by Doug Merlino
For my brothers, Dave and Nik
In memory of James Merlino
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the atomic age—as in being able to remake ourselves.
—Gandhi
Beast: When referring to a person, beast status is achieved when the aforementioned person is so good at a certain skill that they have exceeded human comprehension, thus making them non-human.
—Urban Dictionary
Contents
Preface
Prologue: Kearney
Part One: New Starts
The Anarchist Next Door
The Bear Goes South
As Long as I Don’t Get My Face Broken
Part Two: Grind
Monday
I Don’t Want to Be in an Exclusive Club
My Motivation Was to Kill Everybody
Potluck
The Psycho Switch
Part Three: Fight Season
You Gotta Run Your Mouth a Little Bit
Just One More
A Mauling in Vegas
Lincoln
Hercules
Part Four: Roots
An Uncanny Eastern Rite
There Are No Rules
The Snowman
ATT
Part Five: Rising Up and Coming Down
Heroes and Villains
Believe
Spasibo
One Step Back
Part Six: Sport, Art, Business, Spectacle
Do You Wanna Be a Fighter?
Beast
Life Is Standing There to Kick You in the Face
Part Seven: Pushing On
Head Down
I Finish
You Are Playing in My World
Part Eight: Endings
Edmonton
Peoria
Cincinnati
Kazakhstan
Orlando
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
By the Same Author
Index
American Top Team
(Beowulf Sheehan)
Preface
One morning in early 2012, I watched from a set of aluminum bleachers as dozens of fighters advanced in rows across a length of gray mats, punching the air in unison, dipping a knee to the ground, rising, and repeating. We were in a warehouse gym in a South Florida industrial park. Sunlight beamed through tall windows that ran along one side of the space. Ceiling fans circulated cooled air. Championship belts, plaques, and banners hung on the walls above the fighters. Coaches walked among the ranks, encouraging, admonishing, making technical adjustments.
I looked around for Jeff Monson. I didn’t think that, at five foot nine and two hundred and forty pounds, covered from head to foot in tattoos, he would be difficult to spot. I’d flown down from New York City to meet him, and we had made plans to talk after the training session. After an hour of watching the fighters struggle through an increasingly grueling practice and still no sign, I texted him. He called a few minutes later and apologized. He was in Seattle.
My preoccupation with mixed martial arts had started a year earlier, springing from a conversation with my neighbor in New York, who was a fan. As he enthused about his favorite fighters, I became interested. People fighting in cages?
I barely knew anything of the sport. I was in college in 1993 when the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a pay-per-view spectacle pitting fighters from various martial arts against each other in “no-holds-barred” combat, debuted. It was, at the time, denounced as a new form of barbarism. But in surely the most unlikely story in sports entertainment in the last two decades, the UFC not only stuck around, but became a business with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues, a broadcast deal with Fox television, and the ability on a good night to sell a million pay-per-views at fifty dollars each.
Below the UFC were numerous mixed martial arts (MMA) promotions, from the Viacom-owned Bellator Fighting Championships to fights put on by small-time promoters in armories, community college gyms, and bars. Gyms that taught the sport—which combined elements of wrestling, boxing, jiu jitsu, and Muay Thai kickboxing—populated strip malls in every city and town in the country. It seemed like something out of time, a throwback to the bare-knuckle fighting of the 1800s, an anomaly in an era in which kids aren’t allowed to ride scooters without helmets.
My neighbor took me to an Irish bar in midtown Manhattan to watch a night of UFC fights. The broadcast began with a shot of a shirtless gladiator, lit by torchlight, standing with his head bowed. A bell rang as an operatic chorus sang in Latin. He pulled his breastplate over his head, secured his leather and metal forearm protectors.
There were voiceovers from the night’s opponents:
I’m going to break you till you quit.
I’m going to try to destroy him, take him out as violently as possible.
The gladiator knelt, grabbed a handful of sand, and let it run through his fingers. A door swung open, flooding him with light.
Cue a nu metal riff and a montage of fighters punching opponents in the face, pummeling them on the ground, kicking them in the head.
A shot of the crowd in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, men holding up beers and shouting, “Woo!”
“The night is finally upon us,” an announcer said. “Two men who do not dislike each other, they hate each other. And you know what? The best thing to do is to solve it, solve it tonight, solve it right now.”
The fighters made their way to the octagonal cage in pairs. There were Englishmen, African Americans, a Mexican American, a Brazilian, a white guy from Jersey. They fought and bled on a mat imprinted with advertisements for motorcycles, beer, and shaving gel. The winners were briefly interviewed after their fights, thanking their teams and sponsors before being shuffled off.
The fight that stayed with me was between two heavyweights, one chiseled, the other with a belly that sagged over his shorts. The muscular fighter dominated the first two rounds, peppering his hapless opponent with punches. In the third and last round, however, the chubby fighter snuck a hook to the chin of his brawny adversary, who collapsed, unconscious. It was shocking, violent, and electrifying.
I left the bar energized. On one level, cage fighting embodied much of what we’re taught is “wrong”: It was aggressive, violent, an unrepentant celebration of what some would call regressive masculinity. It was also completely in tune with these anxious times—fighters were presented as warriors battling their demons, overcoming fear, standing up in a world that was increasingly technologized and impersonal. They embodied virtues such as hard work, discipline, courage, and honor. They were freelancers whose product was their own bodies.
Who are these guys? I wondered. How does this whole thing work? I read a few of the dozens of websites dedicated to the sport, which offered minute coverage of its daily dramas—the coming fights and the rivalries—but little in-depth. Of the books written on mixed martial arts, most were quickie autobiographies by popular fighters, revealing little of substance. The only way to sufficiently answer my questions about the men who chose to fight in this unforgiving sport, I realized, was to get out and ask the fighters themselves.
I started by visiting a fight team in Philadelphia. They practiced on the second floor of a furniture warehouse, a space so dank with body odor that breathing was a chore. They invited me to a local card that included several of their fighters. I sat next to the cage while one fighter had his femur broken in half and another had the orbital bone in his face shattered. None of the fighters from the gym I was with was seriously injured: They went out for beers afterward.
But none of them, I knew, was going any farther than Philadelphia. They trained hard but, with jobs and lives outside the gym, weren’
t at the level of athleticism or commitment to make it into the elite levels. I was curious about the fighters at the top of the sport. To find them, I’d have to go to one of the country’s three MMA “super camps,” gyms that were home to dozens of fighters that filled out the events of the world’s top promotions: American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose; Greg Jackson and Mike Winklejohn’s gym in Albuquerque; or American Top Team (ATT) in Coconut Creek, Florida, a suburb just south of Boca Raton.
I chose ATT because of Jeff Monson, who was exactly the character someone looking to write about cage fighting would seek out. At forty-one years old, he’d been fighting for fifteen years, including a failed shot at the UFC heavyweight championship. He was a former mental health counselor and a self-proclaimed anarchist who had no qualms about sharing his opinions.
When I contacted him, he told me he was planning to come to New York City to take part in the Occupy Wall Street protests. When he failed to make it, I decided to fly to Florida, and so we’d arranged to get together at the gym.
He showed up two days after our scheduled meeting, which I learned was pretty much on time by his standards. He introduced me to fighters and trainers at the gym, including Kami Barzini, the team’s soft-spoken wrestling coach.
Barzini and I talked one night after an evening practice. I told him I knew nothing about fighting but wanted to understand it. He sized me up and seemed to make a judgment on the spot. He pointed to a group of fighters who were sitting together on the mats, chatting after training. Why not follow some of these guys? he asked. Live with them, come backstage, see the weight cuts, the sparring, the training—really experience it from the inside?
It was exactly what I wanted to do, the immersive project I’d been seeking. Six months earlier, shortly after my interest in mixed martial arts began, my dad had dropped dead of a heart attack. It left me in shock. To make things worse, there was a dispute over his estate, which would lead eventually to litigation. I was in a state of distress, my mind working to come to terms with my dad’s sudden absence while also trying to process the scorched-earth tactics of my relatives. It forced me to rethink large parts of my own life and experiences. The gym, with its daily routines and rituals, was a respite.
I rented a studio apartment nearby and showed up every day at practice, sitting, observing, taking notes, getting to know some of the dozens of fighters. I wanted to be such a regular sight that I would eventually just become another part of the surroundings, like the elliptical trainers lined up near the wall. I was referred to as “The Writer.”
The gym was owned and heavily subsidized by Dan Lambert, a businessman with interests in time-share condos, hotels, and cruise ships. There were a couple dozen fighters who appeared in the top American promotions. A similar number fought in regional shows a level down but were still broadcast nationally on cable. Others were prospects trying to scratch their way up from the local circuit. Some, such as Monson, fought abroad in Russia, Europe, and Asia.
The gym was also in something of a turnaround, actively looking to add promising fighters to the team. New faces arrived every week—from urban and rural Brazil, from college wrestling programs, from prison and refugee camps, from Chechnya and Cuba, from jobs changing tires and sweeping streets.
There aren’t many places like American Top Team left in America. It’s an open space: Anyone can walk in the door, get on the mats, and try out. Every month or two, someone comes in and shows he really has something. If you last long enough, you might get invited to join the team. It’s a place where you are received on your abilities, not your pedigree.
I was treated the same way. Barzini’s initial invitation and his introductions to fighters were tremendously important. Otherwise, though, I was left to my own devices.
Over the course of several months, I found a small group of fighters to follow, observing all aspects of the sport: the drudgery of training, the highs of winning and the devastation of loss, the money and contractual woes, relationship struggles, the fear and doubt, the marketing of self.
Their challenges were relatable to most of us, but compressed and heightened. Their fortunes rose and fell with every fight, each a step forward or a step back. Stripped of the lights and showmanship, professional fighting was people struggling to come to terms with themselves, to rise above their pasts, to give shape to messy lives, to scratch out a living in a business and society that rewarded winners and discarded the rest.
Prologue: Kearney
On the afternoon of the fight, Mirsad Bektic walked out of the Best Western hotel in Kearney, Nebraska, to get some air. He was joined by his coach, Kami Barzini, and his friend, roommate, and fellow fighter, Sirwan Kakai. It was sunny and mild, surprisingly pleasant for late November in Nebraska. Even the smell of manure, which only a few hours earlier had wafted through the air, had dissipated.
Bektic, having made his 145-pound weight limit the day before, appeared the most relaxed of the three. As was his habit, he’d taped printouts of motivational sayings throughout his hotel room. On his bathroom mirror:
I AM A WORLD CHAMPION
I’M READY FOR WAR!!
THANK YOU MY GOD,
FOR MY HEALTH AND MY DESIRE TO WIN!!
Bektic was twenty-one. He’d just been the subject of a “Prospect Watch” profile on Sherdog, a popular mixed martial arts website. A film crew had trailed him for several days to produce a series that touched on all of the points that made Bektic stand out in a sport overflowing with young hopefuls: his “war-torn” background; his athleticism; his habit of being the first to arrive and last to leave the gym; his total dedication to training as if dominance in the cage held the key to everything he wanted—respect, dignity, a life that would be better than average.
Tonight, his journey led through Kearney, a farm-country stopover on Interstate 80 between Omaha and Denver. Bektic and Barzini had scouted YouTube videos of Doug Jenkins, the night’s opponent. Nothing had raised alarm. Jenkins, a twenty-five-year-old fighter from South Dakota, had been in some scraps, but his technique was lacking. The conclusion: tough kid, but beatable; just another aspirant among the countless with more heart than skill.
Bektic, Kakai, and Barzini followed a path that led away from the hotel parking lot. They walked next to a barren field, toward the freeway that rumbled with the passing of semi-trucks. All three recognized the oddness of lives that had brought them from their foreign birthplaces to a weekend fight card in the American Midwest.
Kami Barzini, the coach, had grown up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, catastrophes that had devastated his family. Sirwan Kakai, a Kurd, was born in a refugee camp in the Kurdish part of Iraq; he had immigrated to Sweden when he was four. Mirsad Bektic’s mother had fled Bosnia with him when he was only a baby, ahead of the killers who would bring mass murder to their home village. He had grown up not far from here, part of a large Bosnian community in Lincoln, Nebraska.
At thirty-four, Kami Barzini was a solid five foot eight, his head shaved close to the scalp with stubble on his chin to match. He was a quiet man with a connoisseur’s taste in beer and a spiritual bent, guiding his interests from Gandhi to the Zoroastrian religion to Sufi poetry.
Mirsad Bektic and Sirwan Kakai, dressed in identical gray-and-white sweat suits, jostled one another as they walked side-by-side. They did everything together: They shared a house in Florida a short walk from their gym; since Kakai fought at 135 pounds, just ten pounds under Bektic, they were often sparring partners; on weekends, they went to the beach together. Both were among the top prospects in their weight classes in the sport: Bektic’s professional record was 4-0; Kakai’s was 8-1.
They came to a drainage lake next to the freeway. It was as far as they could go. Bektic handed me his phone and the three posed for a photograph, the two fighters, in their matching outfits, flanking the coach. Bektic made a fist. All three squinted into the sun as the phone clicked.
. . .
The arena, an aluminum-sided
building that looked like a giant shed, was normally the home of a minor-league hockey team. In the locker room, Bektic pulled on his headphones, lay back on the floor, closed his eyes, and listened to Tupac. Kakai had fought two months earlier and won; now Bektic knew the focus was on him. Earlier in the day, while working out at the hotel, his hands had felt a little heavy. Had he fully rehydrated from his weight cut? He’d seen all the people on Facebook writing that he was going to destroy his opponent. What would happen if he lost?
He redirected his mind: You’ve trained hard, you’re ready, just go out and do what you’ve prepared to do.
The undercard fighters warmed up, grappling and hitting mitts on a black mat spread across the center of the room. Only the faintest sounds from the arena penetrated the concrete walls. What transpired in the cage became clear as fighters reentered the locker room, the winners jaunty, slightly crazed, arms around their corner men. Losers came quietly, heads down, lips pursed.
In a sport with thousands of hopefuls, every loss was a potentially fatal roadblock to further advancement. The Resurrection Fighting Alliance, the promotion Bektic was fighting in that night, was mid-tier—far above the fights held in bars, strip clubs, and school gyms, but a step below the UFC or Bellator, the second-place organization in the sport. It was a developmental league for those higher levels.
To move ahead, even the winners needed more than just a victory: They had to impress physically, ideally ending their fights with a knockout or submission before the three five-minute rounds expired. If they possessed that bit of extra charisma or a nice backstory—anything that set them apart on television—so much the better. But for nearly all the fighters on the card, this level was as high as their careers were going to go.
Bektic grappled with Kakai on the mats, Barzini observing from a few feet away. Bektic’s hands were wrapped with white athletic tape. Four-ounce fingerless gloves had been pulled over them and sealed with strips of red duct tape around his wrists. His black shorts, which clung to his muscular thighs, bore his website address and an advertisement for an Omaha car dealership.
