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 died. I hovered between trying to hit him and not wanting to piss him off. He trapped me in a corner and my tiny life flashed before my eyes as I scrambled. He once threw a turning back kick at me, and I leapt aside and it hit the wall like a wrecking ball. I gave him a dirty look and almost stopped sparring: Are you trying to kill me? Afterward, someone told me I was the same height as Andrei Arlovski, Tim’s next fight opponent.
I felt a little like the new kid in school. People were watching me. They wanted to test me out, although I wasn’t very good, so that didn’t last. Several times during my stay I saw outside pro fighters come in to spar, and everyone lined up to beat their asses. People just got pounded; it was a rough place and you didn’t just walk in there and start sparring because those guys would slaughter you.
A few days into it, I met a guy named Marshall Blevins, a manufacturing engineer about my age who’d been with Pat for two and a half years. Marshall fought amateur kickboxing and has won regional, national, and North American titles, but he joked that he still got nervous before a Wednesday night. He was an easygoing guy with a laconic manner, and very helpful, giving me some pointers. “It doesn’t take long to get pounded out of a Wednesday class if you don’t want to be there,” he said.
“I remember sparring with Jens [Pulver] for the first time; he knocked me out with a head kick. A lot of these guys you don’t want to show them you’re hurt, but you get booted in the head, hit the wall, and slide down…. Well, you shake it off and bite down on your mouthpiece and start swinging again. Most of these guys are like that—you hurt them, they’ll come back twice as hard.” He smiled and laughed.
Though I think they went easy on me mostly because Pat introduced me as a writer, it still was pretty rough. I got hit particularly hard one night and could feel blood running in a thin stream out of my nose. The next day my whole face was swollen. Pat looked at me and laughed. “Did you break your nose?”
“No, no, it’s just bruised,” I assured him. I didn’t break it. No way.
Pat looked doubtful.
I have heard critiques of Pat’s gym, that the sparring is too hard, that people get hurt and don’t learn enough. It is a hard place to learn, and you become averse to taking risks and trying new things when you’re getting beaten on. However, MMA is a rough, rough sport; toughness is critical. You need to be tough, to have overall body toughness to succeed. That night my face in the mirror looked deformed, a tremendous swollen bulge over my nose and between my eyes; the blood settled in a few days to give me two black eyes, like makeup under the skin.
Because I didn’t know any better, I kept at it. I continued to get pounded and thrown around by Tim, by the other heavyweights. I ended up on my ass all the time, but once, halfway through the week, as we were all leaving and I was dazedly collecting myself from the floor, Pat remarked with a laugh, “Sam, you’re going to be tough as hell in two months,” and my heart swelled. I knew he was just trying to keep my spirits up, but it worked.
Team Miletich, or Team MFS (Miletich Fighting Systems), is Pat’s stable of fighters, one for each weight class in the UFC. His team reads like a who’s who in mixed martial arts. Jens Pulver, “Little Evil,” at 155 pounds, is a five-time world champion. Matt Hughes was and still is the dominant 170-pound fighter after Pat vacated the slot, winning six titles; Jack Black and “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler also fight at 170, and with Matt they’re three of the top ten welterweights in the world. Tony “the Freak” Fryklund was a badly underrated 185-pounder, and Jeremy Horn is one of the best in the world at 185 or 205. Of course, Tim Sylvia, the former champ, is still a serious heavyweight (under 265) contender. There’s a second tier, under those guys, of about ten or fifteen pro fighters who are all up and coming, guys like Spencer Fisher, Rory Markham, and Sam Hoger, with impressive records and lesser titles. Of course, the team is a revolving concept, with players changing as their standings go up and down—this was all in the early part of 2004.
It’s a little like walking into a boxing gym where Trinidad, De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., and Lennox Lewis all train together with ten of their friends. It’s intimidating; the guy you’re going to be sparring with is on a poster on the wall. And the second-tier guys are so good, it’s like Tony says, “You can’t get a break,” because anybody in there will give you a hard time, anybody in there on Wednesday night can be a handful.
Pat has somehow welded all these fighters together. They sought him out and moved to Iowa to be with him.
Pat grew up wrestling and playing football and battling with his brothers. He wrestled in college, after his dad, the football coach, died, and moved into kickboxing and boxing afterward. He was lucky in that Davenport, another of the Quad Cities, had an excellent boxing gym; some great pros have come out of it: Michael Nunn, Antoine Echols under Alvino Pe?a. Pat boxed professionally, studied Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Sergio Monteiro in Tampa and muay Thai with Long Longley in Illinois. He wasn’t just mixing his training; he was finding the best trainers in the country. He was revolutionary in that he combined these fighting elements better than anyone had before. In the UFC, before Pat, people would stick to their one discipline and try to use it for everything, or maybe be able to do a few things well. Pat was one of the first to be able to do everything: He could box, he could wrestle, he had submissions, and he understood how to put them all together—especially the transitions between them, which in my mind is perhaps the most important part of professional MMA. He could find a weak link in any fighter he met. And coming up at a time when MMA in America was in its infancy, he was a self-made fighter. He had to bring the elements together on his own, mixing up in his own “laboratory” the stand-up and ground fighting he liked.
I had two little black eyes, and my whole body was in agony. Often I woke up with my legs, trunk, back, shoulders, biceps, and forearms all screaming.
After grappling one night, my biceps hurt so bad that I thought I might faint. I couldn’t hide the pain; I was “guarding” (that’s an EMT word for unconscious protective behavior, when people with broken necks from car accidents, for example, walk around cupping their neck with both hands). People asked if I was okay, if I’d hurt my arms. There was a lot of camaraderie, but I wasn’t admitted yet. Instead, I eavesdropped and soaked up what I could from the outside. I talked to Pat about my aching biceps and he looked thoughtful and massaged my arm a bit and asked, “Are you sure it isn’t a case of wuss-itis?” and laughed with me. Pat is just so naturally tough—in all his fights he’s never gone down from a punch to the head—that he doesn’t quite understand mere mortals.
Pat did a training program for law enforcement called Controlled FORCE with some police officers he met through MMA. Tony Grano, a policeman and martial artist, was training and cornering a fighter opposite Pat in an MMA fight, and they hit it off. Tony saw that MMA was a considerable resource to tap into, as everything in it had been tested and retested, and discarded if it proved to be impractical.
I flew down to Austin, Texas, to attend a training session with Pat, Tony Fryklund, and the two police officers who run the program, Tony Grano and Donni Roberts. These guys, lifelong martial artists, were teaching a weeklong seminar at Lackland Air Force Base for military police and instructors.
Pat began teaching by saying, “I can’t teach you what I would do in a certain situation, because I’m a fighter who’s been training his whole life. Instead, I’m going to teach you a series of techniques that a 115-pound woman can do to a 250-pound man, provided she executes the technique properly.”
The problems with training police officers in the use of physical force weren’t what you’d expect. Pat said, “It used to be that they didn’t really want to train police officers too much in martial arts because they were afraid of them going around beating people down. The reality is the opposite; a trained officer is relaxed and able to cope with a physical situation without the panic and adrenaline that an untrained officer might fall into, which leads him to beat someone down.” Black Belt magazine agreed with him in its March 2004 issue: “Untrained officers, when threatened physically, are three times more likely to resort to deadly force….”
In Controlled FORCE, there a