’s Father Time, and some of it is the growth of the sport; the field of competition is exponentially deeper than it was even five years ago. But to Pat the reasons are personal.

  “I think the problem is that I trained as if I was going to die if I didn’t win. We’ve lost some of that desperation in training right now. It’s my fault. I can’t train like I used to, with my bad neck, and you have to lead by example.” Pat has a neck injury from training that needs surgery, but he resists it, fighting the idea that he’s getting older.

  He laughed. “I can’t scream at guys the way I used to. I used to be screaming all the time. The mind follows the body, so torture the body and the mind gets used to it. The body learns to accept being miserable, and it’s no big deal. When you get to a certain level of conditioning you feel like you can walk through a wall.

  “As guys get in better shape, they get mentally stronger, and as they get mentally stronger their bodies gets tougher. It’s a leapfrog effect.”

  Pat’s style has always been hard-nosed. In high school he’d been an all-state nose guard weighing only 165 pounds (which is tiny for that position). “Uniformly, the coaches described him as both the toughest and meanest player they’d ever seen,” Jon Wertheim wrote in Blood in the Cage. Being hard-nosed necessitates outworking an opponent.

  “I fought this big Cherokee Indian who was a highly ranked cruiserweight boxer at the time, Jason Fickle, and he had a good wrestling background. I planned on taking him down and submitting him, but he kept getting back up. I couldn’t hold him down. But I couldn’t really change my game plan because he was a good striker who hit hard, so I just kept running my head into the wall. I kept taking him down.

  “I was hardheaded like that. If something wasn’t working I’d keep trying it until it worked. I was well rounded but I didn’t switch that easy. You gotta think that you’re gonna win no matter what, that the other guy will start looking for a way out. You’re the predator not the prey. You don’t give a flying fuck what he’s doing, you’re just setting him up for the finish.”

  He laughed, a short bark. “But there’s nothing worse than when you think you’re setting a guy up for the finish and the whole time he’s ahead of you. That’s the cool thing about fighting. That’s the final stage, when you can lure a guy in. Like when you start being offensive to counterpunch, you throw the one-two and he thinks he’s countering and you counter him. That’s the end level, when things get really cool.”

  I asked him how you get there, and he smiled at me.

  “There’s only one way there—a lot of ass whuppings.” He chuckled nastily, but he meant it.

  “When you first start fighting, it’s tunnel vision, you’re freaking out. But as you gain experience things slow down. The combos start to come at you in slow motion. A big part of it is being relaxed. The studies show when police officers’ and soldiers’ heart rates hit certain levels, they lose motor skills except push and pull, they fall into tunnel vision. They lose decision making. It happens to young fighters, certainly, until they take enough beatings to relax.”

  That resonated with something else I’d heard when I spoke briefly to Mike Lerario, the site manager at the Army Center for Enhanced Performance at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. ACEP was doing sports psychology work with Special Forces guys—but not what you’d think, not fear management or kill related but language learning and self-awareness and recovery. They were actively using biofeedback, something called an “M-wave monitor.”

  “There’s a little sensor that attaches to the ear,” Mike said. “With infrared it measures the distances between heartbeats. We’re looking at variability. If the heartbeat is regular, then the subject has a high coherent state with brainwave activity, which is conducive to being in the zone. If it’s irregular, then it’s low coherence. There’s little lights, so green means high coherence, blue means moderate, and red means low. But we don’t train for color, because sometimes excitement is important. We don’t want a guy thinking he has to be green before he breaches a doorway. But afterward, for recovery, for planning, then it’s important.”

  Certainly, what Pat was talking about—taking a lot of beatings, being able to be relaxed, coherent—that was key.

  I sighed with the knowledge that there’s no easy way. You gotta take a lot of beatings. Pat smiled at me. We chewed in silence.

  “I give guys game plans in practice, and you sometimes see the lightbulb go off in their head. But there’s a limit. Game plans matter but mostly it’s about the guy you’re fighting.

  “Most people’s logic is, Okay this guys sucks on the ground, let’s take him to the ground. But he’s so ready for that. Sometimes you say to yourself, Okay he’s great at standup and weak on the ground so let’s destroy him standing and he’s through—get the best of him on the feet and he’s crushed, and when you do take him down he’ll give up. So sometimes, go right after a guy to mess with his head. But you gotta be well rounded to do that. A guy who’s a great athlete, who understands the game—you run right into his punches, beat him up, and he thinks Holy shit I’m in trouble.

  “I think having fighters watch tape can be bad, too. It will give you a false sense of security. If he looks shitty on tape and comes out blasting, you think Wait minute, this was supposed to be easier, and then you’re in trouble. And guys will change a lot in this sport, between fights. I think it’s better to focus on what you’re gonna do and make him be good enough to stop it. Know his tendencies, for sure. And I’ll get guys to spar different ways to emulate an opponent, or use certain submission setups. But fundamentals will always wear them down.

  “I fought a guy once who had gone down to Brazil and smashed everybody in this vale tudo tournament, and I didn’t see the tape. So I fought him and beat him, and afterward I watched the tape and I was so glad I hadn’t seen it because I would have been petrified—the guy fucked up all the top Brazilians, threw ’em around like rag dolls.”

  We drank so
me coffee and the talk moved on to Rory. “Rory’s got the physical capabilities to be as good as anybody out there. But will his mind take him there? He’s been very one-dimensional. He didn’t perceive himself in any other way. He has to change that perception of himself. He has to understand that he can change his identity. He’s young enough. Shit, I went up to Montreal years ago and none of those guys could wrestle, and look at GSP now.

  “When guys lose, it’s easy to talk about it because of my own experiences. I went fifteen and oh and then lost to Matt Hume, who was the best in the world at the time. But I was disgusted, I was going to retire, I was all through. I thought Holy shit I’m not that good. But after a while the fire relit and I went on another run. It’s simple: you’re going to lose if you’re fighting badasses. Randy Couture’s been down and out twice. I’ll talk about Matt Hughes, who quit to farm full time. I went up and argued with him while he was sitting on his tractor. This is before the Carlos Newton fight, when he won his first belt.

  “It’s the guys who go to the breaking point again and again and don’t give up. It’s up to you. Sure, some guys are in it to be a fighter, or to be part of a team, or get girls and be on TV. But there are guys who honestly know that if they don’t give up they’re going to be world champion. The real guys know if they keep at it they can win a title. I would always mentally convince myself there’s no other option.”