Iceman (12 page)

I
GOT HOME FROM BRAZIL FEELING GOOD. GOING THIRTY
straight minutes with Pele and pounding his face literally into the ground was huge for my career. I had the gym. And I was tapped to fight in UFC 19: Ultimate Young Guns, which took place in March of 1999 at Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The promoters even put a picture of me on the poster that touted the fights. My fee now that I was gaining such exalted status in the mixed martial arts world? A couple grand. Turns out mojo don't pay the bills.

Naturally, with all the momentum going my way, I did the one thing all fighters who are early in their careers are not supposed to do: I went out and got my ass kicked. One of my greatest skills as a fighter is that I have no fear. I don't back down from fights and never worry about the implications a potential loss may have on my career. Some guys might line up against soft competition, but I take on whomever the UFC matchmakers want me to take on. And, in this fight, they matched me up against Jeremy Horn, not an easy battle for someone with as limited experience as I had at this point in my career.

Jeremy was five years younger than me but had already fought twenty-nine times before we met, including a championship-bout loss to Frank Shamrock in UFC 17. Jeremy was a badass country boy from Omaha who started doing martial arts at thirteen just to hang around his older brother. By seventeen, he had earned his black belt, and after his first couple of MMA fights, Pat Miletich, one of the original UFC superstars, tapped him as an up-and-coming star and began training him. Jeremy was an expert at submission moves. So much so that all but a handful of his wins early in his career were from armbars, rear-naked choke holds, guillotine chokes, triangle chokes. You name the submission move, Jeremy not only knew it, but he had perfected it and used it in a match. One reason he had such success with all these body-twisting holds was because he was so damn flexible. He'd actually been nicknamed Gumby for the way he could move his body, although he didn't exactly love the label. It wasn't the most intimidating nickname he'd ever heard.

Despite the cartoon name, I knew not to take him lightly. And we had some great exchanges early on. I actually felt that I was winning the fight through the first couple of minutes. He went for a high kick quickly, then made a nice, low shoot move for my leg and tried to bring the fight to the ground. But I wouldn't give up my position. I heard the guys in my corner reminding me not to let him get square, to keep him moving in a half circle so his shoulders were perpendicular to mine. Soon I had him in a headlock and was able to get a couple of blows with my leg and my knee to the top of his head. Then I maneuvered my way back to my feet while keeping him pinned against one of the cage's posts on his knees. While he had his arms wrapped around the backs of my legs, I delivered shot after shot to his head. This was all in the first one minute and forty-five seconds. Then, for the next several minutes, we both caught our breaths. While he was lying on his back and I was standing, he pulled me down to the mat while wrapping his legs around my chest. It was a powerful move. Even though I had been working on my jujitsu and grappling, I still felt like a novice in that part of my game. Especially compared to so many of the fighters, such as Horn, who specialized in that art. But, even on the ground, I didn't feel that he had much of an advantage, as we wrestled to a standoff.

Most of my fight with Jeremy was on the ground. I'd rather strike, but I was still trying to stay on top.

Then as I tried to get up, he snaked his legs around my right thigh. It felt like a vise as he locked down on my limb and got his hands on my heel. They say that when a snake wraps itself around you, it suffocates you by squeezing a little more every time you exhale. That's exactly what was happening to my leg. The more I tried to wriggle myself free, the harder he held on. He had me in a heel hook, which puts a lot of pressure on the knee. I was comfortable because I knew how much I could take, since Scott used to put me in those kinds of holds all the time. But I must have grimaced pretty badly because the announcers made a point of mentioning it on the broadcast. I could hear Pat Miletich, who was in Jeremy's corner, yelling, “Hook, hook, hook,” because he thought Jeremy had a great shot at making me submit. But no way was I going to tap out. He had me twisted around and down on my stomach, and for a full minute my leg was his plaything, but I was able to squirm out and regain the top position so I could pound away at his midsection.

The entire match basically took place in front of one post. We barely moved. If it had been my first fight, John Peretti would never have invited me back, because we hardly threw any punches or kicks while we were standing. It was just me on top of him, him on top of me, back and forth. Finally, with nine minutes left in the match, the ref pulled us apart, sent us back to our corners, and told us to come out fighting. That lasted about a minute before Jeremy dove for my midsection and we were back on the mat, grappling. Then people actually started booing because we weren't fighting enough. I couldn't blame them. While we were both exhausted and fighting hard, all of the action was taking place in a corner of the cage, and most of the punches were thrown while one of us was on top of the other. There weren't any roundhouses or front kicks, just hard-core wrestling and jujitsu. A challenge as a fighter, but a pretty boring show for a fan.

With a minute left in the fight I was on my back and Jeremy slowly moved his way to my chest, so we were face-to-face. Then, with about fifteen seconds left in the fight, he let me flip him over, which caught me by surprise. Then he went for a submission move that I had never seen before, called an arm triangle choke. I had watched guys use a triangle choke, where they get an opponent's neck caught between their legs and squeeze them out. But this was entirely new to me. He got my neck caught between my shoulder and his arm and then used my body against me. It would have been nice if someone had taught me about this move before it was being used to choke me out.

I couldn't move, and he was locked in on the hold so he couldn't move. We were just on the ground, lying there perfectly still, my body flat on top of his, my back to his chest. He wasn't hitting me or letting go. I wasn't hitting him, nor was I trying all that hard to maneuver my way out and get back to my feet. I still don't know exactly why. That the blood wasn't rushing to my head may have had something to do with it.

I'm usually cool as ice before a fight, but I still like to warm up with some taps.

But, with both of us on the ground, this was not the nonstop, rough-and-tumble action the UFC wants and expects from its “young guns.” The ref pulled us off each other and told us to stand back up because it was the end of the round. Jeremy got up no problem, but I was just lying there, motionless. I started out resting during his submission move. I didn't want to tap out and I thought I'd be able to hold on for the last few seconds and send the fight into an overtime round. But I must have blacked out. No one in the arena—not Jeremy, not the ref, not my corner, and not the fans—had any idea. I'm not even sure I knew what had happened. One minute I was on the mat waiting for this thing to go into extra time, and the next minute I see that Jeremy is being declared the winner because of his arm-triangle-choke submission move. Jeremy was so surprised to see me down and out that, after he got up and the ref called it and he walked back to his corner, he rushed back to make sure I was okay.

If you think I was crushed after the fight—after losing badly in my first fight after making a name for myself, my first chance to prove that I wasn't a fluke—it's obvious you've only been skimming this book.

My pulse rate rarely goes up or down, no matter how tense or relaxed the situation. In fact, that's how I got my nickname: the Iceman. Hackleman gave it to me around my third kickboxing match. We were hanging out in the locker room before the fight, and he noticed that I wasn't breaking a sweat or shaking out my arms to release some of the jitters and didn't have any other nervous tics. He told me he had been in countless pro fights and was anxious before every one of them. Meanwhile, I looked as if I were going for a stroll in the park. He thought I had ice in my veins.

I don't get overly euphoric once I leave the ring after a win, and I don't crawl into a shell after a loss. What's the point? I knew I'd get another fight. I knew I'd get better. I knew I'd find a way to win the next time Jeremy and I faced each other in the cage. And I damn sure knew it'd be a long time before I got beat by an arm triangle choke again. It's not that I am overly confident or arrogant. I just don't worry about the long-term impact of decisions I make or things that I do. I have never been the guy who maps out his future; I just live my life. When Casey had just given birth and Lori was pregnant with Cade and I was trying to get my fight career going, I never felt that it was too much to handle. It's not like I'm unloading this stuff on my friends and having some kind of pseudotherapy session, either. I think I offhandedly told Scott that Casey was pregnant when we were driving to Beverly Hills for a jujitsu class. Even then I mumbled it so casually he could barely understand me. When I got my first UFC fight, I didn't spend all day calling friends and family to tell them. Good or bad, news has a way of trickling out and finding its way to the people who need to know. That's fine by me. I've got better things to do than to keep everyone in my life up-to-date with what's happening to me.

Instead of sulking that night after the fight with Jeremy, a bunch of us went to karaoke in Bay St. Louis. I was having a great time, although my friends knew better than to get me up on the stage and make me sing. It's not that I wouldn't have. It's that I'm horrible. Really horrible. Instead I sat at the table, relaxing, while I watched Nick belt out a heartwarming rendition of Jimmy Buffett's “Margaritaville.”

And I knew everything was going to be fine. Eventually.

I
WON MY NEXT MMA FIGHT THREE WEEKS LATER—A
Neutral Grounds tourney—and then won a TKO on punches against Paul Jones four minutes into the first round of UFC 22 that September. I wasn't anywhere near being famous yet, although my last two UFC fights—against Horn and Jones—had been on pay-per-view. And some people had seen them. Including my father.

He had found a new life, with new kids. I hadn't heard from him in twenty-five years and neither had my mom. None of us were particularly upset about that. He was a stranger. A guy who, when he'd left, told my mom he'd check in years down the road and see if the kids were worth claiming. My mom had been working for the county for a couple decades when I started my UFC career, and anyone could find her if he wanted to. It hadn't even been two years since she had moved out of Pops's house and gotten a new home number. Now, all of a sudden, late in 1999, there was contact.

Not from him, though, from his kids. They called my mom and said they wanted to meet their brothers and sisters. None of us thought they had done this on their own; we were convinced he'd put them up to it. But my mom is so damn sweet and open and willing. She never once took out her anger toward him during that first phone call with his kids. She was what she always is: a woman who thinks about her kids above all else. And she didn't want to get in our way—or theirs—if any of us wanted to have a relationship.

I wasn't interested in seeing my dad, and my mom had to convince me to go meet his kids. So we all met at a restaurant. It was tough from the start. One of my dad's boys tried convincing my mom to let our father back into her life, but she was having none of it. Then he asked why they had gotten divorced, and she replied, “That's between me and him. But if you love your father, that is all you need to know.” She's classy.

Then the boy turned his attention to me and Laura and Sean. He asked each of us, “Do you want your father in your life?” All of us answered no, as easily and unemotionally as if the waiter had just asked if we wanted coffee. Sperm donors aren't fathers. None of us had a relationship with the guy. But one of his kids kept pushing the issue. Until, finally, one of them said I really only knew my mom's side of the story and I should hear his. Then I lost it. I said, “Fuck you. I remember her crying herself to sleep at night. I remember her working three jobs at Christmas. I guess I could say thanks to him for donating the sperm that created me, but if he wants more than that, he has to be around. And not just come by after twenty-five years, when he sees me on TV.” Then I just turned around and walked out. From the looks on their faces before I left, it seemed my new siblings were pretty much saying to themselves, okay, let's leave the caged animal alone and get the hell out of here. Which they did.

And while I've seen them at fights the last several years—I might nod their way, and my mom will actually say hello—the subject of meeting my dad has never come up again.

Meanwhile, I had other issues to deal with. Even after beating Paul Jones in an upset in UFC 22, my star had definitely fallen in the eyes of the UFC matchmakers. With a 2-1 Ultimate Fighting record, I wasn't the draw I had been before UFC 17. And their offer for me to fight after I won in UFC 22 wasn't all that appealing. They wanted a three-fight deal. I'd get $1,000 to fight the first match, plus another $1,000 if I won. Then $2,000 and $2,000 for the next fight, and $3,000 and $3,000 for the third fight. Honestly, I would have done it. But that's because I'd fight for free, like Michael Jordan's love-of-the-game clause. But Dana wasn't pleased. He told the UFC bosses, “Screw you. I wouldn't let Chuck off of his couch for one thousand dollars.”

Dana didn't wait for a counteroffer. That was the end of the negotiation. I wasn't going to fight in the next UFC tournament, or any UFC tournament, until Dana felt that I was getting my due. It felt good to have Dana on my side. He loved the sport, he loved fighters, and he loved fighting. He was as confrontational outside the ring as any of his clients were inside it. And he was also fiercely loyal, especially to me. When he was making his case to the UFC on my behalf or telling me to sit out, it never seemed that he had a hidden agenda. Plenty of promoters will sell one client out to get another client a better deal. But Dana didn't do that. He had an innate sense for calculating the value of a match, what his fighters were worth in that fight, and how much the entire UFC enterprise was worth. And then he squeezed every penny he could out of the UFC suits to make sure my real payday equaled his theoretical payday.

Instead of taking a guaranteed payday of $6,000 up front from the UFC for three fights, Dana found me a one-fight deal from the IFC (International Fighting Council) for $4,500. The IFC wasn't as big as the UFC yet—at just four years old it was an even younger league than the UFC. The fights weren't as high-profile either. But, five fights into my career, I wasn't that picky. A fight's a fight and money is money. Plus the fight was in July of 2000, ten months after my previous fight, and I was anxious to get back into the cage. Some mixed martial artists were fighting every three months. Some had a match once a month. Jeremy Horn fought twelve times the first twenty-four months of his career. He was racking up valuable experience. Meanwhile, my first fight was on May 15, 1998. Two years later, heading into my IFC fight, I had been in the cage just five times. I needed to get some action. Because, if you don't fight, you don't truly know if you can win.

Dana kept telling me this was going to be the most important fight of my life, that I had to win it. But he said that about every fight. If it wasn't about proving to the UFC they should have paid me, it was about proving to the UFC I should be on track to fight for a title. There was always something to keep me motivated. Although Dana knew I didn't need to hear it as much as he did. Whenever I was training, he'd call me every day to check in and remind me how huge whatever match was coming up was going to be. On fight days, he'd call me practically once an hour until the moment I left my hotel for the arena. The guy is driven, no doubt, but a little anxious, too.

My opponent in IFC 9 was a guy named Steve Heath, who had learned Brazilian jujitsu from one of the Gracies. Steve's record was 6-1 when we faced off. He'd won his first four fights by forcing his opponent to submit in a choke hold. I knew, like Horn, he'd be great on the ground, if he was good enough to get me down. But I didn't think that could happen. I'm six-two, 200 pounds (although I weighed in at 195 the day of that fight, after dropping 19.5 pounds in eighteen hours). Heath is five-nine, 184 pounds. The strictest followers of jujitsu are always saying that, in their sport, a size advantage means nothing. But in mixed martial arts, when your opponent is usually at least equal if not better as a fighter, that kind of logic gets thrown out the window. I knew, with my size advantage, it would be hard for him to get close enough to take me down. And when he did try to shoot for my legs, he'd have to lead with his head, which meant I'd have a clear shot to take him out. And that's exactly what happened. With 5:39 left in the second round I kicked him in the head. It was lights out, fight over, declare me the winner, and let's go have a good time, because my kick had knocked him out.

Then the UFC took notice. Again. Now I had a three-fight offer on the table, with all three fights set to take place either in late 2000 or early 2001. The terms were $5,000 guaranteed for the first fight, plus another $5,000 for winning; $7,500 guaranteed for the second fight and $7,500 more for winning; and $10,000 guaranteed for the third fight, with another $10,000 if I won. That was $22,500 just for walking into the cage, probably more than I had made combined in my previous seven years of professional kickboxing and MMA fighting. This was a deal Dana and I could live with. I'd have no problem getting off the couch for this kind of money.

The people who owned the UFC were playing hardball, and not because they were cheap. In fact, by the end of 2000 they were broke. Every dollar they gave me was another dollar they lost. The arenas weren't filling up. And when UFC 29 took place in Japan in December—my first fight back under my new deal—it was the sixth straight tournament that wouldn't be televised on pay-per-view or released on DVD. The campaign to choke out mixed martial arts that had begun in 1996 was nearly complete. Just as my career was getting ready to explode.

I've never been uncomfortable in a fight—on the mat, in the street, in the cage. These may actually be the situations in life in which I feel most at home. But, as I began my climb toward a UFC title, I didn't necessarily know everything about myself as an MMA fighter. It's easy to be confident in your abilities, but greatness is believing you can win while being humble enough to understand you don't know everything. In that respect I was still learning every time I trained at The Pit with John or got into the Octagon for a match. And that's part of what I love about the sport. As much as its competitive nature, I love the chance to constantly broaden my horizons as an athlete. Ask any martial artist and he'll tell you he doesn't do it so he can kill people with his hands; he does it because he wants to keep being challenged and learning. Being in the UFC did that for me.

So while the league itself careened toward bankruptcy and shutting down, I focused on getting ready for Jeff Monson and UFC 28 in Atlantic City in November of 2000. Monson was another of those Brazilian jujitsu grappling experts. And he was a compact, strong motherfucker. The guy was only five-nine, weighed 240 pounds, and was nearly as mean-looking as me, with a shaved head and chiseled frame. They called him Snowman, a nickname he earned while fighting a tourney in Brazil. They said he was like a snowball—white, compact, rolling, and getting bigger and stronger as the fights went on. He was completely unknown at the start of the tournament, but then rolled through four Brazilian jujitsu experts with no problem.

John trained me as hard as we had for any fight to that point. John and I were back together after a year of going our separate ways. He had tired of the fight game and just wanted to teach and train people who wanted to get in shape. And I spent most of my time training at SLO Kickboxing. It was good for business, but bad for me. The people working me out were either my partners or my students; none of them were inclined to tell me when I wasn't working hard enough or what areas I was starting to slip in. I won some big fights, but I wasn't nearly as sharp as I could have been—as I would have been—if John were putting me through the ringer.

We both wanted to avoid a Jeremy Horn situation, where I was building some career momentum and moving up the UFC ranks only to get taken down by a move I wasn't prepared for—or just taken down, period. If the UFC was going under, I wanted to have enough appeal to keep fighting anywhere else in the world. At the same time, if some moneyman was going to step in and save the league, I wanted to be in a position to make the new bosses see me as a marquee talent. Either way, losing couldn't be part of the equation.

When Jeff and I weighed in for UFC 28 in Atlantic City, I came in at two pounds overweight. The good news was, so did Jeff. We had an hour to lose the extra baggage before we were checked out again. It was easy for me to shed that kind of weight. I used to do it all the time when I was wrestling in high school. I ran back up to the hotel room, jogged around for half an hour, and sweated out the two pounds. But Jeff couldn't get down. They actually asked me if I wanted to fight him at heavyweight, and I said sure.

Then they found another problem. Every UFC fighter has a pre-match brain scan to make sure everything is functioning normally before a fight. But Jeff's scan showed an abnormality. There is no negotiating that. The fight was postponed for thirty days, until UFC 29, in Japan.

Things would get worse a couple days after the weigh-in. My buddy John Lewis fought in UFC 28 and got knocked out by a guy I thought he could have beaten. Then my other good friend Gan McGee, a heavyweight, gassed out in his match and lost as well. Between those two losing and me not fighting after training for months, I still count it as the worst night of my UFC career.

Part of the frustration was because of the training I had put into the fight. No one likes to work that hard and not get the reward. And leading up to a fight there's a pattern and a rhythm to your workouts. You don't want to peak too soon. The ideal is to be at your strongest, fittest, and sharpest just as the fight approaches. You can feel if you're there when you're sparring. Is your timing right? Is your breathing right? Do your legs feel strong or do they get weak easily? It's not like a
Rocky
movie, where one second you're sparring and connect on a great hit, and then next thing you know you're in the ring. But you know when you're ready. And I was ready for that fight.

At least they rescheduled for a month later, so I could maintain my pace in training. John had me stay in Jersey for the week, doing some light workouts, working on timing, before I went home for two weeks and then flew off to Japan for UFC 29. And the fight, after all the drama putting it together, wasn't as exciting as I would have liked. I kept kicking him and wanted to catch him in the head, but he wouldn't give me that opening. He's a grappler. I'm a striker. So we spent three full rounds circling each other. He tried to bring me to the mat. I wanted to stand him up and punch. In the end, I won by decision after three rounds, but it wasn't because I dominated the fight.

I had more fun carousing around Japan after the fight than actually being in the cage. We hung out in Roppongi, which is a district in Tokyo where all the Americans go when they want to have a good time. Walking around, you'll see the rich ex-pats, the guys in finance, and salesmen all looking to unwind. There are dozens of nightclubs, restaurants, hostess clubs, strip clubs, cabarets, and anything else you might be in the mood for. The whole section of town used to be run by the Japanese Mafia, and their influence is still pretty heavy there. Enough so that, if you drop the right name, you'll be treated really well. And we dropped a name that night. We were hanging out in a club with my buddy who lived there. When he left, he told the waiter and the bartender to make sure they took care of us. We got hungry and ordered a pizza. In twenty minutes we had a pizza, only to find out they didn't actually serve pizza there. The waiter had run across the street to get it. When I tried to leave a tip in a glass, the bartender took it out and handed it back to me in a rush. He waved me off and insisted that he couldn't take my money.