Beast

by Doug Merlino

  As he waited for his bag at the Beijing airport, he was approached by an English-speaking taxi driver who offered to take him to the tourist sites. Instead, Monson asked to go to the hospital. The driver acted as his translator.

  Monson had a detached retina. The Chinese doctors prescribed painkillers so he could make the flight home, where he had surgery.

  To recover, Monson was supposed to lie totally still on his stomach so that his retina could fully reattach. He couldn’t stand it and was soon back training. He took a fight in Geneva in March 2013 against a Croatian. In the first round, Monson’s pectoral tendons tore, detaching the left side of his chest from his skeletal system—he described it as similar to the buttons of a shirt popping out. It rendered the left side of his torso useless.

  Monson did not want to lose. In the second round, he used his right arm to take down his opponent, who toppled over and grasped his knee—he had blown out his ACL. Monson had won again. In the sixteen months since his fight with Fedor, he had fought seven times, with six wins with one draw. He returned to Florida for yet another surgery.

  . . .

  M-1 Global, the Russian promotion, had featured Monson in its posters and advertisements for its April fight: He was by far the biggest star they had. He didn’t want them to know he had to drop out because he had hurt himself by taking a small-time, random bout in Geneva, so he reported that he’d been injured in training. They flew him over to make an appearance nonetheless.

  We drove out to the Saint Petersburg Ice Palace for the event. Midway through the card, Monson entered the ring. Spotlights moved over the darkened arena. Monson spoke into a microphone, his face projected on the scoreboard over his head.

  “I’m glad I’m here tonight, but I’m here with a heavy heart, because I can’t be with the other fighters because of an injury, and I apologize,” he said.

  A translator repeated the sentence. The audience applauded.

  “I want to thank you especially for making me feel at home. I’ve said many times that I feel every time I come here I have a connection with the people in Russia, especially coming to Saint Petersburg, my favorite place in Russia, and you’ve opened your hearts and homes to me.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “My friends tell me they think in a past life I was Russian because I love to be here so much, so I want to say spasibo, thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you again.”

  Monson exited to applause and returned backstage.

  One of the ring card girls, stunningly beautiful, about six feet tall in stiletto heels, hair dyed a shade of orange, held out her phone.

  “Photo?” she asked.

  Monson put his arm around her and posed.

  He stepped away and stood beside me. “I wonder,” he said, “in five or ten years, is any of this going to seem real? It will be like, ‘I can’t believe it.’ You know? Like, now I’m at Walmart, pushing a shopping cart, getting some cereal. It will be like a dream.”

  Monson and I had both grown up in the Northwest at the same time, he in Olympia and I in the suburbs of Seattle. We could have faced each other across the line in high school football—at the time, he was not a standout athlete. Through force of will, he’d pushed himself from there as far as his body could possibly take him.

  Most people spend their lives fantasizing about what might have been. Monson was doing it. There was surely a price to be paid, in both personal relationships and physical health, which Monson knew as well as anyone. He was living highs and lows that most of us can only imagine. It was fun to travel with him, to see the world shaped around the celebrity he had created. But there was always a sense it could crash down at any moment.

  The ring girl teetered back toward the arena, her heels clacking on the concrete floor.

  One Step Back

  One afternoon in February 2013, Daniel Straus and I met at American Top Team and went to lunch. Bellator had scheduled his title fight with Pat Curran for early April, a little over a month away. But Straus’s left hand was in a pink cast that ran down to the middle of his forearm.

  It had hurt for more than a year and a half, after he’d injured it grappling with Mike Brown in practice. He thought it was a bone spur and had fought with it that way four times. When he aggravated it again in a training session, he went to the doctor and found out it had been broken the whole time. His title fight was on hold while he recovered.

  He was in good spirits, considering the setback. “It sucks, but it hasn’t shaken me any at all,” he said. “It just makes me understand how important it is for it to be healed all the way for my next fight. Usually I’ll go into a fight, as long as I can punch, I can take a little bit of pain, whatever. Then I have three months to heal up. But now I have to take the time to heal. I don’t want to rush myself into the fight.”

  He had just rented an apartment in the area to train full-time at ATT. At twenty-eight, this was his time to make it: Lower-weight fighters, more dependent than heavyweights on speed, were known to decline faster after reaching thirty. If he lost to Curran, Straus would need to run together another string of wins for a shot at the belt, chewing up time to get there.

  “I’m like everybody else, I want to get something jumping so I can make money, too,” he said. “Why can’t my brand sell? I’m still trying to lay those blocks. Because in five years my name could mean nothing, or in five years my name could mean a lot. If I lose and never win a fight after this, you’re not going to remember me because I got to the title fight.”

  A week later, I pulled up an MMA website and was shocked to see Straus’s mug shot and the headline: BELLATOR TITLE CONTENDER DANIEL STRAUS ARRESTED ON DRUG, TRAFFIC CHARGES.

  He’d been pulled over on U.S. Highway 1 in Fort Lauderdale while driving with two passengers in the car. According to the police report, the cops smelled “a strong odor of burning cannabis emitting out of the vehicle.” A search turned up small amounts of marijuana and ecstasy.

  Straus spent the night in the Broward County jail.

  . . .

  Not long after, we met at a Starbucks near the beach, sitting at a table on the crowded patio in front of the shop. Straus came with Rachel Lipson, his longtime off-and-on girlfriend, who had driven down from Tampa. They also brought Sincere, Straus’s new pit bull puppy, which Straus sometimes stopped to command in German to Setz! and Bleib!

  When he got out of jail, Straus was alarmed to find that he’d made news on MMA websites. People felt free to speculate on his character in the comments sections. Worse still for Straus, it brought back the whole story of his time in prison.

  When he’d started with Bellator, the promotion had wanted to use it as a way to hype him—a typical man-overcoming-troubled-past narrative. Straus, regardless of what the producer had said to me a few months earlier, had refused to play along. Prison was not only a part of his life he didn’t want to revisit, but he hated the thought of some kid watching and thinking it might be okay to mess up, get locked up, and think you would come out with a redemption story. Straus knew the vast majority of people released from prison did not have uplifting tales to share.

  Straus conceded he’d made a mistake, but he was surprised by the attention it had received. He still had a hard time when people he’d gone to high school with in Cincinnati came up and told him they watched all his fights: These had not been friends, just classmates there at the same time. Now everyone had a camera and Instagram and Facebook, and people seemed to care what he did. If someone posted a picture of him drinking a beer with friends, he thought, people would look at it, nod, and think: There goes Straus again.

  The Starbucks patio turned out to be a pit bull appreciation society. The couple at the table next to us broke into our conversation to say that they had pit bulls of their own. Another man piped in to say he ran a home kennel and loved the breed. “Wonderful dogs with terrible public relations,” he said.

  Sincere clattered across the concrete to a table where a mother sat with her el
ementary-school-age daughter. Straus hustled after the dog, commanding in German. The mom told him it was all right, and the girl, delighted, bent down to play with the dog. Straus joined her. Before long, the whole patio had either commented upon or stopped to pet Sincere, with Straus happily answering their questions about her breeding and training regimen.

  His future was uncertain. The amount of marijuana and ecstasy he’d been caught with had been small, but this was Florida. And it was unclear how things would play out with Bellator, which couldn’t be happy with the publicity. Straus had nothing to do but wait and see.

  He felt he had repeated an old pattern. For every good thing that happened to him—or that he made happen—an equally bad thing had to follow.

  Part Six

  Sport, Art, Business, Spectacle

  Death or glory, becomes just another story.

  —The Clash

  (Beowulf Sheehan)

  Do You Wanna Be a Fighter?

  The annual UFC Fan Expo was in the back of the Mandalay Bay Casino, past the gaming floor, the pool complex, the shops offering jewelry and wedding photography for those who travel to Vegas for their special moment.

  Farther even than the Shark Reef Aquarium, from which you entered a long, colonnaded hallway, where visitors were greeted by a cardboard cutout of Ronda Rousey and Miesha Tate, new additions to the UFC’s roster: The promotion, after years of insisting it never would, had just started to include women fighters. They were to be coaches on the upcoming season of the UFC’s reality show, The Ultimate Fighter, and posed in black sports bras and yoga pants, their facial expressions calibrated between pissed-off and come-hither. The legend read: GENDER. WAR.

  It was July 5, 2013, the start of the UFC’s yearly two-day celebration of itself. It would culminate the following evening with a UFC event headlined by a middleweight title fight between challenger Chris Weidman and champion Anderson Silva, one of the promotion’s biggest stars.

  It cost forty dollars to get into one day of the expo, inside the casino’s convention center, an immense space crammed with the booths of exhibitors vying to capture the attention of thousands of fans.

  There were UFC fighter bobble-head dolls. Jiu jitsu instructional DVDs. Specially formulated protein powders and other workout elixirs. Boxing and MMA gloves, punching bags, shin protectors, head gear (pink for the ladies). Gaudy T-shirts from companies such as Headrush and Venum.

  Strobe lights flashed. Electronic dance music bumped. Women dressed as ring card girls writhed to the beats on platforms. A booth for DART clothing featured a logo of a giant, muscled frog choking a man. A sign read: WHEN YOU COMPETE, DO YOU SAY: I WILL DOMINATE, ANNIHILATE, RUINATE AND TERMINATE COMPETITION. DO YOU EMBODY THE DART PERSONA?

  In one corner of the hall, near the women in leather riding chaps trying to entice people into the Harley-Davidson display, people crowded around an expanse of mats, on which ten grappling matches were occurring simultaneously.

  Another corner was reserved for demonstrations of UFC Fit, a branded exercise program the UFC was launching that appeared to be modeled on—if not a direct copy of—CrossFit.

  The periphery was lined with autograph booths. The UFC promised that more than thirty fighters would be at the event. Lines formed hours ahead of appearances by the most popular, such as Georges St-Pierre; fans corralled between metal stanchions.

  Four giant screens hung from the ceiling around the hall. At the moment, each featured a projection of UFC president Dana White’s face. His voice boomed throughout the space. He was on the stage opposite the entrance, wearing jeans and a Fox Sports T-shirt, a bulky man with a bald head and a malleable face that excelled at registering three emotions: Surprise, Amusement, and Rage.

  White was the UFC’s biggest star, his cartoonish everyman personality both beloved and reviled: To the average fan, he was the guy who had dragged the UFC and MMA into the mainstream. To certain MMA purists, he was a huckster who had devalued the essence of the sport to line his own pockets. Both sides had valid points. White was, in effect, MMA’s Elvis.

  He had scheduled an hour for question-and-answer time, fielding queries by alternating between two lines of people waiting at microphones on each side of the stage. Hundreds more massed around to hear him.

  There were plenty of young white men, but also Hispanic families, African Americans, women, children. They were mostly unimposing—the muscled and tattooed stood out—and might just as easily have been found waiting in line at the Stratosphere or having a frozen drink down the road at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville. These were the UFC’s most loyal customers—ones willing to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars to travel to Las Vegas for a long Fourth of July weekend, to visit the Expo and then take in a fight.

  On stage, White—known for tongue-lashing both reporters and fighters who crossed him—was clearly Amused. As in the opening scene of The Godfather, when Don Corleone entertains requests for favors on the day of his daughter’s wedding, he was in a mood to grant wishes.

  Many had lined up to ask him for a job with the UFC—in marketing, the digital department, copyright enforcement. White smiled and told them to give their information to his assistant.

  A woman wondered if she could stand with him on the stage for the weigh-ins that afternoon.

  “Sure, why not?” White said.

  Another told White he’d been to twenty-seven UFC fights and asked for ten minutes of his time.

  “You paid for twenty-seven of our events?” White asked. “How can I say no to that?”

  There were questioners from Abu Dhabi, Mexico, Panama, Utah, Cincinnati, Sacramento, various parts of Canada; all asked White to bring the UFC back to their cities.

  “We’re working on it,” White assured them.

  A young man on crutches approached the microphone. He had epilepsy, he said, and had flown down from Regina, Saskatchewan. His father had been turned back at customs, he said, but he had pressed on to seek an audience with White.

  He told White he had seen his video blogs about his Ménière’s disease, an inner-ear disorder that affects hearing and balance. The UFC president had undergone ear surgery, of which he had posted graphic footage, but it had failed. On a tip from baseball player Alex Rodriguez, White had gone to Germany to get platelet-rich plasma therapy, an experimental technique in which a patient’s blood is drawn, spun in a centrifuge, and then re-injected into the problem area. In concept, the enriched blood includes platelets and growth factors that speed healing.

  White had raved about the treatment and said it had cured his disease. The young man told him he’d had severe health problems for the last eight years. Could he just talk to White for a few minutes about what he’d had done?

  White’s face shifted from Amusement to Surprise. “Yeah, let’s do it. Come on over here, I’ll get you hooked up.”

  The audience burst into applause.

  “Thank you so much,” the young man said.

  White, a man who often seemed to have seen it all, looked, for once, truly shocked.

  . . .

  At the start of the 2000s, the UFC was in trouble. Owned by Semaphore Entertainment Group, the pay-per-view company that had produced the events since the beginning, the promotion had been swamped by years of bad publicity. In response to pressure, MMA was getting systemized and somewhat tamed. Unified rules implemented by state athletic commissions introduced changes such as weight classes, five-minute rounds, and a 10-Point Must scoring system similar to the one used in boxing, but it was a long slog to get back into arenas and onto television.

  In January 2001, Semaphore sold the UFC for two million dollars to Zuffa LLC, a company owned by Dana White and two brothers, Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta III. The Fertittas owned the Station Casinos, a chain of hotels and casinos catering to Las Vegas locals that their father had started in 1976.

  Lorenzo had gone to high school with White, who was a college dropout, former hotel bellhop, and amateur boxer. White owned a few bo
xing gyms in Vegas and managed fighters, including the UFC’s Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. When White heard that the UFC was for sale, he called his old friend. The Fertittas put up the cash, and White became the front man.

  The new owners continued the push to get MMA sanctioned by state athletic commissions and back on cable. The sport was legalized in New Jersey and Nevada, but the UFC still lost money—forty-four million dollars in the first few years, Lorenzo Fertitta has claimed. According to company lore, Fertittta at one point told White to find a buyer for the money-bleeding promotion—Dan Lambert of ATT is often mentioned—but then changed his mind and decided to give it one last shot.

  In the early 2000s, there were several smaller regional American MMA promotions—World Extreme Fighting, the International Fighting Championships, Rumble on the Rock, King of the Cage—also struggling to make it. The UFC was the biggest in the United States, but the most successful MMA promotion at the time was Japan’s PRIDE, founded in 1997 and immensely popular—it drew 91,000 fans to a 2002 fight in Tokyo’s National Stadium.

  In the United States, even to viewers who followed it, cage fighting was perceived as visceral, violent, crazy, only taken up by people who, like Jeff Monson, marched to a different beat. It had been exemplified by huge, brawling men such as Mark Coleman, Dan Severn, and Tank Abbott.

  White and the Fertittas knew that to broaden its fan base, the UFC needed both exposure outside of pay-per-view and a change in the perception of the sport. They decided the way to do that was through reality television and shopped a concept for a show. Spike, a new cable channel directed at a young male audience, thought that MMA might appeal to its demographic, but wouldn’t pay for it. Zuffa agreed to take on the production costs.

  They hired Craig Piligian, an executive producer on Survivor, to develop the series, which had a standard reality television setup. Sixteen fighters were chosen to compete—eight light heavyweights and eight middleweights. They lived in a Las Vegas house with no access to television, books, magazines, or any other form of entertainment, but plenty of booze.