moters, and he was careless), but it still annoyed me to no end. He said, “It’ll be a great story for the magazine,” and I thought, Don’t do me any more favors, Monte. The bottom line is that promoters don’t care about fighters; they just want asses in seats. As a fighter, you trust the promoters, and it makes you vulnerable. I think Monte just had no idea of my real abilities, and I know he didn’t know anything about my opponent. Monte figured I was working out with Pat, so I must be a badass.
The vendor gave me a free hat and T-shirt, and various people shook my hand as I drank my beer. I watched the rest of the fights and realized what a terrible venue this was; the lighting was horrible, and the white cage made it extremely hard to tell what was happening inside. Only the fighters and the ref could really tell what was happening in there, which I guess is the way it is anyway.
I chatted with my opponent, Jason Keneman, while we watched the fights and drank a few beers. He was a nice guy. He’d done some muay Thai, and this had been his first MMA fight. He hadn’t wanted to go to the ground at all, and neither had I because of my rib. The rib…after all that mental anguish, it had barely bothered me during the fight, even though he’d landed a long body shot right on it. I found out Jason had been training for four years; he had a record of 9–1 in muay Thai. I thought he had seemed pretty calm out there. My one muay Thai fight was nearly four years ago, I had been training about three months since then, and I gave up twenty pounds and had still given him a decent fight—at least I’d pushed the action. That’s what training with Pat’s guys can do for you—it can make up for a lot.
I hadn’t been knocked out or anything. They’d stopped it, and I had definitely been losing on points anyway, even though I had done some damage and had him down once. Getting my mouth guard knocked out…that’s not good. That means you’re getting the shit kicked out of you.
The dilated pupil that had frightened the EMT turned out just to be a “bruise” and was normal a few hours later. The doctor I spoke with later—who was also a fight referee—said the fight never should have been stopped. In medical terms, the mechanism of injury—a punch—isn’t going to cause the brain damage that would result in different size pupils. That would take a car accident or big fall, a more serious impact. He also gave me grief about keeping my hands up while he stitched my eyebrow (he disagreed with the paramedic).
What was most interesting was how much fun it had been. Being in there, bouncing around, pasting him, getting blasted, whatever—it had all been remarkably fun and exciting. Nothing hurt. I didn’t feel any pain at all during the fight. Sure, you know things are bad, like, Oops, that shot was bad, but it didn’t hurt. It was the week, the day of the fight that had really sucked. All that starving and worrying and dehydrating for nothing.
For that, more than anything, I was pissed at Monte and the show. Because I felt that if I had been fresh, and 194 pounds, and crisp…well, who knows? It would have been a better fight. As it was, I pressed the action the whole time. I chased him around. When he inadvertently kicked me in the nuts and the ref gave me time to recover, I didn’t take much because I knew my opponent was more tired than I was (I wasn’t hurt at all; the cup had worked fine). I think if I had been going strong into the third round, I might have been able to get to him. It’s all wishful thinking, but it’s the way I felt. Of course, that’s part of fighting, you’ve got to hold on to your ego, win or lose.
What embarrassed me wasn’t losing the fight, it was coming back to Pat’s looking like I got my ass kicked, even when I didn’t. My face was all swollen up, my eyes were bruised; driving back, when we stopped at gas stations, people would fastidiously avoid looking at me, like I was a burn victim. I dreaded walking into the gym because my fighting credibility was gone—I was just a journalist “having an experience.” That’s the feeling I hated, that I was playing, and I got my hand slapped for it. And no matter what people might say about how good a fight it was and that I gave nearly as good as I got, it doesn’t really matter, because without a win I felt like I besmirched the Miletich name. That’s why I didn’t put on my Miletich T-shirt after the fight; I didn’t want to associate losing with MFS. I let Pat down. One look at my face and he’d know I fought a stupid fight, that I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, which was slip and move and stay outside. It was written all over my battered face: Here’s a stupid fighter, betrayed by a stark inability to move his head.
My ribs were killing me. Sharp shooting pains. I certainly reinjured them. I found out about four months later, when I finally got an X-ray, that there was a “healing fracture” on the floating rib.
I thought about how much happier the homecoming would have been if I’d won. Sure, I was giving up twenty pounds in the fight, but Tony had done that and won. Mike French, another friend from the gym, was 147 and beat a guy who was over 190. Pat fought a guy who weighed 260. And won. That stuff just happens, especially at the amateur level in MMA.
I got out of Bettendorf fast, as I was embarrassed to be walking around the gym. I had some good friends there, but now I didn’t want to face them. I had learned a few things, like what was needed for a knockout; neither Jason nor I had put together enough punches. And that MMA is not a place to learn to fight; I should have ten amateur boxing and kickboxing fights before I get back into the cage.
It was fun. All those blows, the ribs, everything. At least I’d been in a real brawl, finally. And I hadn’t gotten killed. The fight had been stopped, I hadn’t been knocked out. Who knows what might have happened if we’d been on a desert island? I might have outlasted him in the end, all those Hills might have borne fruit.
Driving home, through a steaming Chicago, Tony called to see how I was doing. I asked him how he was doing, as he’d lost a decision in Hawaii to Matt Lindland that same night, and we had been commiserating. He was fine.
“It just sucks to lose,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “but there’s a lot more to it, to doing what we do, than just the fight. If the fight was all there was to it, then it wouldn’t be worth it.”
I thought about what Brandon and I had talked about at length on the drive home from Cincinnati, the meaning of clout. It’s not really about the admiration or respect of others; it’s about self-respect. We have an innate hatred of fear, and we climb into the cage and prove to ourselves that it is nothing to be afraid of. Even this extreme situation, this death match in a cage in front of screaming fans, is nothing to be afraid of.
After I got home Pat sent me an e-mail. He said, “I just wanted to let you know you can fly our colors anytime you want. You showed a lot of heart and 90 percent of the fighters who come here do not last as long as you did.” He closed by saying, “You are without a doubt a fighter.”
Pat Miletich said that about me.
THE RIVER OF JANUARY
Brazilian Top Team. Kneeling, left to right: Bebeo, Murilo Bustamente, Zé Mario Sperry. Standing in the center is Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, to his right is his twin brother, Rogerio.
At AABB Gym, Rio de Janiero. From left to right: Milton Viera, Zé Mario Sperry, Eduardo “Mumm-Ra,” Emerson “Sushiman,” November 2004.
Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.
—Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, referring to fighters
Rio de Janeiro is a city unlike any other, improbably built into cliffs and mountains and around the lagoons and beaches of a wild tropical forest. The urban sprawl, Zona Norte (the North Zone), stretches away in mile after mile of rough and vibrant city, decaying and rising from the decay. From the top of Sugarloaf, one of the rock promontories that rear like titanic fingers from the sand of Zona Sul, you can see everything. The sheer cliff mountains that emerge from the hotels and apartments look like God’s chess pieces. The favelas, the slums, have crept up the sides of the steep mountains like moss, and at night they twinkle like stars.
In the heart of Zona Sul, on the edge of the lagoon, Brazilian Top Team trains. They train to fight vale tudo, “anything goes” in Portuguese—the same thing as MMA—and Top Team is one of the most famous teams in the world.
The gym is luxurious, filling a city block, with swimming pools, tennis courts, workout rooms, and restaurants under a leafy tropical bower. The sun beats down through the giant trees and vines and cuts stark patterns on the mosaic floor. The gym, the Athletic Association of Bank of Brazil (AABB), is a gentlemen’s club, and it is an indication of the high social standing of jiu-jitsu players.
Inside the main training room, just a big padded space, about thirty men of different colors and s