After about six months’ training with this motley crew, I signed up to compete in an MMA event. It was the same situation as my first Toughman competition—I didn’t give a damn about winning or losing, I just wanted to fight. About fifteen minutes before they called me out, I began warming up with a buddy of mine, John Grantham. We started off in the clinch, flowing between light knees and punches, but after a few minutes, we start going harder and harder. I’m getting more and more psyched for the coming bout, and soon we’re going full speed. Next thing I know, John lands a brutal knee right to my sternum.
“What the fuck?” I wheezed. Seriously, it felt like he had broken my chest. I got pissed and tried to shove him down, but he was too big to shove anywhere, and that only made me more pissed. While I was still trying to recover from the devastating shot, they called my name. Not willing to back out of a fight for something as minor as a crushed sternum, I made my way to the cage.
The fight wasn’t anything to brag about. A few seconds in, I tried to knee my opponent in the head, he fell down, and I fell on top of him. The guy’s arm was hanging away from his body, so I locked in an armbar and finished him. My second fight that night went much the same. I moved quickly toward my opponent and tried to kick him in the head, which was strange because I had never trained head kicks. At the time, we only trained in street-fighting techniques, and we had all agreed that kicking to the head wasn’t the brightest idea in a street fight. You could lose your balance and fall down or your opponent could catch your leg. Not sure why I did it, but it worked out okay. My opponent fell down, I fell on top of him, and I slapped on another armbar, forcing him to tap.
Did I learn a lot from my Toughman brawls and my first two fights in the cage? I learned that I did pretty much everything wrong. I didn’t pace myself properly and, in the case of my MMA fight, got injured a few minutes before being called to the ring (Ken Shamrock would be proud). But you’re not meant to get everything right the first time around. If you did, it wouldn’t be any fun. The great thing about this sport is that there are so many facets, you always have room for improvement. From my mistakes, I learned that I needed to pace myself better. I also learned that you shouldn’t get into a heated sparring session a few minutes before you are supposed to climb in the cage. You’re supposed to hit mitts lightly, work on escaping bad positions, and chain stuff together. If the guy who is helping you warm up starts getting rambunctious, you back away from him and find someone else who will help you warm up. These are all things that come with time. However, I was lucky enough to have won my first couple of scraps, which makes staying with the sport all that much easier. For this reason, I recommend not biting off more than you can chew right off the bat. If a promoter is trying to match you up with someone who has twenty fights under his belt, unless he’s lost nineteen of them, you’ll probably want to find someone who is more on your level. Personally, I recommend fighting someone handicappable. Just don’t fight a retarded person. They have retard strength and never give up.
A Beautiful Mind for Fighting
Most intelligent stockbrokers will tell us that the past is not a good indicator of the future, but it’s the best indicator we’ve got. This is especially true in fighting, which makes viewing your opponent’s fight tapes extremely important. It can be monotonous and boring, but it is something that both you and your coaches should do before every fight. And you shouldn’t watch them like you normally would. You want to analyze them like a mathematician to see patterns. When done properly, it’s a lot like buying the cheat guide to a video game—it allows you to see your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses before you step into the fight.
The main thing I look for is habits. By watching footage of Quinton Jackson before our fight for the UFC Light Heavyweight title, I picked up on a number of his patterns. His favorite combinations were to throw a left hook and then a right uppercut or a left hook followed by a right hook. I also noticed that he was a very difficult fighter to punch. By keeping his elbows tight to his body and staying relaxed, he had become a master at deflecting fists. In his previous fights, these two habits had worked to his advantage. He’d wait for his opponent to unleash with a combo, block the punches, and then retaliate with one of the aforementioned combinations. With his opponent’s guard down as a result of the flurry his opponent just threw, Quinton was routinely able to inflict serious damage with his powerful right hand.
Armed with this knowledge, my coaches and I worked on a game plan. One of my plans was to throw left head kicks at him all night long. Although I knew he would block the majority of them, I wanted to damage his right arm as much as possible to take power away from it. To slow him down on his retaliations and hinder his takedowns, I planned to repeatedly kick him in the legs. And to get past his stellar defense against punches, I planned to throw knees to his body. But watching his tapes helped me most with my movement, I think. Instead of throwing my shots and then standing there in front of him, which would allow him to retaliate, I worked on throwing a combination from one spot and then immediately moving away from it.
As it turned out, I managed to implement a good portion of my game plan. I caught him with a couple good kicks to the leg that decreased his mobility and power, which made it difficult for him to execute his normal speedy retaliations after blocking my combinations. And when he did retaliate, I was able to avoid a lot of his shots because I had worked tirelessly on not standing in one spot. It was a good back-and-forth fight, but in the end, the training I had done to correct my bad habits and capitalize on his allowed me to earn the decision. However, my game plan had not been executed perfectly, and it is important to remember that a fight will never go exactly as you plan. After all, your opponent will most likely have improved from his previous fight. If he’s smart, he will have watched your fight tapes and then developed a game plan to capitalize on your weaknesses. In order to win the fight, your game plan has to be stronger than your opponent’s. And when I say stronger, I mean the improvements you’ve made must be more disciplined than the improvements he’s made.
All of us have bad habits that we fall back upon in times of stress, and the goal is to force your opponent to retreat to the shelter of his bad habits before he can force you to do it first. For example, let’s say you’re up against a fighter who has previously had the bad habit of jumping guard (for the five ambitious folks out there reading this book who don’t know jujitsu terminology, jumping guard is when you leap into your opponent, wrap your legs around his body, and pull him down on top of you. The purpose of this? You got me.), but he has worked on correcting that mistake for your fight. By staying strong with your game plan and avoiding your own bad habits (the ones he trained to capitalize on), you can frustrate him and force him once again to jump guard. Breaking your opponent in this fashion will usually produce positive results, but the only way to accomplish this is to work on correcting your weaknesses not just in the few weeks leading up to the fight, but over the course of months and years.
What Not to Analyze Before a Fight
1) Do not analyze your opponent’s cup size because it can be intimidating. For example, Kazushi Sakuraba wears the most gigantic cup known to man. Am I the only one who has noticed this? He’s got to do it as a mind-fuck, kind of like how the U.S. Army dropped huge condoms on Vietnam so the Asian guys would be intimidated by our cock sizes. And it does work to an extent. Stare at Sakuraba’s cup for long enough, it’s downright scary.
2) Do not analyze your opponent’s prefight rituals. For example, Rashad Evans has been known to repeatedly twist his nipples before his fights. That seems problematic to me. It worries me.
Wash Your Balls
I’m going to veer off course for a moment, but this is important…If you haven’t washed your balls in four days and your feet smell like you’ve soaked them for half an hour in a bucket of dog shit, please, please do not come to grappling practice. I’m serious—don’t even leave the house. There is nothing worse in this world than ro
lling around on the mats with a guy who reeks like Rosie O’Donnell’s greasy butt crack. If you’ve grappled for a couple of years at a number of different places, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You know exactly whom I’m talking about. When you close your eyes, you can still see the silhouette of that gangly kid with pee-stained board shorts, his rankness flowing on a river of sweat into your ears and other orifices. Forgive me for being insensitive, ladies, but I imagine it’s a lot like being sexually assaulted; after the fact, you drive home with a faraway look in your eyes and then suddenly wake up in the shower, your skin raw from having scrubbed yourself down with a wire brush. It’s a harrowing experience many of us never recover from, so I have no remorse for the assailants in these dastardly acts. If you happen to be a swamp creature that has no respect for yourself or those you come into contact with, do not take a shower and wash your clothes. It is too late for that—you’ve already ruined lives. Simply find the nearest solid object and repeatedly run your face into it until you cease to exist. You’re a walking, talking fungal factory, and you have no right being here.
The reason I sound a bit harsh is that I’ve been victimized by general filthiness on multiple occasions. In one such assault, I received a nasty staph infection. I’m not going to give you the clinical definition (too lazy to look that shit up), but all you really need to know is that it fucking sucks. The worst part is that it’s easy to miss. If an area of your skin is infected, it will become red, swollen, and painful, but when you grapple on a regular basis, all sorts of chaffing occurs. It can be difficult to distinguish between regular wear and tear and a gross staph infection that, if gone untreated, can have all sorts of horrible consequences, including paralysis or death. Because I turned my body into a punching bag, that’s what happened to me. I picked up a healthy case of staph from some slimy douche bag, didn’t realize it, and then went to Georgia to get some training in at the Hardcore Gym. The first day we did wind sprints, which I’m normally quite good at, and everyone in the place killed me. I was as fatigued as a midget actor at an Ewok convention. I thought that perhaps I had picked up the flu on the plane and decided to wait it out, but I kept feeling weaker and weaker. Eventually, I went to a Quick Care in Athens. Apparently, doctors at walk-in clinics can’t tell the difference between a staph infection and an asshole, because he gave me antibiotics for a sinus infection and sent me on my way. I was told to wait it out, which I attempted to do. A few days later, I literally thought I was going to die.
I flew back to Vegas and saw a real doctor. By this time, an irritated patch of redness had materialized on my knee. The doctor identified it as staph, squeezed out some pus, and then wrote me a prescription for an antibiotic. I was more than relieved to have found the source of my misery because I had an upcoming bout against Lyoto Machida over in England. I needed to get my ass back to the gym, but that didn’t end up happening. Despite popping the pills I was given, I continued to get worse. When the pain and overall horribleness became unbearable, I went to see a different doctor. He ran some tests, and it was determined that I had staph in my blood. Fucking great. I ended up being on antibiotics for five weeks and, as a result, I had to back out of the fight against Machida.
I apologize about this rather long-winded story, but hopefully I have struck the fear of God into you. Staph infections suck, as do all the other bacteria and funguses that you can pick up from foul wrestling mats and unclean people. To limit your risk, it is important to make sure the mats in your gym are clean. Approaching the owner of the gym and asking him about the process he uses to clean the mats might make you look like an anal asshole (no, that’s not redundant—I’m talking about the other kind of anal dumbshit), but it’s better than hoping for the best and ending up with a mat-born disease. If he says something like, “You got to clean the mats? Really?”, pass this information on to him:
1) Wrestling mats should be cleaned twice daily with disinfectant cleaner, and this should be done two hours before each grappling session. For the best results, you want to use one cup of bleach for every hundred cups of water.
2) Street shoes should not be allowed on the wrestling mats. Dogs and other animals carry all sorts of bacteria, and they shit and roll around everywhere. If you step in a puddle of their filth and then walk on the mats, you might very well be giving all your training partners the gift of ringworm.
3) All gym equipment such as boxing gloves, shin pads, belly protectors, and headgear should be routinely sprayed with disinfectant.
Training at a gym that maintains a clean environment will certainly lessen your chances of picking something up, but it’s still not a guarantee. If there is an outbreak of some type of bacteria or fungus among your training partners, you need to be cautious. I once saw an episode of The X-Files where Mulder and Scully stripped naked and checked each other for infection. Although you probably don’t want to take it to this extreme because it will make your training partners uncomfortable, especially if you attempt to examine them in the shower, it can’t hurt to give their upper body a “once-over” just to be on the safe side. Below, I give brief descriptions of some of the bacterial and fungal infections to look out for:
Ringworm
Contrary to popular belief, ringworm is not actually a worm. It’s a disease caused by a fungus. To spot it, look for a patch of rough, reddened skin that is hard in the center and spans outward. If the wound looks like it was created by worms, it’s probably ringworm. There are many types of ringworm—body ringworm, scalp ringworm, ringworm of the nails, and ringworm of the groin (although I’ve never personally had this one, I imagine that it would really, really suck). The majority of the time, ringworm is transmitted from skin-on-skin contact. Sometimes the disease will go away on its own, but most cases should be treated with medication.
Staphylococcal Infection (Staph)
When you get a staph infection, pus-filled pockets will usually pop up just beneath the skin. If gone untreated, these pockets will eventually grow so bloated that they explode, dribbling pus onto other areas of your body and causing new infection. It is also possible for staph to enter your bloodstream and spread throughout your body, which is what happened to me. This is known as an invasive staph infection, and it can do nasty stuff to your lungs, kidneys, brain, and heart. If you suspect you have a staph infection, you should go to the doctor immediately and get treated.
Impetigo
There are two types of impetigo, and both are highly contagious. The first is called bullous, and it appears as a large bump on the skin that has a tip filled with clear fluid. It usually won’t become painful or red, but it will probably itch like a mother. The other kind of impetigo, called epidemic, will also appear as a small bubble of liquid, but surrounding the sac will be a red ring. Both types are usually easily cured with antibiotics, but if left unchecked, they can lead to serious diseases, such as bone infection.
Herpes
We all know that herpes is the gift that keeps on giving. What many people don’t know, however, is that it’s not just transmitted by engaging in dirty deeds with filthy whore bags. As far as skin diseases transmitted through wrestling or grappling, it’s right up there on the list. When a carrier has an outbreak, they will get small bumps that quickly transform into fluid-filled blisters. The virus is usually passed on through skin-on-skin contact. Although carriers are most contagious during an outbreak, they can also pass on the virus during times of remission. There is currently no way to cure herpes, but there are antiviral drugs that can lessen the duration of outbreaks.
Scabies
Scabies is particularly disgusting because it is caused by tiny little insects called “mites.” There are male and female mites, but the males are cool. Just as with everything, the females cause all the problems. When experiencing PMS, they will burrow underneath your skin and lay their eggs. After a short time, the eggs hatch and a host of mite babies surface. Being horny creatures, they don’t go on dates or engage in foreplay—they immediately begin
mating with one another (incestuous little bitches) and lay more eggs in the skin of the host or any unlucky person the host decided to grapple with that day. Unlike many skin infections, scabies can sometimes be difficult to spot. You want to look for slightly raised gray lines on the skin—the path mites burrow. The primary symptom is an irritating itchiness, which is caused by an adverse reaction to the insects’ feces. Scratching is promoted because it will often remove the little buggers from their incestuous love dens, but please do not do this while lying in your training partner’s guard. If scratching doesn’t do the trick, your doctor will most likely prescribe some type of lotion. Lube those babies up, and you should be ready to go.
Grappling Partners to Avoid
People Who Have No Sphincter Control
Everyone on this planet blows ass every now and then. I blow ass, you blow ass, and that superhot chick with a rockin’ body blows superstinky ass from time to time. However, the majority of us can somewhat control when we blow ass and when we don’t. If I step into a crowded elevator, I most likely won’t blow ass. I’ll wait until I’m just about to get off to let the gust of foulness seep out of my body. Back in the day, when I first met a chick, there was no way I would let one rip. I would wait until at least the second or third date before I introduced her to my Love Potion 109. You see what I’m getting at here—by simply clenching up on the vault doors, you can hold those toxins in. And if there ever was a time to hold in a fart, it’s when you’re grappling at the gym. I understand that sometimes emergencies happen, but usually you see those emergencies coming and have the common courtesy to let go of your submission and walk across the room before letting one fly. But there are guys who have no fart control to speak of. These are the types of guys who will not just fart around you, but also fart on you. Neil Melanson, a grappling coach at Xtreme Couture, has one such horror story. On this fateful day, he was drilling with his student Crazy Jimmy in the north-south position. If you’re unfamiliar with this position, it’s where the guy on top has got his ass directly on top of his opponent’s face. In this unfortunate situation, Neil happened to be the guy on the bottom. He was just lying there, allowing his student to work his submissions, and then Jimmy farted horribly. Traveling directly from ass to mouth, the noxious gas didn’t have a chance to get diluted by pure air. Neil literally ate shit. He has not yet recovered from this experience, and to this day he is still in counseling. In my opinion, there is no excuse for this. The majority of us were born with sphincter muscles, and it is our obligation to learn how to use them. If someone in your gym has failed to acquire this courteous training, do not grapple with him under any circumstance.
Got Fight? Page 4