Iceman: My Fighting Life Page 8

  Of course, in the mid-to late 1990s the revitalization of the UFC was still a long way off. In fact, in 1996, before I had ever had a fight, it seemed more likely that the sport would disappear rather than beat major league baseball and the NBA in television ratings. The idea that it could become the next NASCAR was insane. That year Senator John McCain, a longtime boxing fan, called UFC bouts the equivalent to “human cockfighting.” Not long after that, George Pataki, then the governor of New York, had his state’s athletic commission ban the sport. In time the sport became even more marginalized. The founders of the UFC had always marketed the extreme angle of the sport. They pushed that it was “no holds barred” and liked the idea that the fans were tuning in to see men go at each other with such unbridled ferocity. The original intent may have been to find out which style of fighting was the best in the world, but it quickly became obvious, to the men who ran the sport, that selling the blood and gore was the best way to go. But the problem with this strategy was that it reduced the fights to what they had been back in the 1920s in Brazil: They were circus sideshows. The fighters weren’t considered athletes. Instead they were treated like badass bar brawlers who had a lust for violence; nothing more than hard-core weekend warriors. No one saw the training that was involved or the fighting science that was practiced or the skills that were exhibited. Tens of thousands of fans were buying the fights on pay-per-view and knew what the sport was all about. But to the vast majority of people, ultimate fighters were eye-gouging, head-butting, biting freaks who liked to hurt other people. This is what the owners were selling, much more than they sold the competitive nature of the sport or the skill of the guys in the cage. And it backfired.

  The original owners of the UFC didn’t worry about ticket sales. They didn’t see filling stadiums as the best way to make money off the fights. They weren’t even that interested in selling DVDs and sold off those rights to another company. For them, the clearest path to cashing in on the sport was through lucrative television deals.

  But after McCain did his rip job and Pataki banned the sport in New York, state after state refused to sanction UFC fights. The commissions called it too violent, barbaric even, and they caved in to community activists who complained about having fights in their states. And when that happened, the TV execs couldn’t help but be concerned. Before long, cable companies refused to put the UFC on pay-per-view. By the late 1990s, when I was finally ready to fight, the only way to see the UFC was on satellite TV. And if that revenue stream dried up, there was virtually nothing to keep the sport going.

  For me, the politics didn’t matter. I understood what was happening, but didn’t care all that much. And I definitely didn’t worry how it would affect my future. That’s not how I think. It’s not how I’ve ever thought. I don’t plan, I just do. I was bartending, kickboxing, teaching, and training. To me, that was making a living as a fighter.

  But that would change.

  CHAPTER 16

  NEVER LET A LITTLE THING GET IN THE WAY OF MAKING A BIG THING HAPPEN

  Me and my daughter, Trista. I fell in love with her immediately.

  CASEY GAVE BIRTH TO OUR DAUGHTER, TRISTA, IN September of 1997. She was a beautiful little girl whom I fell in love with immediately. And while her mom and I weren’t together anymore, we stayed close. I would probably always have had some kind of relationship with Casey. Now that we had a kid together, it was a no-brainer. Although, even she’ll admit that she was brutal to me during her pregnancy. Partly because the chemistry in her body was constantly changing, partly because she was getting bigger every day, and partly because I’m the one who got her pregnant at eighteen, right when she was about to leave home to go to college. But I never took it personally, never got angry. I was always saying, “You bet, whatever you say, if that’s what you need.” Having been raised by my mom, I’ve got nothing but respect for other mothers and how hard they have it. When Casey was having a difficult time adjusting to life after the baby, I bought her the book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. It was advice I lived by, and I think it helped her prioritize her new life. Years later she was still telling me how much she appreciated my getting her that book.

  In February of 1998, when Trista was just four months old, I got some more news: No, I didn’t have a UFC fight yet. But now my girlfriend, Lori, whom I worked with at the Library, was pregnant. Lori and I had known each other for a long time before we started dating. I first noticed her when I was bouncing and she was a customer. We had a lot of mutual friends and, through them, started hanging out regularly. She told me she was impressed that, despite my rep, I seemed to be a guy who had control at the door. I wasn’t starting fights; I was usually trying to keep things pretty mellow.

  She’ll always be my little girl.

  At first we kept things pretty casual. But I’m a romantic guy, and when her birthday came around early in our relationship, I decided to step it up. I surprised her with a night in a hotel in town. I had called ahead and had music playing in the room when we walked in. Then I took her to a nice dinner and made her think, “Wow, this guy is really sensitive.”

  Lori was five-four, had dark hair, and was a knockout. People always liked her, she was one of those girls who was so sweet, customers just gravitated toward her end of the bar. The truth is, when I found out she was pregnant, part of me was like, “Whoa, this happened fast. What did I do here?” We were together and things were going good. But I was worried, too. Trista was so young, I had barely got used to the idea of being a father. I was a little nervous about money. Now I was going to have two kids just thirteen months apart.

  But you get over that fear fast, at least I did, because I loved being a dad. From my perspective, between Trista, a new kid on the way, and my training, things were going pretty good for me. Then I got the call I had been waiting a year to get: The UFC wanted me to fight.

  Nick had set me up with a couple of managers named Al Davis and Charlie Angelo. He told me that if I signed with them, a fight would come my way sooner rather than later. And he was right. I had sent the UFC a tape of one of my MMA fights, my kickboxing matches, and my training sessions with John Lewis and requested a chance to fight. Plus, because I had been working out at John’s and knew so many of the guys who were already UFC fighters, I figured, naively, it would just be a matter of time before someone tapped me to take on the UFC’s light heavyweight champ. But a few UFC shows went by after my MMA debut and after I had sent in my audition tape, but no one called. Not until I aligned with managers who were connected did I become a legitimate candidate to join the rotation. When Al and Charlie called me in April of 1998, they might as well have told me another girl I knew was going to have my baby. That’s how excited I was.

  In mid-May I flew down to Mobile, Alabama, with Nick, Scott Adams, John Hackleman, and some other friends to make my Ultimate Fighting Championship debut. It may have been the top rung of the mixed martial arts world, but it was still pretty bush-league stuff. Only a few states—such as Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana—would even sanction these fights. And even then they often took place in the middle of nowhere, as far from big cities and the rest of civilization as possible. That is, if they took place in the United States at all. You were just as likely to see a UFC fight happen in Japan or Brazil as you were to catch one in Bay St. Louis. People acted as if just having a UFC fight in a major stadium in the middle of Atlanta or Charlotte would corrupt the entire town. So we fought in such outposts as Dothan and Augusta or, in the case of my first fight, in Mobile, Alabama.

  When Charlie and Al called, it wasn’t exactly the most enticing offer I’ve ever had. I was the sixth fighter invited to square off in a four-man middleweight tourney for UFC 17: Redemption. Essentially, I was an alternate, a part of the undercard, but not a draw for the tournament. The only way I could advance in the tournament was if one of the top four guys won his first-round fight and was hurt, then the winner of my fight took his place. I was only fighting so I wasn’t fresh if I needed to
fill in. That would have been an unfair advantage.

  They paid me $1,000—including expenses—and put me up in a Marriott or a Sheraton or someplace like that. When we had the weigh-ins, they used a bathroom scale, which made me laugh. If you knew how to shift your weight right, the balance on the scale would change, and you could come in just over or just under weight. It wasn’t exactly a science.

  This was the UFC I had been training for? This weigh-in on a bathroom scale represented years of boxing lessons with my grandpa, karate lessons, getting in street fights in Santa Barbara, wrestling at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, kickboxing, teaching. All of it led to this chance, to the Mobile Civic Center for a one-shot, $1,000 fight against a guy named Noe Hernandez in front of a couple thousand people. The operation had such a shoestring budget that Scott had to call around town finding me gym times so I could stay loose in the three or four days I was there. So much for dreaming big.

  I weighed in at 199 pounds, one pound under the 200-pound weight limit. But when Noe stepped off the scale, he was two pounds overweight. Apparently he didn’t know the secret about tilting your body. Just like that I could have won my first UFC fight without ever stepping into the Octagon. But I didn’t travel all the way across the country to win by forfeit. I wanted to go at it. I wanted a knockout. I was not going to let two pounds come between me and the fight I had been waiting to have for years. I would never let a little thing get in the way of making a big thing happen. So when they told me Noe didn’t make weigh-in on that piece-of-crap scale, I said, “Screw it. Let’s fight.”

  Noe was a strong guy with a buzz cut who had already had five UFC fights. He’d won three, including one after a doctor stopped the bout because Noe was hurting the guy so badly and another because he had literally beaten his opponent into submission with punches. There wasn’t a lot of tape on fighters in those days, but I had heard from friends such as Nick and John that he had a wicked right hand that had knockout power, so I should be on the lookout for that. I made a note of it.

  While Nick and John were getting me prepped in the Mobile Civic Center’s locker room, I got a visit from John Peretti, who was the UFC’s matchmaker. He’d been a kickboxer and had been around MMA for a while promoting fights and working in corners. He also decided which fighters were invited into the cage and which ones were always stuck looking on the outside in. If you’re a first-time fighter—especially one who is just an alternate—you want to keep him happy.

  I thought he was going to wish me luck, tell me to have a good fight, and maybe give me a few words of advice. That wasn’t the case. John knew I came from kickboxing, but had heard I wrestled in college. Have you ever been to a college wrestling match? It’s not exactly WWE excitement. No throwing chairs or jumping off the top turnbuckle or chicks in bikinis fawning over the guys. It’s just grappling. A lot of the times the wrestlers aren’t moving so much as pushing against one another, trying to tire each other out. And while going to the mat and getting a guy on the ground might be a good way to win a fight, it’s not going to bring the crowd to its feet.

  John wanted to make it clear that they wanted knockouts in their fights. He reminded me that I should be aggressive and stay off the ground if I wanted to get invited back. I had to take what he said seriously if I wanted a career in the UFC, so I nodded my head earnestly, told him it wouldn’t be a problem, and went back to prepping for the fight. In truth, he didn’t have anything to worry about. I had every intention of coming out striking.

  I don’t fill up with nervous energy waiting for my fights to begin, which I think goes back to my wrestling days. Getting too pumped up was only a waste of energy. And I wasn’t really nervous waiting for the fight to start or walking out to the cage; it’s not as though it was my first fight in front of a crowd. Although, it wasn’t the way it is today with the music, the lights, the crowds hanging over and trying to give me high fives. More people were in the stands than I’d ever seen for one of my fights, but it was pretty quiet. It seemed as if half of them didn’t know what to cheer for, as though they had heard about this violent sport and wanted to come check it out for themselves. They weren’t quite fans; they were curious. I didn’t mind the peace. I could think, focus, and go over my game plan, which was essentially to go beat the crap out of the guy.

  I didn’t feel any real butterflies when I walked into the ring either. But maybe I should have. I had been telling myself to look out for that big right. My friends had warned me about it. And yet, ten seconds into the fight I let my guard down, and bam, he pops with that powerful punch of his. I said to myself, “Damn.” I wasn’t worried, I just couldn’t believe I got caught by that. I felt my eye starting to swell up, I knew it was going to be black-and-blue within minutes. I couldn’t believe I had done something so mindless so early in the fight.

  But it was good. It knocked some sense into me, reminding me I was in a fight and not just baiting some chump I had thrown out of a bar. After that, I settled down and used some of the strategies I had been working on through years of training, from my days at Koei-Kan Karate-Do to John Lewis’s gym in Las Vegas.

  I got in a good pop right at the bridge of Noe’s nose, which sent blood gushing to the canvas. For the rest of the fight, whenever we locked up or stood still for too long, you could see drops of blood forming a pattern at Noe’s feet. While it looked bad, he clearly wasn’t hurt because he came at me as much as I went after him. I’d give him a low kick to knock him off balance, then follow that up with a sweeping right. Then he’d get low on me, flip me over, and make me use some energy to get off the ground.

  It was a tense, tight fight. Years later Nick described it as electrifying. And it had that feel of whoever was in the crowd and whatever fight they were waiting to see after we were over actually began to enjoy it. We were both so desperate to win—me for reasons more than just my competitive nature—the crowd could sense it. Even with a minute left in the fight, we were showing no signs of letting down, throwing as many punches as possible as quickly as possible. Pretty soon the entire crowd was on its feet, cheering the effort as much as they were rooting for one guy or the other. I remember Nick and John screaming, partly encouraging me, partly instructing me. They wanted to make sure I kept Noe moving in a half circle around the ring. The last thing they wanted was for me to give him a chance to set up and take a straight shot with his right hand directly at my eye again.

  That’s what I did for most of the fight: I moved around in the shape of a moon, as if we were dancing with a little bit of space between us. I looked for my shots, high and low, and tried to protect myself as best as I could. Was I a kickboxer, street fighter, wrestler, jujitsu expert? To tell you the truth, I didn’t know at that point. I was just discovering what I was all about as a mixed martial arts fighter. I wanted to survive, win, and get invited back. I could worry about style points the next time around.

  I must have done something the judges liked because after twelve minutes of fighting with neither of us getting knocked out, the folks at cageside had to declare the winner: Chuck Liddell, by a decision.

  My right eye was practically swollen shut. But the first thing I did after the fight was find the matchmaker. I wanted him to know I was ready if someone went down. One eye or not, I could fight anyone who was still standing.

  CHAPTER 17

  A FIGHT’S A FIGHT, NO MATTER WHERE IT IS

  IWANTED ANOTHER FIGHT. FAST. MUCH SOONER THAN the UFC was going to give me one. But I did have an offer to fight that August, two months after my UFC debut, in São Paulo, Brazil. It was truly a Vale Tudo fight in the tradition of Brazilian fighting that dated back to the beginning of the sport in the 1920s. The bout was a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckles brawl called IVC 6: The Challenge. My opponent was already a Brazilian MMA legend named Jose Landi-Jons, also known as Pele.

  If you’re going to have the balls to answer to the same nickname as the greatest athlete your country has ever produced, you better be great at what you do. And Landi-Jons,
who had been called Pele as a boy because he never missed one of the soccer star’s games, was as good as it got in Brazil. He had been a member of the country’s Chute Boxe Academy, which was one of the few fighting-oriented gyms that didn’t focus on one type of martial art over another. The fighters there studied everything from Muay Thai kickboxing to Brazilian jujitsu. It became known throughout the country for producing the best, most well-rounded, and toughest Vale Tudo fighters in the sport. They’re energetic, can punch and kick from anywhere, have no problems taking you down or being taken down, and learn a dozen different submission holds.

  By the time we fought, Pele had been in fifteen fights during his five-year career. He’d won thirteen of them, all by knockout, technical knockout, or submission. Nearly half of his fights had ended with him victorious in less than four minutes. And the two that he lost? Those were decisions that went the distance—all thirty minutes in the world of Brazilian Vale Tudo. This was how eventual mixed martial arts legends such as Wanderlei Silva and Rickson Gracie had made their reputations and sharpened their skills. The fights were a barrage of head butts, elbows, kicks, and viciousness. If Senator McCain had seen how brutal these fights were, he’d have dropped his objections to UFC immediately and declared it the most regulated sport he’d seen.