Beast

by Doug Merlino

Backstage, he sat with his supporters, hunched forward.

  “Give me the fucking scissors,” he said.

  No one moved.

  “Give me the fucking scissors,” Straus repeated. “Please.”

  He cut off his dreadlocks, leaving them in a pile on the floor.

  It earned him only a half pound. He weighed in at 145.5. He had two hours to drop it or the fight, and his belt, would be forfeit.

  Everything hurt. He didn’t have the energy to talk, to breathe, to do anything. He rubbed Albolene over himself and wrapped up in a sweat suit and towels.

  Nearly two hours later, Straus weighed in again. The scale teetered at 145.1, then hit 145.

  He pulled on his clothes, walked away from the scale, dropped to his knees, and pressed his head to the floor.

  He hid his face in his hands and cried.

  . . .

  The Venue at the Horseshoe Hammond Casino usually hosted bands such as Styx and Megadeth. It was an amphitheater, the cage at the bottom set against a black backdrop and lit from behind so that the fighters appeared to battle on a floating island of white phosphorescence and violence. The 3,400 seats were sold out, the crowd lubricated, alive with hoots and catcalls.

  A different Curran showed up than in their previous fight. He was more aggressive, ready to stand with Straus, who was happy to oblige. They met in the center of the cage and went after each other, both eating punches and answering with their own.

  In the second round, Straus landed a left hook flush into Curran’s right eye. Curran went down and Straus jumped on him, trying to pound him into submission. The area around Curran’s eye was turned to pulp, but he managed to grab Straus and hold him long enough to stay in the fight.

  They battled back and forth the next two rounds. Entering the fifth, Curran appeared to have won the first round, Straus the following three. Curran’s corner told him he needed a finish.

  With a little over a minute left, Curran took Straus down. As Straus scrambled to get to his feet, Curran got behind him and snaked his right arm around Straus’s neck.

  They collapsed to the mat.

  There were seventy seconds left.

  Curran, mounted on Straus’s back, tried to pull his arm fully into the crook of Straus’s neck in order to strangle him.

  (Doug Merlino)

  Straus lay still, pressing his chin down to ward off Curran’s arm.

  With fifty-nine seconds left, he gave the referee a thumbs up to show he was still conscious and fighting.

  Curran kept working. Daniel gave another thumbs up with forty seconds to go.

  Curran levered his weight down.

  At twenty-two seconds, Straus gave yet another thumbs up.

  And then Curran got his arm just a little more under Straus’s chin. He grabbed his own right wrist with his left hand and cranked the choke tighter.

  With sixteen seconds left in the fight, Straus tapped.

  Curran released the hold and stood.

  Straus popped up, smiled, and hugged Curran. They stumbled across the cage, locked in embrace. Curran patted Straus on the chest. Straus leaned forward so that his forehead touched Curran’s.

  Curran went back to his corner, where the cut man worked on his eye. As they waited to be called to the center of the cage, where Curran would have his hand raised, Straus returned and hugged him again.

  . . .

  In the Cincinnati suburbs, Straus merged onto the freeway and drove away from his childhood home. He said what I had suspected: It had been a relief to lose the belt.

  His life had been constructed against. Against the school administrators who saw him as nothing, the prison system that treated him as worthless, the Bellator management that let him know where he stood. It was all true: For most of his life, there had been very few who expected much of Straus. He had turned this fact into a painful fuel.

  When he’d got to the top, there’d been nothing left to lean against. He hadn’t been ready to see himself as a champion.

  Besides, in his loss, he had gained something else, another part of what he’d sought his whole career. Social media had blown up as the fight was televised—people called it a possible contender for fight of the year. Straus was being discussed not just as a “grinder,” a superior wrestler who wore his opponents down, but as an exciting fighter.

  And the story about cutting his dreadlocks had caught the attention of fans. People could relate to the sacrifice of shearing a few years of hair growth, perhaps more easily than they could grasp the training, injuries, weight cuts, and everything else fighting entailed.

  It was the fifth loss of Straus’s career. After his three previous defeats, he’d gone on long winning streaks. He told me that was what he was going to do now.

  Our next stop was Vision MMA.

  The gym had expanded, moving into empty space next door. It now had separate rooms—one with mats for jiu jitsu, one with a line of punching bags, an area with weights, and a space for the boxing ring. People trickled in for evening classes.

  Straus introduced me to a man named John, a jiu jitsu student in his fifties. When Straus had been living at the gym, John used to bring him food. Straus told him he would never forget it.

  John shrugged. “I’m proud of you,” he told Straus. “Everybody here is proud of you. You doing good, man.”

  “Baby steps,” Straus said. “Just taking baby steps.”

  A guy named Victor entered, his barrel chest and biceps bulging under his T-shirt. He greeted Straus and turned his head to show off a cut that ran down the side of his face from above his eyebrow to his jaw line. It was closed up with a line of stitches that lent him a Frankenstein look.

  “That’s going to be a badass scar,” Straus said. “What happened?”

  Victor launched into an exhaustive explanation. The gist was that there had been an altercation with the neighbors, one of whom was a teenage girl. The girl had come outside and slashed Victor’s face with a champagne glass. The police had been called and, to Victor’s shock, he had ended up in jail. Straus listened noncommittally, interjecting expressions of surprise and outrage at the appropriate moments.

  As soon he could, Straus excused himself. We walked outside. Straus lit a cigarette.

  Victor had also been a fighter, Straus told me. A few years earlier, he had been one of the most promising in the gym—more so than Straus.

  “We used to be really, really close,” Straus said. “I would say one of the reasons I’ve been successful is I didn’t want to be anything like Vic. He drove me.”

  I realized that with Victor and the guy from the old neighborhood trying to get his detailing business going, we’d spent the day visiting other possible outcomes Straus saw for himself. He reflected on where he’d be if MMA had never been invented. Another black guy in prison? Working some fast-food job for minimum wage? Father of five kids he couldn’t support?

  Sam arrived with Mikayla. We headed to a burger restaurant.

  As we waited for our food, Mikayla sat on Straus’s lap.

  She coughed. “Cover your mouth,” Straus said, gently.

  She looked at him with wide toddler eyes and coughed again. “Cover your mouth,” Straus repeated.

  She coughed one more time, holding her right hand in the vicinity of her mouth.

  “Yay! You covered your mouth! Yay!”

  Mikayla wiped her hand on her chest.

  “Good job!” Straus said. “Even though we just wiped germs all over ourselves.”

  Mikayla giggled. Straus let it go.

  Kazakhstan

  One week later, Jeff Monson hobbled through smoke and blue lights into a small arena in Almaty, Kazakhstan. He was greeted by an operatic blast of synthesizer and hard-rock guitar that sounded inspired by the Top Gun soundtrack.

  “Jeefffff!!!! Moooonnnssoooon!!!!” the announcer screamed so loud that his voice distorted over the sound system.

  His opponent, Shakhmaral Dzhepisov, waited in the ring. Dzhepisov was six foot four,
a tapered triangle of muscle. At the weigh-in, he had towered over Monson, who had tweeted out a photo with the caption: DAVID VS GOLIATH.

  At the bell, Monson limped forward as his much larger opponent punched from a distance. Monson lunged at the Kazakh’s legs and ended up on his knees, grabbing at nothing. He stood and tried again with the same outcome. When he tried to box, his punches fell short by up to a foot.

  When the round ended, the ring card girls stepped onto the canvas. In contrast to the usual attire, they wore local costumes, long quilted dresses that went down to their ankles and tall coned hats with red plumes on top.

  Dzhepisov found his range in the second round, connecting with rudimentary punches. Monson lunged for takedowns. When he managed to get his hands on Dzhepisov, the Kazakh grabbed the ropes to remain on his feet, a violation that the ref half-heartedly tried to correct by slapping his hand.

  The bell rang and Monson went to the center of the ring. He had been told it was going to be a two-round fight.

  The announcer said something over the loudspeakers. It was translated for Monson. The organizers had decided to add a third round since the first two had been inconclusive.

  Monson was exhausted, but he was stuck: If he refused to fight, he would look like a coward.

  As the extra round started, he again dived for Dzhepisov’s legs, his movements slow and predictable. He climbed back to his feet and pushed forward, hands low, flailing with a wild right. When he missed, he was an open target for the Kazakh, who pounded him in the face.

  Monson wobbled. Dzhepisov hit him again. This time, Monson staggered from side to side like a drunk, and then fell.

  His legs jutted up as his back hit the canvas. Dzhepisov rushed in and punched him in the face several times before the referee pushed him away.

  Monson was out. He lay dead still as Dzhepisov’s corner men rushed the ring. One waved the flag of Kazakhstan. Another lifted Dzhepisov in the air, hoisting him over Monson’s prone body. Music blared from the arena’s sound system.

  Medics knelt over Monson. The ref lifted his left leg, and then set it back on the canvas. He did not move. They pulled Monson up and sat him on a chair, steadying him so he stayed upright.

  Monson hunched forward, his head over his knees. A man flapped a towel up and down in front of his face to give him some air. The announcer pronounced Dzhepisov the winner.

  . . .

  When there was a knockout in a fight in the United States, the state athletic commission responsible for regulating the event issued the fighter who had been knocked out a medical suspension for thirty to sixty days with orders to avoid all contact. At American Top Team, fighters who suffered concussions in training were made by coaches to sit out a month or more.

  The reason was the danger of second-impact syndrome. When the brain suffers trauma, it swells up within the skull and needs time to recover. If it is jolted again too soon, even with a light blow such as a punch to the chest that rocks the head back, the organ can once again rapidly expand, leading to severe brain damage or death.

  Four fighters have died after competing in sanctioned MMA promotions, three from blunt head trauma: Sam Vasquez in Houston in 2007; Michael Kirkham in South Carolina in 2010; and Booto Guylain in Johannesburg in 2014. For the fourth, Tyrone Mims in South Carolina in 2012, an autopsy revealed no cause of death. The coroner speculated he might have had an irregular heartbeat.

  Monson had a fight scheduled in Russia two weeks after the one in Kazakhstan. Paul Gavoni spoke to him on the phone and told him he had to get out of it, that he would be risking his life if he fought.

  Monson told Gavoni the promoter of the fight in Kazakhstan had stiffed him and he needed the money from the Russia fight for his family. He was going to do it.

  . . .

  The fight was in Orenburg, nearly one thousand miles southeast of Moscow. Monson’s opponent, Chaban Ka, was a French heavyweight he had fought to a draw two years earlier in Paris. Ka was six foot two, 245 pounds, with six wins and three losses. He was thirty years old.

  Monson rushed at the bell and dived at Ka’s legs. The Frenchman sidestepped, got behind Monson, and punched him in the side of the head.

  Monson squirmed to get away, rolling around on the mat as Ka’s blows landed on his face, his ears, the back of his head.

  Monson grimaced and absorbed the punches, each landing with a thud. He tried to get up but collapsed back to the canvas.

  He was on his knees, holding his hands to his head. Ka wrapped his left arm around Monson’s chest from behind and punched him in the head with his right, again and again.

  Monson fell to his side and curled up in the fetal position. The blows kept coming.

  Finally, the ref pushed Ka away and waved his arms. It had lasted a minute and a half.

  Monson rolled onto his back and held his arms over his face.

  The referee squatted next to him. “Jeff, you okay?” he asked. “Jeff?”

  Monson did not respond.

  The ref spoke again. “It’s over,” he said, gently, as if speaking to a child who had just suffered a nightmare. “It’s over.”

  Orlando

  The Amway Center in Orlando, Florida, had been sectioned off with a ceiling-to-floor black curtain. On one side, hundreds of fans crowded the stands watching a video that did what it could to sell the two headliners of the UFC’s fight the following night, the heavyweights Travis Browne and Fabricio Werdum.

  Browne was shown jogging around a modest neighborhood in Albuquerque, where he trained, and Skyping with his children in Hawaii. Werdum appeared in a paramilitary outfit. “Paintball is my hobby,” he said in Portuguese, the words subtitled in English, holding a gun.

  Behind the curtain, workers erected the Octagon while others maneuvered a green cherry picker to set up the lights. The only illumination came from the scoreboard above the cage and the LED lights running around the front of each level of the stands.

  The fighters waited in the dark. Some paced the arena floor; others, including Mirsad Bektic, sat in the stands, headphones clamped over their ears.

  For a few months after his dominating win in Omaha in December 2013, he’d waited and hoped to hear from the UFC, tweeting at Dana White and the promotion’s matchmaker, asking for a chance. There had been no reply.

  There had been attention from other quarters, however. An MMA website had begun a countdown of the top twenty-five featherweight prospects, naming one a day from bottom to top. Bektic had been the final reveal, “a hulking mass of muscle, explosiveness, unchecked aggression, and raw power who doesn’t so much defeat his opponents as pound them into a bloody pile of quavering jelly.”

  Still, he had resigned himself to fighting again in another regional promotion. Then, in March, Dan Lambert had texted: How would you feel about fighting for the UFC in Orlando April 20?

  Bektic had danced around the house in joy and celebrated that night with a rare glass of wine. He had started training the next day.

  Of the thirteen fights on the card, five involved American Top Team fighters, all of whom now waited in the stands near Bektic.

  Thiago Alves, the gym’s biggest star when I had arrived two years earlier, had not fought at all during that period, undergoing four separate surgeries for injuries. This was to be the start of his comeback.

  Jorge Masvidal, the Cuban-American from Miami, was trying to scratch his way into the top of the UFC’s lightweight ranks.

  Caio Magalhaes, a hulking Brazilian middleweight, was a relatively new arrival at the gym.

  And Yoel Romero, silver medalist for the Cuban wrestling team at the 2000 Olympics, was at thirty-seven making an unexpected run up the middleweight division.

  A UFC employee gathered the fighters from the stands. They lined up at the curtain in the order in which they would weigh in. Bektic stood fourth, behind his opponent, Chas Skelly, a twenty-eight-year-old fighter with an 11-0 record who trained in Dallas. He had been ranked the fifth best prospect on the list that Be
ktic had topped, and was also making his UFC debut.

  On the other side, the UFC’s nu-metal theme song, “Face the Pain,” roared over the crowd:

  Face the pain, Face the pain, it’s ripping me into pieces

  Spotlights swept the audience, which rose and cheered as Joe Rogan, the promotion’s color commentator, bounded onto the stage, his right arm raised in the air. “What’s happening, Orlando?” he shouted.

  He was followed by Arianny and Chrissy, the ring card girls, in red bikini tops and short-shorts; Dana White, in jeans and a black Polo shirt; matchmaker Joe Silva; and ring announcer Bruce Buffer.

  The UFC was rapidly expanding, pushing to make its acronym synonymous with MMA around the world. In the prior two months, the organization had put on events in Montreal, Abu Dhabi, Brazil, Dallas, London, Macau, and Las Vegas.

  Like any good brand, it aimed to serve a consistent experience, in part by building non-fighters such as White, Rogan, and Buffer—accompanied by a rotating cast of alluring women to smile, blow kisses, and shimmy—into its biggest celebrities.

  While rival promotions rose and fell on the popularity of fighters—who could get injured, be temperamental, or hold out for more money—the UFC was thus somewhat insulated: No matter who was fighting, there was a core audience that would tune in for Dana White’s shtick.

  Rogan, the commentator, was as shrewd as any modern American media personality. He’d started as a stand-up comedian and sitcom actor in the 1990s, and later hosted the gross-out contest show Fear Factor. He had called his first UFC fight in 1997, had gotten a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, and then had started a popular podcast in which he explored his interests: fighting, comedy, the nature of reality, and the beneficial uses of magic mushrooms and marijuana.

  “We got a banging card for you, ladies and gentlemen!” he yelled.

  A hip-hop beat played. Rogan called up a six-foot-eight heavyweight, nicknamed “The Outlaw,” who stripped off his clothes and stood on the scale. He flexed and growled at the cheering crowd.