ut. In Japan, where the Pride and Pancrase fights—also MMA—are held in rings like boxing rings, the referee has to stop the fight, bring the fighters back into the center, and try to restart them from the same position, which not only disrupts the flow but gives a winded fighter time to recover and can change the fight. Conversely, fighters in the UFC can use the cage as a weapon—something that certain UFC champions have excelled at. Robbie and Nick bounce and eye each other across the wide space, the corners shout last-minute advice, and the ref gives his final instructions. Suddenly, the fight is on and the crowd is roaring with anticipation. They want to see Robbie knock this kid out with his trademark ferocity.
Robbie begins backing away, looking for an opening, letting Nick pursue him, and angling to land big—somehow he’s a little hesitant. He’s been so confident up to this point, but suddenly, maybe, there is some doubt in there. He had hurt a rib two weeks before, rolling with Matt, and since then he hasn’t done anything but work on his cardio. He claimed it wasn’t bothering him, but the first thing I think when watching him back away is that he is hurt.
The first round is pretty good, both guys swinging and hitting, and Nick surprising everyone with his boxing and stand-up fighting. Before this, he had been known as a submission specialist who would be better off if the fight went to the ground. He pursues Robbie with confidence and even starts talking shit, taunting. Robbie looks furious, and they both seem to hurt each other some. It’s not decisive, but I would have given the first round to Robbie.
Just seconds into the next round, the unthinkable: Robbie swings and misses and Nick, with his slight reach advantage, throws a light, crisp hook that catches Robbie right behind the ear, and Robbie is out. He goes down like a poleaxed steer, his body stiffening in the air, out on his feet. The ref leaps in and Robbie tries to get up and stumbles back against the cage and goes drunkenly down again. The crowd erupts and Nick can scarcely believe it. He’s KO’d Robbie Lawler, the guy who was going to kill him.
One of the big things that separates MMA from boxing is there is no standing eight count or ten count. In MMA, if you cannot “intelligently defend” yourself—if you are stunned or badly shaken, even for a few seconds—the referee will stop the fight.
Robbie begins to recover and realizes what has happened, and his face is agonized. He can’t believe it, his emotion is running riot all over him. The fight is over. I can see him silently screaming at himself, at the world, tearing around the cage, which is filling with people.
I got up, annoying the real journalists again, and beat Robbie backstage. He was desperately unhappy. He yelled “Fuck” a few times but was already subsiding when Matt, the six-time UFC champion, said to him, in a quiet, controlled voice, “Listen, we all lose. Pat’s lost, Jeremy’s lost, I’ve lost twice to the same guy, once in seventeen seconds,” and Robbie seemed to hear him. Pat finished it with, “Now we move on. It’s water under the bridge now.” Robbie’s eyes were dark and wounded, his distress all over him, but I could see him gathering strength from his teammates.
I went back out toward the ring and watched the rest of the fights. There were some good ones, especially Chris Lytle dominating Tiki Ghosn through the force of his will. The main event was a much hyped bout between Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell (light heavyweights at 205), and Chuck, the underdog, won by KO in the second round, which delighted the crowd. There was a tremendous amount of tension during the first round as they both felt each other out, but in the second round, you could see Chuck suddenly realize, “Hey, I can hit this guy,” and he relaxed his shoulders a fraction and started letting his hands go and pretty soon he knocked Tito out.
There was a lot of postfight discussion and analysis from the journalists, but it sounded a little false and tinny to me. I felt slightly superior to them; at least I tried to do this stuff, as opposed to just watching. I waited to talk to Pat and Tony and Tim to venture my opinions. “Tito’s always been a little scared to stand up with Chuck, but he did, and I give him credit for it,” said Tony. He thought that the UFC protected its special fighters, like Tito, too much for his liking. Even though he lost, Tito made more than twice what Chuck made for that fight. “Tito’s chin,” he said with finality, “is suspect.”
It was raining hard the next morning; one of the three days it rains all year in Vegas. Pat and I were flying out together, and Pat said to me in the cab over the squeak of the wipers, “Every time I come here it takes a year off my life. I hate going through all this and then having one of my boys get knocked out.”
I asked what he was going to work on with Robbie, and he smiled.
“He’s got to keep his hands up. He’s learned he’s not invincible; it happens to every fighter at some point in their career. They run into somebody they can’t steamroll through, they take a shot that hurts them. Robbie got caught—it happens to everybody. He’s got to keep his hands up.”
Pretty simple.
Another editor from Men’s Journal had been developing a piece for the 2004 summer Olympics in Athens, a sort of “workout” piece involving three different Olympic athletes: a swimmer, a decathlete, and a boxer. He wanted me to work out with one of them, and no, it wasn’t the swimmer.
So I flew out of the Moline, Illinois, airport (one of the world’s great airports; you just park and walk, like going to the mall) to San Francisco and drove across the filigree of bridges into Oakland. I was there to cover Andre Ward, one of the U.S. Boxing Team captains, a much hyped “speed merchant” who was blitzing his way through tournaments without getting a single point scored on him. He was going four rounds with other top amateurs and they weren’t hitting him once.
A twenty-year-old amateur light-heavyweight (178 pounds), Ward hadn’t lost a fight since 1997. A rattlesnake strikes at eight feet per second; a decent pro boxer throws a jab at eighty feet per second. I didn’t bring a radar gun, but I can tell you that Andre was fast. While some of his speed was natural, some of it had to do with his trainer, and godfather, Virgil Hunter, who had been with him since he was nine years old. Andre had lived with Virgil in Oakland since his early teens.
I met Virgil on a beautiful Oakland morning at a coffee shop by a park. At first glance he seemed young, in his thirties, but eventually he told me he was fifty.
Virgil Hunter had been involved with boxing and training fighters since 1966, when he was taught the sweet science by his uncles in the kitchen. “I’d been training fighters for twenty-some years, but with Andre I decided to reassess the whole thing. I could develop him from the ground up, from the root to the fruit.” Virgil incorporated Pilates and Acceleration and tailored Andre’s workouts on a day-by-day basis. “It varies depending on what he needs,” said Virgil in his quiet drawl, resplendent in a Team USA Boxing jumpsuit. “What did Andre look like yesterday? What does he need to work on? There will always be shadowboxing and mirror work, but sometimes he’ll spar three rounds and go straight home, and other times he won’t spar at all. It depends on him, really.”
Virgil’s watchful eye was Andre’s greatest asset. Virgil was calm and quiet and observant, and never haranguing. I rarely saw him give instruction to Andre at all; it seemed as if Andre could sense him watching and knew what he wanted. In two days, he muttered into Andre’s ear once, for a few seconds, or maybe twice; nonetheless, he was always watching, a reassuring presence. “Sometimes as a trainer you won’t say anything for days, just watch, just so you can be sure you’ve seen something. You [the fighter] are lying in bed at night, thinking about what kind of fighter you want to be, and you begin to apply it, without discussion, in training. You show me what you can do and I see it, you teach me to teach you.” The feel of professionalism is so different here than in Iowa, a more weary, workman feel. These guys are in it for the money and because they were born into it. But they still love fighting—don’t get that wrong. Boxers may be a lot of things, but the good ones love to box.
Virgil, a probation counselor in Alameda County, was also a juvenile hall counselor, and he remarked how it was always harder to restrain the smaller, more wiry, and slippery kids than the big kids with muscles. Virgil was not interested in free weights and big muscles, he was interested in speed and power and core stability. Power, the grail of boxing, comes from speed, not muscles.
“In boxing, speed throws you—it makes you so vulnerable you lose your ability to fight. You need to stay lean to generate velocity, and I train Andre from the inside out. He’s powerful in his movements. You get a big muscular guy in there, you make him work, and all those muscles suck up the oxygen in his blood. You fight to keep him from doing what he wants to do, and then you are whupping his ass.” Virgil laughed softly.
“In the lat