A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (11 page)

After sparring, Andre and I stood around the ring, covered in sweat but relaxed in the easy camaraderie of men who had just fought and now could be friendly again. We talked about the routine, and the dangers of boredom with training, and I said something silly and clichéd like “You gotta stay hungry.”

Andre laughed. “Hungry? You gotta be
starving,
man.”

I had an extra day, so I ate lunch with Virgil, and we walked around one of his old haunts in Oakland. He took a little interest in me as a fighter when I told him about what I was doing.

“That’s just brawling, that stuff,” he said of the UFC, and he was right, to a point. The stand-up fighting is often brawling. He told me that if I spent a year working out in a boxing gym, I could be a bad-ass and make money as a sparring partner, which was very flattering, if unappealing. Life as a punching bag.

Virgil was a “gunslinger,” something he doesn’t talk about much. He fought in unsanctioned bouts coming up because the money was often better. I started pestering him for advice. I asked him which school he belonged to, look at your man’s eyes or his body. Virgil is of the latter. “He ain’t going to hit you with his eyes,” he said with a chuckle. “In the ring, I can make you look at what I want you to look at.”

He was very unhappy that I didn’t know anything about my opponent; that was just foolish. How can you prepare for something you don’t know? He told me to make a quick assessment of the opponent and to watch the enemy trainer. Is he calm? Is he talking to his fighter all the time, making him nervous? Does the trainer have no confidence in his man?

“Truth in observation, that’ll win a fight,” he said.

Back in Iowa, summer was on its way, and I had about a month of hard training left without interruptions. I started doing “the circuit,” an exercise routine Pat lifted from a women’s magazine, in which you do two exercises for each body part and then run hard for eight minutes (increasing the speed every two minutes), and you do this whole thing three times, before practice.

I started to feel strong. I had friends. I played chess with Sam Hoger, the “Alaskan Assassin,” a twenty-two-year-old pro heavyweight, from Alaska by way of Panama and Germany. Sam was getting his MBA and was dead set on Harvard Law; luckily, I beat him at chess, because he could have surely kicked my ass. He wore flashy suits and was an environmental lobbyist as well as a student. He was a big, dusky, well-coiffed fellow, a little larger than life, jolly and loud and intelligent and calling out, “Hey, girl,” to nearly every girl we walked past in a friendly, nonaggressive way, half self-mocking and half curious. That was something Tony did, as well: “Hey, baby…Then, sotto voce: “Your name is Baby, isn’t it?”

There was a little bit of
Fight Club
when hanging out with these guys. You’d walk into a restaurant with four or five muscular bald guys with black eyes and scarred eyebrows, and sometimes people got a little nervous. These guys had a lot of fun, and they did what they wanted. Sam was fond of quoting the film to me: “When you start fighting, the volume on everything else in your life just gets turned down.”

Fighters have a lot of downtime. They train hard, but they still have to rest quite a bit to recover, and you can’t really train more than six or seven hours a day. Drinking will kill you, especially when you are trying to pyramid up to fighting shape, so either you go to bars and drink OJ and water, which Tony and Tim did, or you stay home.

I remember in Thailand, when I had been gearing up for my fight, I took a weekend in Bangkok, just to get out of the camp after a few months, and I had three beers one night. Those three beers set me back about three weeks in my training (easily measured by the pad rounds). That’s the fine knife’s edge of fitness you walk; that’s what they mean by “fighting shape.” So for their downtime, fighters don’t drink and are often forced into cleaner pursuits like watching movies and surfing the Internet.

It is slightly comical, all these fighters combing the Internet for references to themselves, and often feuds will start. Someone will say something in an online interview and someone else will respond, and suddenly everyone is enraged and calling one another out. It has a tinge of junior high school, parading gossip. No one is more sensitive to insult than “tough guys.”

One of the
Fight Club
guys I hung out with was Brandon Adamson, who fights at 155 (and has a thirty-inch vertical) and was making the transition from amateur to pro. He was in Jens Pulver’s weight class and he usually had black eyes from Jens pounding on him, but he was game as hell.

Brandon was twenty-three and had a wife and two children and was getting his bachelor’s, as well as working as a security guard at a local hospital. He wanted to teach ADD kids, because he himself had serious problems with ADD in high school and “could have really used the help.” That’s one thing about Iowa: There are a lot of guys younger than me with one or two kids. Brandon moved here from California and then Minnesota, and his desire to fight was just growing stronger, his interest deeper. He was 1–1 as a pro, 6–4 as an amateur, and day care cost him four hundred dollars a week, but somehow he held it all together.

I asked him why he fights. I ask a lot of people that—and it’s where you start to verge into the territory of what fighters don’t talk about. We’re all here for very different reasons and yet there is something we all have in common, and I’m not sure what that is. For Brandon, it’s not about money. “It’s about clout,” he says, and he keeps hold of that word; there is some deeper significance that I am missing. He goes on a bit, about the rush, and adrenaline junkies, and a love of training, but I can tell he feels he has said it all when he says “clout.” He means respect. F. X. Toole wrote in
Rope Burns,
which became
Million Dollar Baby,
that fight fans think it is about being tough, but “the fight game is about getting respect.” For Brandon, respect has not been given—he’s had to take it.

Sam and I went to the fights in Wisconsin, and I saw Brandon fight an epic battle, with many reversals, but he finally prevailed with a guillotine near the end of the third round. He walked away at the end of the night with a face that looked as if it’d been hit with a baseball bat and a trophy that was larger than himself. His face and eyes were swollen and cut like a side of meat, blood and tissue exposed everywhere.

Watching the crowd react and surge to its feet, I can see that this isn’t just a fight; it’s a celebration of courage. The crowd lives vicariously through the fighters and loves even the losers as “honorable warriors.” The crowd has some kind of cathartic experience through the ordeal of the fighters.

This particular crowd is so knowledgeable, they cheer before I can even see what’s happening, as when someone goes for an arm-bar (even if they don’t get it), and there is respectful applause when a beleaguered fighter who was mounted finally regains his guard.

I still had car-wreck-itis, but by staying away from the heavyweights, I did much better on Mondays and Wednesdays. Then one Wednesday night came the event I had been dreading.

I was sparring some kid (never seen before or since) who was just boxing. He was strong and nervous but not great, and I had him bleeding into his mouth guard when he landed a hard body shot on my floating ribs and knocked the wind out of me. We paused, and I caught my breath, and then we kept going and I kept jabbing him, but a part of me went
Oh shit.

I have a recurring injury to my costal cartilage, the stuff in between my ribs on both sides of my chest. I am prone to separating and straining the stuff. It first happened badly when I was working construction at the South Pole. Four guys and I were flipping over an end wall to a large Quonset hut, and it came down on me and folded me in half. I tried to hide it for about a week. I was hanging Sheetrock, but eventually I couldn’t even lift my arms. The doc there wanted to evac me, but I begged and stayed on light duty for six weeks. Then, about a year later, I was in L.A. boxing for a couple of days at the La Brea Boxing Academy, and my first day sparring I got a little excited and was chasing around a guy who was much better than I was, and he settled me down with a good body shot. Again I tried to pretend it was just bruised, but it wasn’t, and I nearly missed the summer firefighting season with the Gila Hotshots.

Basically, when you injure your ribs, you’re screwed, you can’t do anything for about four to six weeks, sometimes longer. Almost any motion you do involves flexing of the ribcage, and it hurts just to breathe. I had two weeks left till the fight. It was a situation very similar to what had happened to Robbie. I had suspected, at the back of my mind, that this might happen at some point and was just hoping for the best, hoping to get through with a little luck and not tweaking it. But now I was hurt.

I took a day off to mope. What should I do? Robbie had gone through with his fight, but he was a pro. I didn’t have to fight. So I debated with myself over a weekend. I wrote a long letter to my editor at
Men’s Journal
explaining the situation but never sent it.

Pat brought me some Celebrex, a prescription anti-inflammatory, the next night, and I was in a kind of fantasyland, hoping against hope that I would be okay. We went out, driving around Bettendorf. Pat wanted a few beers, and I kept him company. We stopped by some bars, Pat dealing with his celebrity and shaking hands. He told me a story of a couple of years back, when he had nearly gotten into a fight with some guys in a parking lot, and one of them said to him, “Do you know who I am? I’m Pat Miletich!” and Pat gave the guy a look, pulled out his driver’s license, and showed the guy his ID. Everyone was so disgusted with the lie and being found out that the situation was totally defused—no one wanted to fight—and everyone just went home.

Pat’s fondest wish was to climb Everest. He had read George Mallory’s book when he was a kid, the first book he ever finished. We decided to plan on it in four or five years, when we’re both rich. Pat is known as the nicest guy in the sport, and it’s true. He is charismatic and friendly and just a pleasure to be with. He makes everybody feel good, and yet he has a wicked sense of humor. He has a few false teeth he likes to pull out without telling anyone, and then he gives you a big, gap-toothed, hayseed, “I’m a country idiot” grin. He pretends he wants to name one of his kids Slobodan. He tells stories of street fights and shenanigans from his younger, wilder days that would turn your hair white. His charisma is unmistakable, as is the strength of his character. I just liked him instinctively.

Later that night, I had a eureka moment. When Pat asked me why I was doing this, without thinking I answered, “Because I’m not very good at it.” That old answer again, but essentially the truth. Pat laughed a little and said, “Well, you’ve gotten a lot better.” I wasn’t convinced, though.

The next day I ran the Hill eight times, to my astonishment. A fat guy on a golf cart asked me why I was doing that. I’ve got a fight, I told him. Are you with those Ultimate Fighters? he asked. Kind of, I said, that’s the type of fighting I’m doing.

I thought so, he said, I could tell by the tattoos, and your facial expression when you were sprinting.

That grimace of agony must look tough from a distance. The next morning, a Saturday, I was significantly worse. It hurt to open the window, to drive, any twisting motion. I wasn’t even going to shadowbox for a week, just run. I was depressed, and I coughed lightly and a twinge shot through my whole body. I had just a few days left to decide if I was going to fight, and those days became a series of separate incidents, erratic moments.

I was hanging out at Tim Sylvia and Tony Fryklund’s place, watching TV and talking to Tim about
Chute Boxe,
in Brazil. “I wouldn’t get in there with those guys,” I said, and Tim snorted and said, “Why not? You’re a tough kid.” He didn’t really mean anything by it, just that if I could hang with any of the Miletich guys, I could hang with anybody. That is, he wasn’t trying to compliment me, he was saying, Don’t be a pussy, you can do it. And because he wasn’t trying to compliment me, it was a huge compliment.

I talked to Pat about not fighting, and he laughingly asked me, “Are you faking injury to get out of a fight?” and I wasn’t, but there was a door, a way out. Always a door. Always a way out, with some honor intact. I wished it was just in my head, but it wasn’t. It was outside of my control. Was it worth fighting hurt?

Tony and I met Brandon at Barnes and Noble, and Brandon was full of enthusiasm for my fight, despite the injury. He was all fired up to be my cornerman; he said that he’d get me crazy before the fight. “You gotta fight, man. It’s the warrior way.”

I would still go to the gym. It was murder to have to sit there at night and not be able to work out, not be able to get in there and hit and be hit. Everyone agrees that coming to practice and not being able to work out, which is what you are supposed to do if you’re injured so at least you can learn through osmosis, is the worst part of getting hurt.

Tony was moving into the final stages of his fight psychosis. He had a big fight coming up on the same night as mine, in Hawaii, possibly the biggest fight of his career, against Matt Lindland, the number one 185-pound guy in the world. Tony talked to his sparring partners as if they were Lindland; he gave the imaginary Lindland the finger after knocking him out, walking away sneering, leaving his fantasy enemy crumpled in the dust. He’d dyed the tiny stubble he had left on his head blond. He looked ripped, his stamina was up, and he was kicking ass. He was talking to himself all the time.

There is something that reeks slightly of madness in this approach to violence, the premeditation of a scheduled fight. You watch the days and hours shrink toward a guarantee of violence, and it does something to you. Your contract with society becomes slightly more tenuous.