re no strikes, only mechanical locks, so only leverage is used. There aren’t any “pain” compliance techniques. The officers learned a series of locks: ways of holding and controlling a suspect through pressure and leverage on his arms and shoulders. The techniques had to be simple—easily remembered without daily training—and effective without actually hurting a suspect. Fat cops who don’t exercise needed to be able to execute the techniques. The training had to take into consideration liability issues and lawsuits. There are no strikes in the basic course; in the advanced survival course there are open-hand strikes because they won’t break your hand, and they look better for the Rodney King video. How much force do you use? The least amount necessary. The instructors stressed having options, locks to fall back on: “These locks are going to fail, but when they do, you’ll be ready to go for the next one, and if that one fails, you can keep going until you get something.” The important thing was to keep moving, keep your perpetrator off balance, and flow from one lock to the next. So you grab his arm and twist it one way, and when he fights it by pulling the other way, you switch and go with him, using his force against him.
It was fun to be part of the team. We kept up a constant banter, everyone basically abusing everyone else, physically and verbally. Pat and Donni wrestled so hard in the van that Pat tore Donni’s ear up and he bled all over the place, and Tony had to yell at everyone. It was a little like being a freshman and hanging out with the cool seniors in high school; everything was a big rough joke and I couldn’t stop giggling.
One morning, at Denny’s over coffee, Pat looked at me and just laughed, a short dry bark.
“What?”
“You broke your nose, you know that? It’s crooked.”
“It is?”
Everyone started laughing. “Yeah, it is,” Pat said.
Back in Iowa I was sicker than a dog, having developed a sinus infection—probably from the busted nose. I’d been there for about a month before I left to spend a week with Pat and the boys at Lackland, and I was supposed to be around for a few more weeks and then fight. Pat had got me a kickboxing match, “to get the ring-rust off,” but on the night of the fight I was coughing, crying, stuffed up, and I hadn’t slept in three days from the infection, so I bowed out. My MMA fight was moved back more than a month by the promoter, a move I was all too happy to accept because I hadn’t felt good in weeks. I went on antibiotics.
My small brown room became a haven. I went to the Bettendorf library and got books and retreated to my bed, under my sleeping bags, and read and watched the clock inch toward the next practice session. This could be torturous on a Wednesday afternoon, when at four-thirty I was just sitting around waiting for six-thirty, watching the minutes crawl by. But afterward, coming home, having survived a Wednesday night was a great feeling, and there was the luxury of getting in the shower for as long as I wanted, then climbing into bed with a good thriller, NPR burbling cheerfully in the background. I listened to so much public radio that I actually gave them twenty dollars when they started their fund drive.
I had two dingy pull-down blinds, which stayed down all night, as a bright halogen street lamp yellowed the night right outside my bedroom. First thing in the morning I snapped them both up to let in the gray light of day. I made coffee and tried to write every morning and waited for the first class at ten. The antibiotics worked and I got better.
I lived on Pat’s “fighter diet,” of which the main rule is no carbs after twelve noon. I boiled chicken breasts and ate them with tortillas and peanut sauce, and I ate salads (a lot of broccoli), and oatmeal. That was it. It was hard to eat at night after grappling or sparring. I was just too tired to even chew my food; even a meal-replacement shake took some doing—I had to muscle it down.
My hovel was a cold, lonely place. One of the two windows had a gutted air conditioner still in place, and a family of birds nested in it; I could hear them stirring before dawn like giant rats in a cage.
Around the time my grappling began to develop, I started to make friends with a few of the up-and-comers, the young pros and dedicated amateurs.
Champions Fitness is a serious place. The weightlifting was run by Dale Ruplinger, a former Mr. America, Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe. The pretty girl behind the front desk, Emily Fisher, with the ponytail and a southern accent, had fought seven times and beaten three guys in MMA. Her husband, Spencer Fisher, was one of the top non-UFC fighters at the gym, with a 10-0 record as a pro, and they were the first husband-and-wife team ever on the same MMA card at the International Cage Competition in Minnesota. The chiropractor, Dr. Mark Schmall, grappled and was starting stand-up fighting when I arrived. I rolled with him sometimes, and he delighted in tying me in knots from the bottom.
I got to know Tony “the Freak” a little better and found out we went to the same junior high; my mom was even one of his teachers. Tony is a character, and there is a notorious image of him from a cage fight in Canada, in which he is covered in blood, raging. He had taken an elbow to the forehead, it bled so badly the ref stopped the fight, and Tony went temporarily insane. He was so emotional he blacked out and didn’t remember rampaging around the ring until Pat and Matt Hughes dragged him down into his corner and covered his face with a towel, like an animal. “I could fight fine,” Tony said. “If I had trouble seeing, that was my problem, you know? It was cosmetic, a scratch on the hood. You don’t throw away the car just because a windshield wiper is busted…. I was so emotional that now I can understand a temporary insanity plea.” He had also been running a fever of 103 and had been puking the night before the fight.
Tony was one of the older guys at thirty-three, and he’d been down a long road to get there. He was in the U.S. Coast Guard as a rescue diver and an EMT; he’d been a safety officer on the Big Dig and a stuntman before his constant training in martial arts eventually took over his life. He fought in UFC 14 and won the first round but lost the second. It took him five years to get back to the UFC (because losing, to Tony, means that you are dead—your opponent has killed you). Eventually, he went down to Atlantic City to watch Jens Pulver fight and met Pat and asked if he could come out to Iowa to train. He busted his ass on the first day, and Pat invited him to be on the team, one of the best things that ever happened to him. Team Miletich isn’t just a word or a gig to these guys; it is an integral part of their identities. As Tim Sylvia said, “A lot of these fighters are from broken homes, and Team Miletich is their family.” For all of them it was a huge point of pride and honor to be asked to be a part of Team MFS. They all have stories about coming to Iowa and the intimidation and fear they felt, but there were no hazings or bad beatings, like the Lion’s Den and other camps are infamous for. Being a part of Team MFS is much more about chemistry and the intangibles: Does Pat like you? Are you showing him your work ethic? Can you get along with the other guys?
Tony, like many fighters, is without reservation when talking about himself. I think the nakedness of fighting publicly, the exposure for all to see and judge one’s “quality,” makes fighters good interview subjects. They’ll talk about anything. For Tony, “The martial arts are about respect and discipline, knowledge. Fighting is different. Fighting is about ego. When we’re fighting, I’m going to fuck you up. Prove me wrong; prove to me that you’re tougher than me.” And for Tony, ego isn’t the negative “Oh, look at me” ego, it’s more about self-knowledge and total dedication to testing and pushing yourself as far as possible, a way to know everything about yourself.
One Wednesday night, Tony was sparring with a promising amateur named Kenny, and Tony was getting pissed off because Kenny wasn’t coming hard enough. So Tony would throw his arms wide open and let Kenny tee off and hit him flush and open and unprotected, and then close and punish Kenny until he turned away in fear and hesitation. Then Tony would open up again, half taunting and half enraged, until finally he took Kenny down hard and slammed him in the guts. Then he pulled Kenny back up, embraced him, and they talked a little.
Later I could overhear Tony talking about it and he said, “Kenny’s got the speed, the technique, everything, but he lacks a little in confidence…. I’ve kind of taken that kid under my wing and am trying to help him. It’s all right if we beat the shit out of each other in here as long as we never lose to anyone outside this gym.” That was the prevalent attitude: You kill each other in the gym, and then the fighting elsewhere is easy. I heard again and again from other amateur fighters that the people they sparred with in the gym were ten times tougher than anyone they ever met in the cage.
Justin Brown befriended me in a grappling class, because he remembered what it was like to walk in and not know anybody. “People in here