Fighter's Mind, A

by Sheridan, Sam

  The first true, “gee whiz” moment of modern American MMA is Joe Rogan calling out “That man is my hero.” He was talking about Randy Couture, maybe the greatest MMA fighter to date.

  Randy is not the best fighter we’ve seen, or even the most unexpected. And he would almost certainly disagree with my characterization. Nonetheless I will stick with it. Randy is the first Great American MMA fighter. He earned greatness in the moment, not through hype or hyperbole, and not through dominance; his record is 16-8. He’s had his share of defeats. Randy earned it with upsets. Randy goes into fights as a serious underdog with regularity, and he pulls off genuine shockers. He does it often enough to make it familiar, and feel inevitable as you see it unfold—yet each fresh time, it seems he must succumb, and we relearn his greatness.

  My background, such as it is, is in striking. I have learned a little jiu-jitsu late, and never really liked wrestling. But the deeper I got into MMA, the more I realized how important wrestling is. At first, when I saw the good wrestlers doing well, I thought it was because of their athleticism and ground control. They don’t have a professional avenue open to them after college, unless they’re huge and can go into the WWE or the NFL. It made sense that wrestlers would be great ground fighters, and they’re already practiced at cutting weight.

  After several years of MMA, I gradually came to the realization that, in fact, of all the disciplines wrestling is probably the most tactically important—for the simple fact that if your wrestling is better then YOU decide. Meaning if your wrestling is better than your opponent’s, you can either A) take him down, or B) prevent him from taking you down. So you decide where the fight goes, and you can make that decision based on where you feel strongest. Randy uses his wrestling—his trapping clinch, dirty boxing, and filthy Greco—to put fighters where they least want to be and then absolutely smothers them. He drowns fighters right before your very eyes.

  I realized from Dan Gable and Randy and all these other wrestlers that there is another great edge that elite level wrestlers bring to the MMA world—mental toughness and conditioning. Mental toughness is a dominant factor in wrestling, and wrestling practices are the hardest in sports. Wrestling has such a huge conditioning factor that the guys who excel have developed extraordinary mental toughness—indeed, much of the training is focused on pushing through internal walls of exhaustion and breaking your opponent. Wrestling is by design a “game test,” a test of will and conditioning. It’s harder than fighting in some ways, because there are so many fewer options; it’s man on man and muscle against muscle for the whole match.

  Randy Couture was an all-state high school wrestler, and he married young, after high school. Struggling for work, he joined the army and wrestled on the army team. Still, the athletic path was a rough road. Randy was never given anything; he worked for every little step. Eventually he became a student at Oklahoma State, he was an NCAA all-American, and then he coached at Oregon State, but all the while he fought to make the Olympic team in Greco-Roman wrestling. Greco-Roman (as opposed to freestyle) is all upper-body takedowns and clinches—no attacks on the legs. Randy struggled for eight years in the international wrestling world, often ranked number one but never quite winning the right tournament to earn a spot on the Olympic team. He lost critical matches through overtraining or overconfidence.

  I talked to him at his gym in Las Vegas, Xtreme Couture, a mecca for fighters. Randy’s got a genuine goodness about him that even the cameras pick up—an honesty, an openness. He has a craggy, noble face that creases into a smile like an old cartoon of the sun.

  When Randy started fighting, it was almost an afterthought—let’s see if I can do this, have some fun. The Olympics had been an albatross around his neck, a crushing weight of expectation and disappointment. He didn’t put any pressure on himself in fighting; that was saved for the big wrestling meets. Fighting was just a gas he was doing on the side, and he performed better than anyone thought possible. He was so good they called him “the Natural.”

  Randy arrived at the UFC at the ripening age of thirty-three, and after one fight he upset the seemingly unstoppable Vitor Belfort. He beat Mo Smith for the title in only his third fight. This was for the heavyweight title, which topped out at 265 pounds. Randy had a contract dispute and was stripped, but he won the title back two years later. Randy then lost to the much bigger wrestler Josh Barnett, and the heavyweight division was full of guys who had to cut weight to make 265 while Randy fought at 220 or so. Feeling the squeeze from these behemoths, Randy moved down to light heavy (205 pounds) and beat Chuck Liddell, another upset. Then came the biggest fight of his career, against Tito Ortiz, when Tito was at his peak, the young, unstoppable killer who would bound nearly out of the cage in his prefight warm-up. Randy was forty years old and he dominated Tito for five rounds in a win that solidified his myth of defying reputation. Overnight, his nickname changed from the Natural to “Captain America.”

  Randy then lost twice to Chuck Liddell, who had adjusted his style to perfectly counter Randy. After the second loss, Randy retired from the sport, working as a commentator. He couldn’t stay away, and after watching Tim Sylvia defend the heavyweight title in what he felt was lackluster fashion, Randy came out of retirement at the age of forty-four. The six-foot-eight, 265-pound Sylvia seemed a lock to destroy Randy and fans worried for Randy’s health—until the first few seconds of the fight, when Randy (with the perfect game plan) knocked Tim Sylvia on his ass and put it on him for the rest of the fight. Randy defended his new title once against Gabe Gonzaga, with a clinic on how to use the cage as a tool, and then resigned from the UFC. He was chasing the biggest fight in the world, with Fedor Emelianenko, the Russian heavyweight, who was somehow (essentially) unbeaten in MMA and was generally held as the greatest MMA heavyweight of all time. The UFC, with its restrictive contracts, couldn’t sign Fedor but wouldn’t let Randy go, and hung him up in court until Randy was forced to come back. No organization will let its heavyweight champ fight someone it doesn’t have a contract with. What if their champion loses? What’s the belt worth then?

  For his “welcome back, champ” fight, he was matched for the title against Brock Lesnar, a wrestling goliath who outweighed him by fifty pounds. Lesnar is a huge man, built like a silverback gorilla, and a terrific athlete, an NCAA wrestling legend. The first round was classic Couture, Randy in control, chipping and scrapping, and the air was pregnant with the possibility of a further demonstration of Couture’s greatness. But it was not to be; in the second round Randy got caught. Brock is unreasonably fast for a man his size, and Randy’s head movement had slowed down that last little tick, putting him in reach. Brock punched and Randy moved a second late, got clipped behind the ear, and went down.

  Maybe at forty-five the end is finally on Randy, but it should never detract from what he’s accomplished, and when he fights again don’t bet against him.

  “One of the things about being an underdog, there’s no pressure. Nobody expects you to win. It frees you up to go out and compete. We often complicate things with fear of failure, all that baggage of winning and losing. Being an underdog is freedom.” This knowledge hadn’t come easy to Randy; he’d earned it. We sat in his office at Xtreme Couture, the Vegas sun spilling like liquid gold outside on the pavement.

  “I realized I get way more nervous for wrestling than for fights. Way more keyed up. When I realized that, I thought, That’s odd. This guy could kick my head off, but I’m not worried about that at all. I’m having fun, I’m enjoying learning all this new stuff. I stopped and thought, Why the hell am I so nervous for the wrestling matches? I’d lost perspective, and I was putting all this pressure on myself. It came down to one match—everything hinged on it—so I’d forgotten that I loved to wrestle and why I started wrestling—because it’s fun.”

  Randy had been dealing with the systemic pressure that elite athletes face, the overwhelming pressure to succeed. The Olympics is particularly grueling in that respect—there are no seasons, no
multiple game series, not many chances to fail. When you’ve worked every day for four years (or a lifetime) for a goal, and all that work comes down to the next ten minutes, it’s hard not to feel pressure—shattering pressure. But it is precisely how you deal with that pressure that dictates your chances of success. It is the catch-22 vise for Olympic athletes.

  Randy has found his way through. He’s regarded as the strongest mental competitor in MMA. He develops uncanny game plans and sticks to them. He knows in his heart that he has as good a chance to win as his opponent.

  “The first thing is perspective. I frame things in a positive way and stay reflective. It’s almost a cliché, but in the grand scheme of my life, if the worst thing that happens to me is I lose a wrestling match, even if it’s the Olympic finals, then I’m doing pretty damn good.” A fight, even a title fight, barely registers.

  “Right away that takes some of the pressure off. I know I’ll survive it, it’s not the end of the world. I won’t like it; I don’t like to lose, but the people who really care about me don’t care about me because I win. They care about me and want me to be happy. I think this helps me overcome the classic fear of failure that most athletes set themselves up for. They’re so worried about looking stupid, or making a mistake, they don’t do what they’ve trained to do. They get in their own way.”

  Randy understands what I’m looking for.

  “You have to put a positive frame on things. In wrestling, in a heated match, sometimes the difference in the match is that you got called for ‘passivity,’ or your opponent did. You know you’re working your ass off, and then the referee decides for whatever reason that you are more passive than your opponent, so the ref gives him the choice, and your opponent sticks you in the disadvantaged position. And it would get to me, because no one was as active as I was in matches. It would really mess with me when I got called for passivity.” He shakes his head in remembered frustration.

  “Then I figured out, with my coaches, that it was okay, it was a coin toss. The ref was going to call it on somebody. So why am I getting upset? It was taking me out of my game, and I was losing matches because everyone would put you in the disadvantaged position, and I’d get turned and scored on because I was pissed off.

  “So I started framing it as ‘out of my control,’ what the referee does. It’s no big deal, this is just another thing to beat. Now my opponent will put me at a disadvantage, but he’s still not going to score on me. So, psychologically, that will have a big effect on him, it’s one more place where I can break this guy. Who gives a shit what the ref thinks? It’s all about my opponent.

  “Once I wrapped my head around that, I started savoring those situations, not that I ever stalled, but when the passivity call came I looked at it as a positive. Here’s a place where he can’t turn me, another place for me to attack him, wear him down. By creating a different perspective on the same situation, then technically things went a lot better. I thought better, my defense was better, and I had more success.”

  When Yagyu Munenori (the legendary swordsman and contemporary of Musashi’s) wrote that “another man’s sword is your sword,” he meant just that. If your understanding is deeper, his weapons are your weapons, and you can turn his weapons against him. His own sword is more dangerous to him than to you.

  The importance of coaching and cornering is not lost on Randy. “The corner has to have a real understanding of his fighter, seeing things that he can do. You use a word or a phrase, when he gets distracted, when he gets flustered or hit, you use the word or phrase to get you centered, bring you back to your training. Maybe ‘move your feet’ and that goes to your game plan, footwork.

  “A guy gets caught, his bell gets rung, he needs a place to go mentally, to get him back to safety. For Chuck it was, Chin down, hands up. For Tito it was, Scramble, don’t concede, because I didn’t want to give up the takedown. The Tito fight became about who was going to give up the takedown. If I got it he was going to have a bad night, and if he got it, I would probably have a bad night.

  “But you have to be careful with saying don’t get taken down because that’s a negative statement. I was coaching this kid who was winning by one point with thirty seconds left in the match. All he has to do is not get taken down so I’m screaming don’t get taken down! And whaddya think happens? What did I put in his head?”

  Randy frowns and shakes his head ruefully.

  “Instead of giving him positive things to do—get an underhook, tie him up, stay in his face, the things that got him to this point of winning—I give him something negative and he gets tentative.

  “It’s the same in fights. Don’t get hit by the right hand, well shit I just got nailed by it.”

  He pauses, musing, and then picks up his earlier thread.

  “So that positive phrase will refocus him, keep him on track. You want to be calm and focused, not emotional and excitable. But if he needs a slap in the face to wake him up, you gotta do it. All fighters are different. Forrest Griffin needs to be slapped around the locker room or he’ll have a slow start. Karo Parisiyan is the same way. You gotta jack him up. With Mike Pyle I try to settle him down. If he’s smiling and joking he’ll do well, and if he’s intense and inside himself something’s wrong.”

  When you hear Randy describe what he’s going to do in a fight, or talk about another fighter, his language is interesting. It’s technical and dry and devoid of emotion. Randy sees a problem, a technical problem, not an emotional fight filled with fear and rage. He talks about solving Tim Sylvia’s reach advantage like a plumber talks about coming at a leak.

  There’s a reason for this dispassionate observation, and it goes back to wrestling. Even from the beginning, in high school, Randy found what worked was an “in-your-face” type of wrestling, which required he outwork his opponent. In his book Wrestling for Fighting, Randy said, “My style certainly wasn’t the prettiest, but it proved quite effective. During my senior year in high school, I plotted and pounded my way . . . to the State Championships.” You could say that he’s been plotting and pounding ever since.

  Randy can’t deny his own genetic gifts—he’s a natural athlete whose longevity has defied all conventional wisdom on aging. He single-handedly keeps about a dozen aging fighters from retiring. They see him win and think, Why not me? But they’re not Randy. He was featured on a TV show, National Geographic’s Fight Science, where they measured his lactic acid levels (the acid that builds up in muscles as they fatigue and burn oxygen; that tired feeling is lactic acid buildup). Randy was straining and choking a training partner—and his lactic acid levels actually dropped, as did the jaws of the monitoring scientists.

  Randy may not have been the fastest or most purely athletic wrestler, but he loved to train and he could train harder than just about anyone. He’s smart—at Oklahoma State, after the army, he had a 4.0 GPA and was an academic all-American as well as a wrestling all-American. Although they called him the Natural, Randy never felt that way about himself. He titled his autobiography Becoming the Natural, and it shows how his career, his success, was a process, that it was worked for—it wasn’t a free ride on talent.

  His brain has been his biggest asset in his fighting career. Most other fighters will express admiration for how scientific he is, how technical. Randy was always developing his “plotting” skills as well as his “pounding” ones.

  These skills—watching opponents closely, studying tape, and crafting game plans—were honed to a fine point during that long Olympic chase. In the years that Randy didn’t make the team, especially in ’92 and ’96, he was stuck in the unofficial Scrub Club.

  “That’s what we called the number two and number three guys, the Scrub Club. We’d travel with the team but wouldn’t get tickets to many events. We were alternates but it was only until the first weigh-in, after that you couldn’t enter. We scouted, we filmed matches all day long so that the guy we had advancing in the tournament knew who he had next. We filled out scouting reports and wat
ched tons and tons of tape.”

  Even now, Randy sighs at the memories of monotony tinged with gnawing disappointment.

  “That mind-set carried over into fighting. I watched because I liked to watch fights. I would watch how guys were technically doing things, making adjustments.”

  Randy had a whole professional life of scouting opponents and breaking down tape, and he applies those lessons to all his fights. He would see what he needed to learn and then hit the gym religiously, intelligently, to learn it.

  “I had several of Vitor Belfort’s fights on tape and I watched them carefully. I saw okay, he’s left-handed and leads every combination with his left, and he’s very straight-ahead, and he’ll blow through you if you stand in front of him—so I’ve got to work on footwork. I had to learn to box because wrestling won’t work, so I got a boxing coach and started circling left all day. I was confident that if I could get my hands on him I could wear him out, make him work harder than he wanted to work. No one gave me a snowball’s chance in hell.”

  It was all the new knowledge, hiring new coaches and learning entirely new disciplines, that really excited Randy. “I love to train and learn. For me a that’s like a kid in a candy store. The things I was learning in wrestling at the end of my career were so minuscule, tiny technical variations, little changes to grips, things like that. But fighting had so many dimensions, new techniques, it was as exciting as hell. When I’m done learning I’m done winning.”

  Randy learned from his own teaching of wrestling. “The more I taught, the more I dissected my game. And the more I dissected my game, the more technical I became. A lot of wrestlers never truly take the time to analyze how they do what they do, which makes it difficult for them to go down on all fours with a fine-tooth comb and refine their game,” he said in Wrestling for Fighting.