row big punches without as much fear of instant obliteration. Even mediocre heavyweights get the big purses if properly hyped. This is true in boxing, and also true in MMA. People just want to see the biggest and baddest guys in the world.
Fight fans who can understand the technical aspects of the sport usually end up supporting the lighter fighters; in Thailand, where the crowds are very educated, the biggest fights of the night were under 120 pounds (although the Thais are, admittedly, smaller).
Jens, thirty years old and a five-time UFC champ at 155 pounds, had been dealing with the disparity his whole career. He ruminated that “for lighter guys, the money just isn’t there. I left the dollar value behind. I used to look for the payday, but I don’t anymore. I’m a little guy. Little guys have got to stay active and keep it entertaining—that’s what little guys do.
“The first few times, the payday thing really got to me; my biggest fight had a payday of twenty grand, and some of these medium-talented heavyweights are getting paid three or four times that much just to show up—not even to win. Why not me? Twenty grand for eight months isn’t that much.”
Jens was one of my favorite fighters to watch at Miletich’s place—he threw bombs and horribly heavy body shots. Like Bas Rutten, he was a devotee of the liver shot, a hard punch to the liver that can freeze a guy, and end the fight. I asked him about the switch to professional boxing.
“Boxing is just as tiring as MMA. It’s a whole different world—so fast, so many combinations, you have to let your hands go otherwise you lose…. Even if you block everything and slip and move, you stilllose the round.” Jens was just trying to keep busy as a fighter and make a living, which in MMA is hard to do. The UFC, the only game in town for most Americans, had eliminated the 155-pound weight class. Jens had been boxing for eight hundred dollars a fight, but it kept the ring-rust off.
Jens was a short, slender man with a handsome, dark, batlike face and strikingly different-colored eyes. He had a Mohawk for this fight, and he was pale and vampiric. It was his “bad intentions” that gave him the sobriquet “Little Evil,” however: He went into the fight to knock somebody out.
He was happy to be back at MMA but aware of the complications: There were so many ways to lose. “My first two losses were ankle and feet submissions—who would have thought I had to protect my feet?
“It’s still small enough, it’s like a get-together every time. You get to see all your old friends. Boxing isn’t like that at all. There is no friendliness, you got cornermen trying to punk you out, all you got is your own people. With MMA it almost sucks to have an opponent because you don’t get to talk to him until the fight’s over.”
Before this fight, Jens had been boxing at 142, which changed his whole body type because he had stopped lifting weights. He had two months to get up to weight, and he made 160, but Gomi had an advantage because he was coming down from 185. Jens respected Gomi, who had lost to B. J. Penn (whom Jens beat many years before and many think now is the best in the world), but Gomi had been on a tear since then. He was 4–0, and he used his size and strength to ground and pound. Jens was confident that if he could keep Gomi on his feet, however, he could make something happen.
Jens spoke freely, pausing every once and again to spit tobacco into a cup. “There is so much to know in MMA. You can’t wait for your opponent. You have to ignore him and not preoccupy yourself with what he’s going to do—if you think about all the things he’s going to do, you’ll freeze: You have to focus on what you are going to do to him. Worrying about his offense will hurt yours.
“I’ll probably have to outwrestle Gomi, but if I can get him standing for two minutes, I have to capitalize on that.”
Jens had coauthored a book on his own life that was published on a small scale, and in it he detailed a horrific home life with his abusive father. Jens was a little crazy. The joke at Miletich’s place was “Whenever you’re sparring Jens, he thinks you’re his father, and Jens hates his father.”
But at thirty, in a hotel room in Tokyo, Jens sounded remarkably sane to me. “I don’t need to be scared to death to fight hard; I just want to perform well. If a guy wants to fight me in the street, well, I got nothing for you.” He shook his head.
“It’s not aggression. Aggression will get you beat. Those guys who have to black out to fight, or who get nausea…I just want to know that my skills are better.” This was Little Evil, so I wasn’t sure whether I believed him. I had seen how emotional he could be when he won—he was crying when he first took the UFC lightweight title.
Jens thought Gomi was a momentum fighter. Momentum fighters get so broken when plan A fails that they can’t get to plan B: “You can see a momentum fighter lose it. You can see it slip out of his eyes, until he’s so beaten he can barely take a sip of water.” I could remember in my MMA fight when I was too gassed to drink water.
Jens paused in his rambling monologue, thinking aloud. “Ten more seconds is all I ever ask. That’s the good thing I learned about being KO’d twice. You don’t see it coming—it’s like death—you don’t plan for it, so don’t wait for it. So many people are afraid of getting KO’d that their hands stay home, but not me. I got to go out there and shoot the lights out and fall down.”
Jens spat, and offered one more nugget as I stood up to leave.
“Rulon better be ready. That’s the thing with wrestlers is that they don’t like getting punched. He better be ready to trade punches and get hit.”
When Fedor walked in at the prefight press conference, Rodrigo quickly turned to watch him—not nervous but curious. The appearance of the “Other,” as Joyce Carol Oates might say. George Plimpton wrote in Shadowbox, “No sport existed in which one’s attention was so directly focused on the opposition for such a long time—except perhaps chess—so that the matter of psychological pressures was certainly in effect.”
Fedor was so relaxed that I felt sure it was an act, mere posturing. He and Rodrigo sat in front of banks of cameras, at high tables covered in microphones, like UN envoys. There were maybe two hundred journalists in the room, only two or three of whom weren’t Japanese. Fedor and Rodrigo spoke through their translators, and the conversation went from Portuguese to Japanese, from Japanese to Russian, and then back. I could barely follow what was being said, but when a reporter asked Fedor about what he wanted to do after the fight, he said, “Visit Brazil,” and that got a few delayed laughs. Rodrigo gave Fedor his big smile and said, “You should come down for Carnival.” Fedor was in a tracksuit; Rodrigo wore Armani and Diesel.
Their fight had the potential to be a classic. Rodrigo was the technical submission specialist, renowned for his ability to take a punch and stage miraculous comebacks to submit his opponents. Fedor was the feared striker, the heavy-handed athlete who was so slippery, whose hips were so good, that he appeared unsubmittable. Styles made fights.
They both weighed in shirtless, and neither was large for a heavyweight, each around 230 pounds. They had both beaten much heavier fighters, guys who weighed fifty or even a hundred pounds more. Rodrigo was lean and muscular, while Fedor was slightly beefy, with the Russian heaviness that was so deceiving. Fedor laughed at his own chubby physique, but no one thought for a moment that he was out of shape.
The tightness of control at Pride was legendary. They didn’t really know I was there, although the Pride office in Los Angeles did, and they couldn’t have cared less. Pride existed for the Japanese, and although the overseas market was tremendous, there was little catering to foreign reporters.
Zé was instructed not to talk to reporters, and more than that, not to interact with any Japanese people. Picture taking and autographs were to stop. The reasoning behind that was never made clear, although Zé suspected it may have been about the ratings war on New Year’s Eve with K-1, the other major fighting event in Japan. K-1 was having a slightly smaller show in Osaka the same night. It was a Japanese tradition on New Year’s Eve to stay in and watch TV all night with the family, and the ratings wars were intense.
Late one night at Sizzler, Rodrigo was posing for pictures with fans, and someone from the Pride organization actually came over and made them stop.
Eventually, the day of the fight arrived. There was an ugly hum, a tenseness, a buzz that ran through all of us as we scrambled to make sure every last thing was ready.
It was cold and getting colder when we climbed into the bus, and the snow had been picking up all day. I’m not quite sure how snow can be Japanese, but this snow had a distinctly Japanese aesthetic, falling like a heavy, quiet haiku. The roads w