Fighter's Mind, A (6 page)

I had been to Sityodtong Academy before, to shoot an interview for the
Boston Globe,
but the place had been empty. Now it was packed. Sityodtong Boston (the other is in Pattaya, Thailand) is a tiny gym with astoundingly low ceilings—just when you think they couldn’t get lower there’s a beam that is even closer to your head. There are several places where if I bounced too hard I might ding the top of my skull. There was a dense crush of humanity—all men, almost all young, nearly all Massholes, and the air was swampy with their breath. There were three different levels of muay Thai going, and there were probably a hundred guys training in a gym that was crowded when it had thirty guys in it. It felt like a slave-ship hold, or a submarine. If there was a fire about five people would make it out and the rest would burn or suffocate, bodies stacking up, jamming the door . . .

Mark DellaGrotte came out and shook my hand, and he was warm and welcoming in that Boston way. He laughed and said with his heavy accent, “I feel like we know each other although we never met,” which was true because I had seen him fight and watched him coach on TV, and he’d read my book.

Mark is a young, pleasant-looking guy with dark hair and an easy smile, an obvious Italian background. His eyes are bright and watchful, often underneath a Kangol cap, a little old-school Boston street. Mark’s been extremely successful with adapting muay Thai for MMA; he’s become known as one of the best pure striking coaches in the game and a great tactician. The fighters he coaches were on a vicious winning streak in the UFC, something like 9-0 when I showed up. He’s doing something right.

He set me up with one of his coaches, a guy who was smaller than me and “with great control,” just to mess around, and we had a good time, just playing. I thought of how things had changed since MFS, when Pat had thrown me in with Tim Sylvia. Of course, every now and then someone might land a clean leg kick, which would garner a harder kick in return, but we kept it pretty civil. Mark wanted me to have fun and be happy—but he also wanted me to be out of the way, not to get mashed by his top guys or spazz out and hurt someone with fights coming. He was everywhere at once, listening to complaints, hollering advice, keeping time. I was a little amazed about how extended he was, doing everything himself, but he seemed to thrive on it.

 

Over the next couple of weeks I hung around and talked to Mark when I could, and I got to know him a little. His gym is in the basement of his father’s law office, and he grew up right in the area. He talks about his youth with a little reservation. “I grew up with a bunch of rough kids. A lot of them are either dead or in jail, and I was on both sides of the fence. I had friends who were troubled, but we weren’t broke and we were raised well. Every time one of my friends got into trouble, I’d go hide in the gym.”

Mark credits traditional martial arts with keeping him straight, “on the right path.” Mark met guru Guy Chase and studied the “Inosanto curriculum.” Dan Inosanto was Bruce Lee’s greatest student, and his curriculum is a combination of many arts: jeet kune do (Bruce Lee’s hybrid fighting style, which combines a dozen traditional arts with Western boxing), pencak silat (an Indonesian hybrid martial art with a lot of weapon aspects), shoot wrestling (ground fighting, a precursor to modern MMA), and kali eskrima (Filipino stick fighting). Mark’s initial exposure to martial arts, with a broad background and the philosophical tradition of “borrowing what works best” from different places, would prepare him well for MMA.

Mark originally opened a Multicultural Martial Arts center in the same place where the muay Thai gym is now. This was in 1992, a year before the UFC started and
vale tudo
was still a relatively unknown Brazilian tradition.

Mark still wanted to fight, and he discovered and fell in love with muay Thai, spending time and fighting at the famous Sityodtong Camp in Pattaya, Thailand (for a long time, Sityodtong and Fairtex were the only camps that took on foreigners). It turns out we may have overlapped in Thailand, although we never met.

Mark had been bit by the Thailand bug. “I went back to Boston, and two months later I was homesick for Thailand.” He trained hard, and fought well, and earned a place in the camp. Eventually, he was welcomed into the Sityodtong family by Kru (teacher) Yotong.

In 1998 he turned his martial arts center into a Sityodtong muay Thai academy. Kru Toy, Kru Yotong’s son, would come and visit for a month at time.

But Mark found another trainer who would have far more impact. He heard rumors of a Thai boxer who was working on some shady visa in a Vietnamese kitchen on Newbury Street. This was Ajarn Thong, with the fighting name Satsit Seebree, who had been a successful Thai boxer and whose family owned and ran a small camp in northern Thailand. Mark brought the Thai boxer into his home to live, and he laughs about it.

“I had Thailand right here. I lived it in this little basement apartment in Somerville. Ajarn moved in with me and Marie [Mark’s long-suffering girlfriend and now wife]. I learned the language, he held pads for me every day, and I lived Thai style. The sink would get clogged and I’d find chicken feet in it, so I’d yell at Ajarn, ‘You can’t throw food down here, we’re below the street,’ but he’d swear he didn’t do it.”

Mark is laughing hard now. “What, I don’t eat this, Marie don’t eat this, how’d it get in here?” It almost sounds like a sitcom setup.

Mark continued to go back and forth to Thailand regularly. He fought in the world famous Rajadamnern stadium in April 2003 and won with a second-round TKO, on a low kick. “That was a high point for me, and Kru Yotong urged me to semiretire. I wasn’t going to go that much further, and I was more important as a teacher now, for preserving the art. I’m a conservator of muay Thai traditions and techniques.”

A few years later, though, when Mark was back at Sityodtong, training and relaxing, something odd happened. “I’d been at the beach all day. I had a belly full of rice and a sunburn, and when I got back to camp I noticed all this commotion—and I knew somebody was fighting that day.” Turned out the somebody was Mark, fighting a Thai in an “exhibition” bout for Songkran, the water festival. He hadn’t been training to fight but he was assured repeatedly that it was only an exhibition.

“So I called a friend of mine, Peter Hoovers, a Dutch guy who lives in Thailand—he knows everybody—and I asked him about it. He laughed and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard of a white guy fighting a Thai in an exhibition match? No such thing, you’re gonna fight the kid.’”

Mark had actually been slated to fight this same fighter some years earlier. “He was an ex-military guy, had something like four hundred fights. I had nothing to bank on but being totally relaxed.”

Mark jumped in the back of the truck with his trainer and went to the fight. “Right before the first exchange I knew it was on. You could feel the energy.” It was a real fight, no holding back. But Mark smiles.

“It was probably my best fight ever. I kept chipping away at him, and in the third round I finished him with a series of head kicks. I was in the worst shape of my life, I was overweight. But some guys are like that. I was a nervous fighter, my business was based on my reputation. For some guys, it’s better if they don’t even know. They’re just training hard and sleeping well, and then you tell ’em: ‘the fight’s today.’ I didn’t have time to think about it, to scenario the fight to death. When a fighter has too much time to think about it, he actually clutters his thoughts.”

Mark recounts seeing this with the older Thai trainers, something I’d seen as well. “The retired champions, I’d see them drinking and smoking and not training. But they could take fights and stay so relaxed because they had so much experience. I saw one retired champ who was horribly out of shape take a big fight, and by the fifth round he was putting on an old-school clinic—spinning elbows, climbing up on the guy. I could relate to that now. If you got no pressure, nothing to lose, and you’re mentally content, you can fight and not get tired, stay within your parameters.

“I learned a lot about the mental game from the Thais. I think the biggest thing about what they do is they’re very proud of the art, of their camp. They have the utmost respect for muay Thai. It’s really the one thing they claim as theirs. The only reason Thailand has always been free is that muay Thai has always been around to protect it. When you have something you hold dear, you consider sacred, it’s harder to take it from you. For the kids who fight, it becomes about business much later on, but they always have that base pride to rely on.”

On the other side of the country, at the Fairtex muay Thai gym in San Francisco, I spoke to an old-school Thai fighter named Jongsanan, the “Wooden Man.” He’d earned that nickname because he took so much damage and never seemed hurt; when opponents kicked him he seemed made of wood. Jongsanan is a decent-sized Thai but still short, with a big round head, battered doughy face, and heavy scars over his eyes. He was smiling, enjoying himself, his mind sharp and his grasp of English good, even though his accent is thick, and he speaks in a soft Thai burble. His real name is Anucha Chaiyasen, “Noom” to his friends, but to me he was Jongsanan. He was a little bored with me, but still happy and pleasant with that natural Thai goodness and warmth that is so refreshing. He had been a two-time Lumpini champion and an ISKA welterweight champion, among other things. He was a Fairtex lifer, brought to San Francisco to help anchor the gym in America. He spoke quickly and laughed all the time at himself.

“I’m really quiet. I’m not mean or an asshole. I listen to my trainer. That’s it. My trainer tells me one thing, I do one thing. If he tells me two things, I do two things.” He grinned and shook his head. That’s it. In Thailand, that’s the mental game. It’s not complicated.

“I am slow. In the gym they call me big head, balloon head. Twenty years ago in the camp they call me balloon, at Bang Pli.” Bang Pli Fairtex was the same camp I had spent six months at, back in 2000.

“My first trainer, Molit, was the big trainer for me. He brought me up and took care of me. When I was at the top it was different. ‘Jongsanan’ becomes my style. ‘Forward, don’t show pain.’

“It all comes down to my trainer. If you don’t listen to them you out. Because of gambling. They control you, to be wooden man. I don’t want to be wooden man, I want to be a smart guy.” Here he makes the arm gestures of a muay Thai fighter with a shifty, smooth style. “But my trainer control me, and Philip [the owner of the camp] behind me, too. He wants strong fighters, good fighters that are aggressive and strong. Every trainer has a different technique of looking at the body, to teach him how to be a forward fighter, or a technical fighter. Or fast fighter, or heavy punch, or leg kick, it depends on body style. I’m tall and lean, and I have ‘big lung’
bod dee
—good stamina. They just see big lung. I can run with the top fighters, when I am young. I follow them in everything.”

He’s talking about the camp system in Thailand, a whole different universe. The fighters there are essentially chattel, property. They have no options, owned by the camp. If they want to leave and fight elsewhere, the new trainer or camp has to buy their contract. So you do what your corner says, what the boss says. It’s what happens in the third world when you’re poor—you do what you have to do to eat.

“Sometimes when they try to teach me smart things, I can’t get it. I can only do one thing, keep coming forward. They try and teach me fake here, step back.” He is laughing, short and quick, shaking his head. “I can’t do it. That’s why my trainer teach me the style of knee knee knee, come forward. I have to train very hard for that style, but I am healthy, lucky with that, fighting all the time. I come very fast, and I win first eight fights at Lumpini stadium. Then I lose one, then I win for another seven times or so, and always the same. First three rounds I get beat up, because I start slow. Techniques are not good, but I have good heart and I can take it. And now I am glad to beat them up, after they beat me first. After that punishment. So they call me ‘Wooden Man.’

“I hate the balloon head nickname, so I don’t say it when the newspaper ask,” he said gleefully. But Jongsanan turns thoughtful about what having a nickname and public identity can do for a fighter.

“For me it was the same thing as ‘Golden Boy.’” He was talking about Oscar de la Hoya, and Golden Boy Promotions.

“It was his promotion name, and he has to represent it. It is a real thing for him. He has to be the Golden Boy. Rampage is the same, Quentin Jackson. The nickname and the personality in the ring have to mesh up. Even if you are a nice guy, in the ring you have to mesh with your promotional personality. They call me that way, I have to be that way, that’s how I feel.”

It goes back to what fighting is all about: honesty and identity. You have to know who you are. There is no dissembling about your character in the ring. There is
deception
—fighting involves faking one thing and doing another. As Randy Couture said, “No lies get told when you’re in there.” You can’t lie about being in shape, about knowing the techniques, about being faster than him, about being stronger or tougher. The truth will out.