The Laws of the Ring (11 page)

But things change when the issue is
life
. When it comes to big things, we forget the simple lessons and fall back on false premises and easy judgments. We settle for the easiest option—to let adversity overcome us—and dismiss the truly worthwhile pursuits as being either too difficult or impossible. Too many of us ignore the basic principles and give up on our passions. Often it's because we lose sight of our passion. But adversity can redefine it for us.

The Inspiration and Purpose of Joseph Benavidez

When it comes to identifying and cultivating a sense of purpose, I can't think of a better example than my friend Joseph Benavidez. Let me tell you his story.

Joseph grew up in New Mexico, poor, with a dysfunctional family life and wavering focus. Although he was a state-champion high school wrestler, he started drinking early, and by the time he was seventeen or eighteen, he had a serious issue with alcohol. His father spent several years behind bars, and Joseph was the only one of three brothers to graduate high school. He was close to his mother, a strong woman who was fighting upstream against social and economic factors, but his father was unreliable and a poor role model whose other two sons followed in his footsteps.

Joseph drank, and Joseph fought. His type of fighting, as you might have already guessed, was even less sanctioned than the kind I was doing.

And then, at twenty years of age, Joseph decided to change his life. He quit drinking. He started working out. He heard about this new kind of fighting—MMA—that was mostly an underground phenomenon at the time. He thought he'd be good at it, even though he weighed only 135 pounds and—aside from his high school wrestling—had no formal training in the martial arts.

From the moment he got serious and began to train, it became evident that Joseph had a future in the sport. Of course, that prediction depended on the sport itself having a future. At the time Joseph began dedicating himself to fighting, there was no guarantee the sport would progress with him. This was early 2005, and the chance of making a living from fighting MMA was about the same as a young man in 1974 deciding he was going to make his living as a computer programmer. It took foresight and faith, and even then a lot of things outside Joseph's control had to happen for it to become a reality.

Still, Joseph persisted. He started getting some amateur fights. He loved every aspect of it—the training, the fighting, and the sense of accomplishment it gave him. He liked the distance it created between who he was and who he was in the process of becoming. When he got into that cage, he wasn't a poor kid with a troubled past and a complicated family life. He was a fighter. He had a sense of purpose in the ring, something that took him far away from his daily challenges and made people respect and, in some cases, fear him.

Joseph was motivated by everything in his life that wasn't perfect. He took all those things—his family life, his old bad habits, and society's low expectations for someone like him—and unleashed them in the cage. Once he made the commitment to the sport, his sense of purpose was profound. He fought and trained like a man determined not to let his dream die.

In a strange twist consistent with the confusion of the early days of MMA, some of Joseph's “amateur” fights were against professionals. He even got paid for some of them, even though they went on his record as amateur fights.

Regardless of semantics, Joseph went out and fought whomever they put in front of him. He fought fighters who outweighed him by twenty or more pounds, and he beat them. There were very few opportunities for fighters of any weight back then, and far fewer for a 135-pounder. No matter; Joseph fought up and Joseph fought well.

And then one day Joseph and his mother watched a documentary on MSNBC called
Warrior Nation.
It showed a young, lightweight fighter from Sacramento attempting to make this new sport his career. The show featured me, and it ignited something even stronger inside Joseph Benavidez. He'd been motivated before, but seeing someone else who shared his passion took it to another level. On his television, he saw someone close to his size who was intent on making it. It's funny how perception works: I saw myself as a struggling fighter, filled with passion and energy and hope, but also as a fighter who was short on opportunity. Joseph saw me as nothing short of a miraculous success story.

The documentary was a huge break for me in so many ways. As you will read later, it set in motion a series of events that seemed almost providential, although at first they seemed to be nothing but random. What I didn't know was how the film might affect other fighters, guys who were looking for a tangible reason to follow their passion. Never mind that I was just a couple of years removed from quitting my job busing tables at a restaurant that sat twenty paces from my rented room. Never mind that I had
no
idea whether my quest to make my passion my career would be successful. I wasn't getting paid jack shit, but for Joseph Benavidez and others, the mere fact that I was
following
my passion and being paid
anything
to fight qualified me as a success story.

And how did I know this? Well, I discovered it the day Joseph Benavidez showed up in my gym.

That's right—Joseph just showed up. Shortly after he saw the documentary, he scraped up enough money for a plane ticket from Albuquerque to Sacramento and told his buddy Daniel Moffat, who was based in Sacramento, that he was on his way and needed a place to stay.

One problem: Joseph couldn't find me. My gym wasn't quite finished yet. We had some equipment and a slim list of class offerings, but most of the folks in the gym at this point were charter members who were in the fighting community. Joseph found a couple other MMA gyms in town where he trained and asked around to see if anybody knew where he might find me. Neither of the gyms' proprietors had heard of me. The day before he was scheduled to return to New Mexico, he found a third gym, where he got an opportunity to do some sparring. And he
destroyed
people. One of the guys watching him said, “Dude, you're really good. You need to go train with Urijah.”

Finally, someone who knew me, and he offered the information without Joseph's having to ask. Joseph told him he'd been trying to find me, with no luck. Joseph cursed his rotten luck; he had a flight back to New Mexico the next morning, and the surcharge to change his flight was just too much at this point.
Maybe next time,
he thought.

The next day, he arrived at the airport only to find that his flight was canceled and the airline couldn't get him on a return flight till the following day. To this day he says he doubts that anyone in the entire history of aviation was as happy to have his flight canceled as he was. The second he was booked on a flight for the next day, he went directly from the airport to my gym.

When he arrived, I was working behind the counter. At this point, trying to get the gym operational, I was doing everything: mopping the mats, working the counter, teaching classes.

He walked up and introduced himself, saying, “My name is Joseph, and I want to train with you.”

It still hadn't really hit home that people might recognize me from TV, so when I looked at him a little puzzled, he told me he had seen the documentary and admired what I was doing. Of course, I was flattered, but more to the point, I was about to start a class, so I told him to jump in.

I could tell immediately that he wasn't some bum off the street. He was cut, tough, and had serious endurance. But the X factor was this mean streak I picked up on—this whiff of desperation coming off him. Here was a guy who was training for something more important than a possible paycheck. I loved his demeanor, and I loved hearing the circumstances that led him to my doorstep. Joseph was raw, but he was fierce, and I could see right away how special this guy was.

When the class ended, he told me, “I want to do this full-time. I've had seven amateur fights, but I'm ready to make a run at this.”

He told me his life story. He told me about his family and his brothers. He told me about his tough times, and how he got sober. He was working in a T-shirt factory back home doing silk-screening, and although he didn't use these exact words, he had made the decision to let his passion lead him. He had drawn strength from the documentary and seeing it had made him feel a little less alone in his pursuit. None of this came with an instruction manual, but he was motivated by one thing: He wanted to do what he loved, and he was willing to get out of his comfort zone to chase it down.

Late 2005, when Joseph walked into my gym, featured only a slightly more promising landscape than
early
2005, when Joseph started training, and every guy who wanted to fight for a living was up against the same roadblock: opportunity. There just wasn't much of it, and definitely not enough to provide sustenance for the number of guys who wanted to pursue MMA as an occupation. Adding to it was Joseph's size; there weren't many venues for fighters in heavier weight classes, and there were almost none for someone like Joseph, whose best fighting weight was 125. (My best fighting weight is 135, but when I started out, I took fights at 145 and even 155.)

Yet Joseph was undeterred. He knew the odds, and he didn't care. The way he saw it, he'd beaten longer odds just by overcoming his personal demons, escaping a tough past, and becoming a good enough fighter to even be
considered
as a professional. I think he already recognized that his presence in my gym alone was a personal success story and that in the face of the odds he'd already beaten, what kind of impediment could a lack of opportunities in his weight class present?

“I want to do this for a living.” He must have repeated that line five or six times before he left my gym that day. I nodded along, but inside I was thinking,
Fuck, dude—I'm the guy you call your inspiration, and
I'm
not even doing this for a living.

But every man creates his own reality, and even though this promising young fighter saw me in a way that I had not yet been able to see myself, I wasn't going to trample his dream by downplaying my position in the MMA hierarchy. And besides, not only was it clear that Joseph had exactly the right attitude for realizing his own potential, I truly believed that I could help him become a better fighter. It might not work for him—hell, it might not work for any of us—but if it was going to work for anyone, it was going to work for guys who had positive attitudes and a sense of purpose. Guys like Joseph.

As we shook hands and he told me, once again, that he wanted to fight for a living, I said, “Cool, man. Here's my number. Keep in touch.”

He promised not only to keep in touch but to return. He had some matters to clear up in New Mexico—namely, a job to quit and a family to inform—and then he would be back to live with his friend in Sacramento and train full-time in my gym.
My
promise was simple: I would have a job in the gym waiting for him when he returned.

Without fail, every other week I'd receive a text:
This is Joseph. Just reminding you I'll be moving out soon.
I regularly responded by telling him to make sure to let me know his plans.

What Joseph was doing with those texts, whether consciously or not, was moving closer to his goal. He was holding himself accountable by reminding not just me but
himself
of his promise. Even if he was facing the worst possible conditions back home, he was taking the time to do that one little thing that moved him incrementally closer to his dream.

To incorporate your passion into your life, you need these kinds of triggers. You need the accountability, focus, and mentality that something as simple as a text can provide. It establishes your goal
and
puts someone else in the mix to help with accountability. Humans have an instinctual need to belong, and by texting me his desires repeatedly, Joseph found a way to make a connection—in essence, a sense of belonging—without being physically present.

Sure enough, three months after I first met Joseph, I was teaching a class when the door opened and he walked in. His packed-to-the-gills '86 Lincoln Continental was parked in the lot out front. The guy may have mentioned exactly when he was coming during one of our calls, but our conversations were just a small part of my busy life at the time and I didn't realize he was actually coming until he pulled up to the gym. I had to a admire a guy who had driven straight from New Mexico to the gym—not even stopping at his friend Moffat's house to drop off his stuff. He was so excited to get started he couldn't wait. He had uprooted himself and everything he owned (it wasn't much) to chase his passion. His sense of purpose firmly established, he was ready to go to work.

“Leave that hoopty out front,” I yelled over to him, “and hop into the class.”

From that moment Joseph became a part of my community. He was under the umbrella. I put him to work mopping the mats and cleaning the gym. He was a tireless worker, and he spent every spare moment of downtime taking advantage of his new environment. He'd hop on the treadmill during a fifteen-minute break. He'd do abs work during lunch. And when it was time to train, there was no guy in the gym more serious than Joseph.

It was clear from the beginning that he was going to be very good, and very soon. He was killing it. I recognized this and told him that although there wasn't even a 135-pound class at the time, he'd be an animal at 125. Always the compliant student, he trained with that mind-set, and I just hoped that the evolving state of MMA could somehow cater to a guy of his size. He was one of the toughest guys in the gym, but, predictably, it was tough to get him training partners, let alone organized fights. So, knowing his skill, I'd put bigger guys—some with actual UFC experience—up against Joseph. They'd look at him funny because he was so tiny, then he'd give them the fight of their lives. People were blown away by this guy.