The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment

by Sonnen, Chael

  I held on to this belief for the next four years. I had seen news reports that covered Santas at local malls—they were fakes. I heard adults talking about how they had once believed in Santa—they were idiots. I had seen a drunk Santa’s beard fall off at a bus station—he should be strung up for mocking the God-like figure who brought me presents every year. I held on to Santa like he was my security blanket, straight into puberty. And then came the fateful day when I just couldn’t ignore all the evidence any longer.

  “Mom,” I said one afternoon, “if I ask you a question, do you promise to tell me the truth?”

  “Why sure, honey,” she said.

  “I mean like promise-promise?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I promise.”

  I looked up at her with big, hopeful eyes. “Is Santa real?”

  She hesitated for a moment, and it was the longest moment of my life. Then came the words. “No, sweetie, Santa isn’t real.”

  My bottom lip, which was already growing a healthy amount of peach fuzz (remember, I was twelve), began to quiver. My defense mechanisms shot into overdrive.

  “But years ago, we told you we switched chairs, and Santa got it right!”

  “Oh, honey, your sister and you had your chairs picked out for months. When you told us you had changed chairs, we knew it was a trick.”

  Upper lip doing the jitterbug.

  She looked down at me and smiled. “Do you want to cry?”

  “No,” I said, my voice cracking.

  “It’s really OK if you cry. I cried when I found out.”

  Yeah, there was only one minor difference. I was twelve!

  Did tears start gushing down my cheeks? Did I run upstairs, jump under the covers, and sob into my pillow? Some things are better left unsaid.

  The whole event proved so traumatic that I feel duty-bound to dispense with a few other myths that mess with the minds of my fellow Americans. Here are the facts (sorry to break it to you, but someone had to do it):

  The Easter Bunny does not exist.

  JFK was not a good president.

  Yes, the earth is getting warmer, but it is called summer and it is not your fault.

  The tooth fairy does not creep into your bedroom and put money under your pillow.

  Liberal men do in fact urinate; they just use the stalls because they have to pee sitting down.

  Once and for all, training with a gi does not make you a better fighter.

  ’m sure all of you have been patiently waiting for me to cover the topic of terrorists. Or, more important, what we should do with them once they are captured. The general consensus is that terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants, and dealt with accordingly. In an ideal world, this would mean swift military tribunals that are hopefully followed by even swifter death. But with many of these terrorist tribunals getting delayed because of red tape, and incarceration more hospitable than the terrorists deserve, I think there is a far better way of dealing with this scourge.

  First off, terrorists are not in the military. They don’t represent a country or a national or political will. They don’t wear uniforms, declare war, or restrict their aggression to military targets, and their aim is not the acquisition of land or resources. Because of this, and the fact that they do not engage in combat, they don’t deserve the appellation “enemy combatants.”

  What are they if not enemy combatants? They are criminals who target the weak, the unsuspecting, and the innocent for murder, by the cruelest possible means. With such a modus operandi, they do not merit the status of “prisoner of war” when they are discovered, dragged out of their filthy holes in the ground, and brought to detention centers. It does not, and should not, afford them the special privileges of private cells, huge security details, and a public forum for their beliefs. It does not, and should not, entitle them to the lead story on the evening news.

  They should be greeted as what they are: murderers, gangsters, and cowards. They should be brought into whatever jurisdiction they are apprehended in, and then handcuffed to whichever scumbag got arrested right before them. They should be forced to sit on the floor of a holding cell that reeks of urine and sweat. They should be ordered around by corrections officers. In light of their probable history of cultural violence toward women, the toughest female CO, with a butch cut and a neck tat, should drag them, chained and helpless, into court and point to exactly where they should sit. If they refuse, then she should drag them there by their leash. She should stand behind them, and over them, to shame them, in their humbled, foul, urine-stained state, in every photo of them on trial.

  The terrorists should be forced to exist in gen pop. They should have work detail like every other inmate, and no more access to visitors than any other convict, and every request for interviews should go through the regular system in the prison. They should get the bejesus beaten out of them over a vanilla pudding or a paper cup of Kool-Aid by some weight-pile gangbanger. They should get no special privileges, no high-security lockdown motorcade with hovering helicopters every time they have a court appearance. They should get transferred around the system from one hellhole to another, just like every other felon. They should spend their days with people just like them—vicious, brutal cowards—and be at the mercy of anyone stronger than themselves. They should be ordered around day in and day out by officers who have no respect or fear of them, who treat them with antipathy and disgust.

  Whaddya think?

  Chapter

  ’m being squeezed and forced down a dark, pulsating tunnel of living flesh. I’ve been ripped from a place of comfort and quiet solitude, a haven where I floated, with time suspended, for ages. The convulsive, relentless actions of a power I cannot control force me further and further toward my future, toward my fate. I feel crushed, malformed. My eyes are slits. I can see vague shapes, and discern dark from light, but barely, and only with effort. My ears feel clogged. I can hear, but like my vision, my sense of hearing is corrupted, semi-formatted, incomplete. I can feel, and at the same time I am numb. The forces that control my progress cannot be resisted or bargained with. There is no reason, no sense of humanity or concern, just that inexorable force pushing me ever onward.

  I am wet, slick, greasy. I see light and hear voices. Hands grasp for me. I am grabbed, and thrust into the grasp of the unknown. A sharp slap brings me fully into existence. I open my mouth to scream. …

  Birth? Death? My Ring-walk?

  All of the above.

  You’re never ready. You prepare. You train. You plan, plot, scheme, connive, accommodate, gather intelligence, float falsehoods to throw your opponent off the trail and identify moles in your own camp, encourage and nurture unholy alliances, sweet-talk sponsors, infuriate your family and friends, grind yourself into a fine powder day in and day out, then reconstitute yourself in the morning with water and hope, like instant mashed potatoes served in the soup kitchen of your mind.

  You tell yourself you’re ready.

  Your cornermen scream it in your ears as you hit mitts backstage.

  Your friends and family tell you you’re ready, cell phones, granola bars, and energy drinks clutched in their hands. They are confident, but if you look closely, the hands holding those objects are trembling, ever so slightly.

  You know you’ve done the work, but it’s not the Angel of Knowledge you need right now; it’s another, much more elusive angel in the canon whose intercession you urgently need. The angel we call Belief.

  You’re never ready.

  But, eventually, inevitably, immutably, you’re …

  Next.

  When Bert Fields, the captain general at UFC events, calls your name, you take that walk, ready or not. And as you do, as you take that walk and hear that crowd and listen to the familiar strains of your walkout song, as you and your cohort, wearing sponsor’s T-shirts and hats, heads to the ring, you silently pray that the Angel of Belief will alight on your shoulder, smiling sweetly, chubby and rosy-cheeked, like Cecco, Caravaggio’s model a
nd muse, eyes alight with the wonder of possibility, full of secret and divine knowledge, shamelessly nude, like in the masterpiece Love Conquers All.

  You wait, and watch, and listen for the Angel of Belief as you walk through a crowd of screaming strangers toward your fate.

  And in a movie, if this were a movie, that angel appears, parting the beams of the seizure-inducing strobe lights as they flash in time to the walkout music you hate, but are stuck with because your sports psychologist believes in routine, even in a sport that lives and dies by improvisation and adjustment.

  And sometimes the Angel of Belief appears.

  But sometimes the angel …

  Doesn’t.

  But you still have to fight. The cage door is closed behind you whether you, your cornermen, your family, your fans, or your angels are ready or not.

  So here we go. Down to the Octagon.

  It’s like looking through two paper-towel tubes, a kind of tunnel vision. Whatever is on the periphery disappears. Things in the center of your vision are in clear, sharp focus. You hear the referee ask you about your mouthpiece and groin protection. You grimace like a chimpanzee warning away potential rivals for a mate, and knock on your crotch like a traveling salesman behind on his monthly quota.

  Your cornermen pull off your shirt, which inevitably gets stuck halfway off your head, and you clumsily struggle with it in your MMA gloves, your hands wrapped too tightly or too loosely, or both, or neither. You absent-mindedly wonder why no sponsor has come out with a shirt that has snaps up the front, like a hospital orderly’s shirt, instead of the same horrid, rock-concert-quality shirts with the tiny neck hole and single-stitch sweatshop construction (that is, of course, everybody else’s sponsor shirts; my sponsor’s shirts are of the highest quality, are made for years of comfortable, reliable wear, and can be treated as objects of heirloom-quality pride and value).

  OK, shirt’s off. The officials point me to the stairs, like they’re afraid I’ll make a wrong turn, walk into the crowd, and start pounding a fat guy from Orlando here in Vegas on a UFC vay-kay. I’m usually pretty good about knowing where to go once I’m almost completely naked, covered in sweat and grease, in a room full of people chanting my name—and I also know where to go when I’m fighting.

  So off I go, ready to stand, by myself, rather awkwardly, listening to someone else’s walkout song, shifting impatiently from one foot to the other like an old gambler at the dog track with a hot tip, in a long line with a slow cashier a minute before the bell rings and the mutts start chasing the electric rabbit.

  Here he comes. I watch, impassively, as he makes his way through the same fleshy tunnel full of grasping hands and blinding lights that I just negotiated. I begin manning the garrison in my own mind; the creaking, leaky fortress where I attempt to safeguard my confidence, where I try to immunize my insecurity by locking it in the deepest recesses of the stockade that is my inner psyche. But the troops I have left to defend the fortress are the least reliable; they are the last line of defense, once the best and brightest of my mental war-party, but they have been decimated by my training camp, previous fights, self-doubt, want, misery, pain, and regret. I survey this ragtag force; their armor is rusty, their weapons are worn and dull. Some have no weapons at all; just a steely-eyed stare, a mute, desperate resolve to serve, even if the campaign is doomed. Among them I see rheumy eyes, missing teeth, scarred visages, missing limbs. But still they stay and man their posts. I gather them together one last time. I attempt to give them my “Crispin’s day” speech about how lesser armies have conquered more powerful foes, about how courage and faith can carry this day.

  But damn that guy looks big.

  And damn he’s got a helluva walkout song.

  And damn do I wish this were over.

  And it will be … but not for a while.

  Referee asks if I’m ready. It’s too late to give him the spiel I just gave you readers about angels and Cecco and Caravaggio and all that. I don’t think the referee, the deranged, raving crowd, or the massive PPV audience, all worked into a lather, are all that interested in my drama-queen, self-pitying poetics right now. And the big doofus across from me just nodded his head yes like a bobble-head dog on the dashboard of Granny’s ’64 Plymouth Valiant going down a bumpy country road, whilst saying nary a syllable, and I don’t think he’s too keen on waiting.

  So off we go.

  There are a few things I know.

  I know it’s gonna hurt. And I know I’m gonna bleed. I always do.

  That’s part of the occupational hazard of doing business, like the burns on a chef’s hands or the needle tracks on a rock star’s arms; it’s just part of what a day at the office is all about.

  And what an office!

  I’m in the middle of the Octagon. I’m executing my game plan. He’s backing up. He’s waiting for the tackle. He’s trying to line up his intercepting knee or shoot his hips back by springing backward from his toes up, removing his thighs and hips from the ballistic equation I am formulating in my wrestler’s mind. But his plans form a self-defeating, desperate calculus; if he throws the knee and misses, he’ll be perched awkwardly on one leg. Not the graceful, powerful, unbeatable one-legged stance of the legendary MMA fighter Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid, but rather a sloppy, unbalanced disaster area awaiting the cleanup crew, also known as me, who will grab his off-kilter body and hurl it to the mat. Or he can sprawl, which will leave his head sticking out like a turkey on the last Thursday in November, anticipating the ax blow of my newly minted left hand, the mirror image of Henderson’s right hand. My opponent has very little time to choose, as I advance, in perfect balance, hands up, changing levels, feinting. …

  He wants to initiate; his cornermen exhort him to “be first!” And he will be first—first to get tackled, first to get dumped, first to get immobilized, first to get punched, first to leave when the bell is rung for the last time.

  I’m evolving as a fighter. I’ll be the first to admit that many of my previous fights were predicated on a strategy that entailed a long fight and a decision win as my only genuinely realistic positive outcome. I had no hands. I had no submission skills. I was a wrestler. I concentrated on my strengths, and trusted them to carry the day. Even now, even as I grow and try to expand my skill set to include other techniques and tools, I know that when the pressure mounts, I, and everyone (you readers included), will retreat to the comfort of the familiar, which, for me, is wrestling. My objective right now is to present my opponents with scenarios that allow me to win, and win decisively and dramatically, while avoiding the necessity of the comfort of the familiar. It’s nice to know that I have wrestling, much as it’s nice for a riverboat gambler to know he’s got his two-shot Derringer, but I’m working on acquiring other weapons so that my opponent becomes at least as confused, insecure, and scared as I am. If I can re-level the playing field based on the terms of my inadequacies, then I’m pretty sure my training, my skills, and my long history of wrestling can be the last card I play, if I need it.

  So I feint. I watch to see what he bites on. Does he plant his lead foot flat to throw the knee, or does he slightly raise the heal of his lead foot, his toes pressed out and down, ready to propel himself backward into a sprawl? Do his hands drop? How much? Which hand?

  And then buh-bomb. I throw the double jab.

  He eats it; a look of bewilderment on his face. Thas right, suckah. ChaCha’s got some hands now. He’s got some better coaches and some better strategies. My boxing coach, Clayton, has been amazing. He should be working for NASA. He’s turned this pumpkin into a horse-drawn coach, conveying my opponent to a place called Lump Town. Yep. Buh-bomb, the two jabs land again. Lumpy brings his hands up; enough of that, his body language eloquently says. He throws his own double jab, a predictable attempt to serve me with my own sauce, to pay me back in my own currency. To generate and deliver energy with his punches, he has centered himself and concentrated his weight. His feet are glued to the floor for the briefes
t of interludes, almost too brief to be noticed or capitalized on.

  Almost.

  “Almost” becomes obvious to my opponent as he feels himself become disconnected from the ground and lifted toward the lights overhead, as he hears the crowd roar. With his tendons and muscles aflame with adrenaline-drenched survival instinct, his hands, a mere second ago clenched, now open and grab desperately at the fence, at the air, at my hunched form, which is hard at work, in the process of completing the mission of throwing him to the ground. And not just throwing him down, but successfully acquiring a solid, inescapable position, utilizing leverage, weight, and geometry to form a mechanism that keeps him down.

  An old wrestling coach of mine once told me something brilliant, and it applies to every fight I’ve won and, sadly, every fight that I’ve lost: “Chael, you can tell when a guy breaks.” And you can, even (nay, especially) when it’s you.

  But this time it’s not me. And as I concentrate my full weight upon him, as I consolidate and arrange the physical forces that portend his destruction, I feel him break. It’s not a real big thing, but once you’ve felt it or done it, it’s unmistakable. Just a fleeting second of semi-relaxation as his body tells his mind, “I gave you a chance to win. It’s now up to me to survive.”

  Behavioral scientists in France coined a term that applies to circumstances like this when the world doesn’t operate the way you thought it did—l’idée fixe, or “fixed idea.” It’s why you feel a little sense of weirdness, a sense of something being out of place, when you walk up to a set of nonfunctioning escalator stairs. There’s absolutely no difference in the physical architecture of a set of escalator stairs or regular stairs—platform, riser, platform, riser—but it feels a little peculiar to walk up escalator stairs because your mind, through experience, has created a mental trellis that your behaviors grow on. Your brain erects a ladder of symbols that it instructs your body to climb, and when that ladder functions in a nontraditional manner, we freeze. So my opponent’s body, accustomed to being upright and active, with an able, experienced, and tested captain (his mind) at the helm, has now been waylaid and dragged into the shallows by a junta it has no worthwhile defense against; that junta being what I do better than he does.