It's Time!

  I’d tried managing fighters for a while, but finally realized that it wasn’t for me. You have to be in the gym constantly, which makes it hard to focus on anything else. Your fighters have to be your chief concern. At one point, former UFC fighter Frank Shamrock wanted me to manage his career and build his brand in areas outside the world of MMA. I declined respectfully.

  “That’s not what I want to do,” I told my father. “I’m about making the deals, not dealing with day-to-day personality issues slowing me down.”

  My father got disgusted with me, and we hung up. I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. I thought, What the hell just happened? Two minutes ago, I was happy as hell. But this guy just stuck a needle in my balloon and sucked the life out of me.

  Sometimes I was able to tell him how I felt. At other times I just didn’t want to ruin my family’s evening, so I squelched it. I knew without a doubt that my father was one of my biggest fans, but there were times when I could not be in the same room with him. The heat of two stubborn men duking it out in a war of the wills was just too much.

  BUFFERISM NO. 15

  “THE ONLY WAY TO FOLLOW A HORSE IS WITH A SHOVEL.”

  My dad said this all the time. The best achievements in life—like fighting and poker—require skill and professionalism. There’s no skill in betting on horses, because you can’t control the outcome. Whatever you do in life, you’ll minimize your losses if you remember to apply your skill to endeavors you can actually control.

  But there came a time when I began to notice that my father was losing his edge. Spirited as he was, he could no longer deal with the physical demands of traveling the country and exhibiting his fine collection of historical guns and artifacts, while buying and selling and dealing with the public at these trade shows. Driving back and forth to Vegas and elsewhere was taking a toll on him and my mom. And it was then that I caught a glimpse of the future. My father had turned his back on the corporate culture, on its pensions and retirement benefits. If this man and woman who had loved us so much were going to live in comfort into their golden years, they would need a new breadwinner: me. And Brian was going to step into a new role as well, watching out for our mom and dad. In fact, that’s just what he did. When he retired from the force, he dedicated much of his time to helping them run their business, keeping things running smoothly, and making sure that the bills were paid.

  We did all this because we were family. And because we were a team.

  But, ironically, my father’s life changed the day mine did. In 1996—at the very moment Robert Meyrowitz’s office called to offer me my big break announcing UFC 10—my father and I were visiting my mom in the hospital. Later, as my father and I left to grab some sushi, he noticed a funny thing: his foot was acting funny. He’d take a step and one of his feet didn’t lift; it dragged on the ground and he almost tripped. Strange. But it turned out to be the first sign of neuropathy, a gradual deterioration of the nervous system.

  Over the course of a dozen years, he’d struggle with that and a host of other ailments. His short-term memory was going as well. At one point, as I was taking him, my mom, and their caregiver to the movies, my dad was telling us a story, and it suddenly struck me that nothing he was saying made sense. He was basically recounting for us a very far-fetched hallucination. I’d be having dinner with him and he’d insist that his father, the prizefighter Johnny Buff, had just walked into the room and sat down at the table to enjoy a meal with us.

  In his lucid moments, which were frequent, he hated what was happening to him, hated to see his body turning against him, and of course he was too proud to accept people’s help. If we were in a public place, he was especially self-conscious, and hated to have people see him walking with a cane, and then a walker. And so I indulged him far too many times, leaving the walker and, later, the wheelchair in the car, and coming around to take his hand or arm.

  Once we went to Geoffrey’s, a restaurant in Malibu that had a beautiful patio overlooking the ocean. I went over to take his arm as we left the car, and he said, “Son, you let me walk.” I knew he was self-conscious with all those people around. Although it scared me, I let him do as he asked. I felt I had to let him have that moment. But the times I could let him do that were rapidly coming to an end. He walked all the way through the restaurant, and just as he reached the table, that thing happened with his foot again and he toppled. I rushed forward. But he caught himself and slipped into the chair unharmed.

  My parents were luckier than most people who get to this point in their lives. When it became obvious that my father could no longer get up and down the stairs, Brian and I bought them a lovely single-story house within fifteen minutes of each of us in nearby Playa Del Rey, near the beach. After thirty-five years, they moved out of our beloved Malibu. I was able to hire two very loving caregivers to come live with them when it became obvious that my father was too much of a burden for my mother.

  Caring for a parent or loved one this way is not cheap. When people hear me talk about money, the assumption is I’m spending my fortune on wine, women, and song, but that is only half true. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the fruits of my labor; the last time I went to buy a new wardrobe, I easily dropped five figures on a half dozen new tuxedoes and suits. But a lot of my good luck has gone to care for my parents, too. And I would trade all my money and more to give them their health back.

  I’m happy to do it. My parents deserve it. They cared for me once, and now it’s my turn to return the love. I thank God every day that I have the resources to pull this off. My heart goes out to anyone who is caring for elderly parents. I don’t know how Americans do it without vast financial sacrifice.

  The public never knew this, but my parents’ health was and is often on my mind when I leave town for a UFC show. On the road, I’m often fielding calls from my brother or one of our caregivers. There were always little crises that rattled me: a fainting spell, a drop in someone’s blood pressure, bad falls, calls to the paramedics, trips to the emergency room, and Dad’s anger bubbling to the surface again. To be able to do a UFC event, I have to be able to put it all out of my mind and concentrate on my work. I need to put on a shoeshine and a smile and give a hundred and ten percent in the Octagon. It has always been my ritual to find a quiet spot when the show ends to call my parents and relive the highlights. “Well,” I’d say, “what did you think? Did you like the show?” I’d talk to them, get the update from the caregivers, good or bad, and then I’d hang up, put the smile back on my face, and head out for a fun evening.

  One day in 2008, Mom and their caregiver Daysi went to a bakery to pick up some special desserts for dinner. They went into the store, leaving my father in the car. Minutes later, they heard screams. They looked out the window and saw a crowd gathering around their car. My dad had decided to get out. In the three minutes it took for them to go into the store, he experienced one of his dementia moments. He forgot he could not walk, and when he got out of the car, he crashed to the ground and cut his head open. He had to be taken to the hospital. He insisted that he was fine when I rushed over to meet him at the emergency room. But when I went to pick him up when he was released three days later, he looked at me, his head bandaged, and said, “That fall took a lot out of me, son.”

  It tore me up inside. I know that it humiliated him, as it would any of us, to be helped from the wheelchair to the bed, to the toilet, to the dinner table. There were days when he’d kick up a fuss and lash out at Daysi, her daughter Yohanna, who was his second caregiver, or my mom, who were only trying to make his life more comfortable. Daysi and Yohanna had come to love him, too, and they wanted him to enjoy his days and be the loving, caring, and funny man he always had been.

  In one of the poems Dad read to us as kids, the poet Dylan Thomas wrote about the death of his father, also a military man. I’ll never forget the words Thomas used, urging his father not to give up without a fight: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

  My father raged,
all right. Man, did he. And I was always the heavy who was brought in to smooth things over. One night in the middle of May 2008, after he had a particularly bad, angry day, I came over after work, went into the den where he was sitting in his favorite chair, knelt beside him, and spoke to him face-to-face.

  “Look, Dad,” I said. “Please don’t get mad at me. Everyone here loves you. We know you hate this, but you have to understand that everyone here has feelings. The girls are just trying to help you out. You can’t treat them like this. Now, can we work together on this as a team?”

  He winced. Nodded. He knew I was right. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ll work on that.”

  “Good.”

  I went home that night, and later, just before his bedtime, he called. “Son, I just want you to know that I’m being my wonderful self. I’m behaving myself.”

  “I know you are,” I told him. “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you too, son. More than you’ll ever know.”

  He went off to sleep, but it was a fitful night for him. At one point he deliriously told his caregivers that the devil himself was perched at the end of his bed, waving at him, urging my father to come with him.

  About 4:30 a.m., Daysi called me. “Bon-Bon,” she said, using the name she calls me. “I have to tell you something …”

  She didn’t have to finish. I rose in the darkness and got dressed. I drove over. My parents’ house was silent. My mother was lying down. Daysi came out of my dad’s room. I went in and closed the door. I stood beside the bed and looked at my father’s body. Then I kissed him good-bye.

  This was the man who raised us, fought us, fought for us, and taught us. Once, in service to his country, he had barked orders to troops and taught them to fight with their hearts, minds, and bodies. He had charmed CEOs, movie stars, and countless women. He had captured one woman’s heart and never let it go. He had marched confidently through the glittering halls of those long-gone casinos in the desert, and played to win. He had pounded out thrilling adventure stories. He’d taught his sons all he knew in the hopes that they would become good men.

  Lying before me was the same man, only not. The man I knew was gone. What I saw before me were the eighty-three-year-old remains of that warrior. And some days later, when his ashes were scattered along the Los Angeles County coastline, we sent that warrior out to sea.

  My family felt great pain at his death. Brian and I had never lost anyone this close to us. But waiting on the other side of the pain was relief. He was a proud man, and we hated to see him suffer. We thanked God that he was in a better place.

  In the days after he passed away, I put his death in the back of my mind and went about my business. I thought I was dealing well with the loss. But then it all came back to me in the strangest way. I went to see the movie Gran Torino when it came out six months later. Clint Eastwood is phenomenal in the role of a tough Korean War vet who bonds with a young Asian kid who tries to boost his beloved Gran Torino. In the course of the film, you watch this tough old soldier take on a gang of young men, ultimately sacrificing himself to save his newfound friend from becoming a killer.

  Clint Eastwood’s toughness, his rage, his guts reminded me so much of my father that I was a ball of tears at the end of the movie.

  I was a wreck when I left the theater. I went to a bar and got a couple of boilermakers, a drink my dad and I used to like. Beer with Johnnie Walker Black. I sat in the bar and thought about the old days.

  For some reason, my father and the movies seem to come together hand in hand in my memory.

  In 1992 a controversial Quentin Tarantino film called Reservoir Dogs came out. Dad and I went to the Century City theaters to see it the Friday it opened. The theater was packed, and there in an aisle seat in the fifth row was a man laughing crazily at the scene where Michael Madsen tortures a restrained police officer, then callously cuts off the man’s ear.

  Everyone in the theater was quiet and stunned by the scene. But the sound of one lone man laughing maniacally turned my dad the wrong way. He didn’t take kindly to the thought of authority figures being tortured. No doubt in the back of his mind he was thinking of my brother Brian, who was an active member of the force at the time.

  My dad asked me for my keychain, which has clipped to it a kubaton, a small metal weapon that can be used for striking and submitting an opponent. I knew what he’d do with it, so I refused to hand it over.

  He stood and walked down to the spot near the screen where the man was laughing incessantly. I saw a shadow loom across the screen as my father leaned over him and said something. The man was lifted out of his seat for a second, then dropped back down.

  He didn’t say a word for the rest of the movie. Not a peep.

  When my dad returned to his seat, I asked him, “What did you do?”

  My father had leaned over the man, grabbed him by his lower lip, and wrenched him off the seat by tugging on his lip. He’d looked him in the eye and said, “Do you think this is funny?”

  The guy shook his head no.

  “Then I don’t want to hear you say a word for the rest of the film, or you’ll be carried out of the theater!”

  My father dropped him back into his seat.

  Now, sure, that was crazy. A situation like that could have turned on my father, who at the time was sixty-eight. I suppose we should give him props for wanting to go up against a much younger man at that age. When he was still in his fifties he’d told me that his biggest fear about getting older was not being able to handle himself in a fight if he had to throw down. Well, he had done fine that day. How many senior citizens do you know who would have done the same thing?

  But in our litigious society, he could easily have been sued, arrested, or both for his actions. It got to the point that whenever I went to the movies with him, I braced myself because I never knew what kind of crazy situation he would get us into. He believed in respecting others and was not shy about expressing himself. If you had your feet on the chair in front of you, then he would sit in front of you just to make sure you dropped your feet. Or he’d tell you to, even if you were the only two patrons in the theater.

  The movies and my dad also came together in my mind for another reason.

  A long time ago, when I was just a kid, after I had met the great movie stars Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell, my father berated me for not taking a picture of that special moment. “When you have a great experience,” he’d say, “you should always write it down or take a picture so you won’t forget it.” And he was right. Few of us realize the importance of memories when we’re young. It’s only later, when we start to see how short life is, that we begin to appreciate what a wonderful life we’ve had.

  Do you see now why I go out of my way to help fans get the pictures they want? And why I try to instill in fighters I meet that this really is a special time in their lives, one that is brief and beautiful, and that they will never get it back? You can fight into your forties if you feel like it, as Randy has shown us, but after that, you have the rest of your life to think about. How will that be? What is the next chapter? How will you meet the challenge of the passage of time? When I’m friends with fighters, I try to share that wisdom with them. No one ever laughs when I say this. I think on some level all athletes know that their time in the sport is brief.

  The Eastwood movie triggered a three-day period of mourning for me. My father was in my thoughts the whole time. And then, as quickly as the pain arose, it subsided again.

  Even before that, I knew I had to get on with my life. I showed up for UFC 84 in Vegas on May 24, only days after my father passed away, and pulled off another great night and went out with everybody to celebrate. I ran into Dana at an after-party that night after the show. He came up to me and offered his condolences.

  Then he said something to me that I will remember forever, as it solidified and justified the loyalty I swore to him and the Fertitta brothers to be their teammate and warrior through thick and thin. “I just wa
nt you to know that we know how fucking loyal you are,” Dana said, “and we love what you do. We want you with us till the day you die.”

  EPILOGUE

  RETURN TO THE OCTAGON

  As August 6 approaches, I’m good to go. When I board the red-eye for Philly, I’m wearing two things designed to safeguard my health: compression socks and an incredible knee brace custom-made for me by Össur, an Icelandic company that specializes in orthopedic devices. The paralympian champion Marlon Shirley hooked me up with them.

  I’m talking with Joe Rogan as we take our seats. He’s funny as hell, and he reminds me that he’s had the same surgery in both his knees, but he’s amazed by my progress.

  It’s nice to hear that, even if he is the umpteenth person to tell me. This is the first (and I hope the last) time I’ve gone through such surgery, so I didn’t know what to expect. Yes, I know it’s a common procedure in sports circles, but my pain-free recovery is apparently nothing short of miraculous. The day the doc walked into the office where I was sitting, he was happy to announce that the graft was still in place and everything looked good.

  Wow, I thought. So six weeks of pre-surgery workouts really did make a difference. Flavio worked me so hard during those sessions that I sometimes wanted to kill him. Three to four times a week, ninety-minute nonstop workouts. Thirty minutes of intense full-body stretching. Intense circuit full-body training, with special attention to my legs. Twenty reps a set, ten sets of three different leg exercises. He worked me harder with a damaged ACL than I ever lifted or trained with that leg when it was healthy.

  He worked me to the point that I wanted to throw up and punch him, not necessarily in that order. It did occur to me that maybe, just maybe, it was too much, and all for naught. The leg would heal the way it wanted to heal. But that wasn’t true after all. The crazy Brazilian had turned out to be a genius.

  “You got any special moves for tomorrow?” Rogan jokes now as we settle into our flight.