Fighter's Mind, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  We started talking about backgrounds, about upbringing and experiences. Pat himself had plenty of fuel, an abusive father who died of cancer young, and a lot of tragedy, brothers dying, going to jail, committing suicide.

  “There are some guys out there that are from normal families that are still animals and smash people, but usually it helps if you’ve had a shitty life. If somebody’s starving, then somebody else is getting his ass kicked.”

  Rory’s next fight was in the spring, on the Affliction card in Chicago. The IFL was in the process of folding, its mysterious business plan untenable. Rory was on the verge of being a free agent. There was money to be made.

  Rory had decided to address his wrestling head-on. He was sparring less and wrestling more, working out with a local high school coach, Brian Glenn, who had been third in the nation at one point and was about the same weight. We talked on occasion, and he took heart from the success of George St. Pierre. Rory would eventually make his way to Overtime Wrestling and a gym full of Olympians.

  I came out a few days before the fight. My first thought had been to get a hotel, stay out of the way. But then you realize that’s not what’s needed. Fighters, in the last days before a fight, shouldn’t be alone. They can’t train too much, so their energy level gets high, and the oppressive weight of the oncoming fight looms large. Rory even laughed about it, “Dude, don’t leave me alone in my house watching fight tapes and doing push-ups and freaking out.”

  We went to dinner, we went to the movies, we watched TV. I kept Rory company as he worked out, as he finalized his “cut.” There was a big gleaming gym near his house that he liked to use, so his girlfriend dropped us off.

  Even before we started Rory was bony and pale, and his natural good humor was long gone. He grew quieter and quieter as hunger and dehydration took their toll—and this for a “catch-weight” (informal) of 180 pounds, a full ten pounds heavier than what he normally had to make.

  We sat in the sauna and began to tell stories to pass the time. Rory’s background is somewhat typical for a fighter, the estranged father, the single working mother, the tough part of town. Rory has his own demons of rage—he loves to fight. He’s capable of getting really crazy. He’s looked into the void. He started telling me a story, a story I knew a little of, as we sat dripping onto the bone-dry boards, the heat itching our skins.

  “A lot of people said they were his best friend but Ed Bielskus was my best friend. We were inseparable. He lived four houses down from me. He would steal his dad’s car to take me to my full-contact karate tournaments. We were hoodlums.”

  Rory looked over at me, his eyes almost hidden beneath a tight wool hat. He was in a full “sauna suit,” made of plastic material like trash bags, and a sweatshirt and sweatpants to keep the sweat sloughing off him. I was sweating like a pig just in a T-shirt and shorts.

  “I was fifteen, he was sixteen. We were at the White Hen Pantry, hanging out, corner store . . . trying to whittle smokes off the cashier. Ed wandered off, and about an hour later a cop came by asking, ‘Is Rory Markham here?’

  “Of course, we got into a lot of trouble, so I dummied up. But listening to his walkie-talkie, I hear him talking about Ed. So I confessed to being Rory and tried to figure out what was going on, and the cop just got me in the car and drove off.

  “We came around the block and four stories up, across from the hospital is a parking garage. Ed is standing on one of the pillars, on the northeast corner, up on the pillar. I can see it like a painting.

  “There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks . . . and I was thinking to myself, What a fucking asshole and I assured the cop, ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’ I thought he was fucking around.” Rory’s voice was confident, everything a big joke. He paused and shook his head.

  “That’s something I’ve had to live with. I was sure I could get him down. Now, Ed had been doing some crazy things, like buying a boat with his dad’s credit card, but his dad was wealthy and Ed had never even uttered the word ‘suicide’ in passing.”

  The reasons are mysterious. Rory mentioned that Ed was adopted, and that it was troubling him, but it’s impossible for Rory to say. You can see that bothers him, the unfathomable nature of it. The unknown horrors of the human heart. If Rory doesn’t know this, about his best friend, then can anyone know anything about anyone?

  “I said to the cop, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ A counselor was talking to him, but he was shouting for me, ‘Get Rory up here!’

  “I came through the door, and he said everybody else stay back, and when I got five feet from him he held his hand out and started inching back on the ledge—he told me to stay there.

  “I was saying, ‘What are you doing? I love you.’ I knew he was serious. His eyes were . . . he was not there. I knew shit was fucked up. I remember, with every inch that I came closer, any movement, a hair would blow, and he would inch his heels out over the ledge. His feet were more than fifty percent off the ledge. I tried to talk to him but he just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I just wanted you to be here,’ then he threw the keys to his brand-new Ford Explorer—and you know how important a car is for a teenager, it’s who you are. And then he went. He jumped like a reverse cannonball—he put his head down so his head would hit first. He flipped into a dive.”

  The sauna ticked, quietly.

  “There was an enormous pool of blood.”

  Rory paused and spit on the floor. I had nothing to offer him. I thought about this book, and the fighter’s mind. The motivations. The heat pressed in around us. Eventually, Rory started talking about the aftershocks, how everyone claimed Ed as a friend, people who barely knew him.

  “I’d make weird promises to myself and Ed, and I promised Ed in the bad times that I would become a professional, I’d fight in the UFC. I promised.” Rory looked at me and shrugged, and we went out to the chill air.

  We went from sauna to the stationary bikes. Rory had a system. He had to keep a sweat going to drop the water weight for the weigh-in. He cut too much, down to 178 at the end of an hour from 185. It came off too easy—but that meant it would go back on easy. He still had plenty of water left in him.

  At the weigh-in Rory’s opponent, Jay Ellis, finally showed, a muscular, smaller black man with glasses, a little on edge. Jay had a losing record, and he’d lost several fights in a row, but the worst part is he weighed in shockingly low, 161. Most people didn’t catch it but the few fighters who are friends with Rory laughed and a murmur ran around the room. Ellis was a replacement for Taiwon Howard who got hurt, a one-week-notice guy and probably the only opponent the promoter could find. He fights at 155, normally.

  Rory can rehydrate and did so with relish; he made 180.6. In a way, the fight was its own kind of test for Rory—could he maintain his professionalism, could he stay focused without a credible threat?

  When the fight happened, Jay Ellis—doing his “crazy” routine —ran at Rory and leaped, basically, completely over him. Rory pounced and started to work, but they were too close to the cage and Jay used his feet to run up the fence and reverse Rory. Then, lo and behold, Rory slipped on the triangle from the bottom and Jay was tapping before it was even closed—because Rory was using the squeeze properly, as Zé had shown him. To Jay, it felt tight, and it felt hopeless. Rory’s feet weren’t even in the proper position, he hadn’t secured the hold. But the squeeze was there.

  WITNESS TO THE EXECUTION

  Andre Ward in a virtuoso performance against

  Edison Miranda. (Courtesy: Andre Ward)

  Unpredictably, the moment of grace breaks upon you, and the

  question is whether you are ready to receive it.

  —Andrew Cooper

  Gunpowder was invented in China, maybe as far back as 850, and it traveled to Japan in the form of fireworks. It was never actually weaponized, and when the Portuguese introduced firearms in 1500 the Japanese reacted strongly. The ruling caste saw the social hazards—and an end to their way of life—in the potential equali
zer, and so banned it. They continued their endless feudal autumn, wherein most lives had little value, and samurai dueled to the death with the weapons of their grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers—the long and short swords. While the rest of the world plunged into the abyssal arms race, the samurai caste refined their techniques, using the tools they had perfected. These swords were the sharpest-edged weapons ever created by man. Smiths, considered national treasures and guarding their secrets, poured their souls into the blades, folding and pounding the steel thousands of times, over months, years. Horrifically deadly, dueling with those weapons was about as far out on the edge as you could go, walking a hair-thin line between life and death, risking everything to take everything. The modern mind reels at the thought of facing off with three-foot-long razors, where one of us will die. The levels of concentration, stress, and refinement of technique were stratospheric. Miyamoto Musashi, perhaps the greatest swordsman in this era of great swordsmen, wrote a book on fighting and strategy called Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings). Musashi was a warrior who rose to prominence by winning all his duels, some sixty of them. He was the culmination of a caste and way of life that devoted the entirety of its energies to study of the sword. He achieved a level of mastery that may never be seen again.

  When I started writing this book I was thinking about it as an updated Book of Five Rings, which has become a kind of knee-jerk part of any traditional martial arts philosophy; it was even adopted in the 1980s (when the Japanese business model was booming) as a self-help book for businessmen. A lot of people have found inspiration and guidance in the book, for all sorts of reasons, but one must never lose sight of what Go Rin No Sho is finally about: cutting.

  Andre Ward was the only American boxer to win gold in the 2004 Olympics. I have known Andre and his trainer and god-father, Virgil Hunter, since 2003. I wrote extensively about them in my first book, curious about the development of a red-hot boxing prospect in the early stages of a professional career. I had spent several months at King’s Boxing Gym, a throwback gym, dank, gritty, and functional. I lived near them in Oakland, in the desert heat, and drove through the dusty streets and sprinted hills and ran the parks. Virgil said to me once, “I knew Andre would win gold at the Olympics because I was influenced in my training by The Book of Five Rings, and that’s the symbol for the Olympics. Five rings.”

  Virgil and I have an interesting friendship; he’s in his fifties, black, from a militant background—Oakland and Berkeley in the ’60s and the overtones of black power. He’d come up from the streets and I was a white kid from the East Coast who went to Harvard. We were using each other in a classic boxing way: mercenary but mutually beneficial. I was getting good material for my book and Virgil was getting exposure for himself and his fighters. He knew how I saw him, as a wise trainer, and he could play that role, but he also knew it was no bullshit. Virgil really did have a profound understanding of the game. He had the goods and he knew it.

  Boxing is about reputations, and Virgil knew that the more I wrote about him the better for him, but only so long as his fighters were winning. Fighting has that beautiful bottom line: win. I don’t care how wonderful a human being Muhammad Ali was, without his big wins—if he had lost those marquee title fights—he wouldn’t be the sportsman of the century. No one would care if he refused the draft or not. No one would care if he changed his name. So I won’t overestimate my importance but I could be a help. Plus we had a genuine liking for each other, a respect because I could understand him; to a certain extent I could pick up what he was putting down.

  Virgil met Andre when he was nine years old and saw something in the little boy—the ghost of a killer’s punch, some premonition of speed. Andre, his dad, and Virgil had embarked on a career together. Andre’s father had been a boxer who loved the sport, and he wanted Andre to learn it properly, how to hit and not be hit.

  Andre, or Dre to his friends, trekked to the boxing gym after school and he stuck with it, day in and day out. He was caught in the inevitability of it, like a soldier swept to war, but he was also called by something inside of him. He came to love and hate the gym. The gym is the anvil on which boxers are forged, tempered like a samurai sword with thousands of hammer blows, bending steel into steel. Fighters are born in the dedication to repetition. It’s not about who is stronger and faster, although those things can cover for other problems. Nothing can replace natural self-discipline; nothing can replace time in the gym. Andre loved boxing, and you have to love it to be great. To compete at the highest level requires eight or ten years of groundwork, going to the gym and working to get better every day, day in and day out, with no end in sight. You have to love the journey.

  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers is a fascinating look at success. He talks at length about the search for innate talent, and a mind-blowing study he cites is an investigation by psychologists at the elite Berlin Academy of Music. These psychologists looked at the violinists and found a very simple correlation—the more they practiced, the better they were. They checked it with the pianists and found the same thing—everybody had some talent and started playing around age five. “But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else . . . until by the age of twenty they were practicing . . . over thirty hours a week.” These were the players who were the virtuosos, the ones who would go on to become famous performers, world-class talents, “geniuses.” The lower half, who did only eight hours a week, were destined to be music teachers.

  And the incredible thing was there were no “naturals” who were at the top without this commitment. Nobody in the top third didn’t practice thirty hours a week since childhood, and there weren’t any “grinds,” guys who worked that hard but just couldn’t make it. There’s a magical number: ten thousand hours of diligent, intentional, informed practice. “That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work harder, or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”

  The ten-thousand-hours thing apparently comes up in just about every field and discipline. I had a painting teacher who told me in college, “You just got to push paint around for ten years before you figure it out.” Even a prodigy like Mozart got in ten thousand hours; he just started early. Gladwell wasn’t the first to notice this. The basic signifier for expertise had been set at ten years of practice by everyone studying these things, but his book is well written and really brought the point home.

  With boxers, with fighters, you have to have get your ten thousand hours in before you’re too old to fight, which is why you have to start so young. And there is a certain amount of athletic ability and toughness needed. Gladwell makes the point in basketball—if you’re five-foot-five, you can practice ten thousand hours with the best coaches in the country and still probably not play in the NBA. But if you’re over six-five? If you have the bare minimum of ability? Then it comes down, overwhelmingly, to commitment.

  Virgil started sparring Andre at around age eleven, with a kid named Glen Donaire (who’s won flyweight, 112-pound titles, as has his brother Nonito, the current IBF flyweight champ). Glen was older, and about the same size, but more advanced and physically mature—he would “put it on” Dre with ease. “I wouldn’t let Dre take a real beating, but I’d let him get frustrated. He’d get hit.” At this point, Glen so far outclassed Dre that Glen wasn’t concerned at all with what Dre would throw back.

  Virgil talked at the local coffee shop, Coffee With a Beat, sipping his tea, his eyes hidden behind his glasses. Watchful, his voice was quiet with the sibilance of confidence.

  “Dre was running all around the ring, ducking and dodging, turning, grabbing, holding on—not punching but surviving. So I encouraged that. ‘Don’t let him hit you,’ I told Dre. I never mentioned fighting back. I wanted to know if he could take it before he started dishing it, to handle the pressure. He can’t beat you up if he can’t ca
tch you.” Virgil as a trainer needs to always evaluate where his fighter is, mentally. Especially at a young age, you need to see what you’ve got, because otherwise Virgil could waste years of his life training someone who will never be successful.

  Virgil smiles. “Sometimes there were tears, but they were retaliatory tears.” He laughed.

  “I would cheerlead Dre, ‘man he missed you by a foot!’ and watch Glen. Glen was so confident, he would finally walk Dre down, when Dre got tired, and stand right in front of him and look him over. Glen would stand there and look for an opening to land his punches.” This went on for weeks, with Dre learning how to move, to get out of the way, to avoid damage from a better, stronger, more experienced guy.

  “So I taught Dre this little hook-jab-type punch, and I told him every time he stops in front of you hit him with this little punch, and then go move again. Lo and behold, the next sparring session, Glen pulls up in front of Dre and pow, Dre pops him and then he goes. Of course, this incited Glen—we’ve been sparring three weeks and you’ve never hit me—so he would swarm Dre and try and get that last hard punch in. The next couple of weeks, that was the routine, hit him and move fast. Just as Glen was pouring it on, I’d stop it. I’d let Dre take one good hard shot, and then I’d stop it, middle of the round or whatever. I was looking for one thing.”

  I can imagine Dre’s life—the constancy of the boxing gym after school, the routines and smells of leather and Vaseline, hand wraps and boxing shoes. Ever present was his white father, Frank Ward, who’d been a heavyweight with ten amateur fights, who pushed him and be-lieved in him, and tall Virgil watching and teaching him. Virgil had been an officer at a juvenile delinquent hall his whole working life; one thing he understood was young mens’ psyches.