ape, but Philip told me my form was very good. If I wanted to stay around for a year or two and get some fights, I could fight in K-1. That seemed a little far-fetched, but I did feel good, and Apidej would regularly remind me that he liked how I thought, how my brain worked. I still felt like total shit—you need a month just to get to the point where you can train hard—and I sweated like a pig. But I noticed when we worked the bags that I was the only guy in there who left sweat in a ring around the bag; everyone else left it in just one place—they weren’t moving laterally.
My ribs felt better; I could train hard but didn’t want to start sparring yet. I went to Yangon in Myanmar for a little while, which was a step back in time, like visiting Bangkok sixty years ago. I couldn’t find any real places to train; none of my three or four contacts pulled through for me. I trained in the one place I found Burmese boxing, at the YMCA in Yangon, but it was not for professionals. There was no equipment, just two homemade bags hanging from the rafters, one pair of bag gloves we would all alternate using. The teacher was interesting, and he showed me a different kind of head butt, one using the side of your head, back and behind your ear, not the spearing attacks I expected. He was good, but the training wasn’t, so I returned to Thailand and ended up back at Fairtex.
Finally, a promoter I didn’t know got me a fight in Myanmar, but it was only three weeks away, and I wasn’t in great shape. I got really excited, but when I mentioned it to Philip, he was adamant, immediately shaking his head. “No way,” he said, “you’re not going to be ready. The reason you did well when you fought before was you were in shape, great shape. Those guys will try and kill you.” I thought about it for a few days, but in the end I agreed with him, because I wasn’t such a good fighter that I could take a fight on short notice. I didn’t have the experience. I only had two fights, after all. I needed to be in much better shape than any opponent because my work ethic was the only advantage I had. Some guys with great skills, or a lot of fights, they can take fights when they’re out of shape and fight smart and be economical, but I was emphatically not one of them. The promoter wrote me some e-mails, saying things like “Don’t worry, nothing will happen to you,” which had the opposite effect from reassuring me. It was a fight—why would you keep telling me that? I wanted six weeks or eight weeks to train with lethwei guys and then I would fight, and instead here he was telling me he could teach me all the tricks I needed to know in the two days before the fight. That was the final straw. He was going to teach me head butts, and how to defend against them, in two days? I declined the fight. I just didn’t know him. He hadn’t returned my e-mails for years, and then suddenly he was overly friendly, and it put me off. I’d been burned enough times by promoters, I guess. I wasn’t going to allow myself to get rushed into something stupid. I wasn’t out to prove anything; I’d fight when I was ready. I’d go back to the United States and get another MMA fight with promoters I could trust.
COOLER THAN REAL
Pat “Hollywood” Miletich on the set of Death and Life of Bobby Z, September 2005.
Paul Walker rehearses with stuntman Tommy Rosales Jr.
The sight of a gladiator performing well and dying courageously was held by spectators to be an ennobling and uplifting experience, and well worth the price of a life.
—Don Atyeo, Blood and Guts
I flew back from Thailand and arrived in Los Angeles. I was shocked by the hordes of gigantic white people. I thought about fighting; my friend Kirik in Massachusetts was setting something up for December, an amateur MMA fight.
I kept thinking about the ties between fighting and entertainment, the game test, and the big punch. Every single action movie I could think of had the climactic battle when the hero fights the villain, and without fail, the hero gets bashed around and it looks as if he will lose; and then he shows gameness, he makes scratch, and comes back from the edge of death to snatch victory. And action movies and fight movies always had big clean punches, huge shots that would kill a full-grown polar bear, just like in pro wrestling—to galvanize the crowd. Movie fighting is where most of us learn about fighting, especially at a young age, and I was starting to wonder if my exploration of fighting for the twenty-first-century American man should include some kind of investigation into the cinema, into the emotional drama of fictional violence and how it is made. How different is it, really, from the old gladiator arenas? Sure, the action is staged, but it looks real; making it feel real is a whole industry. Does your subconscious know it’s just a movie, that none of it’s real? Isn’t that when a movie fight is great and exciting, when it fools you emotionally?
I was about to leave L.A. for the mania of the cross-country drive back to the East Coast when I got an e-mail from Pat Miletich. He was consulting on a film to be directed by John Herzfeld, who did 15 Minutes and was a huge fight fan. (He’d given an older UFC hero, the Russian Oleg Taktarov, his start in that film.) Herzfeld had been in contact with Pat for months about a UFC Rocky-style movie that had stalled in development. In the meantime, Herzfeld had taken on a thriller, and he had brought Pat down to Mexico, where they were filming, to be the fight coordinator.
The movie, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, was an action-thriller based on a book by Don Winslow, about a convict in a prison who is recruited by a shady DEA agent to impersonate a famous drug dealer—Bobby Z—whom the convict resembles. Mayhem ensues. Paul Walker, the handsome, boyish actor who came to fame in the tremendously popular B-movie about illegal car racing, The Fast and the Furious, was going to play the convict, and the shady DEA agent would be played by Laurence Fishburne.
Herzfeld, in a combination of hubris, prescience, and philanthropy, was filling the supporting cast with MMA stars, former Ultimate Fighting champs. Not only Pat, but Oleg was back, as well as members of Pat’s MFS stable: “The Maineiac” Tim Sylvia, Ben Rothwell, Rory Markham, and “Ruthless” Robbie Lawler were all playing various convicts and bad guys, and the UFC light-heavyweight champ, Chuck Liddell (notoriously hardheaded and heavy-handed), was playing the baddest guy in prison, Maddog. Pat told me to come along if I was interested, and I was. Maybe this chance to take a look behind the curtain would shed some light on the whole experience of fighting.
I drove from L.A. down past San Diego and across the border into the Mexican countryside. The concrete jungle of Tijuana gave way to desert and crystal blue sky. I drove around and around, got lost and found and lost again, until I stumbled onto the set, hours later, and met one of the producers, Keith Samples. He was friendly but a little surprised to see me. “You made it here, huh?” he said. “Well, score one for persistence.” He looked at me for a long moment and then asked, “Do you have any tattoos?” I nodded, and he said, “Great, we’ll use you in the Aryan Brotherhood.”
The set was an abandoned, half-finished Mexican prison being used by la policía for training purposes, with empty guard towers standing sentinel over a rocky void. I drove hours back to where the crew was staying, and I was relieved to see Tim Sylvia’s massive, forbidding head through a window, watching TV.
It was great to see him again, and Pat was there with a chew in, and instantly I was back in the MFS family, back in the fold, made welcome into that jock wrestling-fighting world where it’s share and share alike and favors are asked and granted. Pat and I fell right into conversation, as though it had never stopped. It felt good to be on the inside. There was another heavyweight I vaguely remembered, a young monster named Ben Rothwell, down to play another bad guy. They got the beds, I got the couch cushions and my sleeping bag.
Pat was a little nervous about his role as fight coordinator and wasn’t sure how things were going to go around the Hollywood people, and he missed his little girls already—but he was happy and curious, enjoying the novelty of the situation. He also had a healthy case of Mexico paranoia: He worried about the water, needles on the beach, getting robbed, and getting shaken down by the police. To be fair, we did get pulled over a few times, just for being gringos, and once we were about to be extorted when the policeman recognized Tim and started laughing and shaking his head. “Arlovski, eh?” he asked. (Andrei Arlovski was the guy who had beaten Tim and now had the UFC heavyweight title.) Several other people who were working on the film got shaken down for a hundred bucks here or there. What you really worried about were the federales, the state police.
The next day I was on set. John Herzfeld, the director, had been high school buddies with Sly Stallone and was of a similar vintage; he also had an assistant named Adrian he wou