Pain Don't Hurt

by Mark Miller

  We were now trying to function after about eighteen to nineteen hours without sleep. Running was increasingly difficult. We moved from one line to another, got on a bus, got off a bus. Finally we were at the plane. We boarded, and suddenly I felt like I was on the set of a bad movie. The aircraft was shabby, to say the least. The carpet was coming up in the corners on the floor. The seat cushions were ripped and some had been taped back together. All the magazines in the pockets of the seats in front of us looked like they might have been twelve years old. The flight attendants looked like they were from a sixties movie. The uniforms were bright orange, with pencil skirts, white gloves, and pillbox hats, still sporting the hammer and sickle. This was the strangest airplane I had ever been on. Gordon was already laughing. “So this is why they get the reputation. Oh boy . . .”

  The plane had a rickety takeoff and the flight attendants began an in-flight service with a meal. Once they passed it out, Mo, Gordon, Shelby, and I lifted the lids on the meals to find an absolutely unidentifiable meat.

  “What is this?” Gordon asked, prodding it with his fork.

  “This could be fish or pork. That’s how unsure I am of what it is,” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake.” Shelby jammed her fork into the slab of whatever and shoved it in her mouth. She took a few chews and said, “I still don’t know. But it’s edible. You need to eat.”

  She shoved the rest of her tray in front of me yet again. I picked at what was left. Afterward I was able to get a fitful thirty-minute nap before awakening to Shelby shoving a fistful of vitamins in my face. “Take these, your electrolytes are going to be so screwed up, you need to try to fix it, and here, extra vitamin C.”

  By the time we landed in Moscow it had been thirty-one hours since we left L.A. None of us were doing that well. We already knew that our luggage was probably lost, so we were going to have to deal with that. What we didn’t know as we deplaned was that Russia is one of the least visitor-friendly countries in the world. Little backstory: To go to Russia, you cannot just walk in with your passport like you can in Europe. No. To visit Russia you need more than just a passport, you need a visa. This visa must include an invitation from someone within the country (yes, you have to be invited or you aren’t allowed to come; those are the rules) and a definite outline of where you will be staying, including the address of your hotel or of the home in which you will be staying and how long you will be there. And you cannot overstay your welcome by even a day; this was really emphasized to us by the folks who took care of our visas. If you do, they arrest you. Then, once you actually get to Russia, instead of just walking through a gate where they say, “Where are you going, how long, cool, have fun,” or something like that, they put you through what seems like an interrogation. They make you fill out your mother’s maiden name, where your father was born, the city he was born in, etc. etc. When you have been awake for over twenty-four hours, this is not easy. It took us another thirty minutes to get through the gate and into the actual airport. Here’s the other thing about Russia that no one will tell you. Russians seem to hate smiling. They are the least smiley people I have ever been around. After so many hours of travel, I was just looking for a smile, some kindness. What I got was a woman who barely even looked me in the face and who spoke no English, shouting at me from the luggage-retrieval desk and motioning for me to walk around a corner, presumably to go get my luggage. Mighty Mo had run out of words at this point. He had procured a luggage cart and was just walking in the direction the woman had motioned for us to go in, grumbling. Shelby was following him; her body was bent nearly in half carrying both her backpack and my carry-on, which I nearly had to wrench from her to get her to give it up to me. She was trying so hard to take away any pressure, and this whole trip had just fought her. Here at the home stretch, her bloodshot eyes showed the strain. She was tired, hungry, and emotionally worn down. There were no creature comforts here, and she couldn’t even get a smile from anyone. Russia is, in a word, cold. And Russians are, in a word, surly. Both of these things were the opposite of Shelby. She was from California and she was as smiley as they come. This place was already very hard on her. As for me, I just wanted one thing to go right.

  We said good-bye to Gordon, whose luggage had arrived safely. With Mighty Mo leading the way, we descended into the guts of the airport. We walked for a long time. Finally we reached this door that looked like a door to a submarine, with a crank wheel and a small sign that had been printed out and taped to it that read LUGGAGE RETRIEVAL in red. Mo stopped, looked at us, and said, “Well, has to be it,” and knocked.

  The door swung open and this man who looked and smelled as though he hadn’t showered in the last four months and was missing all but a few teeth beckoned us into a small, severely overheated room. He spoke no English. Not a word. So he just started talking to us in Russian and using pantomimes to communicate. He “asked” us for our passports, and we all obliged. He then took them and walked into a completely different room. I glanced at my phone, which had no service, and started to laugh uncontrollably. I was way, way too overtired, and this was way too ridiculous. I mean, this was how bad horror movies started. Here we were, sitting in some dungeon in the innards of the Moscow airport, while a sweaty and toothless old man wandered off with our only forms of ID. I couldn’t stop laughing. Mo had taken to just rambling to no one in particular, and Shelby was just staring at me, one part amused and three parts scared. We were all losing it.

  We sat there for probably an hour and a half. Finally the door opened again and some giant woman, equally as smelly and equally as non-English-speaking, came in and gestured for us to walk into a small side room. There, wrapped in plastic bags, to our utter shock, was our luggage. We all signed for the bags and left.

  Now the new issue was, we didn’t know if we were going to have a ride to the hotel. It had become apparent that not everyone in Russia spoke English, and all the Russian Shelby and I knew was “please” and “thank you.” We wandered to the front of the airport, staying just inside the sliding glass doors. It was now two A.M. in Moscow.

  “I see a driver, holy Jesus, thank you, God.” Shelby quickened her pace and made for the door. Suddenly I saw him. A tall, impossibly thin albino man with alopecia was standing holding a poster for the United Glory show. He was wearing a long-sleeved silk button-up shirt in a very loud print, tight Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots. We asked if he was our driver and he answered without a smile, and through a thick Russian accent, “My name is Yuri, and you are very, very late.”

  I could not make this shit up if I tried. I felt like I was in a fucking Fellini film.

  It took Yuri another hour to contact his partners to get us all into one very small sports car. Mighty Mo was seated in the passenger seat up front next to a driver who reeked of vodka and was blasting techno music. Getting in the car with a potentially drunk driver would have been out of the question if I had had my wits about me and thought there might have been an alternate choice. As it was, I just wanted to get to the hotel and go to sleep. In the back Shelby and I were wedged next to one of the co-promoters for the show, a wide-shouldered man wearing a pinstripe suit, also reeking of vodka, and smoking a very large cigar. Being in Russia, so far, was like being in a twisted cartoon. As we were driving into the city I noticed something very strange: the streets were full of people. No one looked drunk, even if they were. No businesses were open. There were just people walking around everywhere.

  The promoter said, “Do you see all of these people here? They are all criminals. Everyone in Russia is a criminal in some way.”

  This just could not have gotten any weirder.

  At the hotel, we checked in very quickly and went to our room. Shelby threw her stuff down on the small chaise lounge in the corner and immediately opened up the room service menu. She ordered me a chicken dinner and a bottle of water and tossed me two of the bottles of water the room had provided us with. She explained to the woman on the phone that she had to pay with
American dollars. One hundred sixty-five American dollars. For a chicken dinner. Goddamn it, Russia. I wanted to like you but you were making it very, very hard.

  Shelby laid out a series of B-vitamins, zinc, magnesium, and melatonin for me to take.

  “I really don’t think I need melatonin. I’m pretty sure I’m going to pass the fuck out after eating,” I told her.

  “That’s not the point. You need restful sleep. This will ensure that.”

  She made herself comfortable on the chaise and quietly said, “Hey, Mark, let’s play a game.”

  “Okay. What game?”

  “I’m going to call out a strike, and you are going to call out the counter for it as fast as you can, okay?”

  She had been playing this game with me on the plane a little bit. This was how she kept me focused on the fight at hand.

  “Jab, right hook.”

  “Right hook, right low kick.” I was seeing this as I said it.

  “Jab cross jab.”

  “Right low kick, block the jab, right hook.” The combo I worked with Rob and Buddy over and over . . .

  The bed swallowed me whole as I allowed myself to relax. I fell asleep calling out counters, and I dreamed of fighting a fight in slow motion, almost like we were underwater, every one of my openings so clear to me. . . .

  chapter nineteen

  In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it is more dangerous to lose than it is to win.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

  I was startled awake by my cell phone ringing. I blindly hit the mute button, rolled over, and glanced at it to get the time. It was close to noon there in Moscow. I had slept for almost eight hours. Shelby was already awake, showered, and dressed, and was sitting at the foot of the bed in all black with knee-high motorcycle boots on and her bright red lipstick. “You might want to check that, it’s gone off twice,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  I grabbed my phone and looked to see who was calling me. It was one of the promoters for the show. Shit. I muscled myself up, gathered the sheets around me as I rubbed my eyes, and called him back.

  “Hey, Mark! Did you get the itinerary yesterday when you checked in?” he asked brightly, his thick Dutch accent making his words staccato.

  “No. I got nothing. I got a room key, that’s it. What is the deal with food, man? I’m starving.”

  “Oh, well, uh, you should have gotten an itinerary. Breakfast and dinner is covered, but you are on your own for lunch. Breakfast already happened; you slept through it.” He was smiling while he said this, I could hear it. He was being preemptively gentle when he told me this, because he knew I was going to get mad.

  I sat up, irritated. “Yeah, well, my planes, plural, were a little delayed. I didn’t get in until three A.M. last night.” My stomach was starting to burble and whine at me. Shelby’s eyes widened with the panic of a nutrition coach who was trying desperately to keep her athlete fed. She began to rifle through all her bags, searching for anything to give me.

  “Oh wow. Well, we can figure it out today at the press conference. You are due at weigh-ins.”

  Suddenly I felt very rushed and frustrated. “When? When are the weigh-ins?”

  “Well, uh, they start in twenty minutes.”

  I hung up the phone without waiting for further explanation. Typical fucking ragtag promotion; the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Don’t get me wrong, they had the talent on this card, but there was just no order and no organization to anything. I sprang out of bed and sprinted to get ready. I couldn’t even fucking shower. I had wanted to shower, shave, and get really prepared before this godforsaken weigh-in was to take place and before I had to go stand on a scale in my underwear in front of everyone. Now I got to do none of that. I threw on a pair of jeans, a shirt, my Thai amulets that were blessed for me by Buddhist monks when I fought in Thailand, a wooden-bead mala, and a necklace with three small silver disks on it that read HARRY, HELEN AND COLIN that Shelby had given me for Christmas. I’m not a religious man per se, but I know my ghosts are fiercer than most, and so I chose to try to keep them appeased. I grabbed a beanie and threw it on my head. Shelby was fishing around for whatever food she could find. One last protein bar and a green apple that was from the fruit bowl at the front of the hotel. I ate both quickly and we ran downstairs to the press conference.

  The Ritz-Carlton Moscow was a gilded jewel of a hotel, but the elevators were utterly confusing and seemed to run from floor to floor on some unseen schedule that had absolutely nothing to do with the numbers being punched in. As with many things in Moscow, form preceded function. We were delayed descending to the press conference room. By the time we arrived, I was an anxious mess. From the corner of my eye I could see Nikolaj’s red Mohawk across the crowd, patterns shaved into the side of his head. He looked like an angry rooster. Many of the fighters I admired were fighting on this card. Errol Zimmerman, who would go on to become a friend of mine. Artur Kyshenko, a smaller but incredibly tough Ukrainian fighter. Chalid Arrab, who wasn’t fighting but was just there to watch, and whom Shelby had a terrific crush on. Gokhan Saki, another man who would go on to become a friend; Zabit Samedov, one of the most interestingly dressed men in all of kickboxing with his Hawaiian shirts and neon board shorts and dress shoes; Siyar Bahadurzada; Brice Guidon; Nieky Holzken. All men I admired. This card was stacked with talent. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t a little intimidated. When they called my name I rose, approached the scale, stripped, and stepped up. I had lost weight in transit—I knew this before I even shed my clothes—and as my shirt hit the floor Shelby sighed with irritation. I am what Shelby called a “hard gainer.” It means I have a very fast metabolism and I lose weight and size quickly. She refused to go the easy route and just stack fat on me; she wanted my speed to remain, but it meant that I was never going to be as big as so many of these guys. I weighed 207. I could hear Shelby grumble from across the room. She’d had me level at 220. The travel had just caused me to go too catabolic, which means I’d burned up muscle mass for fuel. I’d lost muscle, water, and electrolytes. Nikolaj stepped on the scale: 229. Had I kept my weight up, we’d have been almost even weight-wise; as it was, he had me by a little, not that I cared. His physique was much more beach body. He was thick, well muscled, and tan. I was taller but leaner. We both stepped forward for the stare-down photo. Nikolaj looked straight into my eyes and tried to snarl and growl. This was so silly to me; what was the point? I used a phrase I heard Phil Davis once say in regard to a guy mean-mugging him before a fight: “I signed the same contract you did, I promise I’m going to fight you, you don’t need to encourage me!” Then I grinned brightly.

  Nikolaj’s tough-guy image faded momentarily as he told me that his English was not very good. We shook hands and went back to our seats. As the rest of the weigh-ins proceeded, I was getting hungrier, and my sugar was dropping lower.

  I approached the promoters once the press conference was done and asked once again about meals. Apparently breakfast was at nine A.M. in the dining hall, and dinner was at six. There was no other food being served. None. They had covered two meals for a boatload of heavyweights, all of whom were used to eating six times or more a day. The Dutch promoter I had spoken to on the phone was trying to pass this off as normal to me. Suddenly Shelby burst out, “You know he’s a type one diabetic, right?! So if he doesn’t get any fucking food he could go into a coma. So what are you going to do for him? Because this is ridiculous.” Her cheeks were flushed and she was tugging on her hair, which was set into two long red braids, covered on top by a black knit cap.

  The promoter got a semi-worried look on his face and assured us that he would work something out. I could have laid money down on the fact that he wasn’t going to do anything. Instead, he forgot about us and I just waited until dinner, sucking on glucose tablets in the meantime. Dinner was delicious: salmon, vegetables, and a small piece of honey cake, which I didn’t eat. It was the fir
st real meal I’d had in days. Our waiter at dinner was a young Mongolian man who actually smiled at us. It was such a relief and a comfort to see a smile. Mighty Mo sat with us, and I was overjoyed to see his trainer, William “the Bull” Sriyapai, with him. Willie and I had known each other for a long time, and I asked him to corner me for my fight, as Shelby suggested that he would make a better cornerman than her. Shelby was a supporter and an incredible strength trainer, but she didn’t pretend to know the sport better than an actual fighter. Willie accepted with a big smile and over dinner we made some plans to go walk around Red Square the next day, do a little sightseeing in the afternoon before the evening of the fight. Then we went back up to the room. Shelby flipped on FashionTV, and we both passed out watching runways before eight P.M.

  The next morning at breakfast Shelby had devised a simple plan. Breakfast was a buffet, so she kept revisiting it for whole fruit, small tubs of yogurt, bottles of water, muffins, crackers, anything that would keep without too much refrigeration for at least a day. She would bring plates full of the stuff to the table and casually scoop it all into her lap, which was covered by a napkin. She then wrapped the napkin up and stuffed it into her massive purse. Then she would stand and grab another napkin as she walked to the buffet again. She did this three or four times before finally settling down to have her actual breakfast. When we got up to leave she had an incredibly nice Alexander McQueen purse brimming so full of fruit and pastries she could barely close it. “Russia is turning me into a thief,” she joked.

  The food she procured at breakfast became lunch, and a few other meals. We would have ventured to a restaurant, but not knowing the language and hearing horror stories of $800 meals nearby kept us away. Make no mistake, Moscow is very, very expensive. Plus, this way we could better control what I was eating, and being that this was now the day of the fight, we needed to be absolutely careful. One bad piece of meat could ruin the entire thing. After breakfast we changed into some comfortable clothes and walked out the front of the hotel to Red Square, which was two blocks away. At the front of the hotel, outside the metal detectors (yes, there were metal detectors in front of the Ritz-Carlton), a famous techno DJ was signing autographs and people were crowded around him. We squeezed through the bundle of people and walked on. At some point I turned, feeling like I was being followed, to see that half of the crowd had started following us, taking pictures of me as I walked. I found out later why. Apparently my face was on a massive billboard somewhere in Moscow. I never got to see it.