A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (40 page)

The day meandered on, and the cocks died again and again. Just a few threshing bursts, splashing up together in their lizardlike fury, and one staggered, drooped, and failed to rise. I didn’t really get it, although cockfighting is tremendously popular around the world and supposedly the oldest spectator sport, dating back three thousand years. I’d read that Abe Lincoln earned his nickname “Honest Abe” during his days as a cockfight referee.

The next day, Tim and I flew back to Thailand. Driving into Bangkok, I asked Tim a question that had been on my mind. I remembered Escorrega in Brazil telling me about love, and how important that was for dogs, and I wanted to know what Tim thought. How important was the bond between the dog and the handler—how important was love? Tim didn’t spend all that much time with his dogs, his Cambodian yard man trained the dogs and had them kept according to Tim’s specifications because Tim had a full-time job and a family.

“It’s extremely important,” he said, without taking his eyes from the road. “I wish I could spend more time with my dogs, especially right before a fight. You can do a lot with a real tight bond, you can raise them up. If your dog is on the bottom, getting chewed up, you can get in there and raise him up with encouragement. You can turn the whole fight around. There are dogmen that sleep with dogs [in a crate] for the week before a fight to increase that bond. If I could spend more time with them, my dogs would fight better. You should really invest from a puppy onward.”

Tim dropped me off, and I jumped into a cab, winding through Bangkok traffic. Evening rush hour was just peaking and everything was jammed solid, a city-sized parking lot, and the taxi guy laughed with me as I got in, and said, “Thailand number one traffic!”

I was not disgusted by the dogfights, even though I love dogs. The knee-jerk reaction that I get whenever I mention the dogfights, “Oh, I couldn’t watch that, it’s so cruel,” has always struck me as hypocrisy—unless you are a vegetarian, don’t wear leather, and think that what chicken farmers and cattle ranchers do is unusually cruel. It’s telling that cockfighting is still legal in parts of the United States, because animal cruelty laws could be applied to the poultry industry, as well. Ike X said that “the S.P.C.A. uses the ‘scourge’ of dogfighting as a fundraising tool, mostly…and then they save fighting dogs by taking them away and killing them.” And what about breeders that raise puppies for the pet store window, and when the puppies don’t sell, send them to “no-kill” pounds—which in turn pass them along to pounds that put them down?

The fight itself is not cruel. The dogs love to fight—it is what they do, and their tails are wagging. It is a joyful, mad rage that has been bred into them. What is cruel is the life on the chain, being kept from physically bonding with one another or a human owner, and especially the isolation of the keep for a pack animal:
That
is the cruelty of dogfighting, like solitary confinement for prisoners, like the endless training and denial for fighters.

The losing dog is either killed or given away. He won’t fight again—once he has curred out, there is nothing to be done for him. Tim tried to give away the dogs he couldn’t use, as opposed to killing them—“I don’t like killing dogs,” he said—but they are hard to find homes for and don’t make great pets if they have been fought or rolled. So, usually, a losing dog is killed. Ike X said, “The exception is when a dog is sick or has had a poor keep, or maybe is a little too young—then you pick up before he is broken. There have been quite a few great dogs that lost and went on to win again.”

But often the loser is culled.

Killing them when they lose is rough, but these animals are like chickens or beef cattle. They would not exist if not for man’s intentions. That cows never get to walk but are just pumped full of food and hormones until they are slaughtered seems just as cruel to me. The demonization of dogfighting is tied to the anthropomorphizing of dogs, and that is not an illusion that I subscribe to.

I am not for or against dogfighting; it exists without my approval or disapproval. I was drawn to it because of the close relationship it has with men fighting for sport, and the parallels between the two; and I wanted to understand them both. I had a professor once tell me that man cannot view himself clearly; only less complicated organisms can be completely understood.

It hit me when I read the description of a “game test”: When a dog has been fought to exhaustion, you bring in a fresh dog to face him; and if the exhausted dog is still game, then you keep him and breed him. That quality of gameness is so specific, so valuable. In
A History of Warfare,
John Keegan makes the point that the evolution to modern combat happened with the Greeks, who would stand and fight and die in the phalanx. Primitive warfare had no such discipline; the fighters would posture, and yell, and throw spears, but not stand in and fight. Giving his warriors a willingness to stand in and die was how Shaka Zulu conquered much of southern Africa, how modern warfare came to be. The British navy, the “hearts of oak,” won many sea battles because of gameness: The British would always fight and loved to fight; they were eager for a scrap. That quality of gameness allowed them to conquer the world. “Never mind the maneuvers, go straight at ’em,” said Lord Horatio Nelson, the British sea commander who won a series of battles that set the stage for England’s domination of the world in the nineteenth century, knowing that aggressive gameness was a strategy in itself. Decisive, competent aggression, sheer willingness to fight, was a tremendous advantage in a sea battle. It is no coincidence that the sports of dogfighting and prizefighting grew together in popularity, with the same fans, as the bloodier sports of bull-and bearbaiting and the tradition of dueling faded.

The appreciation of gameness, then, is probably both cultural and biological. The love of aggression, a willingness to fight regardless of safety or consequences, is a biological key to success, to domination.

Basically, I have been game-testing myself.

I finished up my stay in Thailand at Fairtex, and I found out a lot of things, about old friends who had thrown fights, about the inner workings of the camp, and I finally began to comprehend my own naïveté and lack of understanding—the American in the Orient, who thinks he understands when really he sees only the tiniest bit, the scratches on the surface.

My skills had come a long way; after Hamid and Steve left, I was the best
farang
in the camp, the only one with decent form. I was way out of shape, but Philip told me my form was very good. If I wanted to stay around for a year or two and get some fights, I could fight in K-1. That seemed a little far-fetched, but I did feel good, and Apidej would regularly remind me that he liked how I thought, how my brain worked. I still felt like total shit—you need a month just to get to the point where you can train hard—and I sweated like a pig. But I noticed when we worked the bags that I was the only guy in there who left sweat in a ring around the bag; everyone else left it in just one place—they weren’t moving laterally.

My ribs felt better; I could train hard but didn’t want to start sparring yet. I went to Yangon in Myanmar for a little while, which was a step back in time, like visiting Bangkok sixty years ago. I couldn’t find any real places to train; none of my three or four contacts pulled through for me. I trained in the one place I found Burmese boxing, at the YMCA in Yangon, but it was not for professionals. There was no equipment, just two homemade bags hanging from the rafters, one pair of bag gloves we would all alternate using. The teacher was interesting, and he showed me a different kind of head butt, one using the side of your head, back and
behind
your ear, not the spearing attacks I expected. He was good, but the training wasn’t, so I returned to Thailand and ended up back at Fairtex.

Finally, a promoter I didn’t know got me a fight in Myanmar, but it was only three weeks away, and I wasn’t in great shape. I got really excited, but when I mentioned it to Philip, he was adamant, immediately shaking his head. “No way,” he said, “you’re not going to be ready. The reason you did well when you fought before was you were in shape, great shape. Those guys will try and kill you.” I thought about it for a few days, but in the end I agreed with him, because I wasn’t such a good fighter that I could take a fight on short notice. I didn’t have the experience. I only had two fights, after all. I needed to be in much better shape than any opponent because my work ethic was the only advantage I had. Some guys with great skills, or a lot of fights, they can take fights when they’re out of shape and fight smart and be economical, but I was emphatically not one of them. The promoter wrote me some e-mails, saying things like “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you,” which had the opposite effect from reassuring me. It was a fight—why would you keep telling me that? I wanted six weeks or eight weeks to train with
lethwei
guys and then I would fight, and instead here he was telling me he could teach me all the tricks I needed to know in the two days before the fight. That was the final straw. He was going to teach me head butts, and how to defend against them, in two days? I declined the fight. I just didn’t know him. He hadn’t returned my e-mails for years, and then suddenly he was overly friendly, and it put me off. I’d been burned enough times by promoters, I guess. I wasn’t going to allow myself to get rushed into something stupid. I wasn’t out to prove anything; I’d fight when I was ready. I’d go back to the United States and get another MMA fight with promoters I could trust.

The sight of a gladiator performing well and dying courageously was held by spectators to be an ennobling and uplifting experience, and well worth the price of a life.

—Don Atyeo,
Blood and Guts

 

I flew back from Thailand and arrived in Los Angeles. I was shocked by the hordes of gigantic white people. I thought about fighting; my friend Kirik in Massachusetts was setting something up for December, an amateur MMA fight.

I kept thinking about the ties between fighting and entertainment, the game test, and the big punch. Every single action movie I could think of had the climactic battle when the hero fights the villain, and without fail, the hero gets bashed around and it looks as if he will lose; and then he shows gameness, he makes scratch, and comes back from the edge of death to snatch victory. And action movies and fight movies always had big clean punches, huge shots that would kill a full-grown polar bear, just like in pro wrestling—to galvanize the crowd. Movie fighting is where most of us learn about fighting, especially at a young age, and I was starting to wonder if my exploration of fighting for the twenty-first-century American man should include some kind of investigation into the cinema, into the emotional drama of fictional violence and how it is made. How different is it, really, from the old gladiator arenas? Sure, the action is staged, but it
looks
real; making it feel real is a whole industry. Does your subconscious know it’s just a movie, that none of it’s real? Isn’t that when a movie fight is great and exciting, when it fools you emotionally?

I was about to leave L.A. for the mania of the cross-country drive back to the East Coast when I got an e-mail from Pat Miletich. He was consulting on a film to be directed by John Herzfeld, who did
15 Minutes
and was a huge fight fan. (He’d given an older UFC hero, the Russian Oleg Taktarov, his start in that film.) Herzfeld had been in contact with Pat for months about a UFC
Rocky
-style movie that had stalled in development. In the meantime, Herzfeld had taken on a thriller, and he had brought Pat down to Mexico, where they were filming, to be the fight coordinator.

The movie,
The Death and Life of Bobby Z,
was an action-thriller based on a book by Don Winslow, about a convict in a prison who is recruited by a shady DEA agent to impersonate a famous drug dealer—Bobby Z—whom the convict resembles. Mayhem ensues. Paul Walker, the handsome, boyish actor who came to fame in the tremendously popular B-movie about illegal car racing,
The Fast and the Furious,
was going to play the convict, and the shady DEA agent would be played by Laurence Fishburne.

Herzfeld, in a combination of hubris, prescience, and philanthropy, was filling the supporting cast with MMA stars, former Ultimate Fighting champs. Not only Pat, but Oleg was back, as well as members of Pat’s MFS stable: “The Maineiac” Tim Sylvia, Ben Rothwell, Rory Markham, and “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler were all playing various convicts and bad guys, and the UFC light-heavyweight champ, Chuck Liddell (notoriously hardheaded and heavy-handed), was playing the baddest guy in prison, Maddog. Pat told me to come along if I was interested, and I was. Maybe this chance to take a look behind the curtain would shed some light on the whole experience of fighting.

I drove from L.A. down past San Diego and across the border into the Mexican countryside. The concrete jungle of Tijuana gave way to desert and crystal blue sky. I drove around and around, got lost and found and lost again, until I stumbled onto the set, hours later, and met one of the producers, Keith Samples. He was friendly but a little surprised to see me. “You made it here, huh?” he said. “Well, score one for persistence.” He looked at me for a long moment and then asked, “Do you have any tattoos?” I nodded, and he said, “Great, we’ll use you in the Aryan Brotherhood.”

The set was an abandoned, half-finished Mexican prison being used by
la policía
for training purposes, with empty guard towers standing sentinel over a rocky void. I drove hours back to where the crew was staying, and I was relieved to see Tim Sylvia’s massive, forbidding head through a window, watching TV.

It was great to see him again, and Pat was there with a chew in, and instantly I was back in the MFS family, back in the fold, made welcome into that jock wrestling-fighting world where it’s share and share alike and favors are asked and granted. Pat and I fell right into conversation, as though it had never stopped. It felt good to be on the inside. There was another heavyweight I vaguely remembered, a young monster named Ben Rothwell, down to play another bad guy. They got the beds, I got the couch cushions and my sleeping bag.

Pat was a little nervous about his role as fight coordinator and wasn’t sure how things were going to go around the Hollywood people, and he missed his little girls already—but he was happy and curious, enjoying the novelty of the situation. He also had a healthy case of Mexico paranoia: He worried about the water, needles on the beach, getting robbed, and getting shaken down by the police. To be fair, we did get pulled over a few times, just for being gringos, and once we were about to be extorted when the policeman recognized Tim and started laughing and shaking his head. “Arlovski, eh?” he asked. (Andrei Arlovski was the guy who had beaten Tim and now had the UFC heavyweight title.) Several other people who were working on the film got shaken down for a hundred bucks here or there. What you really worried about were the
federales,
the state police.

The next day I was on set. John Herzfeld, the director, had been high school buddies with Sly Stallone and was of a similar vintage; he also had an assistant named Adrian he would yell after, adding a note of farce. He, Pat, and Oakley Lehman, the stunt coordinator, were talking their way through a pivotal scene early in the movie. Paul Walker’s character is being pressed by Maddog to join the Aryan Brotherhood, an evil white supremacist gang that runs the prison, and Paul slashes Maddog’s throat with a license plate.

John asked, “Who’s in here as part of Maddog’s gang to jump on Paul after the slash?” and Pat said, “Well, Tim and Ben will be here.” John looked thoughtful and said, “We should have one more,” and I piped up with, “I think I’m supposed to be in this scene as another gang member.” John looked at me like he didn’t remember who I was, and Pat and Tim waited to see if my little gamble worked. I wanted to be a part of things—I can’t stand sitting around. John nodded okay and started talking details with Oakley.

I got my prison costume: a cruddy pair of jeans, slip-on shoes, and a blue federal button-down shirt (like the stuff I’d gotten from the Washington Department of National Resources back in my firefighting days). I then proceeded to stand around with all the other extras and fighters. And stand around. Moviemaking seems to be a pretty miserable experience; there are only a couple of good jobs on the set. The actors have it okay, and the director and the DP (director of photography, same thing as a cinematographer) are pretty busy, but everyone else does a ton of waiting, waiting, waiting. I drank coffee and ate cookies off the snack table for hours and hours. The DP, John Bailey, muttered to me, “Sit down whenever you can—I learned that from Phil Lathrop.”

Chuck Liddell was a nice guy, big and a little wild-eyed, but friendly and open and exactly “what you see is what you get.” He was somewhat amused by his character’s antics: “If some kid was punking me out like this guy is,” he said, referring to the way Paul Walker’s character was mocking Maddog, “I’d just crack him and lay him out—there wouldn’t be any talking.” Chuck had a prosthetic neck made for the license plate slash, and his abnormally thick real neck had deeply impressed the makeup people. His massive neck had a lot to do with his hardheadedness; a thick neck makes you harder to knock out. Virgil had always been thinking of new ways to exercise a fighter’s neck. The Thais used to do it with a piece of cord tied to weights; you bite down on the cord and do neck curls. I’d never done it. Rory said he’d done it until it started to screw up his teeth.

Chuck was one of the first American MMA fighters to make real money—he’d just gotten a sponsorship from Xyience, a supplement company, and he wore designer jeans and texted restlessly on his Internet phone. He was old school gone new school; he had just kept beating people until they realized he wouldn’t go away, and then the UFC embraced him.

Chuck’s two heavies were Tim and Ben. Tim was an old friend, and although he’d lost a couple of fights since I’d seen him last, he’d won his most recent fight with a spectacular head kick that had KO’d his opponent, Tra Telligman. Pat had heard a funny story: After the fight, in the locker room, Tra didn’t really know where he was. His corner told him that he’d just fought in the UFC.

 

Tra: I just fought in the UFC?

Corner: Yeah.

Tra: Who’d I fight?

Corner: Tim Sylvia.

Tra: I just fought Tim Sylvia in the UFC?…What happened?

Corner: He knocked you out with a head kick.

Tra: Tim Sylvia knocked me out with a head kick in the UFC?!

 

Pat had a good time telling this story.

Ben was much younger but still experienced. He’d started fighting MMA in high school, and he’d fought and lost to Tim at nineteen, a fact Tim never let him forget. Ben was huge and played the simpleton, but he was, like all these guys, a lot smarter than he seemed. He liked to hoot and holler and yell “Fuck” in his heavy midwestern accent, but it was an act: He was no fool.

The four of us, along with dozens of prison extras, waited for our scene. The prison was high and cold and empty, the bare unfinished concrete lit by the brilliant klieg lights of Hollywood and patrolled by a half dozen Mexican PAs (production assistants, the lowest of the low, gofers) with headsets, shushing people constantly and taking up the call of “Rolling!” whenever filming was going on. All offscreen chatter was supposed to cease; sometimes it did, but sometimes it would just subside to a low murmur until everyone started yelling, “Quiet please!”

We rehearsed our little scene, with Chuck getting slashed and falling at my feet, and big Tim Sylvia punching Paul Walker down, and the rest of us piling on, stomping and kicking. Oakley was Paul’s stunt double as well as the stunt coordinator, and he went through the motions that Paul would go through, with a wig pinned to his head (Paul’s hair was long for this scene).

Oakley Lehman was a former desert motorcycle racer and horse-packing guide who had been friends with Paul in Burbank as kids, and they had gotten into movies separately, Paul as an actor and Oakley as a stuntman. Oakley’s specialty was first bikes, then cars and horses. When they ran into each other later, Oakley instantly noticed that they had similar builds and complexions, and he asked Paul if he could double him; they had been working together ever since. This was Oakley’s first film as the stunt coordinator, but he was a talented, competent guy, young and friendly in a very L.A. surfer way: “That sunset is bitchin’.” I liked him immediately, and he knew enough to respect Pat and they got along famously. Pat said he’d teach Oakley to fight if Oakley would teach him to surf.

John Herzfeld came in and took a look at the latest rehearsal. “I want something faster, more violent—just a quick smash of Paul,” he said. “Why don’t we try it with just the knee?” So instead of Tim throwing a right elbow and then a big knee, he would throw just a leaping knee—a small thing, perhaps, but it showed me something. The director, a fight fan, was going to put his stamp on the action and modify what the real fighters would have done, fighters who were all consummate street brawlers and had been in these fights a hundred times in and out of the ring. John wanted something that looked a little different—that looked cool instead of being real.

Finally, after what seemed like several days, with the cold desert night settled in like a blanket over the prison, prying at the corners, we were shooting. The cameras went in, and then the extras: about thirty tough-looking guys in prison blues, who all looked a lot rougher than me, older Mexican guys, young white tattooed dudes, and black Muslims. I found myself in the near background with the camera in front of me, and suddenly I had to
act.
It felt very strange, and unfamiliar. I had acted in high school, but since then hadn’t done anything but the stuff that almost all guys do with their friends—funny voices, stupid girls, movie quotes—the typical screwing off. But there I was, at the forefront, watching Paul fall again and again, and then leaping into Oakley and pounding on him, over and over. You know the camera can see you, so you have to act. You don’t have lines, but you still have to act.

It took hours, but we got through the scene—from various angles, with dozens of prison extras in the background, kicking and stomping Oakley, and then we stomped some cardboard boxes that stood in for Paul, then Paul himself, careful not to kick him too hard. I tumbled to the ground on every take, dragged down or shoved down by a guard. As long as we were doing something, it was fairly entertaining—not something I’d want to do every day, but fun in small doses. It was funny to hear the various assistant directors coaching the extras—“Remember, you’re in prison, you hate it here.” “I want to see that prison walk.” “This is a living hell for you guys”—like the assistant directors had ever been any closer to prison than watching
The Shawshank Redemption
. That’s one of the problems with movies: You have guys making films about mobsters who have learned about mobsters from watching
The Godfather,
which is fantasy itself. Movies get further and further away from the truth if their only reference to reality is other films. Later, however, I noticed that John was consulting with one of the extras—who had been in prison—about the way the guards held their guns, so that was good to see. I had a friend in L.A. who was working on a script about a death row inmate, a legal thriller, and he had never been inside a prison or visited death row.

Moviemaking has elements of an endurance test: Can you stay interested and do good work at three a.m.? Finally came the gleeful call of “It’s a wrap!” and we all scuttled for our gear and the vans, like at the end of a rave, desperate to get home.