Fighter's Mind, A (14 page)

Pat ruminates on the MFS slip from the preeminent position in the MMA world. Whereas MFS used to have three UFC titleholders and a half dozen contenders, now there are only contenders; his champions have aged and fallen from the number one spots. Some of it’s Father Time, and some of it is the growth of the sport; the field of competition is exponentially deeper than it was even five years ago. But to Pat the reasons are personal.

“I think the problem is that I trained as if I was going to die if I didn’t win. We’ve lost some of that desperation in training right now. It’s my fault. I can’t train like I used to, with my bad neck, and you have to lead by example.” Pat has a neck injury from training that needs surgery, but he resists it, fighting the idea that he’s getting older.

He laughed. “I can’t scream at guys the way I used to. I used to be screaming all the time. The mind follows the body, so torture the body and the mind gets used to it. The body learns to accept being miserable, and it’s no big deal. When you get to a certain level of conditioning you feel like you can walk through a wall.

“As guys get in better shape, they get mentally stronger, and as they get mentally stronger their bodies gets tougher. It’s a leapfrog effect.”

Pat’s style has always been hard-nosed. In high school he’d been an all-state nose guard weighing only 165 pounds (which is tiny for that position). “Uniformly, the coaches described him as both the toughest and meanest player they’d ever seen,” Jon Wertheim wrote in
Blood in the Cage
. Being hard-nosed necessitates outworking an opponent.

“I fought this big Cherokee Indian who was a highly ranked cruiserweight boxer at the time, Jason Fickle, and he had a good wrestling background. I planned on taking him down and submitting him, but he kept getting back up. I couldn’t hold him down. But I couldn’t really change my game plan because he was a good striker who hit hard, so I just kept running my head into the wall. I kept taking him down.

“I was hardheaded like that. If something wasn’t working I’d keep trying it until it worked. I was well rounded but I didn’t switch that easy. You gotta think that you’re gonna win no matter what, that the other guy will start looking for a way out. You’re the predator not the prey. You don’t give a flying fuck what he’s doing, you’re just setting him up for the finish.”

He laughed, a short bark. “But there’s nothing worse than when you think you’re setting a guy up for the finish and the whole time he’s ahead of you. That’s the cool thing about fighting. That’s the final stage, when you can lure a guy in. Like when you start being offensive to counterpunch, you throw the one-two and he thinks he’s countering and you counter him. That’s the end level, when things get really cool.”

I asked him how you get there, and he smiled at me.

“There’s only one way there—a lot of ass whuppings.” He chuckled nastily, but he meant it.

“When you first start fighting, it’s tunnel vision, you’re freaking out. But as you gain experience things slow down. The combos start to come at you in slow motion. A big part of it is being relaxed. The studies show when police officers’ and soldiers’ heart rates hit certain levels, they lose motor skills except push and pull, they fall into tunnel vision. They lose decision making. It happens to young fighters, certainly, until they take enough beatings to relax.”

That resonated with something else I’d heard when I spoke briefly to Mike Lerario, the site manager at the Army Center for Enhanced Performance at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. ACEP was doing sports psychology work with Special Forces guys—but not what you’d think, not fear management or kill related but language learning and self-awareness and recovery. They were actively using biofeedback, something called an “M-wave monitor.”

“There’s a little sensor that attaches to the ear,” Mike said. “With infrared it measures the distances between heartbeats. We’re looking at variability. If the heartbeat is regular, then the subject has a high coherent state with brainwave activity, which is conducive to being in the zone. If it’s irregular, then it’s low coherence. There’s little lights, so green means high coherence, blue means moderate, and red means low. But we don’t train for color, because sometimes excitement is important. We don’t want a guy thinking he has to be green before he breaches a doorway. But afterward, for recovery, for planning, then it’s important.”

Certainly, what Pat was talking about—taking a lot of beatings, being able to be relaxed, coherent—that was key.

I sighed with the knowledge that there’s no easy way. You gotta take a lot of beatings. Pat smiled at me. We chewed in silence.

“I give guys game plans in practice, and you sometimes see the lightbulb go off in their head. But there’s a limit. Game plans matter but mostly it’s about the guy you’re fighting.

“Most people’s logic is,
Okay this guys sucks on the ground, let’s take him to the ground
. But he’s so ready for that. Sometimes you say to yourself, Okay he’s great at standup and weak on the ground so let’s destroy him standing and he’s through—get the best of him on the feet and he’s crushed, and when you do take him down he’ll give up. So sometimes, go right after a guy to mess with his head. But you gotta be well rounded to do that. A guy who’s a great athlete, who understands the game—you run right into his punches, beat him up, and he thinks
Holy shit I’m in trouble.

“I think having fighters watch tape can be bad, too. It will give you a false sense of security. If he looks shitty on tape and comes out blasting, you think
Wait minute, this was supposed to be easier,
and then you’re in trouble. And guys will change a lot in this sport, between fights. I think it’s better to focus on what you’re gonna do and make him be good enough to stop it. Know his tendencies, for sure. And I’ll get guys to spar different ways to emulate an opponent, or use certain submission setups. But fundamentals will always wear them down.

“I fought a guy once who had gone down to Brazil and smashed everybody in this
vale tudo
tournament, and I didn’t see the tape. So I fought him and beat him, and afterward I watched the tape and I was so glad I hadn’t seen it because I would have been petrified—the guy fucked up all the top Brazilians, threw ’em around like rag dolls.”

We drank some coffee and the talk moved on to Rory. “Rory’s got the physical capabilities to be as good as anybody out there. But will his mind take him there? He’s been very one-dimensional. He didn’t perceive himself in any other way. He has to change that perception of himself. He has to understand that he can change his identity. He’s young enough. Shit, I went up to Montreal years ago and none of those guys could wrestle, and look at GSP now.

“When guys lose, it’s easy to talk about it because of my own experiences. I went fifteen and oh and then lost to Matt Hume, who was the best in the world at the time. But I was disgusted, I was going to retire, I was all through. I thought
Holy shit I’m not that good
. But after a while the fire relit and I went on another run. It’s simple: you’re going to lose if you’re fighting badasses. Randy Couture’s been down and out twice. I’ll talk about Matt Hughes, who quit to farm full time. I went up and argued with him while he was sitting on his tractor. This is before the Carlos Newton fight, when he won his first belt.

“It’s the guys who go to the breaking point again and again and don’t give up. It’s up to you. Sure, some guys are in it to be a fighter, or to be part of a team, or get girls and be on TV. But there are guys who honestly know that if they don’t give up they’re going to be world champion. The real guys know if they keep at it they can win a title. I would always mentally convince myself there’s no other option.”

We started talking about backgrounds, about upbringing and experiences. Pat himself had plenty of fuel, an abusive father who died of cancer young, and a lot of tragedy, brothers dying, going to jail, committing suicide.

“There are some guys out there that are from normal families that are still animals and smash people, but usually it helps if you’ve had a shitty life. If somebody’s starving, then somebody else is getting his ass kicked.”

 

Rory’s next fight was in the spring, on the Affliction card in Chicago. The IFL was in the process of folding, its mysterious business plan untenable. Rory was on the verge of being a free agent. There was money to be made.

Rory had decided to address his wrestling head-on. He was sparring less and wrestling more, working out with a local high school coach, Brian Glenn, who had been third in the nation at one point and was about the same weight. We talked on occasion, and he took heart from the success of George St. Pierre. Rory would eventually make his way to Overtime Wrestling and a gym full of Olympians.

I came out a few days before the fight. My first thought had been to get a hotel, stay out of the way. But then you realize that’s not what’s needed. Fighters, in the last days before a fight, shouldn’t be alone. They can’t train too much, so their energy level gets high, and the oppressive weight of the oncoming fight looms large. Rory even laughed about it, “Dude, don’t leave me alone in my house watching fight tapes and doing push-ups and freaking out.”

We went to dinner, we went to the movies, we watched TV. I kept Rory company as he worked out, as he finalized his “cut.” There was a big gleaming gym near his house that he liked to use, so his girlfriend dropped us off.

Even before we started Rory was bony and pale, and his natural good humor was long gone. He grew quieter and quieter as hunger and dehydration took their toll—and this for a “catch-weight” (informal) of 180 pounds, a full ten pounds heavier than what he normally had to make.

We sat in the sauna and began to tell stories to pass the time. Rory’s background is somewhat typical for a fighter, the estranged father, the single working mother, the tough part of town. Rory has his own demons of rage—he loves to fight. He’s capable of getting really crazy. He’s looked into the void. He started telling me a story, a story I knew a little of, as we sat dripping onto the bone-dry boards, the heat itching our skins.

“A lot of people said they were his best friend but Ed Bielskus was my best friend. We were inseparable. He lived four houses down from me. He would steal his dad’s car to take me to my full-contact karate tournaments. We were hoodlums.”

Rory looked over at me, his eyes almost hidden beneath a tight wool hat. He was in a full “sauna suit,” made of plastic material like trash bags, and a sweatshirt and sweatpants to keep the sweat sloughing off him. I was sweating like a pig just in a T-shirt and shorts.

“I was fifteen, he was sixteen. We were at the White Hen Pantry, hanging out, corner store . . . trying to whittle smokes off the cashier. Ed wandered off, and about an hour later a cop came by asking, ‘Is Rory Markham here?’

“Of course, we got into a lot of trouble, so I dummied up. But listening to his walkie-talkie, I hear him talking about Ed. So I confessed to being Rory and tried to figure out what was going on, and the cop just got me in the car and drove off.

“We came around the block and four stories up, across from the hospital is a parking garage. Ed is standing on one of the pillars, on the northeast corner, up on the pillar. I can see it like a painting.

“There were cops, ambulances, fire trucks . . . and I was thinking to myself,
What a fucking asshole
and I assured the cop, ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’ I thought he was fucking around.” Rory’s voice was confident, everything a big joke. He paused and shook his head.

“That’s something I’ve had to live with. I was sure I could get him down. Now, Ed had been doing some crazy things, like buying a boat with his dad’s credit card, but his dad was wealthy and Ed had never even uttered the word ‘suicide’ in passing.”

The reasons are mysterious. Rory mentioned that Ed was adopted, and that it was troubling him, but it’s impossible for Rory to say. You can see that bothers him, the unfathomable nature of it. The unknown horrors of the human heart. If Rory doesn’t know this, about his best friend, then can anyone know anything about anyone?

“I said to the cop, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ A counselor was talking to him, but he was shouting for me, ‘Get Rory up here!’

“I came through the door, and he said everybody else stay back, and when I got five feet from him he held his hand out and started inching back on the ledge—he told me to stay there.

“I was saying, ‘What are you doing? I love you.’ I knew he was serious. His eyes were . . . he was not there. I knew shit was fucked up. I remember, with every inch that I came closer, any movement, a hair would blow, and he would inch his heels out over the ledge. His feet were more than fifty percent off the ledge. I tried to talk to him but he just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I just wanted you to be here,’ then he threw the keys to his brand-new Ford Explorer—and you know how important a car is for a teenager, it’s who you are. And then he went. He jumped like a reverse cannonball—he put his head down so his head would hit first. He flipped into a dive.”

The sauna ticked, quietly.

“There was an enormous pool of blood.”

Rory paused and spit on the floor. I had nothing to offer him. I thought about this book, and the fighter’s mind. The motivations. The heat pressed in around us. Eventually, Rory started talking about the aftershocks, how everyone claimed Ed as a friend, people who barely knew him.

“I’d make weird promises to myself and Ed, and I promised Ed in the bad times that I would become a professional, I’d fight in the UFC. I promised.” Rory looked at me and shrugged, and we went out to the chill air.

We went from sauna to the stationary bikes. Rory had a system. He had to keep a sweat going to drop the water weight for the weigh-in. He cut too much, down to 178 at the end of an hour from 185. It came off too easy—but that meant it would go back on easy. He still had plenty of water left in him.