were nice to me and took me under their wing, so now I try and help some of the new guys out.”
Justin was twenty-seven and is 4–0 as an amateur, just getting started. “You gotta have your shit together or you get your face ripped off,” he said, laughing. He was divorced with two kids, five and seven, and held down two jobs—as a manager at a local Hy-Vee (a supermarket chain) and a bouncer at Daisy Dukes, a strip club. He had a very strong sense of the Miletich team and the honor it was to be associated with it. He didn’t want to street fight because it might hurt the gym’s credibility. Justin was from Des Moines and said lightly that in Iowa, the mentality is “fuckin’ or fightin’.” “If you’re not getting laid, you might as well find somebody to fight. You’d be sitting around a bar and someone walks up and says, ‘Let’s go outside and fight’—well, okay.”
The gym was a remarkably egalitarian place, and once you’d been accepted, it was friendly and helpful. Everyone gave tips to everyone else; if you saw something, you mentioned it. “Keep those hands up,” Tim might call from the sidelines, watching two amateurs spar on their own time. Fighters of all skill levels were in there at all different times, depending on their schedules, and much of the training was done by peers. The pros would stop you and come over and grapple with you—to show you something or give a little lecture on footwork.
It is one of the more interesting facets of MMA: the democracy. In MMA, there are no grand masters, no belts, no fixed ranking system. Knowledge is shared, so good strikers work out with good grapplers, and they teach each other. Far superior fighters like Tony gave me help all the time, and then, sometimes I would tell him about something I’d seen Thai fighters do in Thailand, and instead of dismissing me, he and the others listened carefully. They were willing to take knowledge from anywhere.
The grappling nights were the best examples. The gym was rife with judo black belts, under Coach Humphries, but the judo guys all came to the grappling nights to expand their knowledge. Nearly everyone in there had trained elsewhere, and everyone contributed to group knowledge. There were Iowa state champion wrestlers, Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belts, and everything in between.
Let me try to explain a few of the principles of the ground game, as I understand them. Everyone, more or less, can understand “stand-up” fighting. It’s boxing and kickboxing and muay Thai. You punch, kick, elbow, and knee. Then you lock up and go for a takedown, much like in high school wrestling, often by dropping down, “shooting” in, and snatching up ankles or legs.
Once on the ground, each man works for position. You always want to be on top; your weight is working for you and you have much more control, although some fighters skilled in ground fighting actually prefer to work from the bottom. The bottom man wants to keep the top man “in his guard,” which means the bottom man has his arms free and his legs around the top man’s waist. It looks a little like the missionary position, but it’s safer for the bottom man because he can control the top man’s hips, the key to the ground game. The top man can punch and look for submissions, but he doesn’t have a decisive advantage. So he looks to “pass guard,” which means he wants to somehow maneuver his legs over the bottom man’s legs until he is “mounted,” or off to the side in “side-control.”
“Mount” is exactly like what the grammar school bully used to do to you; sit on your chest with his knees under your armpits and rain punches down. It is very dangerous for the bottom man, as the top man can punch with impunity and easily set up submissions. The bottom man has to squirm, buck, and scramble to either reverse the position or at least get back into guard. Side-control is more stable and versatile, and pretty much equally bad for the bottom man—he has to get back to guard.
When he’s in guard, the bottom man has a lot of submissions he can go for, chokes and arm-bars. He can use his legs to set up a “triangle” choke, where he catches the opponent in a triangle between his legs and uses them (plus one of the opponent’s own arms, pinned helplessly) to cut off breathing. In an arm-bar, he tries to hold one of the opponent’s arms straight and in such a way that he can break it if the guy doesn’t tap out. He can try a “guillotine” choke, a kind of headlock where he exerts direct pressure on his opponent’s windpipe. Those are just the basics and the ones you see most often; there are hundreds or thousands of variations and methods. And some fighters don’t even try for submissions, they just work for position and try to beat their man into oblivion, the “ground-and-pound.”
Other fighters prefer to stay on their feet, as it’s a little more exciting for the crowd and they feel more confident on their feet; so those guys just fight standing and train hard to avoid being taken down, called “sprawling”; when a man dives for your legs to take you down, you kick them out backward, sprawling away from him, and land on top of him with your hips, driving him into the mat. This style is sometimes called “sprawl-and-brawl,” and it’s what I was trying to learn.
I needed to learn to move my head. I would feel the hard stinging impact that jarred my world, the rushing in my ears like I’m underwater, and then I could feel the blood gushing from my nostrils, the droplets spattering my gloves and shirt. I would rush outside to the paper towels, and the gym rats, lifting weights, would stare with a mixture of pity and chagrin. I joked with Pat that I was going to bleed all over my opponents to scare them. And then I mopped up the blood, put my headgear back on, and tried to get back in there, until I got popped again and repeated the whole process. Sam can’t hold his mud.
I didn’t talk to Jens Pulver much, but he is one of the fighters I most admired, devastatingly heavy-handed for 155 pounds, and he moved like a pro boxer—he had won a few pro boxing fights. He said to me at one point, “You got to find a way to survive in here. We all did. We all found a way to survive in here sparring on Wednesdays, on the Hill, during grappling nights.”
The Hill. I’d heard about it for weeks now, and finally one morning Pat grabbed me as I was coming to work out. Along with Mike Whitehead, an up-and-coming heavyweight and a national champion wrestler from Oregon, and Tim Sylvia, who had a fight coming up, we headed out to the Hill. I still had a persistent, hacking cough, but this was going to “blow out” my lungs, said Pat. We parked on the top of a windy, steep little hill and Pat stayed behind as the three of us headed down to start. There was a slight sense of dread, of imminent doom.
The Hill is a killer because it is not so long and steep that you can’t sprint it; you can. It just about kills you to sprint it, but you can, just barely. And then you jog to the bottom and do it again, a total of six times.
So you start pounding up the steep paved road, and you feel okay, and then it twists a little, and you keep pounding, because there’s the corner, and then if you can make that, it teases you, because there’s the finish line, so you “sprint” through (in reality just a short, choppy, painful jog by now) and stand there gasping like you have asthma, wheezing with a high note in your chest. The third one felt like it should be the last one, and during the slow jogs back down the hill my hamstrings and ass were burning like someone had injected the muscles with a syringe full of poison. The fifth one felt like I should be dead, or maybe puke a little, but then there’s just one left—anyone could do one more….
I ran the Hill once a week, and I was supposed to pyramid up, to do eight and then ten and then twelve the week before the fight. Pat once ran it sixteen times. “I’ve never gotten tired during a fight,” he said. “The one thing I always knew going in was that I had prepared better and harder than my opponent, that I was in better shape. I wasn’t going to get tired, and when a fight runs to twenty-five minutes, that’s really something.” I was reminded of the adage I’d gleaned from watching muay Thai in Thailand: Whoever’s in better shape wins.
Pat watched me running and dying, and somehow that was where I earned his interest, a little bit, because I left everything I had on the Hill. It wasn’t very much, but it was everything I had, and I noticed from then on that Pat somewhat accepted me into his family.
After about a month and a half, I fought an informal boxing match down at the local bar’s Friday Night Fights. One could drop in around eight p.m. and sign up to fight. They asked me if I’d fight a 220-pound guy, and I looked at the guy and said yeah, because he looked big and soft and had been drinking. Three one-minute rounds, fun for all, headgear and