Ruthless, primal, barely legal, mixed martial arts has become a breakthrough phenomenon thanks to the UFC. But what kind of man does this for a living? A look inside America’s favorite combat sport.
By Daniel Duane
It doesn’t hurt, getting punched in the face. Not like you’d think. It might sting a little when your face is cold and the first shot tears open the bridge of your nose. But after a couple of minutes, after you’ve been clocked a few times and your flesh starts to tenderize like a hammered chuck steak, after your brain catches up to the fact that you’re in a brawl and dumps cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream, you will still feel the impact, but the pain - the pain doesn’t register anymore. Even when a guy grabs the back of your head with his hands, hauling it down so he can launch knee after knee up into your face, it’s not the blows that hurt so much. It’s your pride. It’s demoralizing to have a guy hang on your head like that, controlling you, making it impossible to stand up like a man.
Some shots do get through to you, of course. Like if you get tagged between your fourth and seventh ribs, up around the liver. A hard knuckle punch there can make your diaphragm spasm, so you can’t catch your breath. That can buckle you in half. Make you sick to your stomach. Or if a guy’s thumb gets by your orbital bone and booms against your eyeball. If it lands just right, the blow can expand the back of the eyeball like a squashed balloon and fracture the fine layer of bone inside the socket. That’s a real motherfucker. The pain ripples straight into your brain.
But you don’t have time to think about that, because you dropped your guard for a moment and now the guy’s sitting on your chest and raining down shots, banging and banging, trying to get you to fade out. So you’re feeling for some imbalance in his weight, some subtle shift amid the barrage that’ll allow you to buck him off. And if you do manage to worm away, maybe you can take his arm with you, wrapping it up in your legs to hyperextend that elbow, try to rupture the joint capsule. If he doesn’t tap out right away, you’ll hear his ligaments tear and his bones creak. Or maybe you’ll wrap your arm around his throat, lock his trachea into the crook of your elbow, and bear down so hard with your other arm that you close the huge carotid arteries in his neck. Unconsciousness comes fast if you do it right - 10 seconds, more or less. And if you’ve been there, you know it’s mostly a feeling of being stuck, and being pissed at yourself that you didn’t see the move coming. You feel your strength dim as he sinks that arm deeper into your throat and a kind of darkness falls over your mind.
“Find Dr. Shu!” Dana White yells into an iPhone. “Do not take Stephan to the hospital. We got to find Dr. Shu.” White is president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, better known simply as the UFC. He is a big guy, built solid from his days as an amateur boxer and gym owner, and as he listens on the phone he shakes his head and rubs one of his meaty hands over his smooth-shaved scalp. He hollers to an assistant in the next room, “Hey, Stephan Bonnar’s got a big cut above his eye, all the way up his fucking head. Will somebody please get me Dr. Shu!”
Then White jumps to his feet, shakes my hand, and with a wide smile says, “Hey, what’s up, brother? Good to meet you. Sorry I was on the phone. One of our fighters got cut. You got to get these guys to the right doctor or it can ruin a career.”
White knows what he’s talking about. He runs the hottest circuit in the hottest sport: mixed martial arts. It’s known to the cognoscenti as MMA, and it has fast replaced the Sweet Science as America’s favorite combat sport. When White took over in 2001, the UFC was near bankruptcy. Now its fights can fill a major arena 10 or 12 times a year, raking in $2 million to $4 million in ticket sales and, reportedly, as much as $30 million in pay-per-view revenues for each event. UFC’s fight videos are among the best-selling sports DVDs on Amazon.com, and its Ultimate Fighter reality show is the most watched program on Spike TV. MMA even has its own clothing lines, including Warrior Wear and American Fighter (and, for the ladies, Fight Chix), ideal for making a nice middle-class kid feel like a badass.
—-
The base appeal of the sport is obvious. Put a couple of guys trained in multiple fighting styles into an eight-sided cage known as the Octagon and see who comes out standing. We’re talking about three five-minute rounds (five rounds for title fights) of the closest thing you’ll find on TV to no-holds-barred all-out fighting. It taps into the fear and craving every American man has for mano a mano violence: the imposition of one man’s will over another’s, the assertion of status in the pack. Under White the sport strikes a careful balance between the respectability that keeps it legal and the bloody spectacle that keeps it satisfying.
White heads this growing empire from a stucco office building behind the In-N-Out Burger on Vegas’s West Sahara Avenue. Inside his office he keeps the drapes drawn and the decor a kind of Gen-X fight-mogul chic, with black-and-whites of Ali, Bruce Lee collector’s dolls (”given to me by the Bruce Lee family, actually; we’re real tight”), and a framed skateboard from Tony Hawk (”a friend”). White speaks in bold declarations punctuated by profanity, and he jumps to his feet again to explain why MMA is enjoying such a surge in popularity.
“Fighting’s primal,” he says. “It’s inside all of us. If you take four street corners on any intersection in any city on earth, with guys playing stickball on one corner, football on another, throwing dice on a third, and a fight breaks out on the fourth, which corner does everybody run to?”
But what about the fighters themselves, I ask. What kind of guy does this? And what’s it really like?
White’s answer is to lead me out of his office and down a couple of flights of stairs to the basement of the building, where UFC has a training gym filled with speed bags and heavy bags and teardrop bags for throwing knees and elbows.
“You ever done any jiujitsu?” White asks. “It’ll fucking blow your mind. The first time I tried it, it was like taking the red pill in The Matrix. Hey, Mario!” White calls across the boxing ring to a huge Brazilian kid. “Come over here. This guy’s a journalist. Roll around with him, okay? Show him what the ground game feels like.”
“Now?” I ask. Not only is Mario big, he’s a black belt.
White nods. “Take off your shoes and your glasses.”
So I do, and Mario lies on his back and tells me to lean in between his knees, missionary-style, and try something.
“Like what?”
“Try to hit me,” Mario says.
“No, don’t do that,” White says, clearly worried for me, not Mario. “Just try to choke him.”
I try to press my forearm into Mario’s trachea and he flips me around and locks my own trachea into the crook of his elbow, using his other arm to leverage the choke. My carotid arteries shut down, my blood pressure plunges, and my head feels like a swelling balloon. I remember the universal MMA way of conceding defeat: three taps of the hand on the other guy’s body. Except I do more like 30, and they’re more like slaps.
After Mario finally lets go, White moves the tutorial on to another aspect: the power of the kicks. “It feels like getting hit with a fucking baseball bat. You’ve got to experience it to believe it. In fact, let’s have a guy kick you.”
Turning to his PR director, White says, “Hey, Jen, take him over to the Xyience gym so Forrest can kick him in the leg, okay? But tell Forrest it’s got to be just a little love tap. Seriously.” White pauses to make sure she understands. “Really, Jen. That’s important. You have to tell Forrest ‘a little love tap.’ He really hurt that last guy.”
Forrest is Forrest Griffin, and the “last guy” was a Web journalist named Eric Newby, who agreed to be kicked as a prerequisite for asking Griffin questions. Griffin broke his femur.
—-
When I meet Griffin he’s in a sparring cage, stretching with a yoga instructor. This is how he introduces himself: He squints at the word Ireland on my T-shirt and says, “You look Irish with that white skin. You should marry a black woman so your kids don’t have to look like you.”
“What?”
“Ask me a question.”
“Okay,” I say. “What’s it like to get punched in the face?”
“What the fuck do you think it feels like?”
“I have no idea.”
I stare at him a moment, trying to decide how badly I want this interview. I open my laptop, figuring that if I take notes maybe he’ll answer like a reasonable person. And to some extent, it works.
“God, I wish I was nicer. I wish I wasn’t such an asshole,” he tells me. He does this a lot, switching from bully to self-loathing nice guy, as I’ll learn. “You know, when I was younger I used to wish I had a bigger dick, or bigger muscles, or whatever. Now I just wish I wasn’t so dumb. It must be great being smart, laughing at everybody. By the way, I noticed your typing. Very impressive.”
Not all UFC guys are so hard to talk to, so surly. Most make a fetish out of being calm, self-contained martial-artist types, unafraid of any question. But Griffin, who is 28, will leak only a few details about his past, like that he grew up in Athens, Georgia, and that his mom was a third-grade teacher’s aide until her back went out and she couldn’t walk anymore. “When I was 13 she married an engineer,” Griffin says, “and my dad before that did construction, and my dad before that…I don’t remember what he did.”
“Bunch of different dads, huh?”
“Not like a bunch.” He sounds pissed. “You calling my mother a whore? Hey, Donny! This guy just called my mother a whore!”
After that moment passes, Griffin picks up where he left off, telling me that he fought a lot as a kid. “That was all I’d bring to a friendship; I could beat people up for you.” And he found he liked it. “It’s a rush, it’s a roller-coaster type thing. You don’t think about whether your girlfriend’s pregnant or you’re going to pay your bills. It’s pure escape. It’s in the moment. You’re hitting somebody, somebody’s hitting you. You don’t worry about nothin’. ”
It’s also true that Griffin has a reputation for hurting people - not just Newby, but a buddy whose nose he broke three times while just horsing around and a sparring partner whose forehead he ripped open. Which makes it a little incongruous that he went to the University of Georgia to prepare for a career in nursing. When that didn’t work out, for reasons he clearly doesn’t want me to ask about, he joined the Athens police force, which he seems to have found boring. “There was far too little gun-fighting,” he says.
Just for the hell of it Griffin signed up for a cage-fighting tournament at a National Guard armory. The four fighters had to put in 50 bucks each, and the winner took the pot. Griffin won, and he liked it so much he looked for more bouts. “When I started fighting I walked around different,” he says. “I didn’t have nothing to prove. All my aggression was spent. I was a nicer person to people.”
Griffin quit the police force while he tried to get a pro fighting career off the ground. After a few years, he gave up, but then was offered a spot on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, in 2005. He became a fan favorite, the big guy who loved fart jokes and was always up for a beer; the one with the goofy ears who wasn’t particularly cut. But, man, could he fight. He survived the show to the final episode and the final match, battling for a six-figure UFC contract. Spike TV still hadn’t committed to buying a second season when that bout began. Then Griffin and Stephan Bonnar walked out, stood toe-to-toe, and beat the shit out of each other for three rounds. Spike’s viewership hit 2.6 million households - making it, at the time, the most watched fight in UFC history - by the time White hoisted Griffin’s hand. “People were calling up their friends in the middle of the fight,” White says, “and telling them, ‘You have got to fucking see this.’ ”
White says Spike execs committed to three more seasons in a handshake deal in an alley afterward, and from the moment Griffin started in the UFC, he had the Kelly Clarkson factor going for him: The fans felt as if they’d known him before he got huge, as though he were a friend. And he’s done well since, with five wins in seven bouts. White tells me Griffin has made more than a million dollars at this point.
“Want to see my new toy?” Griffin asks me suddenly. He pulls on track pants and the same nylon jacket he wore three years ago on the reality show, and I follow him into the parking lot to the Scion xB he won then. He opens the back door and takes out an assault rifle. Looking for the safety, Griffin waves the muzzle around as I bob and weave to stay out of the way.
“What I really wanted was an AR-15. Maybe I’ll get one of those, too, and you and me, we can take them both into the desert and see who comes back.”
He’s joking. I think.
He puts the rifle back in his Scion, closes the door, and puts his hands in his jacket pockets. He looks antsy, bouncing on his toes.
Then I see his right leg fly toward my left thigh.
He stops an inch away.
“Fuck!” I yell. “I knew that was coming.”
“I telegraphed it, didn’t I?” He seems genuinely disappointed.
Before I can answer he slams his fist into my chest, just below the pectoral muscle, a spot that, I now know, hurts like a bastard.
—-
Rich Brazilian guys have been doing this for decades, beating the snot out of one another in private fight clubs, practicing what they call vale tudo, or “anything goes.” Back in the early 20th century one family of these guys, the Gracies, took the basics of Japanese jujutsu and developed it into what’s now called Brazilian jiujitsu, a system of joint locks and choke holds that allow a smaller guy to control a bigger opponent.
The form came to the United States in 1993 when one of the Gracie offspring, Rorion, teamed up with Semaphore Entertainment Group, or SEG, to put on a pay-per-view tournament in Denver. They invited martial arts experts and professional fighters from all over the world to compete in what they called the Ultimate Fighting Championship. They sold coverage and billed it as the moment of truth for age-old questions like what would happen if, say, a pro boxer fought a kung fu expert. The first bout saw a 410-pound sumo wrestler charge a Dutch kickboxer and get three of his teeth kicked out. One tooth flew into the crowd and the other two got buried in the kickboxer’s foot. Ringside doctors simply left them there so he could finish the tournament.
SEG ran more of these tournaments over the next few years, pushing the blood-and-guts angle. Nothing could stop a fight, the company touted, except a knockout, submission, “or death.” Nobody actually died, but the carnage grew: ruptured joints and broken limbs; crushed vertebrae and temporary paralysis; trauma-induced seizures and even a broken rib that tore open a guy’s lung. At UFC 5, six-foot-seven, 295-pound John Hess faced Andy Anderson, owner of the Totally Nude Steakhouse in Longview, Texas. Hess bit a chunk out of Anderson’s hand and rammed a thumb so far into Anderson’s eye socket that the eyeball popped out.
Eventually a curious thing happened. Tournaments conceived as spectacle, and as a way to popularize Gracie jiujitsu, spawned both a new fighting form and a new sport: mixed martial arts. Fighters started studying one another’s disciplines, blending skills from jiujitsu, muay Thai, wrestling, and boxing.
At the same time, this emerging sport faced political pressure. By the late 1990s Senator John McCain was making it his personal mission to destroy what he called “human cockfighting.” Dozens of states had outright banned mixed martial arts, and SEG was so desperate for venues that it staged one tournament on a Canadian Indian reservation on which the Mounties couldn’t go. By 1999 not a single state athletic commission would sanction MMA, and, although pay-per-view figures had always been respectable, no cable channel would carry a match.
That’s when SEG sold out to White and his billionaire boyhood friends, the Fertitta brothers, sons of a Las Vegas casino magnate. The brothers had the financial backing, and White had a plan for bringing the UFC back out of the underground. Step one was dumping the no-holds-barred routine for a list of outlawed moves: head-butting, eye-gouging, biting, hair-pulling, fish-hooking a guy’s cheeks with your fingers, poking fingers into orifices, twisting a guy’s fingers or toes, spitting on your opponent, and even saying mean stuff to him (really). White managed to keep mixed martial arts exciting enough to draw a crowd but safe enough that fighters didn’t worry much about permanent injuries.
Not that injuries don’t still happen. Cuts and broken noses are so routine that blood has to be mopped from the Octagon’s floor between bouts. White insists that mixed martial arts is safer than boxing. Its four-ounce fingerless gloves may cause more facial cuts, but their minimal padding actually protects against worse. The little bones in our hands aren’t as hard as our skulls, so if a guy hits you too hard he’ll shatter his hand. Despite safety measures, a fighter named Sam Vasquez, who is not part of the UFC, died in December after being knocked out at the Renegades Extreme Fighting show in Houston. That was the first death ever in a sanctioned mixed martial arts bout.
White’s other gift has been for promotion. “I’ve been a fight fan since I was a kid, growing up right here in Vegas and watching fights at the Showboat Casino,” he says. Now he looks at boxing as a cautionary tale. “Those guys fucked up that sport so bad: Don King and Bob Aram. They just stuck their hands in and ripped the life out and shoved it in their own pockets.” They did that, he says, by promoting one or two stars and ignoring the rest. That’s why White stocks the UFC with a big roster of fighters, each with a marketable Horatio Alger life story, and he gives even the smallest bouts publicity.
So when Chuck Liddell, one of the two most famous guys in the sport, loses a couple fights and his light heavyweight title, or Randy Couture, the other most famous guy, retires as reigning heavyweight champ, the UFC doesn’t miss a beat.
“I remember what it felt like going to the fights,” says White. “I was so fucking excited. I wanted everybody’s autograph, but at a boxing match you can’t get near anything unless you’re Clooney or Nicholson.” So he makes a point of offering access to fans, with free autograph sessions and prefight weigh-ins open to the public. He has clearly learned from pro wrestling, too, borrowing its crowd-amping tactics such as light shows and booming music, but none of the fakeness of its fights.
These days 32 states sanction MMA bouts, and the UFC has built up such a market that it’s spawned a slew of imitators, such as the International Fight League, which airs on Fox Sports. Mark Cuban, owner of HDNet and the Dallas Mavericks, has launched HDNet Fights. White has already eliminated his main competition by recently paying a reported $70 million for Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships, then brought some of its best fighters to the UFC. If he’s worried about Cuban he doesn’t let on.
“If he thinks he’s going to compete with me, he better quit fucking dancing with the stars,” White says. “It’s like me going, ‘Hey, there’s a McDonald’s on every corner. They must be killing it! I’m going to make burgers too! I’m going head-to-head with them.’ That’s how fucking stupid this is.”
—-
UFC fighters talk about fighting the way porn stars talk about sex: They do it for a living because they love doing it. That, and they dig the fame. When I ask Wanderlei Silva, the legendary MMA fighter from Curitiba, Brazil, why he fights, he smiles. “I fight to make the stadium shake,” he says simply. Lots and lots of UFC guys say this, in fact - that playing to a crowd is the absolute best part of the job.
I meet up with Silva at the UFC headquarters basement gym. He has a bout coming up against Chuck Liddell, and he smiles at me even as he works out like a freak of war - as if he were an actual, honest-to-goodness gladiator readying himself for mortal combat. He straps on a weighted vest, tapes his nostrils shut, and pulls on a padded helmet that keeps his mouth wrapped around a snorkel with an airflow restricter so he can push his cardiovascular system even further. Over the next 20 minutes, as I watch alongside Rachelle Leah, a Spike TV hostess wearing a low-cut T-shirt and spray-on jeans - the single hottest female I’ve ever been near enough to smell - Silva hammers through plyometric jumps, body-slams a 200-pound punching bag, runs up and down the UFC fire-escape stairs, and charges across a boxing ring with huge surgical tubes strapped to his waist, holding him back for resistance. Then he repeats the whole cycle. I can hear him sucking air through that snorkel, and his Brazilian trainer keeps screaming, “Vá! Vá! Vá!” (”Go! Go! Go!”). For his cooldown Silva strips to his briefs and jumps neck-deep into a plastic garbage can full of ice water, and then sits there moaning like a grizzly bear as his trainer times his soak.
Afterward, over a protein shake in a UFC conference room, Silva, 31, says he’s been fighting since he was a fat, ugly teenager who wanted a better body and thought muay Thai kickboxing would get him there. His single favorite moment, he says, came in Japan, before an audience of 50,000, which is bigger than any MMA audience this country has ever seen. He survived two matches in a single night to reach the finals against Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, who now happens to be the UFC’s light heavyweight champ. Silva managed to get Rampage into a muay Thai clinch, wrapping both hands around the back of Rampage’s neck, pulling his face down, and landing several consecutive knee shots into his skull. Right before the end, Silva recalls with a lighthearted sense of wonder, Rampage lifted up his dazed head and smiled wide. “I don’t know why he smiled,” Silva tells me. “I smile too, of course, and then I punch and end it.”
For other guys, such as Stephan Bonnar, it’s about the gamesmanship. “You have all these weapons to choose from - knees, elbows, punches, submissions, slams,” Bonnar tells me. “It’s all kind of playful. You take the personal aspect out and it’s a fun game with high stakes.” Randy Couture speaks in similar terms, telling me that a fight is a kind of “kinetic chess” in which “your opponent moves his pawn, so you’ve got to block or go on the offensive to force him to react to your moves, and you hope that he doesn’t present something new that you didn’t know he had.”
Couture describes locking Vitor Belfort into an arm bar in the middle of a title fight, only to watch Belfort escape and lock Couture into the very same hold, pushing his elbow joint toward the breaking point. Couture escaped, he tells me, only because he’d already broken Belfort’s nose and there was so much blood everywhere, mingled with so much sweat, that Couture was able to slither free. “The fans see the strikes and the cuts and the occasional knockout and they can’t imagine being in that situation,” Couture says. “But if they trained, they’d be surprised by how quickly the body adapts to the workload, from kicking and being kicked to getting punched. The first time a cut happens it might freak you out, but you get used to it, and three or four stitches, or even nine or 10, isn’t that big a deal.”
Some fighters actually seem to crave a beating. Welterweight Matt Hughes describes being choked unconscious to me as “not a bad feeling.” Lightweight Roger Huerta, a formerly homeless south Texas gangbanger with the third-step prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous tattooed on his forearm (though he never did AA), says that fighting is “my drug, my fix.” He tells me about a recent fight in which Clay Guida knocked him out in the second round with a big right hook. “I was out for five seconds,” Huerta says. “Completely out. Then my vision was coming back, but my vision was red, and I couldn’t hear anything but a ringtone, and I could see him on top of me, pounding and pounding and pounding me, and it was a blur.” That round ended just in time, and Huerta says he spoke with God. “I go, ‘I don’t think you put me in this situation to lose,’ and I pictured my mom, and my friends that have hope in me, and I was going to show them that even at your lowest you can overcome anything.”
Soon after the ref started the next round, Huerta landed a knee strike that blew Guida’s entire skull up and backward in a horrible twisting snap. Then Huerta climbed onto Guida’s back and locked him in a choke hold that ended the fight. The experience was so emotional that Huerta burst into sobs of relief when the ref held his hand up in victory.
—-
If you ever get to shake a fighter’s hand, remember this: Look him in the eye and don’t step back. He’ll get up in your face, because these guys have a screwy sense of personal space, and if you move back you’re a “vic,” a victim. I got a warning about this in Newark, New Jersey, the night before I went to UFC 78, live at the Prudential Center arena. Light heavyweight Houston Alexander, the most hyped fighter on the card, was pitted against Brazilian black belt Thiago Silva, and when I met Alexander in the lousy restaurant at the Doubletree Hotel where the UFC fighters were housed, he put his face inches from mine and locked my hand in a crusher grip. Groups of thick-necked fighters and their fat coaches muttered in secretive tones at other tables, eating chicken tenders and salad and looking grim and shadowy, as if they didn’t want to be caught smiling.
I’d wanted to meet Alexander because, though new to the UFC at 35, he was one of its hottest prospects and biggest personalities, a hardcore bruiser from the Midwestern cage-fighting circuit whose fighting style is usually described, simply, as “violent.” He has a shaved head, a manicured goatee, crisply symmetrical features, and a body that’s been called the best physique in the UFC, which is another way of saying that when he takes his clothes off to fight it makes normal guys want to join a fight gym. Sitting at an isolated table, so other fighters couldn’t overhear him, Alexander outlines his story for me: single father of six kids by two mothers, supporting them all in a one-bedroom apartment in Omaha; has only one kidney because his sick daughter needed the other one; has her name, Elan, tattooed across his left fist (”See, look,” he says, putting that fist to my face) and his own graffiti tag, Scrib, tattooed across his right fist (”See?”).
“And on the back of your right hand?”
“Bringer of War,” Alexander says matter-of-factly, as if he’s telling me his e-mail address.
But fighting is not all he’s about, he wants me to know. He’s a professional breakdancer, too, and a hip-hop DJ at a local radio station, and he’s doing what he calls a Culture Shock Tour of Nebraska public schools to share the deeper meaning of hip-hop.
“How’d you get started fighting?” I ask.
“I’ve been a street fighter all my life.”
I nod as if I know what he means. Then I realize I have no idea what he means.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, it started in East St. Louis, when I was a kid. Them guys was just rough, they’d just want to fight you. In Omaha it was usually guys who were getting too physical with my girl cousins, to where I would have to take care of them. I never came off as a tough guy, but I did know how to finish it.” He laughs a little. “I did know how to finish it.”
One night a lady friend told Alexander about an Omaha bar, Club Amnesia, that had a ringer, a fighter who took on all comers. (Yes, these places do exist.) She dared him to sign up. (Yes, these women do exist.) So he did, and clobbered the guy. The fight promoter asked Alexander if he’d like the ringer role. He was already laying asphalt during the day and working radio at night, taking care of his kids and recovering from that kidney-removal surgery, but he liked the sound of a couple hundred extra bucks every Wednesday night, so he agreed.
“And you won?”
“For two years. Wrassling guys, boxers, tae kwon do guys.”
After that there was nobody left in Omaha who wanted to fight Alexander. So the same promoter offered him a job at an arena in Des Moines. That lasted two more years, with Alexander making the trip every Wednesday by car, for $500 a pop. Then, last March, he entered the Extreme Challenge, a cage-fighting tournament in Iowa. He fought two guys, knocking out the first in 55 seconds, the next in a minute and a half.
A few weeks later he got a call from the UFC, asking if he’d like to fight somebody named Keith Jardine in seven weeks. Alexander had never heard of Jardine, and he had little martial arts training, but he knew the UFC was the big time, so he agreed, and spent the next month learning a few basic muay Thai tricks and some simple grappling. Forty-eight seconds into the match, Keith “the Dean of Mean” Jardine, a top-ranked light heavyweight, lay sprawled unconscious on the mat, his mouthpiece halfway across the Octagon. When he finally regained consciousness he looked as if he wanted to cry.
“Seeing a person go down, that’s pretty damn exciting,” Alexander tells me. “You feel this sense of dominance like no other. There is no better sense of confidence than seeing some guy who’s trying to hurt you on his back.”
Now, sitting across from me in that dingy New Jersey dining room, with two fights (both wins) and less than two total minutes of UFC fighting experience, Alexander is 24 hours away from walking into a sold-out arena and facing a man who has been refining his Brazilian jiujitsu technique for more than 10 years. Alexander is getting $10,000 to show and another $10,000 if he wins, while the UFC will bring in an estimated $30 million for the night. He swears he isn’t nervous a bit, that he simply doesn’t get nerves before a fight.
“It’s a calming thing,” he says. “I’ve been doing it for so many years, it’s just like, Okay, here we go again.”
—-
Akihiro Gono kicks Tamdan McCrory in the balls so hard it makes me cross my legs. And then I hear the smack of Gono’s left fist hooking into McCrory’s head, a tactile cracking sound against a sweaty cheek, followed by the sharp whack of Gono’s right shin whaling like a steel pipe into McCrory’s thigh and buckling his knee so that he stumbles, thudding backward like a drunk before booming down hard onto the mat not 30 feet from where I sit. The referee blocks my view, so I stand up on the floor of the arena just in time to see Gono leap onto his prey and rain down fists.
Even from this close, where a surgical mask might have been a smart precaution against the spraying blood and sweat, the ground fighting looks like just a mash of two superheated bodies, nylon shorts grinding against the black metal mesh of the cage as Gono pounds and pounds. The two Octagon girls, sitting a few feet in front of me and wearing nothing but these little bikini numbers, seem almost bored, whispering to each other and trying to sit there with good posture until it’s time to strut around again.
But then Gono bends McCrory’s arm straight up behind him, pushing both the elbow and shoulder joints toward a simultaneous rupture, and I have to watch the result on the Jumbotron way up in the ceiling, craning my neck as the referee shoves Gono off and declares the fight over and lets this poor McCrory kid, a 21-year-old from upstate New York, kneel facedown, limp, his whooped ass sticking straight up in the air and that wrenched arm all twisted at an ugly angle. So now those Octagon girls are standing up and pulling their bikinis out of their butts and whispering to the tense middle-aged woman who is handling them, getting them ready for their walk-around.
“They don’t have asses,” says the woman in the VIP seat next to me. She is a Brazilian stripper, in from Vegas for the bouts because she knows the fighter going up against Houston Alexander later in the night. She wears fishnet stockings and says, “It’s always tits in America, but the ass is the beautiful part of the woman. In Brazil, we like a big, beautiful ass.”
The Prudential Center is only three weeks old, shiny-new and borderline sterile, smoke-free in that modern sports-arena way. A sell-out crowd has paid $40 to $1,500 per seat, and they pour in steadily as the fight card progresses and Joe “J. Lau” Lauzon dominates a short, stumpy little guy with tattoos that say things like “Warrior Within.” The fans, clean-cut middle-class men in their 20s and early 30s, look like regular schmoes with good jobs and a taste for beer and a big night out and the chance to scream stupid shit at men who would otherwise terrify them (as in “You suck! Go back to Ithaca!”).
It gets a guy’s bloodlust fired up, watching fight after fight - in that porno kind of way where you’re never fully satisfied because you’re not doing the pounding yourself, and also because the refs keep stopping it before anybody gets killed or driven into a coma or even has a joint destroyed. Not that you’d actually go home happier if that happened, but it’s weird to watch things run to the brink of horror and then have it all halted at the key moment, like coitus interruptus. It leaves you standing up at your seat with all 14,000 of the fans in that squeaky-clean arena while the big light show and death metal soundtrack tries to convince you that something even more major is on the way - which maybe it is, because now Houston Alexander is slapping hands with fans, strolling across the arena floor and stripping his clothes and letting his cut man smear Vaseline on his face. “I am scared for Thiago,” says the woman next to me. “This other man looks so dangerous.”
Then this Thiago Silva character does likewise, trotting right in front of me, up into the Octagon. Now the two fighters are dancing around each other and may be about to put on a spectacle that would catapult Alexander to the very top of the league and the very top of the UFC hype machine - except that, uh-oh, for some reason he is rushing in and grabbing a Brazilian black belt and slamming him to the mat, which is a terrible idea because those guys know what to do on the ground. And, oh God, I’ve met this Alexander guy, so I like him, and I’m rooting for him, but now Silva is on his chest and Houston is lying there like a limp fish who happens to have huge muscles and scary tattoos, and he’s just getting his skull pounded and pounded, his head bouncing off the mat, until the ref stops it and, damn it, I want blood more than ever.
“You fucking pussy!” somebody yells from right behind me, and it sounds as if the rest of the crowd feels the same way, but it’s almost okay because Dana White doesn’t let the UFC ride on a single story, a single fighter. He’s always got another bout on the way, another brawl short enough for an MTV attention span, safe enough for the guardians of public morality and vicious enough for a world in which we can all search YouTube for an actual street fight (or “sucker punch” or “bitchslap” or “kick in the balls”) any time we want. So the Octagon girls pull their bikinis out of their butts again and whisper to their middle-aged handler again and start parading again, and the death metal starts back up and the house lights start swirling and two more fighters come running down the aisles, ready to rumble.
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This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.
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