The Laws of the Ring

by Urijah Faber

  Two weeks later I was in Southern California ready to compete. It was pretty shocking when I got to the Host Hotel. I had brought my two buddies Virgil and TJ with me on the trip, as usual, and found out that although the rooms were paid for, each competitor was matched up as roommates with another competitor. I got my room assignment and it turned out I was supposed to be rooming with one of the brightest up-and-coming stars of the UFC, Georges St-Pierre. With Virg and TJ at my side, I tracked down Georges to explain to him that I had screwed up and brought my friends to stay in our room.

  “St-Pierre, St-Pierre!” I yelled down the hall. When I approached him, he thought that I was some kind of eager fan and treated me as such, turning to me quickly and extending his hand to shake.

  “Hello, how are you? Georges,” he said with a big smile and a funny French Canadian accent.

  I could tell he had no idea that I was his roommate, so I started the conversation with, “Congrats on your last win! You did awesome.” He answered quickly, trying to get the small talk out of the way, and move on.

  “Did you want a picture?” he asked sincerely.

  “Oh, I don’t have a camera, man. I’m supposed to be rooming with you but I brought my two friends. Sorry, man, I just didn’t realize that we were sharing.” A lightbulb went off in his head.

  “Oh!” He laughed. “It’s okay, I’m gonna get my own room. Good luck tomorrow.”

  I said, “Cool, man. Yeah, you, too, and I’m a fan of yours. I fight, too, in King of the Cage. My name’s Urijah.”

  It was starting to sink in that this tournament was a big deal.

  The next day I came to the tournament and everyone was there. I started looking around and saw one of my early favorites, MMA superstar Tito “The Huntington Beach Bad Boy” Ortiz, warming up to my left. To my right was former UFC champion Ricco “Suave” Rodriguez and UFC welterweight contender Frank “Twinkle Toes” Trigg. I walked to the edge of the mat and said hello to my fellow Northern Californian competitors Gilbert “El Niño” Melendez and Jake Shields. Gilbert and I were in the same weight class and knew each other from college wrestling. We had also done some cross-training that Nick and Nate Diaz had put together. Jake and I had been in the same small school subsection together in high school in neighboring towns, and knew each other pretty well.

  “What’s up, Gil, you got Japan first? I’ve got Parrumpinha from Brazil [one of American Top Team’s BJJ coaches]. Let’s get it done for the USA, baby! Good luck.”

  Gil gave me a big smile and said, “Forget that, let’s do it for Cali!” I laughed and we gave each other the standard California handshake.

  “Yup, let’s do it for Cali!” I smiled with a little extra pride. I continued to walk around the arena and saw a small crowd around a big dude with a huge chain hung on his neck. It was Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. A friend . . . and a fan of mine. He caught a glimpse of me walking up the concourse and yelled out, giving me his big signature smile.

  “What’s up, California Kid!”

  I gave him a head nod and shot him a smile then went on my way. But that name bounced around my head. Gilbert’s comment about doing it for “Cali” was there, too. I remember thinking, California is a cool place. I made my way back to the warm-up mats and was soon approached by none other than UFC’s ring announcer Bruce Buffer. It was my first time meeting him and I was a fan. He had been hired to announce the event and was looking to get my name perfect for the announcements.

  “You’re Uri-Jah right? I’m going to be announcing you today.” He didn’t get the name right, so I corrected him.

  “It’s actually pronounced U-ri-ah, the j is silent. I’m sure it’s hard to get all the names right, you have to say a ton of them.” He was quick to correct me.

  “Actually, I rarely have trouble with names. It won’t happen again,” he said with confidence, making it very apparent that he wasn’t the type to make errors in his area of expertise. “Do you have a nickname?”

  I quickly told him that I didn’t. “No, just my name.”

  He said, “Okay, nice to meet you,” and turned to walk away. I stopped him after a few steps and got his attention.

  “Hey, Bruce, actually I do have a nickname. Put down ‘The California Kid.’ ” He looked at me and quickly jotted it on his notepad.

  “Got it!”

  The tournament was tough. I won the first match against the Brazilian black belt Parrumpinha and then lost a hard-fought battle with multiple time BJJ and ADCC world champion Marcos Feitosa in the only submission loss of my life in competition. But some more important things happened that day. I was a peer with some of the biggest names in MMA and had competed at the highest level in a discipline that I had only trained in for two years, and I felt in my heart that with a few adjustments I could have been a world champion that year. My new nickname was established and I was excited for the future of my career, knowing there was a place for a happy, friendly, blond, and bronzed kid from California.

  It’s obvious that certain areas in life are filled with stereotypes and status quos, but it’s always best to stay true to yourself and carve your own niche in this world. Even when you may seemingly not fit the mold.

  The 20th Law of Power

  Build a Community of Potential

  Here’s what I’ve learned: If you surround yourself with positive, like-minded people, success will follow. The power of community is vital for physical, mental, and financial health. As I sat down to write this book, I came to understand some deep-seated values that I held, values that trace back to my family’s time in the Christian commune. Many of the tenets that have guided my life, I now realize, were not from specific teachings and lessons of the Christian commune but the positive energy and combination of the great people that made up the group.

  The question is: How do you go about forming or joining the kind of community—a community of potential—that brings out the best in both the individual and the whole? My experience with the Dunmores, despite being relatively short-lived, taught me to seek potential in others. I don’t look for people who have achieved great things; I look for people who will achieve great things.

  After my third fight, right after I got the Dunmore sponsorship, I decided I wanted to buy a house. I didn’t know anything about real estate, but I knew I wanted a house and I knew my meager income made the prospect unlikely. I had a college friend, Michael Yosef, who was in the mortgage industry, and he said, “I can get you a loan.”

  “Dude, my income was only ten thousand bucks last year.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  With that vague commitment providing motivation, I went house-hunting. I was so ignorant of the process that I refused to speak with real estate agents because I didn’t want to have to pay them. I didn’t know they showed houses for free, which is why I turned away ten or twelve agents who expressed an interest in helping me. So I drove around on my own, looking through neighborhoods I liked that contained houses I could afford (that was a rare combination), picking up flyers, and hitting some open houses.

  At an open house in an older part of Sacramento, I met an agent named Dana. She was filling in for her friend, who was supposed to be showing the house, and I liked her immediately. Dana was a tough, smart woman and gave me a quick crash course to educate me on the real estate process, which relieved any worries I had about paying an agent to show me homes. I told her I knew I could afford a monthly house payment, because my plan was to move my buddies into the house and split up the cost. She believed me and agreed to help me find something.

  Looking back, I see that I was a real estate agent’s worst nightmare, spending the first month with Dana tossing out lowball offers on all these shitty houses. But I loved her straightforward and honest approach; she would look at the houses I was targeting and say, “You don’t want to buy this house” or “What are you
looking at this for?” She was more supportive than perhaps was reasonable, but I guess that’s why I trusted her.

  Then we found a pocket of nice homes tucked in between Interstate 80 and a busy industrial street I didn’t know existed. It wasn’t a prestigious address, but it was superquiet, with big trees and huge backyards. It was perfect.

  I found a house that was kind of a piece of shit, but it was a nicer piece of shit than any of the others I had considered. It had a huge mess of a backyard, with old trees and junk everywhere. I could see the potential in it right away. I didn’t see the disaster it was; I saw what it would become. The houses in the rest of the neighborhood were all well kept and unique. Most of my neighbors were in their eighties and many had them built years ago. A fireplace sat in the middle of the living room and there were old beat-up hardwood floors that I thought looked kind of cool. There was a big detached garage and huge trees in both the front and the backyard. I could envision a big pool in the back (when I earned enough money) and the neighborhood was quiet—at least before I got there. The house was a metaphor for the way I saw the world: raw but promising.

  So after lowballing all these houses for weeks, I told Dana, “I love this house. Offer full price.” There were two other full-price offers, from people I imagine were far more qualified to own a home, but Dana went to work. She told the old lady who owned the house my story. I don’t know what version she told her, but I ended up getting the house. I moved in a couple of my best friends, Dustin Soderman and Virgil Moorehead, to help pay the mortgage.

  Dustin soon got serious with his future wife, Maggie, and moved in with her. Shortly after, my buddy from college Tommy was making the move from a nearby town and was looking for a house. I showed him my neighborhood and the house next to mine, which happened to be for sale. Virgil and Tommy decided to partner up and buy the place. I moved in a young aspiring fighter from Hawaii named TJ Kuahine who I had met at a wrestling camp, and then my college wrestling rival, Matt Sanchez, who had taken my spot as a coach at UC Davis moved onto the block (more on him and our rivalry later). The place was always jam-packed. Guys would drop in and stay on the couch for a few weeks, get some training, then head home or find a way to stay. Tommy and Virgil had five rooms in their house and kept filling them up with renters: old college friends, wrestling buddies, aspiring fighters. My friends would get married or otherwise head off on their own and someone new would snatch up their spot.

  Flash ahead, pretty soon I owned three houses on the street and my friends owned two. The houses have been filled with guys from every part of the United States and many parts of the world: Thailand, Brazil, Australia, Japan, Canada, Alaska, Florida, Idaho, Hawaii, and of course California (from San Diego to the edge of the Oregon border). Today, we have what amounts to a fighters’ commune. This is my network. We’re all huddled under the umbrella, including Pop and Ryan next door. Tommy handles the business side of things (you’ll read about him shortly), I handle the fighting, and many others fill the gaps in between. I guess you could call it a nonreligious rebuild of the Isla Vista Christian commune. We call them “friendly houses” and it all started with a tough-minded real estate agent who saw something in a young guy with a limited job history, very little money, and a penchant for fumbling around with more passion than knowledge.

  The 21st Law of Power

  Go the Extra Mile

  You don’t catch people’s eye by doing the bare minimum. You don’t advance in a profession if you’re willing to do something only when there’s a price tag attached to it. Proving your passion often means pursuing it for the sheer love of it. To use the example of my fighting career, you’ll do it hoping it pays dividends down the line, but you won’t do it knowing or even expecting it. You do it, as I did, locked in the moment. If you find something you’re passionate about, you have to go the extra mile to be noticed.

  Sounds good, right? But how do you get noticed? How do you transform your sense of purpose, your tireless work ethic, and your personal credit into the ability to impress other human beings? A lot of motivational speakers and self-help books preach the importance of having people skills. It’s a standard, almost commonplace aspect of the genre. Think about it: How many job interviews include the prospective job applicant boasting of being a “real people person”? How many HR directors die a little inside every time they hear someone trot out the “people person” answer as a reason they should be hired? Seriously, what does it even mean?

  It seems to me the terms people skills and people person have been misused and overused into meaninglessness. Is a people person someone who can carry on a credible conversation? Is it someone who can make other people feel good about themselves? Is it someone who can defuse a potentially volatile situation with a coworker or client?

  Here’s my definition of a people person: someone who enjoys interacting with people, has a knack for building friendships, and can use these characteristics in order to communicate and succeed. The communication may or may not be verbal. From the time I stepped into the cage, I was told I had a magnetism that drew people to my fights. It was completely unconscious; I didn’t even know it existed until I felt the crowd’s excitement that first night in the Colusa Casino. The idea is not only to convey your passion but to share it. This is a pretty broad category, and it includes things like communication, motivation, and charisma. It includes more tangible qualities such as organization and work ethic, and less tangible ones such as empathy and trust.

  Put simply: You need to be able to communicate well enough to bring like-minded, strong-willed, successful people along with you.

  Tommy Schurkamp is one of my best friends. He is also my closest and most trusted business associate. We wrestled together at UC Davis after being rivals in high school. He’s from a small town called Escalon in the foothills above the San Joaquin Valley, and our teams competed against each other in the higher-level high school tournaments.

  As I said before, when I bought my first house, Tommy and Virgil bought the house next door. Tommy soon became the guy I trusted and leaned on for everything from business advice to my daily schedule. When he left college, Tommy worked as a surveyor for an engineering company. He would leave the house at four-thirty in the morning, spend eight to ten hours at his surveying job, and then come home and help me organize my affairs.

  Tommy would pay my bills, schedule my calendar, and organize my mail. I used to have to sell tickets to all my fights, and Tommy took charge of that. By my third fight, we were selling three hundred tickets to all our friends and their friends. It’s not as easy as just leaving three hundred tickets at “will call.” The ticket purchasers didn’t all know each other, and everyone had a preference for where they wanted to sit and with whom. Tommy had to make a seating chart and collect the money. Tommy became the guy who handled all the overflow in my life: getting specific food I might need, scheduling doctors’ appointments, helping organize the team when it first got started. A lot of small things added up in a huge way.

  And for his trouble, I paid him absolutely nothing. We were friends. I would do it for him, and he did it for me. It was never an issue, which was good because I didn’t have the money to pay him, anyway. But when things got rolling with my career and our team, I offered Tommy a job as chief operating officer of Faber Enterprises. He dropped the surveying gig, no questions asked.

  He was working for next to nothing, but the quality of life, by his own account, was far better than it had been. As I made my way into the limelight as a fighter, the parties grew more lavish and the people more attractive, and Tommy and I were traveling together to places as close as Canada and as far away as Japan and Brazil, having a great time along the way. But it’s also important to note that jealousy and envy were never issues in our relationship. Our relationship was based on mutual respect, and we treated each other as equals. I have never felt like Tommy’s boss, and I don’t believe Tommy has ever felt like he is subser
vient to me. I trust him implicitly to make good decisions on Team Alpha Male’s behalf.

  Tommy’s investment in the team didn’t start with a financial investment. It started with a spiritual and intellectual one. As a former wrestler himself, he loves the team concept and missed it immediately after leaving UC Davis. He continued to do some martial-arts training but never pursued MMA. Instead, he became sort of a “team mom”—and I use the term lovingly—for Team Alpha Male. He started out putting together a media side to my career that allowed people to see me with viral videos (that helped lead to the Kenny Powers commercials) and created content that allowed people to get attached to my brand. Then he helped turn our team into a group that not only trained together but served as a family, complete with team dinners, golf tournaments, and an end-of-the-year banquet. Today, he’s the heart of Team Alpha Male.

  Flash-forward to when I started FORM Athletics with Mark Miller. Tommy was the point man for my side of the operation, which meant handling just about every aspect of the business with aplomb—most of it for little or no pay—and when we sold the company to K-Swiss for a large profit, K-Swiss recognized Tommy’s hard work, business savvy, and brains and hired him to help run the team side of the brand.

  At the same time Tommy continued doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for me and the guys on Team Alpha Male. He was helping with fight promotions and some management stuff, and he was always tossing out great ideas that always advanced our cause. His financial reward was always secondary, but Tommy’s work in this regard caught the eye of Jeff Meyer and MMA Incorporated, my fight management company (the formation of which is a great story, I’ll share later). It didn’t take long for them to hire Tommy and put him on that payroll.

  So yeah, Tommy’s a “people person.” He could articulate our shared passion and produce real results. He’s a positive person with a creative mind and an ability to converse with a wide variety of people. He’s smart and he understands how to handle different types of personalities. I have no doubt he could walk back into the engineering world and make the climb up the corporate ladder in that profession if he wanted.