I wasn’t happy immediately after the victory against Condit. I was content to win, but I don’t like getting knocked around. It wasn’t until I went to my parents’ place and watched it with family that I saw what happened.
The postfight feeling of uncertainty is astounding. Watching myself fight, I realize the line between success and failure is so narrow, it’s scary. Every single time I win a fight, I better understand how the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
CONSCIENCE: After meeting the press, with his fancy suit and bag of ice, Georges took me up to a private lounge in the Bell Centre to meet friends and training partners. He still hadn’t had a single moment to himself. He posed for pictures, chatted and charmed, and went looking for a bathroom.
I took him into the hallway, he put his arm around me—for balance as much as brotherly affection—and we walked a few feet to the public loo. “I’m so tired,” he said. “And hungry.” He stood in front of the mirror and, between shadow and light from the semi-lit sink area, took a good look at himself. He reached up and touched the bridge of his nose. He stroked the side of his swollen cranium. He turned away from the image, shaking his head, and he looked toward me. “Why do I keep doing this to myself?” he said, more a statement than a question. “I don’t like this. Everything hurts.” Yes, everything hurts, I thought. Yet after a fight, he never takes pain medication. Never.
And then we went to his suite, where a mountain of food from his favorite burger joint was waiting for him. Another key part of his routine . . . pure happiness!
CONSCIENCE: Georges and I met on the mat. We rolled. It was a gym in Verdun where I was teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in 2001.
The odd truth is that I’m one of his closest and oldest friends, and yet I fucking tolerate a lot of shit from Georges—especially when it’s related to a non-training, non-fighting activity. Sometimes—and we can be surrounded by two camera crews and banks of spotlights and backdrops and makeup artists and stylists and hangers-on—Georges just looks at me and I can hear him getting angry. I can sense it, see it in his movements. We catch each other’s eye for a split second and I know what’s happening in his head. He’s pissed. Maybe he’s slipped on gelatin left over from a photo shoot and thinks he could hurt something. Maybe he’s being asked to take more pictures and it wasn’t planned. Maybe some guy keeps sticking a camera right in his face, right there in the ring while he’s training. And it’s all my fault.
My business partner in our management agency, Phil, is the perfect definition of partner. When Georges stops listening to me, or when a strategic decision must be made, Phil steps in. Together we find solutions to problems I can’t solve alone. He covers every angle that I’m blind to. He’s every skill I’m not. Georges likes to call Phil “The Brain” (he’s a tax lawyer), and when he sees “The Brain” pop up on his smartphone screen, he always answers. Always. Without Phil there with me, none of this would be possible. Nothing. He removes doubt from our decisions. He has the ability to provide unbiased advice that leads to action. Phil, in essence, saves me from my own misery.
Before the Condit fight, I had to return to St-Isidore for an event at my old high school. On that particular day, I admit that I really didn’t want to go. I felt like it was interrupting my pre-fight preparation; we were already in full training-camp mode. Although the timing was not ideal, we drove out to my hometown, I walked into the gymnasium . . . and I saw all those kids before me. I looked into their faces. I met many of them and got to chat for just a few minutes. These young people move me. And by the time we drove away, I understood the importance of having been there. Not just for those kids, but for me personally. They’re energizing, inspiring, and they remind me why I have this mission in the first place.
CONSCIENCE: I understand his stress. I am not naturally a stressed individual, but I am deeply emotional. In French we have an expression, “soupe au lait,” which refers to a person who wears his heart on his sleeve. I would say that, as his close friend and manager, I have become hypersensitive to Georges’s stress. I know why he’s acting weird. This isn’t everyday life. And I believe that acting this way helps him get ready for the fight, which means it’s okay. I understand that real friends can tell each other to fuck off and there’s no betrayal. In many ways, I’m privileged: I’m the only person in the world who has this relationship with Georges. He speaks a certain way to me, and I respond in kind . . . People look at us and they can’t believe we’re friends. But I know that we have the most open and sincere relationship two individuals can have. There is never a word of lie, a lost moment, a lack of clarity. We know better than to try and hide from one another.
It’s like children who are too hard on their parents. They speak to them inappropriately, rudely sometimes. Some of us are like that with the people we love. Well, I pick up all that crap when he is stressed. In the entourage, I’m the only one he’ll talk to that way. I’m the escape valve—when the pressure gets to be too much, he turns to me. It’s funny because Georges, at the start of each training camp, comes to me and says: “Rodolphe, I apologize ahead of time for the next two months. I will be an ass and make your life miserable. I know sometimes I am hard, but I need you and I am sorry.” Like I don’t already know.
He doesn’t need to say these things. It doesn’t bother me one bit. My job is not to add to his stress. My job is to absorb his stress. I’ve never had a job as fulfilling as this one, yet I know he hates everything I do. He always jokes that I have the most boring life in the world, but between the two of us, I’m the one with the extreme job. He sleeps in every day while I need to wake up early, go to meetings, manage the business, manage his life—it makes me laugh.
The irony is that my own personal life is a mess. My bills go unpaid for weeks beyond the deadline while his books are spic and span. My loving girlfriend often sits there on the sofa or at the table while I spend time on the phone with Georges, keeping his affairs in order. My renovations are a multi-year plan, to say the least, but at least they’re the source of many jokes. Yes, his life is ordered and mine is a shambles. Albeit a happy shambles . . .
This is why I’m here—me and nobody else. Georges loathes disruption during his training, hates the interruptions that affect rhythm. Every move I make must be strategic. I won’t talk to him during training. I won’t discuss business in the locker room or after his shower. The only time we can talk about non-fight-related work is when he’s started eating.
But in the lead-up to a fight, I manage everything, and Georges doesn’t even realize it half the time. The schedule for public appearances, for the UFC events, for his training—I coordinate all of it. From the cooks to the security, from dropping and picking up the dry cleaning to making sure the elevator is there when he’s ready to come down, to managing each room to ensure that the dozens of friends and partners and sponsors get their tickets to the fight.
I make sure Georges doesn’t get up too early in the morning, so he’ll be ready to fight at midnight. I watch for the media and prep them. I don’t let ignorant reporters near him. Sure, I’ll coach “uneducated” reporters, but later, not during training before a fight. I screen every single person who’ll interview Georges: Who is he/she? Does he/she know MMA? Has he/she been to one of these before? Does he/she know his stuff? I do all of the due diligence because we can’t afford to waste our time. We can’t afford to have a reporter address him as Nick because he doesn’t know the difference between Georges St-Pierre and Nick Diaz (I am not making this up). But I do this because I love it; it puts me in my element and lets me invent the environment I think works best to meet our goals.
Georges hates public training sessions and he doesn’t want to do them. But for his career, he has to allow them, and sometimes for the UFC promos I find alternatives. He shows up and signs giveaway DVDs and T-shirts. He shakes hands and meets his fans. He likes meeting fans and taking pictures with them. He likes to ask about their day and what they do. These are small, stupid details, but to
gether they make up the bigger picture.
In fact, the most important thing is to be able to stick to the schedule because Georges will probably have booked two additional training sessions before and after the lunch break, and we need to find a way to be on time.
We’ve had documentary filmmakers in the room before fights, and I make all the cameramen wear UFC T-shirts so they’ll disappear in the familiar fog of commonality that exists in Georges’s head. I create and manage Georges’s environment, like an orchestra leader. The truth is that Georges didn’t know he was being filmed by a documentary crew the day he fought Condit. I didn’t want to tell him. I couldn’t risk a temporary loss of focus or momentary frustration. I wouldn’t change the prefight picture that exists in his mind. I told the cameraman to look down or away if Georges even gazed in his direction. “Do not speak,” I added, “because he’ll know you’re not from the UFC. Get out of his face, because twenty seconds of inattention means you’re bothering Georges.” At the end of the day, the film’s not the priority—the fight is.
These are just details, but I’ve always treated small matters with great attention; it pre-empts matters of great concern . . . and I’ve known the ins and outs of my friend Georges for so long now. Nothing Georges does is normal. Nobody in his entourage is normal. He and I are always fighting, like an old couple. What’s more, he thinks I’m the weird one. He doesn’t understand our “normal” lives, and how we go through every single day doing things we don’t want to do. He doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do, except for the occasional photo shoot, but he does that because it’s all part of the plan. His favorite photo session of all time was a fashion shoot—we timed it and it took five minutes and forty-one seconds. The photographer from that day gets to shoot Georges more often now . . .
To become champion and do what Georges does, a great part of his life is egocentric. It has to be. When to train, when and what to eat, what to do and why: these are the priorities, and they can’t ever come second. He must come first, before anything or anybody else. It’s the only way he can have any hope of reaching his goals. Georges will never tolerate someone who tries to carve out a place in his life while bringing about change that is unrelated to his greater goal. He can’t. He won’t. His goal is to become the greatest martial artist of all time. Nothing can take away from his focus. People coming in and out of his life can’t halt or slow the process. They won’t last.
Georges wants to change the sport. He seeks to bring it to a new level. It’s his vocation. His destination. Every single person who tried to stray from that ideal is gone.
We were visiting a school, and a little boy wanted to ask me a question about bullying. I recognized my ten-year-old self in his body language. He sat there, slouched forward, head down, his voice a frightened whisper. So I interrupted him mid-sentence. I asked him to stand up and roll his shoulders back. I asked him to look me straight in the eye and speak up so that I, and everyone else, could hear his question. And he did. He sounded great, and what a smile he had. I think about him all the time.
CONSCIENCE: There’s more than just the technical perspective to how Georges wishes to become the greatest martial artist of all time. It won’t happen exclusively inside the octagon, or be limited to performing various martial arts in dojos or wats or boxing clubs. In this new era of communications, Georges must also rely on all the tools at his disposal to fulfill his mission. It’s why he has developed his brand and his communications platforms. He has his own media channels on You-Tube, Facebook and Twitter. He works with sponsors. He’s spearheading a new wave of professional athletes who want to develop links with fans using social media. He’s trying to bring himself, and his sport, to new levels—and it seems to have worked so far. He wears suits for many public appearances, and now other fighters have to do it. His “branding” has helped the UFC image and has brought new sponsors to the table. It has attracted new fans to the sport and has opened minds about UFC fighters. Georges has found an innovative way of highlighting the facts about mixed martial arts and challenged conventional thinking and stigma related to violence.
While Georges now has devoted Canadian and U.S. agents and a global marketing firm behind him, most people don’t know that Georges built the foundation of his brand all by himself. Before anyone started working on his marketing channels, Georges’s brand was good and well because he doesn’t know any other way to act than to be genuine. Not once has he veered from his own legitimacy, from his own truth, from the best way to tell his story. All the marketing angles are based on it, inspired by it, and limited to it. I remember the instructions he gave us when the sponsorships started growing: “Just make sure everything stays 100-percent authentic—it’s the only thing I insist on,” he said. “No bullshit.”
Nothing really frustrates me to the point of hatred. It’s not worth the energy. I don’t like people who are super slow. Everything happens in my mind at the same speed as my training. That’s why I expect my team to always be prepared for our meetings. There is no time to waste. I like to go from the introduction to the conclusion fast, and then decide.
CONSCIENCE: Georges can’t think of his future outside the UFC right now; his focus can’t allow him to. He doesn’t know what he wants to do yet after his fighting career. Our team’s job is to give him options and prepare the next steps. We’ve already started looking at the design of a martial arts academy where Georges would teach youth.
Seven days before the fight, Georges and his tight-knit entourage move into a hotel suite to get ready for the main event. The main room in the suite becomes a dining room and common area. It’s where everybody meets because everybody has free access, it’s where the TV is, and it’s where the food is served. There are Georges, myself, Kristof, Firas, John and Eddy, his personal security guard and friend. The bedrooms are adjacent to the main room. The week before the fight is quite uneventful because Georges is cutting weight. We watch films, documentaries, anything to take our minds off the upcoming fight. Before the Condit fight, we watched a lot of animals fighting. There was this one great documentary about lions attacking hyenas. We always watch a few of the same mindless films, knowing they’ll make everybody laugh and give Georges a reprieve.
In the eighteen months before Georges won his title against Condit, we lived on a cloud. We were signing sponsorship deals; in fact, we signed at least three times as many as usual because he was inactive (and had time to do it). The real world of the octagon and the fight seemed so far away from us, an intangible we couldn’t fathom. We could look down from the cloud and know that someday we’d be back in the real world, but it seemed like a distant journey. And then, all of a sudden, we weren’t on the cloud anymore. We were fighting. We were back in the warrior mindset, aware that in the fighting world, you’re no better than your last performance. To have eighteen months to sell a world champion is a heck of an opportunity, a dream for any manager.
The UFC title is, in my opinion, the hardest championship to hold on to. The system is unique and no other sport replicates it: as champ, you are always facing the second-best fighter in the world. In boxing, the champion gets to pick two of his upcoming opponents until the third fight, the big title defense. This is when the federations impose a choice on you. Not so much in the UFC. In the UFC, you’re always fighting the number-two contender. It’s not up to you. You don’t have a choice. Georges is always imposed on the top guy. There are no breaks.
I take no painkillers after the fight. I don’t need them.
The Wednesday after the Condit fight—three days later—I went back to training.
Epilogue
I’m really just a normal person.
I know that some of the things I do are different from the traditional norm, but when it comes down to basics, I’m like anybody else. I have my good days and not-so-good days. I told the audiences at Cannes that the big secret to my success in accruing a big support system has been to simply be myself, something that has been enthusiasti
cally supported by members of my immediate community.
I’ve written in these pages about hiring to my weaknesses, and it’s a theme that keeps coming up in my life because I keep finding things I could be better at. I either hire people to help me become better at my profession—like Phil Nurse with Muay Thai—or, as I play a very visible role in a very visible industry and want to create the best impression on young people who may be having similar childhood experiences to mine, I work with experts who fill needed outreach areas like developing a website and Facebook page.
The only way for me to determine success—to evaluate whether or not an outside “thing” is going well—is to know myself and know if I’m acquitting myself genuinely. As I said, prior to the Koscheck fight, Josh hyped the fight by trash-talking. Coming from me, it would have sounded strange—or at least it would have been uncomfortable. I have to know myself and understand what works for me and what doesn’t. This is why I always seek coaches from other disciplines, other countries—to broaden my knowledge. It’s also why I created an expert team for everything that happens outside the octagon. But while I seek to surround myself with experts, I also distinctly look for those who are like-minded. And to assess like-minded individuals, I have to first know who I am. What I believe. How I think. And what I feel.
The Way of the Fight Page 19
