Iceman: My Fighting Life Read online

  Going into the fight, I had heard plenty of horror stories about no-holds-barred fights. And the only bare-knuckle brawls I had had were in the streets of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Our gloves barely covered our fists and left our fingers bare, but having no gloves at all would be an entirely different sensation. Another factor I had to consider: I’d be fighting a five-year vet and a Brazilian legend in front of his hometown crowd. That should have been enough to throw an experienced fighter, let alone someone like me, who had just one professional fight. Yet, none of it bothered me. A fight’s a fight, no matter where it is. Whether it’s in the backyard, an alley, a dojo, or the middle of São Paulo. You’ve still got to strap your game on and brawl.

  I went down to Brazil with Nick, who organized the fight. And I had plenty of reasons to be pumped, despite all the circumstances that seemed to be lining up against me. I had my first sponsor, the magazine Full Contact Fighter, which was paying me $500 to put its logo on the shorts I wore into the ring. Even better: Not only was I getting $1,000 to fight, I’d get another three grand for a win as long as I actually won the fight—that was more than what Nick would pay me in two or three kickboxing fights combined.

  Not that I ever had any doubts, but right away, Nick and I knew this was a different rumble from what we were used to seeing in Las Vegas, San Luis Obispo, Mobile, or anywhere else we’d thrown down in the United States. The venue was a nightclub. When we walked in through the back door, we could see fighters bleeding from their noses, mouths, heads, and eyes getting stitched up in the kitchen. It was pretty crude, even for me, and looked like a butcher shop. Then these guys with nothing but fresh stitches and a high tolerance for pain were being sent back out to fight. And those were the winners. There was no sign of the losers, but a lot of blood was everywhere you looked.

  Nick kept telling me before the fight that the key to winning—not just lasting the full thirty-minute fight, but winning—was to make Pele stand up with me the entire time. If I hit the ground, with his expertise in Brazilian jujitsu, I might find myself in trouble. But if I stayed up, Nick and I both felt Pele and I were evenly matched in our striking ability with our hands and feet. In some ways, it was to my advantage that I’d had just one previous MMA fight. There was very little to know about me. That first bout was a slugfest; it didn’t show a lot of technique. So Pele might as well have been blind coming into the fight.

  Nick also kept telling me I had to take the fight into “deep waters.” I had yet to train with a fighter who could go toe-to-toe with me for a twelve-minute fight, let alone thirty minutes. I was in as good a shape as I was in high school, when I used to make the team do extra conditioning drills. I could punch and had natural power, but I had no idea yet how strong I was or what my best attributes as a fighter were. But conditioning has nothing to do with natural talent. It’s all about heart and determination and want, wanting to train longer and harder and better than anyone else so you can stand in the middle of that cage for as long as possible. Wanting to win because the alternative is so goddamn embarrassing. Losing a fight because you ran out of steam is cowardice. It means you didn’t have the guts to push yourself when no one was watching, when the foundation was laid for what would become your legacy as a fighter. Mine will never be: He gave up before the fight was over.

  Walking toward the cage was the complete opposite of what the stroll had been in Mobile. It seemed as though 80 percent of the fans were wearing Chute Boxe Academy T-shirts, in honor of Pele. And nearly 100 percent of the fans were cheering wildly for him and either booing or ignoring me. When the fight started, I wanted to take it slow, make him work, and get him tired out. But he had other ideas.

  The crowd was electric, and clearly energized, Pele came right at me. Early in the fight he caught me with a kick to the head that brought me down to one knee. Before I could catch my breath, he was on top of me, trying to wrestle me to the ground. No matter what kind of shape you are in, trying to catch your breath, slow your heart rate, free yourself from a Brazilian combat-fighting expert while thousands of fans scream for your head, and then stand back up is going to take a lot of energy. Fortunately, being the aggressor in that scenario wears you down, too. When I was able to get back on my feet, it did a few things: It tired out Pele, made him lose a little confidence since his opening gambit had failed, helped me slow down and focus after the initial blow to my skull and, most important, gave me a boost, even if I didn’t know that I needed it.

  After that, the fight settled into the kind of pace I wanted it to. We were on our feet, trading lots of bare-knuckle blows. Nick was right, the deeper the water Pele and I waded into, the more dangerous I became and the more Pele tired. The crowd seemed to be turning my way, too. Vale Tudo isn’t like the UFC. The sport has such a long history in Brazil, fans are educated and understand when an epic battle is taking place. It is not just about the blood and gore for them, although they don’t mind when they see it. And as our fight progressed, fans began to recognize that I wasn’t going to quit, that I had a strategy, and that Pele was fighting exactly as I hoped he would. Midway through the fight, you could hear the fans cheering whenever I connected or escaped from a vulnerable position. Slowly, they started chanting my name. It was straight out of Rocky. I was just some onetime fighter, an underdog who should have lay down for this superstar. But not only was I going toe-to-toe with the guy, I was whipping him. Like, really whipping him.

  It got so bad late in the fight that I couldn’t believe the ref, who was Pele’s manager, wasn’t stopping the match. My fists were dripping with Pele’s blood; it looked as if I worked in a meatpacking plant. A net surrounded the ring so no one could get out, and Pele was just falling into it, but the ref wouldn’t step in so I had to keep hitting him. He had a cut so bad above his eye that a huge piece of skin was just flapping around.

  I started talking to Nick while the fight was going on, asking him, “They ain’t going to stop this fight, are they?”

  “No man,” he said, “they’re not.”

  With five minutes left, Nick was yelling at me to just tap the guy in the face or in the body or gently kick his lower leg. But don’t kill him. It was a mercy match by the end, but this guy was not going to tap out, he was an absolute warrior. I think he would rather have died than submit to punches. I saw Pele the next day and his face looked like the Elephant Man’s.

  When the ring announcer was getting ready to declare me the winner after the fight, Nick gently nudged me behind him. He was afraid people were going to start throwing things at me. But instead, the fans cheered. All of them. The people of Brazil were great to me and had accepted me. Afterward I got stitched up in the back, right next to a bunch of guys who were doing the same and going right back in to fight. Nick had to go to the hospital with a guy who had broken his jaw, and when he got back, he told me, “Thank God you didn’t have to get stitched up there.”

  Winning that fight earned me my first magazine cover. Naturally, it was Full Contact Fighter. It also put me on the international map as a mixed martial arts threat. Most important, it helped me realize what I could do in the ring. I knew I had the talent to go far in this sport.

  CHAPTER 18

  BE ABOUT BEING THE BEST

  LET’S FACE THE FACTS: NO MATTER HOW MUCH MY star was on the rise as a mixed martial arts fighter, I was standing knee-deep in a whole lot of life-changing stuff at this point. Cade was born in October of 1998, and unfortunately, Lori and I broke up two months later. So by the end of the year I had two kids, both less than a year and a half old, with two different women, neither of whom I was with anymore. (Casey and I would give it another try after Lori and I broke up, but it wasn’t meant to be. We were better as friends than we were as a couple. Realizing that back then is probably why we are still so tight today. I’m close with Lori, too, who is happily married and living in Denver with Cade, her husband, and their three kids.)

  I wasn’t stressing about any of it. That’s just not me. One of the th
ings I love most about being a fighter is the lifestyle. Fortunately for me, these were all the same things that, until my fight career took off, made being a bartender great, too. I like to stay up and stay out late. Some nights I want to split a bottle of Jameson’s with a buddy. Some nights I want to drink the bottle of Jameson’s myself. There are nights—and days—I want to bring more than one girl home. I don’t really like to get up before 10:00 A.M. I don’t get to sleep until midnight, at the earliest. The way I’m wired, I’ve always known I’d find a way to live this way. I’m pretty carefree, and little in the world has ever made me stay awake at night worrying.

  Me and my son, Cade. I’ve been asked if I’d let him become a fighter when he grows up. Absolutely.

  Which is why, after Cade was born, it seemed like the perfect time to take on even more risk—as if having two young kids and trying to become a full-time MMA fighter at twenty-eight wasn’t enough. My buddy Scott Adams—who had wrestled with me at Cal Poly—and I had been debating opening a kickboxing gym together in San Luis Obispo. Scott had been a freshman when I was a senior. Traditionally at our school, during our first practice, the upperclassmen would square off against the underclassmen and give them a lesson in what college wrestling was all about. Scott was a hotshot prospect from Ventura, California. But I figured he couldn’t know much. He was too green. Turns out he was ridiculously quick, too. We got on the mat, and before I could get low, he was diving for my ankle. He took me to the mat in a single-leg takedown, which made me furious. A lot of the all-Americans I wrestled couldn’t take me down. And this freshman punk had done it on his first try. For the rest of the year, I chose to wrestle against Scott in practice. And he never took me down again.

  Scott became interested in MMA fighting when he graduated, and he wanted to build on his wrestling background by expanding his grappling skills. He focused on Brazilian jujitsu and spent a lot of time commuting to Los Angeles for workouts at Beverly Hills Jiu-Jitsu. We went together once, but mostly he’d go down, pick up some technique and some moves, and spread them around to the rest of us who were hanging out in SLO.

  Billy Blanks’s Tae Bo training was big back then, MMA was getting popular, I had kickboxing skills and students from teaching in town, and Scott had jujitsu skills from his training. That December we decided to open up SLO Kickboxing in town. We put $10,000 into the business, found a location, and by January 1999 we were open. I handled most of the stuff in the front of the house—teaching and business—and Scott worked on the marketing and publicity. We had a big mat that Trista used to crawl on, medicine balls, a weight room, and heavy bags. R&B from SLO’s local station was constantly coming through the loudspeakers. A lot of the people who came by were students of mine, but plenty more came to get a good workout and just hang. Even today, some of the people I met there are still my closest friends.

  * * *

  MY FAVORITE DRINKS/SHOTS:

  Patron

  Wild Turkey

  Jameson’s

  Cactus Cooler

  Grey Goose

  * * *

  Within a year the gym was packed. It felt as if we were doing something different from a lot of facilities because of the combination of weight training and kickboxing and martial arts we were offering. Our workout didn’t feel like exercise, but instead you felt as if you were playing a sport. Before you knew it the workout was over and you were healthier, too. Scott and I were each usually earning between $4,000 and $5,000 a month. That was enough for me to quit bartending and focus just on the school and, of course, my training. Developing my UFC career was never far from the forefront of my mind, especially not after that first fight. When we opened SLO Kickboxing together, I told Scott that the business would always take a backseat to my goal of becoming a world champion. I always wanted to be about being the best. Luckily, the business did well, and I was always there. Which meant I was working out and training every single day.

  The MMA world had only been around for six years when we opened the gym. It still felt brand-new and, in a lot of ways, experimental. New techniques, new styles, new forms of combat were being invented right before our eyes, every time we saw a fight. The sport had a real pioneering spirit, from the way business was done to the way it was marketed to how the fans treated it. It was almost like a cult. The enthusiasm from those who followed it was boundless, but still, only a small group of people knew anything about it.

  San Luis Obispo, and especially our gym, felt like an incubator for UFC. We were in the middle of nowhere. Whenever we trained, it seemed as if we were creating something, setting new precedents. There was no money in the sport then. We were doing it for the same reasons people had been practicing martial arts for thousands of years: the discipline, the challenge, the way it made you concentrate. In my case, I still absolutely loved fighting. I would tell Scott this all the time. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  * * *

  MY TYPICAL DAILY MEAL:

  Cottage cheese and fruit for breakfast

  Sandwich for a snack, turkey and cheese in a pita

  Pasta with chicken and mixed vegetables for lunch

  Protein/carbohydrate shake

  Chicken with rice and broccoli for dinner

  * * *

  I was getting better, too. I did round-robin training with Scott and another guy we worked out with named Jeremiah Miller. I really never wanted anyone to force me to submit, so Scott and Jeremiah focused on making me hone the Brazilian jujitsu techniques I had learned with John Lewis. I also began to take myself more seriously as an athlete. I started doing plyometrics regularly. Brett Hamlin and Pat Hopkins worked out a strength and conditioning plan for me. I started eating more fish and chicken and vegetables.

  Now that I had won my UFC debut and beaten Pele in Brazil, I was a legitimate Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter. I was someone the matchmaker could slot into a tournament and know he was going to get a good fight. He didn’t have to worry about me trying to grapple my way to a win. The fights would be coming now. I had to be a professional.

  CHAPTER 19

  TURNS OUT MOJO DON’T PAY THE BILLS

  IGOT 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 co
uld 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.