Without a challenge, the top fighter has a hard time staying motivated, staying in the gym and doing what he needs to do. It’s fun at first, but after years and years of it, working out acquires a deadly dullness that needs a sharp point to pierce. And on fight day, unless he’s facing a really tough challenge, chances are he A) won’t get to show his skills and perform and B) won’t mentally be sharp. Most great fighters perform well only against great challengers, and often they give lackluster performances against mediocre opponents.
“For my guys, my fighters who lose, I tell them it’s a learning experience. I do my job as a trainer and make sure they’re not in there with someone who’s just way too good for them, out of their league. So I can honestly say to them, ‘Here’s the lesson,’ and if you learn it, it was worth it one hundred percent.”
Frank studied bodybuilding before he got into fighting. He brought a physical trainer’s mind-set—an understanding of musculature, anatomy, and force—to his grappling and later his striking.
“I was looking at the body and thinking about the angles and applied force in the holds, the strength and leverage of a body part. I look at someone and can see where they’ll be strong, where they’ll be weak.”
Frank’s a self-made man. Without an experienced trainer raising him, he was forced to be his own sage and expert. “I came up in submission wrestling, but I’m at the point where positions don’t matter in my world—not position for it’s own sake. How much energy are you expending? How much damage are you applying and how much damage is being done to you? Those are the big three. I like the endless flow of attacks, because it evens out the technical aspects. You may have a good grappler who’s a hundred times better than me, but when the flow never stops he has to have the muscular and vascular systems to keep up the pace.”
Frank and I sat in the dark in a wrestling room and Frank stretched slowly. He was perfectly content and relaxed, all business. I asked him to describe his mental process, and he willingly lectured, handing out self-evident truths.
“The mental side is broken into three areas or levels. One: the idea, the visualization or conceiving side. It’s hard to equate it to anything other than those positive-affirmation, self-help type of things. Olympic skiers visualize the course. For me, I do it for everything I do, not just fighting. Now that I’m commentating on live TV, I play it out in my head a bunch of different times, seeing ways it could go, making sure I hit the points I want to hit.
“The second part is replicating—just practice. It’s hard to believe something will work if you’ve never pulled it off. You practice the moves. The fighting ones are obvious, but for this last press conference I rehearsed with the fighters, I walked them through it, got them used to the sound of my voice. It chilled everyone out.
“The third part is doing, and every time you do it you get better. It takes less energy and stress.”
Frank paused in the dark. “So, one, two, three, and I end up with a result, but then I evaluate it. I think about changing what I did, and this is where a lot of people fall down. They go through a good process, end up with a result, and think it’s just fine. I won but I went to the hospital afterward.”
He smiled, his teeth flashing in the gloom. “Fighting is like a business. If you did a deal and you came away with twenty percent of the company and somebody owns you, you need to do things differently. If you won the fight but you’re in the hospital, did it really work out for you?”
Frank maintained that this process has helped him check his ego. He knew he had a reputation for being an occasional egomaniac. “If my ego was so big, I would never need to visualize anything. I would just do it and everything would be a hundred percent wonderful, right?”
I thought of Eddie Bravo’s discussion on ego, and Frank had a lot to say about it. “Ego is an evil thing. Confidence is important, but ego is something false. Humility is the way to build confidence, and ego is hugely dangerous in this sport, because if you’re running on ego you aren’t running on good clean emotions, or cause and effect. You bypass it to support a false idea. It’s all garbage, the ego is garbage.
“The hardest thing about being an MMA fighter is the huge ego boost you get from winning—not only from yourself but from your community. I hear, ‘Oh you’re the greatest, you don’t have to train all the time.’ Marcelo Garcia made the exact same complaint.
“Your own community is the hardest on you, because they’re in love with ego, too, and you have to fight yourself and them now. Anyone can fight, fighting is easy, but to sustain it, to remain normal and relaxed and grounded within yourself and your community, is really challenging.”
This is related to the other aspect of fighting that Frank has found to be challenging: fame. “Being famous is hard to do—it amplifies everything negative and positive about you. It’s amplified by your fans, whoever watches you. I see guys get famous and that’s a big test for them: what will you do with your ego and power and influence now?
“False ideas about yourself can destroy you,” Frank said. “For me, I always stay a student. That’s what martial arts are about, and you have to use that humility as a tool. You put yourself beneath someone you trust. That’s extremely useful.
“There is a belief in our system”—he was referring to his school—“that I came up with years ago, that it takes three people to make you into the best person you can be. Somebody better than you, someone equal to you, and someone less than you. People hear that and get freaked out, because they want to be better than everyone, or at least equal. The goal is actually to put yourself as the last person, even if you’re the guy in the lead. You can always find something other people are better at. So teach me, show me, let’s work on that. If you can accept the humility and understand why it’s important, you’ll grow so strong in every way. Imagine if you did that to every person you came in contact with? You put yourself underneath them to learn? I always stay a student.”
Frank launched into one of his favorite topics, his own scientific approach. “I study the biomechanics of the human body and look for the angles of strength. Where energy is distributed—I break down techniques into how much energy they expend. I go through the technique in my mind, and if your mind sees it, it happened. Whether it’s true or not, if your mind saw it, it happened. So I go through these techniques mentally. My confidence gets built up and I go in and try them, and then I evaluate it, think about how it worked. There’s always something that could be better, so you stay a student.”
One of the things I was interested in was the pysch-out games Frank played. He would very famously talk shit. He made it very clear that, at this level, anything was fair game.
“I listen to people,” he said. “They will inherently tell the truth about themselves—it always happens. I amplify things they say about themselves, either right or wrong. But the truth is stronger than anything. If you know a guy has bad feet, then he’s got bad feet! Just tell the truth. Some people, when they hear something like that, will fight it. They’ll argue, ‘Oh, no, it’s not like that.’ Now the game is on—because you’ve got a guy defending something you both know is false. He should say, ‘You’re so right, and I’m grinding in the gym to make myself better,’ but ego jumps in, ‘Of course I’m good and my footwork is fantastic!’” He gives me his now-familiar smile. “If someone says to me, you’re hands suck then I’ll be in the gym working on that extra hard for the next six months.
“Everyone has stuff they get nervous about, their personal shit, and if you hang around long enough they’ll volunteer it, or they’ll tell somebody else for you. I go after that stuff. Phil Baroni stutters. We know it, he knows it. Most people don’t pick up on it. But Phil hasn’t made peace with it. When I’d goof on him, he’d get mad.”
In one press conference, Phil was almost in tears. I get what Frank is about. He’s not picking on Phil out of nowhere, he’s not just an asshole. Mental toughness is on the table.
“Now he’s not in a peaceful mind,
ready to fight. Now he’s somewhere else, some other issue from when he was a kid. He’s not focused on the task or the goal.
“I talk to people during fights the whole time. I build on what I said beforehand. I picked that up from Bas Rutten. We’d both talk to each other the whole fight, and the ref used to warn us. Bas was funny. He’d talk to me as a way to pump himself up, ‘I’m so strong, I almost got you,’ more like Muhammad Ali, to empower himself. What he did wasn’t crafted to get into you, but I’m all about that privacy, that inner attack. It’s distracting and confusing and it’s supposed to be. If you hear it, it exists. Especially if you’re in a high-stress situation, with uncertainty anyway. I look in a guy’s eyes, and I talk down low, just for him. I don’t want anyone to hear it but him, not his corner, not the crowd. So when he goes back to his corner, and his trainer is telling him things, there’s another voice he’s been hearing. It falls into what he thinks about.”
This may be why some MMA fans dislike Frank; shenanigans like this are frowned on in martial arts. But Frank assured me that mental strength and focus are fair targets at this level of fighting. “It’s part of the game,” he kept saying.
Frank even confessed to a time when he was head-fucked by another fighter. It was the second time he fought John Lober, and Lober engaged in psychological warfare of a petty nature—ordering room service to Frank’s room, sending him threatening e-mails, prank calling him, getting personal.
“It was weird, funny childish stuff, but it made me upset. I was young, I had to learn. I went out all angry and kicked the shit out of him, but when it was over I had a big sobering up. I realized holy shit I exposed myself, being angry and frustrated. There was a moment when I could have finished him, and I thought no, I wanted to hurt him, and that could have been really bad. I could have let him off the hook, and he might have come back. I could have hurt myself or gotten hurt. He got in my head, plain and simple.”
I was reminded of Dan Gable talking about seeing a guy break, and staying on him—because if you gave him respite he could come back. Frank agrees wholeheartedly. “You have to stay on him when you see him start to break. My style is to break you. I try to get you to go anaerobic—change your fuel source so you’re no longer efficient, or you’re afraid of running out of gas, of getting knocked out. I fight at a pace that borderlines aerobic activity, which is hard to do unless you’ve got good technique. Don’t worry so much about positions, but keep the fight flowing at a fast pace. It’s a race. The person with the best conditioning and technique should win. I didn’t hurt Tito, I made him tired.”
Frank was talking about his epic battle with Tito Ortiz, one of the great early MMA fights. Frank fought the larger, younger, and angrier Tito for four long rounds, and in a superb technical display he finally started to take Tito apart in the fourth.
“Tito tapped because he was exhausted, and I was going to keep beating him. When you’re dog tired that lactic acid builds up, and you get sick and nauseous, and you have to do something. You can’t keep fighting. It’s conditioning. If you push them over the brink, they’ll lose everything. They break down, they feel like they could die. Fatigue makes cowards of us all, right?
“Anytime you can take a technique from somebody—absorb a big blow without damage, stuff a takedown—that’s huge. I don’t consciously do it, I technically do it. I train for it. If he’s got a great uppercut, I shift my hand over and take that away from him. I don’t think about it, but I can feel his energy subside when he thinks he’s done something good and it doesn’t work. You can feel him deflate. I’m always in tune with his energy, his emotions. You fight in front of thousands, but there’s only one guy. I hear him breathing, I hear the impacts, and I hear my corner, that’s it.”
Frank found spirituality in what he does, in teaching and training. “The core of every religion is a social structure that connects everybody, for the common good of society,” he said in a rehearsed line that rolls off his tongue. “For me, that’s what martial arts is. You teach children to make them better people, you teach adults to give them a better understanding of themselves, or of their partner. Some students will ask me to go to church with them on Sunday, and I say, ‘I go to church Monday through Saturday and Sunday I stay home with my family.’ That’s how I look at it.”
EVERYTHING IS ALWAYS ON THE LINE
Josh Waitzkin playing chess as a kid.
(Courtesy: Josh Waitzkin)
Josh rolling with Marcelo Garcia in preparation
for Abu Dhabi.” (Courtesy: Marcelo Garcia)
I first became aware of Josh Waitzkin through a friend from New York who’d played chess with him when they were both kids. “Did you ever see that movie Searching for Bobby Fischer? I drew that kid in a game,” he said, over a chessboard. “We were nine.” Not only had I not seen the movie, I hadn’t been aware that nine-year-olds played in chess tournaments. When I was nine I focused on tying my shoes and killing salamanders.
When I left Thailand, sailing across the Indian Ocean, I started reading chess books, just because I hadn’t studied anything since college. Funnily enough, one of the books I ended up with was Josh Waitzkin’s Attacking Chess, written when he was eighteen. I enjoyed the story more than the chess, which is a common thread for me; I buy chess books and read the introductions.
Later, when I was living briefly in Manhattan and studying tai chi with William C. C. Chen, I saw pictures on the wall of that same chess kid, Waitzkin, winning “push-hands” tournaments. Push-hands is the competition side of tai chi, a kind of flowing, standing wrestling where you push and pull, trying to either push an opponent out of the ring or “fall” him. It’s pretty fringe in the United States but a major deal in China and Taiwan, and Josh had gone there and won world championships. Now, push-hands is not MMA, but it’s also not a joke, especially overseas, where it’s taken as seriously as judo.
I finally watched Searching for Bobby Fischer, based on a book that Josh’s “Pop” had written about Josh’s early chess career. It’s a great story about a chess prodigy coming to terms with competition and life, and a fascinating look into the cutthroat world of child chess in New York, high-stakes pressure tournaments for eight-year-olds.
At the age of six Josh had been walking by Washington Square in Manhattan and was lured in by the commotion of “street” chess. The Square has a famous corner where hustlers play for money, raucous as any street basketball court. I’ve played there, and it’s a little rough on the ego to get shit-talked to, then slapped around the board by a black guy with muscled arms bigger than your legs. Josh started playing with these boisterous characters without ever seeing a chess board before, and he started coming back every day, winning more than he lost. With this rough apprenticeship, he’d gone on to become one of the top young players in the country. His story is powerful, and made more so by his struggle to maintain his identity and hold on to his childhood in a chessic world without mercy.
I had picked up a new book Josh had recently written, a nonchess book called The Art of Learning. The back is covered with intimidating quotes, effusive praise by everyone from Cal Ripken Jr. to Deepak Chopra—you better like it. Fortunately, it’s easy to like. It’s a great book, an honest and open look into Josh’s thought processes, and the lessons he’d gleaned from his study of the world. The book takes into account both his chess and tai chi careers, and I would recommend it to anyone. Josh has been in deep waters, at least in chess and tai chi, and he’s drawn genuine insight from them. At the end of the book he mentioned he was studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and that drew my attention. I knew some people who knew him, so I managed to get in touch. We set up a time to meet in New York.
Josh had been a star from six years old, immediately labeled “special” in the eyes of adults, and different than most kids . . . but then a hit movie about how wonderful you are, when you’re fifteen? What could that do to your ego? To be honest, I was pretty sure he was going to be an asshole. It was almost impossible for him NOT to
be.
He was taking jiu-jitsu, though—with an eye on competing in the Mundials (the world championship). I thought, Perfect, here’s a guy I can talk chess and jiu-jitsu with. If he was an asshole I could handle it.
When I met Josh in New York he reminded me of Caravaggio’s painting of Dionysus. He’s a good-looking, normal guy, medium height and thick, with the jiu-jitsu body, rounded and grounded. He had an amiable face, broad nose, and thick curly black hair, like an Italian farmboy. He laughed easily, things amused him, and he was intensely curious about the world. He didn’t come across as an asshole—he was a relaxed dude with a friendly intensity.
We laughed and talked and had coffee, and he was very complimentary about my book, and I about his. We both meant it.
Through it all, though, you could feel him watching you with those soft brown eyes—he didn’t look like a chess genius, he looked like a Mediterranean peasant. But in his eyes you could feel it—suddenly it made sense, the serious intellect behind there watching you, evaluating you, and cataloging weakness and strength, patterns. Listening intently, watching carefully without self-consciousness. “Tell me,” he’d say intently about something, an MMA fighter I knew, some detail from the book, and I’d try and be precise. He was watching for later use, gathering information. Here’s a kid who’s been playing serious competitive chess since he was six—of course he’s watching you like that, that’s how he grew up. Not all the time, but flashes, here and there.
At the end of his chess career, Josh was sort of off-balance from the pressures of fame, combined with a chess instructor who tried to lead him down a path away from his natural inclinations. Josh also talks about his emotions. “Now I don’t block them, I use them . . . I was brittle, locked-up, and now I can channel what I need to. It’s liberating and far more resilient.” He’s an incredibly emotional, heart-on-his-sleeve guy, something he freely admits, and which fuels him and his writing. But he learned to use his emotions, let his opponents read him, and then apply tiny emotional changes to mislead. He learned to channel his emotions into useful pathways, to ride them, in control and with understanding. Part of that process was the intensive study of tai chi.
Fighter's Mind, A Page 17