Iceman: My Fighting Life Page 5

  Alfie was looking for places to work out and came across a gym called One Kicks, which taught Muay Thai boxing, run by a guy named Nick Blomgren. Muay Thai is the original form of kickboxing and allows competitors to strike from eight different points: the hands, elbows, legs (shins and knees), and feet. It’s actually called the Art of Eight Limbs. Most sport-oriented martial arts only allow two strike points, the hands and the feet. Muay Thai is as revered in Thailand as football is here. It’s the national sport, is recognized by an official holiday, and is treated with a respect by the combatants unlike any other sport. It’s not just about sport to those in Thailand, it’s about finding serenity and peace through the practice of an art. Fighters usually touch the rope three times. They always enter the ring from the top, rather than through the bottom, because the head is sacred and the feet are dirty. When in the ring, they perform a traditional dance called the Wai Kru, in which they circle the canvas to figuratively seal it off, meaning the fight is between them and them alone.

  Here in the United States, the ritual is confined to the actual beatings. And Nick was a master. He had been a black belt in karate when he discovered the sport, then spent several years training in Thailand for three months every year. In 1992 he won the North American kickboxing championship. Since Alfie knew I kept up with the sport, he called me and asked if I had heard of Nick and if the gym was any good. Nick’s nickname was One Kick because that’s all he needed to knock someone out. So, yeah, I told Alfie, Nick was legit.

  Nick was also becoming one of the bigger kickboxing promoters in town. At first, he was doing it just to get himself some publicity for his fights, but pretty soon he was putting together cards at casinos such as the Aladdin and Four Queens and the Orleans that drew as many as fifteen hundred people. Sure, these were the out-of-the-way, down-market casinos that the locals played at, not the upscale tourist traps such as the MGM and Mirage that drew fifteen thousand boxing fans for title fights. And, yeah, kickboxers only made about $500 per fight, rather than the $5 million or more that the boxers made, but the fights were sanctioned. They had refs, judges, and fans screaming for blood and took place in a ring. For a kid like me, looking to fight in someplace other than a bar, it was the pinnacle of combat sports.

  Not too long after Alfie began training with Nick, Nick called me and invited me down for a visit. I told him I wanted to try a few matches, and without even seeing a tape, he started putting me in shows he was promoting. Pretty soon Alfie—who went on to win seven national titles—and I were Nick’s headliners.

  Nick said he liked my look—the Mohawk, my stare, my generally mean-looking disposition—and my style. That was the same as it was when I was wrestling or fighting in the street: aggressive, focused, and completely immune to the idea of getting hurt. Nick told me I was becoming a draw, that a lot of people were coming out to see me go on the attack when I fought. I had a pulse and energy when I stepped into the ring, mainly because I liked fighting so damn much.

  But when I wasn’t fighting, I was as invisible as a guy with a Mohawk and tattoo on the side of his head can be. I’d go out with Nick, sip on a Coke, sit by myself, and not say much at all. He’d take me all over town, trying to get me to open up, show a little life outside the ring, at least act as if I were having a good time. He wanted me meeting people, elevating my profile, increasing interest in the sport. Really, he just wanted me to lighten up and have a good time. But that wasn’t me, at least not then. I was all about fighting. Everything else was not only secondary, but not all that compelling.

  It wouldn’t be too long before I realized that would have to change.

  CHAPTER 9

  NEVER UNDERESTIMATE ANYONE

  ISETTLED INTO A NICE RHYTHM AFTER COLLEGE: I’D fight in Vegas for Nick, bartend during the week, teach karate at a couple of local dojos nearly every weekday. I made good money—a lot of it in cash—and between winning a few kickboxing matches and my teaching, I developed a rep as a good fighter in SLO’s karate community. Then, one afternoon, I got a call from the sensei at my dojo asking me to stop by. A new fighter had moved to town, and he was looking to spar.

  Going a few rounds in the afternoon is no different for me from playing a pickup basketball game for anyone else. And I’m always eager to take on someone new, try out my moves, and see if they’ve got anything I can pick up. When I arrived at the dojo that day, I noticed the new guy, John Hackleman, right away. He was shorter than me and stocky, with a barrel chest and thickly muscled arms. At first glance you might wonder how he moved those things with any speed. Then you get on the mat with him and you realize how smart it is to never underestimate anyone. Because your question is quickly answered.

  John was born in New York and moved to Hawaii when he was four years old. He picked up judo when he was nine, mainly because, as a white kid living in a Samoan neighborhood, he was tired of getting his butt kicked. By the time he was a teenager he was a kickboxer, a Golden Gloves boxer, and on his way to becoming a tenth-degree black belt. His style of fighting was called Kaju Kenbo, which was created by a group of Hawaiian martial artists in the mid-1940s. It was hard-core. The guys who started it weren’t looking for some kind of inner peace. They developed Kaju Kenbo because they wanted to become better street fighters. And it wasn’t long before John perfected the form.

  John Hackleman is an amazing trainer and a great friend.

  He was—and still is—a master at all the combat sports. After a three-year stint in the army in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was signed by Don King and had twenty professional fights. He then became the number-one-ranked kickboxer in the world during the mid-1980s, when he moved to Southern California and opened his gym, The Pit, which was for hard-core devotees of martial arts. Then he realized owning a gym called The Pit and having a rep for teaching what was essentially street fighting didn’t exactly invite the widest swath of customers. That’s when he tweaked the Kaju Kenbo style and created his signature form of karate, Hawaiian Kempo. It had all the striking and fighting techniques of Kenbo, along with conditioning drills that made it more mainstream.

  John was moving The Pit to SLO with his wife, who was from the area, and he came to spar that day to get a feel for the local talent. We didn’t do any serious fighting. The instructor ran us through some drills, I’d run at him and he’d defend, then he’d run at me. Both of us would do wall drills, with our backs to the wall and multiple people coming at us. It was the first time in a while that I’d sparred with someone who was better than me. He was great at landing powerful punches and kicks from different angles, and I was impressed. As he was leaving, he handed me his card and said, “If you ever really want to train, give me a call.” After the workout he had given me already, I was intrigued. And later that week I rode my motorcycle out to his house for a session.

  John had bought a place—it looked like a compound, really—about twenty minutes outside San Luis Obispo. It was on three acres of woods, halfway up one of the foothills that surround the town. His house and a garage were on one plateau, and behind that, farther up the hill, was another house. This was where he had relocated The Pit.

  It was raining when I drove up the hill. I was soaked and my motorcycle wheels were spinning to get traction on the dirt driveway. I had barely had a chance to dry off when John led me up a set of steep steps made of pebbles. John was a registered nurse who was working at a jail at the time, and the scene at the top of the hill looked like something out of a prison yard. My buddy Eric, who trained with me there, joked that it looked like one of those bunkers people have when they’re expecting the apocalypse and have a basement full of machine guns. With all the modern technology and exercise equipment available—even back then—John’s program was decidedly old school. The single-story house—which had a covered deck—was empty, except for several heavy bags. Hundred-pound tires were lying around, which John’s trainees used to flip up the hill to improve their explosion. People filled wheelbarrows with weights and then pushed them u
p and down the hills. A thin pad wrapped around a metal pole holding up the roof of the deck was used as a punching bag. Dumbbells, free weights, medicine balls, and benches were lined up around the place. John had those working out do Black Jack drills, which were a push-up, then a body-weight squat, then a push-up, then two body-weight squats, until you reached twenty-one total. All the exercises ended when John rang an old-time boxing bell.

  The holiest place at The Pit was the ring, which was set up along the edge of the woods that abutted John’s property. It was four-sided and made of fraying rope, with an even greater incentive to staying upright than not being embarrassed: The entire ring was surrounded by poison oak. If you got knocked on your ass at The Pit, you’d be feeling it long after the pain of the punch went away.

  Before John had me lift a weight, climb a step, or punch a bag, he wanted me to spar. With him. This time, no instructor was blowing his whistle and calling out drills. John decided when we started and when we finished. In an all-out fight session, we went at it for nineteen straight minutes. UFC rounds only last for five minutes, and boxing rounds only last for three, because fighting for even that long is exhausting. Even if you’re in shape, your legs and arms start to shake from all the adrenaline pumping through your body. Sparring for nineteen straight minutes felt like running a marathon. My whole body was burning. And hurting, too. Because John handed me a beat down like I’d never had. My roommate at the time was Eric, and when I got home, I looked at him and said, “That was awesome.”

  But I must have shown Hack something. When I left that day, it was still raining, and it was expected to keep raining for several days after that. As I hopped on my bike to leave, John tossed me the keys to his truck. I gave him a look as if to ask, “What’s this?” But he answered with a question: “You coming back tomorrow?” I said yes. He told me to take the truck so I didn’t kill myself riding my bike up his hill in the rain. I told him I couldn’t do that, and he just asked me again, “You coming back tomorrow?” When I said yes again, he turned around and walked away. That was the end of the discussion. I was taking the truck, and I was becoming a member of The Pit.

  I was proud to become a part of John’s team of Pit Monsters.

  CHAPTER 10

  BEING MENTALLY TOUGH IS NOT A SOMETIMES THING

  THE UNDERLYING THEORIES OF HAWAIIAN KEMPO are the same as they’ve been since the Kempo form was first created by a Buddhist monk in AD 525. While visiting China to teach Buddhism to villagers, the monk saw them being robbed and beaten by bandits. He didn’t believe in fighting, but he believed that not being prepared for a fight was a graver sin. For several days he fasted, until a vision of a new fighting style came to him. He taught the villagers how to defend themselves using an open hand and their feet, knees, and elbows. They would not always stop the marauders, but at least they could now defend themselves.

  The tenets John preached were the same. If you couldn’t pay for workouts, he didn’t care. Most of the guys he trained weren’t paying a cent. John was always saying, “I never let lack of money come between you and Kempo. All I ask is that you give Kempo and The Pit the respect and loyalty it gives you. Confidence, loyalty, and humility are what I expect from all Pit Monsters.”

  It wasn’t easy to come by that confidence, but the humility was no problem. You couldn’t just sign up for a trial membership to The Pit and decide if it was the right gym for you. You had to be invited by someone who was already training there. After my first few times, I would bring Eric. We were so close that he was once accused of being in a fight in college—while he was sitting at home watching TV—just because I was there. He knew how much I wanted to be a kickboxer and made himself miserable trying to help me. He used to wince when we’d do drills that strengthened our shins. When we’d be driving over, his head would start hurting and I’d hear him whispering, “Please no sparring today, please no sparring today.” Eventually, though, he’d become a black belt. He was one of the few who survived the program.

  There’s no better—or harder—place to work out than The Pit.

  Even with an invite from someone on the inside, there was no guarantee you’d become a lifetime member of The Pit. Every day you came to work out, you were going to be pushed to agony. Not just on the weights or the tires or the heavy bags, but in the ring. Sparring was a constant, and the sole purpose was for you to get beaten, until you decided you’d had enough or John decided you were ready. It may sound extreme. Hell, it is extreme. But John’s purpose was clear: He wanted to separate those who were strong from those who were weak. And not just physically strong, but mentally strong.

  Being mentally tough is not a sometimes thing. You don’t turn it on and off. If you’re not mentally tough in the gym while you are training, then when you’re challenged in a fight, you will fold. It doesn’t mean you have to be balls out every time you work out. But, when you are being pushed in training, you can’t just fold a couple of times because you feel that you’ve done enough that day. Before you know it, when you get in a fight and are tired and beat-up and in a bad position, you will give up, too. That was the point of the beatings. If you were going to fight, you’d better be prepared—for everything.

  CHAPTER 11

  SIZE DOESN’T MATTER

  FITTINGLY, THE HISTORY OF MIXED MARTIAL ARTS and ultimate fighting began at the circus. Or, more accurately, in a booth next to the big tent that held the main events. It was in Brazil in the 1920s, and these fights were sideshows, no different from seeing the bearded lady or the man who swallowed knives. They held bouts the organizers called Vale Tudo, Portuguese for “everything allowed.” And it was. The more insane the matchup, the more popular the show. One Brazilian newspaper in the 1920s wrote about a large black man fighting a tiny Japanese man. The crowd expected the little guy to be pummeled—in fact, that’s what they had paid to see. He was thrown to the ground by his opponent, an expert in the South American fighting style of capoeira, and was vulnerable. But as the looming giant readied to kick the man in the head, he was suddenly brought down. The Japanese man had used a deft jujitsu move to lock his opponent’s leg before he could finish his kick, then rendered him unconscious with a few other deft maneuvers. After the short struggle, the fight ended with the Japanese man sitting on top of his felled opponent’s chest.

  This style of fighting was especially popular in Brazil, where Mitsuyo Maeda, a former Japanese boxing champ, had immigrated. When he arrived in Rio, Maeda found a benefactor in Gastão Gracie, a wealthy businessman. He took Maeda in, helped him get established, and became a leader in the movement to bring Japanese immigrants to Brazil. In exchange for his help, Maeda taught Gracie’s sons the ancient art of jujitsu. Only he added a twist.

  The Japanese jujitsu learned by Maeda when he was a boy in the late 1800s focused on using an opponent’s force against him, which often led to throws and flips. But Maeda emphasized grappling and defending yourself from the ground. He taught submission holds, joint locks, and choke holds, making it a more violent, aggressive, and combative form of jujitsu than that taught in Japan. Three of the Gracie boys—Carlos, Carlson, and Hélio—took to it instantly. It wasn’t long before they opened their own academy, Gracie Jujitsu, and became known as the founders of Brazilian jujitsu.

  The sport’s popularity quickly spread across the country. Children practiced in the countryside, and the circus made it a regular part of its traveling road show. Everyone loved the choke holds, seeing men spasm as they became unconscious, and the joint locks that twisted elbows into gruesome angles. The Gracies were confident that their form of martial arts was superior to all others. They believed that when it was practiced properly and the right technique was used, size didn’t matter. No matter how small they were and how big the opponent, they could not be beat. Shortly after perfecting their sport in the 1920s, Carlos inaugurated what became known as the Gracie Challenges. He challenged anyone throughout Brazil to battle him or his brothers in a fight to submission. The challenges became le
gendary within the country and lasted for decades. In 1952, Helio, then thirty-nine, participated in what is still the longest recorded fight in history, a three-hour-forty-minute loss to Brazilian judo expert Valdemar Santana.

  Then in 1959, the original form of Vale Tudo fighting first appeared on Brazilian television, on a show called Heróis do Ringue (Ring of Heroes). Hosted by the Gracie boys, it featured no-holds-barred fights between competitors from all different disciplines. On the first show a Brazilian jujitsu expert named João Alberto Barreto battled a nationally known wrestler. Barreto quickly locked his opponent in an armbar, but the wrestler refused to tap out. Barreto slowly applied more pressure, expecting the match to end or the wrestler to give up, but he never did. Not until the arm snapped like a twig, leaving an exposed compound fracture for all of Brazil’s television audience to see, was the fight stopped. The violence was so shocking—and the complaints flooded in so quickly—the show was immediately pulled off the air.

  At the end of the decade, in 1969, Hélio’s son Rorion left Brazil as a seventeen-year-old for a summer vacation in California. For three months he roamed around SoCal, sometimes working odd jobs, sometimes just spending the night on the streets. He loved it and had a vision of bringing his family’s style of jujitsu—and its academies—to the United States.

  Nine years later, armed with a law degree and a lifetime of martial arts training, he moved to LA full-time. To make ends meet, Rorion cleaned houses, worked as an extra on such shows as Hart to Hart and Fantasy Island, and choreographed fight scenes for movies (such as that choke hold Mel Gibson uses on Gary Busey at the end of the first Lethal Weapon). He also set up a mat for training in his garage. The friends he made walking around Hollywood’s lots as an extra became his students, spending afternoons, mornings, and evenings in his garage in Hermosa Beach, learning the arts of submission holds and choking people. Word about this Brazilian badass teaching jujitsu out of his garage began to spread—one of those in-crowd secrets that so many Hollywood poseurs wanted in on. It helped that Rorion would challenge any dojo sensei to an anything-goes fight, right in front of the sensei’s students, to prove how powerful Brazilian jujitsu could be. By the mid-1980s, classes became so large Rorion needed one of his younger brothers, seventeen-year-old Royce, to move from Brazil to help out. Hundreds of students were learning Gracie-style jujitsu, filling thirty-minute classes from seven in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week.