tacts, but when I asked him where the best place to train might be, he said, “Probably Pat Miletich’s place in Iowa. He’s got some of the best fighters in the world there, and there’s nothing else to do in Iowa but fight.”
I called around and thought about Florida, and Oregon, and some other teams; but what I kept hearing about was Team Miletich in Iowa. I spoke with the legendary Pat Miletich on his cell phone. I was nervous, talking too loud, and he was unconcerned and enthusiastic. “Of course, it’d be fun, bro,” he said. Unhesitating.
So I went.
I drove out to Bettendorf, Iowa, across a snowy wasteland and crashed in a no-frills motel in the middle of town. Bettendorf is one of the Quad Cities, four little towns that sit on the Mississippi in eastern Iowa and western Illinois: industrial and blue-collar, with the Big Muddy flowing frozen and brown and sluggish as molasses down the middle.
The next morning, I found the Champions Fitness Center. Right as I walked in the door I exchanged nods with a medium-height, broad-shouldered man. He had a wicked set of neatly cauliflowered ears and a pleasant, battered face that maintained a boyish air. Pat Miletich.
Pat Miletich, the “Croatian Sensation,” was born and bred in Iowa (there’s nothing Croatian about him but his name) and became one of the most successful fighters in the UFC—winning five titles at 170 pounds—by being the most technically proficient fighter in the game. He understood before anyone else the need to diversify and borrow from different disciplines, and as a result he is now widely recognized as probably the best MMA trainer in the world.
Pat also has a reputation for being a good guy; as Kirik said, “the nicest guy in the sport.” He shook my hand and gave me a quick tour of the brand-new gym, fresh white paint and new equipment everywhere. We walked under the cardio machines and out into the giant weight room and took a hard right into the heart of the gym. Pat cocked an eye at me, smiling. “You’ve got some size on you,” he said. “What do you walk around at?” He meant weight.
“Something like one ninety-five,” I said.
“Good, you can cut to one eighty-five easily then.” We chatted a little about a piece I was planning on writing for Men’s Journal about MMA, an introduction to the sport. “It’s not for everyone,” he said with a slight pause, a tiny raising of the eyebrow. I got it.
I rented an apartment across from the gym’s parking lot, filthy and decrepit but three hundred dollars a month and the shower got hot. One of those modern indoor flush toilets—what else do you need? I even could see a tiny brown strip of the Mississippi, and Illinois across the bridge. I had no furniture, so I rented a bed and bought a folding chair and table from Wal-Mart.
That night, a Friday, I started training. “Sparring” just means practice fighting, standing up, usually three-minute rounds with thirty-second breaks or five-minute rounds with minute breaks. You wear headgear and big sixteen-ounce gloves, and a cup and mouth guard and shin protectors, and bang on each other. We kicked, punched, clinched, and on Mondays we went for “takedowns,” in which you take your opponent to the ground in such a way that you come down on top. The headgear keeps you from getting cut, but there were still knockouts and plenty of concussions and bloody noses to go around. Miletich’s place is famous for the hard sparring on Monday and Wednesday nights (Friday was light sparring), and I thought I was doing okay until Pat grabbed me and said, “Hey, Sam, come spar the heavyweight champion of the world.” What could I do but say yes?
A minute later, I found myself sparring with Tim Sylvia, six foot eight and 260 pounds. He was so big and strong I couldn’t really get near him, and the few times I did hit him it was like punching into a tree. He was taking it so easy on me that I could actually see and think, which was very nice of him. I knew a little bit about Tim, that he was from Maine, so I tried to talk about Maine between rounds to keep him in a friendly mood. It was a key strategy, because he could have destroyed me easily, if he just decided to let a few body punches go hard. He wore no headgear. His head was massive, forbidding, like a stone statue with jutting brow and craggy jaw. He was a nice guy; he thumped me some, but nowhere near as bad as it might have been.
After practice there was a warm glow in the gym, the air like a sauna from twenty or thirty guys sweating and bleeding their hearts out. People flopped down on the mats, discussing in groups of two or three their sparring mistakes, or fights seen recently on TV. The atmosphere was excellent; although I wasn’t a part of it, I could sense the camaraderie. It made me just a little lonelier as I packed up and limped home across the parking lot and up a set of rickety wooden stairs.
The water out of the tap in my hovel was foaming and leggy, and left a serious rim of scum in the glass. Didn’t taste too bad, though. The light in the kitchen didn’t work. I stumbled around in the dark and showered (that shower was the only good thing in my life for weeks) and made a plate of beans for myself. I forced down a few bites but was too tired to eat.
I was already beat to pieces. This is going to be rough, I thought to myself with a tinge of despair. I hadn’t trained like this in years. I had the suspicion that twenty-nine was going to be way different than twenty-five. Still, I was committed—I was going to fight, so I better get ready.
I tried to get into a routine as quickly as possible. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were sparring days (Monday with takedowns), and on those days I ran and lifted a little in the mornings, while my Tuesdays and Thursdays were devoted entirely to grappling: a basic class at nine, another basic class at five-thirty, and then advanced from five-thirty to six-thirty, when the experienced guys repeatedly tied me in knots, yanked my arms out, cranked my neck.
There is nothing so frightening as being on the ground with a guy who really knows what he’s doing; it’s like being in the water with a shark. You’re struggling, desperate, trying to escape, and suddenly you can’t breathe, you’re smothered, and you can’t see, your arms are getting twisted off, and you “tap” and then it’s all over. “Tapping,” a light tap on your opponent, or on the mat, is how you concede the fight. He’s caught you in a “submission.” A submission is when you get your opponent in an arm-bar, or a knee-bar, or a choke, or a thousand other things, where you essentially threaten your opponent with a broken limb or being choked unconscious. He can tap instead of actually having his arm broken or losing consciousness because you’re pinching his carotid arteries.
Submission fighting is a huge part of ground fighting. It is at the heart of MMA and one of the reasons the sport has a small, educated following. It’s sometimes hard for uneducated observers to understand that while the two guys were rolling around, one guy could have broken the other guy’s arm and the other guy admitted it. A submission can happen in seconds; the “ground game” is extremely technical and about position and outthinking your opponent; it’s a lot like playing chess.
Having done muay Thai and some boxing, my “stand-up” fighting was okay—not good, by any means, but at least I had a clue as to what I wanted to do. My ground game, however, was nonexistent. I never even wrestled in high school. People sometimes wonder why one of the best MMA gyms in the world is in Iowa, but when you realize that some of the best wrestlers in the world come from Iowa, it starts to make sense. I came to dread the grappling days, and on the mornings afterward I would wake up with my whole body in agony. I started calling this “car-wreck-itis,” that feeling of having been in a car wreck the night before, where everything is strained and black-and-blue, including little muscles you didn’t know existed. Getting out of bed took ten minutes.
The only other time I’ve been beat up like that was after branding. During college I worked a summer on the largest cattle ranch in Montana, and I helped brand for three days, wrasslin’ calves, late in the season when they were getting big. Those calves would run all over you and kick you to shit, like you’d been put in a blender.
During those first two weeks, I often left sparring to stanch a bloody nose, a common occurrence at Pat’s. Somebody was always dashing to the paper towels. People laughed, yelled in faux anger, “Clean up your mess!” and Tim delighted in crowing, “Sam can’t hold his mud.” I sparred with several different people, but far and away the worst was Tim; every time I threw a rear-leg kick he trapped it and dumped me, without fail. His hands were like sledgehammers, and if he had landed some hard body shots, I would probably have