Beast

by Doug Merlino

  Daniel Straus fought for everything. In his mind, without fighting, he would be a nothing, just another ex-con that no one gave a shit about, struggling to find a decent job. Fighting was his path to a better life. When you added in his motivation to support his daughter, who in the world would want to get in a cage with him?

  Mirsad Bektic had lost his homeland. Fighting was his way to be seen in the world, to please the people he loved, to be great. When you faced him you were the human impediment to everything he hoped to achieve.

  Jeff Monson got into the ring to get what he felt he’d been missing since childhood: love, a way to prove his worth. It had also made him a celebrity, someone reporters loved to interview, women desired, people found fascinating. If he stopped, all that was going to go away. He would be just another guy shopping for cereal at Walmart.

  But Mocco had been a two-time NCAA champion, an Olympian, lauded around the world. He had a beautiful wife and three children. He still had his work ethic and code of honor, but what was going to trip the psycho switch when he got in the cage?

  In the arena, the final bout of the night was just about to start, a welterweight title fight between Joel Powell, who trained near Toronto, and Ryan Ford, a local fighter and crowd favorite.

  As it started, the two squared up, testing each other out for around thirty seconds. Suddenly, Ford threw a front kick that shot right between Powell’s hands, hitting him directly under his chin. A crack rang out that sounded like a wooden bat smacking a baseball.

  Powell’s head snapped straight back and his body crumpled to the mat. Ford jumped on him and punched him in the head until the referee managed to push him off Powell’s limp body.

  The people around me lost control in a way I had not seen at any of the dozens of MMA fights I’d been to: They leapt to their feet, baying as if jolted with electricity.

  Ford dropped his head back, spread his arms wide, and howled. He jumped up on the cage, pointed at the audience and screamed. The crowd stomped and yelled in return.

  Powell lay motionless for minutes.

  Finally, the medics pulled him to his feet. When they let go, he wobbled and nearly toppled before they could grab him. He hugged one just to stay upright. A few minutes earlier, he had been at the apex of youth and strength; now he looked old and used up.

  The ecstasy ebbed to an afterglow. Flo Rida came on the house speakers: “I get a feeling that I never, never, never, never had before,” a woman cooed.

  I still had the gloves in my hand. I gave up on finding the guy and went back to the locker room.

  We filed out of the arena through a concrete hallway under fluorescent lights and exposed pipes, up a back staircase, and out a side door.

  Joey drove back to the hotel.

  “How’d you feel when you got hit?” Hackleman asked Steve.

  “I mean, I could tell I was getting hit a lot,” Mocco said.

  “How’d it make you feel? Happy?” Hackleman asked.

  “No, it didn’t make me feel happy,” Mocco replied.

  “Make you feel like you still want to keep doing this?”

  “Yeah,” Mocco said, “yeah.”

  “He hit really hard?” Hackleman asked.

  “I didn’t feel like he hit me that hard,” Mocco said. “That one time I felt like I got lost a little bit. I was like, ‘Oh shit, I’m on my knees, I must have really got hit.’ But I didn’t feel the punch, you know? Kinda confused me a little bit, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes I do,” Hackleman answered. “I’ve been hit so hard I actually think my mom is calling me to come down for breakfast, I got to go to school.”

  . . .

  The next morning, Joey Mocco and Hackleman left for the airport at 4:45, pulling out of the hotel in the dark.

  Joey asked Hackleman what he thought about fighting for a living. Hackleman shook his head. He never encouraged anyone to fight professionally, he said. Better to do it as a hobby and find another way to make money. “I even told Chuck when he came to me not to go pro. I said, ‘You have a college degree, better to see what you can do with that.’ ”

  They went silent, each in his own thoughts as they drove out of town across the prairie.

  Peoria

  In early February 2014, Jeff Monson had not won in a year.

  After losing to Satoshi Ishii in October 2013, he fought a couple weeks later in a small promotion in a Seattle suburb, facing Mike Hayes, a veteran of average skills who had lost four in a row.

  The fight went the way they were all starting to go with Monson: His opponent stayed outside and hit from a distance. Hayes was no one’s idea of a technical striker, but by the end of the second round, Monson’s face was swelling from the abuse.

  “Who’s still awake?” the announcer asked, receiving tepid applause from the small crowd.

  “Two or three of you at least, it sounded like,” he said. “I’m hanging in there.”

  As the third round started, Monson pressed straight ahead, eating punches from Hayes. Monson went for a takedown but ended up just flopping on the canvas.

  He stood, took a right hand in the face, and dropped his hands. Hayes threw a high kick that smacked Monson in the side of the head.

  Jeff wobbled and collapsed to the canvas. Hayes knelt above him, bringing his fist down on his head like a hammer until the ref pushed him off.

  Hayes jumped up on the cage to celebrate as Monson lay there. A doctor rushed to attend to him. Slowly, he rolled over to his knees and struggled to get up.

  The crowd was already headed for the exits.

  Monson had never lost more than two fights in a row; now he had dropped four. He tried to justify it to himself: He was injured in the first two, he thought, and maybe he hadn’t trained hard enough for the last two.

  The most obvious answer was the one he avoided: He had just turned forty-three and his body was in decline.

  It had been a little over two years since his fight with Fedor had ignited his fame in Russia. The high point of his ascent there had been the Aleksander Emelianenko victory a year earlier. Now, Monson was desperate to win again, anywhere and anyhow. When a small-time promoter offered him a fight in Peoria, Illinois, Monson jumped at it, especially since the opponent would be a short, fat grappler with a 13-24 record. It was the easiest matchup he was likely to get. He agreed to do it for three thousand dollars to show, a thousand extra if he won.

  But in the weeks before the fight, which was scheduled for February 15, the promoter switched the opponent several times. Monson ended up facing Tony Lopez, another aging fighter, but one with a record of 33-14. Monson had beaten Lopez in a decision victory in 2011, but his skills had deteriorated since then. Worse, Lopez was tall and rangy, exactly the type of striker who could stay outside and jab Monson over and over.

  Paul Gavoni hated the fight. He had been encouraging Monson to focus on teaching seminars and finding other ways to capitalize on his fame in Russia and to limit, if not retire from, fighting. If he was going to fight, Gavoni told him, just do the ones in Russia where he was paid well. To fight in Peoria for three and one, he said, was crazy.

  Monson agreed that the pay was low but felt there was nothing to do since he had taken the fight. Gavoni called the promoter to negotiate. The whole event was based on exploiting Monson’s notoriety—he was the only one pictured on the promotional materials. Yes, Monson had agreed to it, Gavoni told the promoter, but that was when it was supposed to be an easy fight. Up the pay, he said, or forget about it. The promoter grumbled that he was going to expose Monson as a money-grubbing anarchist hypocrite, but finally offered nine and two.

  Monson still thought there was a big win out there ahead of him. The next Abu Dhabi grappling championship tournament was in 2015: If he could win it a third time, that might be it. Or maybe, he thought, he could get back in the UFC. To do that, he realized, he needed to string some wins together.

  But if he couldn’t do that, then what? There was no retirement in this job. He w
asn’t going to be like some of the guys now, leaving with money; he’d gotten into it too early. He’d made thirteen thousand dollars when he fought for the UFC heavyweight title in 2006. Now, he was blind in one eye and could barely sit down.

  Seventeen years, almost seventy fights. He tallied it up. All the bouts, all the grappling, the seminars, the trips here and there, the interviews, the posing for pictures, the injuries: All he had was a small piece of property in Nicaragua and a 2003 Acura sedan.

  One idea that had occurred to him was to use his counseling background and fame in Russia to open a walk-in shelter in Saint Petersburg, a place where people could get some donuts and coffee, read the paper, use a computer, get set up with job search and mental health services. Monson thought it might also be a way for him to fill the void that would be there if he quit fighting.

  . . .

  My plane landed in Peoria five hours late after a snowstorm shut down the airport. It was six P.M. by the time I got to the hotel where Monson and Gavoni were staying, a Baymont Inn and Suites tucked behind a shopping mall, fronting a freeway. They had arrived a day earlier, joined by Jen, Monson’s first wife. Their daughter had just been accepted to the University of Illinois, the same school from which Monson had graduated, and they planned to visit the campus after the fight.

  I arrived to find that the fight had been canceled. The night before, the brother of one of the fighters on the card had skidded off the road while driving to Peoria and had been seriously injured. The fighter had dropped out to be with him at the hospital.

  There had been three professional and six amateur bouts on the card. According to state athletic commission rules, professional MMA events had to contain at least three fights. It was too late to find a substitute, so the professional side of the evening had to be called off, leaving only the amateurs.

  Monson, ever amenable, had agreed to stay and make an appearance. As soon as I arrived, we drove through the icy streets to the site of the weigh-in, a boxy building with a marquee announcing: WORLD FAMOUS BIG AL’S. It was a strip club.

  Inside, the bouncer was checking IDs. Monson, never the type to be overly worried about carrying identity cards, didn’t have his. When the bouncer insisted on seeing something, Monson picked up a laminated postcard from the counter. It featured Monson flexing his muscles against a backdrop of an inferno. LOSERS GO HOME, the legend read.

  As we entered the club, the same image was projected on large screens mounted around the cavernous space. Dead ahead, in the middle of the floor, a woman was crawling naked across a small stage. A few men seated around the platform occasionally tossed dollar bills at her. It was Valentine’s Day.

  The strippers took a break when the amateur fighters were called to weigh in.

  “We have a special guest here tonight,” the announcer said. “Former UFC title contender and MMA legend Jeff Monson!”

  A few of the fighters clapped.

  Monson, who was by now eating an omelet, looked up and waved.

  . . .

  The next day, Jen and I dropped off Monson and Gavoni at a gym to train, and ended up at Chipotle for lunch.

  She was thinking about her daughter leaving for college. She had devoted herself to the kids the last twenty years and was now getting empty-nest jitters.

  Raising kids with Jeff had presented some unique challenges, such as separate visits from the Secret Service and a SWAT team—the first after Monson wore his ASSASSINATE BUSH T-shirt, the second after he tagged the Washington State capitol building. Jen remembered looking out the window at the SWAT team and seeing guys she knew from high school. She went outside and told them that she found the show of force a little ridiculous. Jeff, she felt, had gotten the fun of the spotlight, while she cleaned up the mess.

  Now she worried that he was risking his health as well as his reputation as a fighter. It was hard to see where it stopped. She felt there was nothing she could say to him, though; it was a decision he would have to come to himself.

  That night, the parking lot of the Peoria Civic Center was full. Maybe the fights had drawn more people than we expected? It turned out the Peoria Rivermen, the local minor-league hockey team, was playing in the main arena. A crowd roared as we entered.

  The rest of the complex, however, was desolate. We wandered the corridors until we found an employee, who pointed us to Hall C. It was a ballroom with a cage erected in the middle. Around two hundred people had shown up to watch. The fights were ongoing, amateurs lining up and bashing each other with desperation.

  Monson sat near the cage. A woman approached with four kids from the Boys and Girls Club and asked if he would sign their posters.

  The last fight was between two women, one tall and gangly, the other short and thick. Death metal rattled the hall as they glowered at each other across the cage.

  They met in a flurry of arms, neither bothering with defense. The taller fighter caught the shorter flush on the side of the head, sending her to the canvas and, temporarily, someplace else.

  Cincinnati

  Six weeks later, at the start of April 2014, Daniel Straus and I drove through the northeast suburbs of Cincinnati down a street lined with spacious brick houses, each with a tidy lawn out front and a mailbox next to the driveway.

  A few miles on, past a series of shopping complexes, Straus took a road that ran behind a Comfort Inn and a McDonald’s. A sign read: FIELDS ERTEL APARTMENTS. Straus pulled in. “Out of all the families and all the richness,” he said, “there was this tiny ass hood.”

  It was a collection of two-story apartment buildings. Scraggly pine trees were sprinkled around the property. Some boys shot hoops on a basketball court.

  Straus parked in front of the unit where he had lived until he was twelve. He hadn’t been back in fifteen years.

  Memories returned as we walked around: the strip of barren grass where he and his friends played football; the loop they raced their bikes around; the tree he used to climb to get on the roof; working his first job at the McDonald’s across the street; the place where his friend Giles was bashed in the head with a baseball bat by Stevie, the neighborhood bully—lost his hearing and went blind in one eye.

  There was the spot where a couple county sheriffs had parked and tried to get Straus’s brother to pick up a bag of crack. His brother had said it wasn’t his. Well, pick it up, anyway, they’d told him. His brother had refused again. “That was my first experience,” Straus said, “with having the police trying to set somebody up.”

  We continued through the middle of the complex on a concrete path, the grass around it trampled and muddy. A few kids climbed a slide on a small playground.

  We came to another parking area. Straus indicated where his friend Keith had been shot and killed in his car one night. “Some drug deal, something fucked up,” he said.

  He asked if I wanted to see Hazelwood, the other neighborhood in the area where black people lived.

  “Fields Ertel and Hazelwood, we just used to beef,” he remembered. “Pretty much for no reason, because you’re from Hazelwood or you’re from Fields Ertel. As we got older a lot of that shit started dying down because we were all we had. And not to be funny, but we were the best ones on the sports teams, so it was like we had no choice but to interact and be friends.”

  Hazelwood was an area of modest, single-family homes on small lots. A guy crossed the road ahead of us. Straus rolled down his window.

  “What up, what up, what up?” he asked.

  The guy walked over, slapped hands with Straus, and asked what he was doing.

  “Shit, seeing the old places,” Straus said. “What you into?”

  “Nothing. Just going to the store to get some cigarettes.”

  “What you doing this weekend? I leave Monday. I’m trying to get everybody together on Sunday and do something.”

  “All right.”

  Straus drove on. He’d known the guy since childhood. He had opened a car detailing business, and Straus had put the company’s n
ame on his fight banner. “He’s a good dude,” Straus said. “He wasn’t ever given shit and he’s trying to make his little fame and get his money. I appreciate guys like that, anything I can do to help, I’ll do it, because I know what it’s like. Didn’t no one expect him to do anything with his life.”

  . . .

  A few weeks earlier, Straus had fought Pat Curran in a rematch for the Bellator featherweight title. The fight was in a casino near Gary, Indiana, just south of Chicago. I flew into O’Hare and drove down. It was March and winter had not let up. Filthy snow lined the side of the freeway as I passed through the industrial landscape, heading to a Marriott next to the Interstate where Bellator had put up the fighters.

  Straus was in the midst of his cut. To get down to 145 pounds, every time he had to push his body to the limit of what it could endure, but he was proud that, going all the way back to when he started wrestling in middle school, he had never missed weight.

  This time, however, something was wrong.

  He’d woken up at 150 pounds, five over, but well within his comfort zone—for his last fight against Curran, he’d dropped thirteen pounds on the day of the weigh-in.

  He went through his usual routine—working out in his plastic sweat suit, soaking in the tub—and dropped to 147 without a problem. He was just two pounds over (title fights do not include the pound of leeway given to other fights).

  And then his body stopped. He couldn’t drop another pound. He lost all his energy, blacked out, and came to. His vision clouded. Nothing like it had ever happened to him before.

  He was still a pound over when the bus came to shuttle the fighters to the casino. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and rode in silence as it wound through a cragged landscape of refineries and smelters on the way to the fight venue, a casino near the shore of Lake Michigan.