by Doug Merlino
Bektic tackled Kakai to the mats, stood, shook out his arms, breathed in around his mouth guard. The main card, including his fight, was to be televised nationally on cable. Bektic’s teammates and coaches back in Florida would be watching. He wanted them to see his best performance.
(Doug Merlino)
A man with a clipboard appeared. “Bektic!”
Kakai and Barzini led him from the locker room. They entered darkness: One third of the hockey arena had been draped off, black curtains hanging from the ceiling to the floor. Plywood had been spread over the ice, and a chill shot up through the seams. A set of stairs led through an aluminum trellis and down a gangway to the cage.
One hundred feet ahead of Bektic, his opponent, Doug Jenkins, huddled with his corner men. When his name was called, Jenkins climbed the stairs and disappeared.
A few thousand spectators from central Nebraska’s Tri-Cities—Grand Island, Hastings, and Kearney—filled the arena for the Friday night fights. Baseball caps and flannel shirts were abundant; blue aluminum bottles of Bud Light overflowed the arena’s garbage cans and spilled onto the floor.
One section had filled with several dozen Bosnians, including Bektic’s older brothers, Senad and Suvad, who had made the two-hour drive from Lincoln. Several of the Bosnians waved the blue and yellow flag of their home country.
Most of these men—many of whom had been using the preceding hours to catch up on drinking—Bektic barely knew. Since the early 1990s, when civil war had devastated what was Yugoslavia, several thousand Bosnian refugees had arrived in Lincoln. Some had done well, others had struggled, especially those that had been older. Bektic felt that many had placed their hopes on him as a symbol of Bosnians making good in the United States.
He cringed as his fans greeted Jenkins with a cascade of boos.
It was Bektic’s turn. He emerged onto the gangway through a blast of red-lit dry ice. A cameraman backpedaled a few feet in front of him as his walkout music kicked in:
Big things poppin’ and little things stoppin’
The Bosnians exploded. Mirso! Mirso! Mirso!
Bektic reached the stairs up to the cage and pulled off his shirt, revealing a chiseled torso devoid of fat. BELIEVE was tattooed above his heart. He was handsome, with high cheekbones, black hair shaved closed to the scalp, cauliflower ears that jutted from his head, and forceful eyes.
A man from the state athletic commission, which was responsible for regulating the event, rubbed Vaseline around Bektic’s eyes and cheeks to help prevent the punches from Jenkins’s leather gloves from lacerating his face.
Bektic climbed the stairs to the cage, jogged around it once, and then paced as Jenkins mirrored him on the other side.
The ref called the fighters to the center and advised them to protect themselves at all times. They touched gloves and returned to their corners.
Jenkins shook out his hands.
Bektic faced him, left leg forward, and rocked back and forth, fists clenched.
At the sound of the bell, he blasted across the cage.
They met in a flurry of punches. Bektic ducked down, grabbed Jenkins around the waist, lifted him, and slammed him to the mat.
Bektic was the heavy favorite, and Jenkins had seemed even less of a threat when they met at the weigh-in the day before: With his long hair falling down around his face, a goatee, and a frame that was emaciated at 145 pounds, he had looked, in Barzini’s curt description, like a junkie.
Now, however, his straggly hair was pulled back and tied up, and his body, after rehydration, had filled back out. As he worked to grab Bektic’s arms and limit the damage he could inflict, it was clear the South Dakotan was not going to go easily.
After two minutes on the ground, Bektic had planted Jenkins on his back and straddled his hips—the full mount position—ideal to smash down fists and elbows on his face. Jenkins struggled to grasp Bektic around the shoulders and pull him close to halt his strikes. At the same time, he maneuvered his feet to the fence of the cage. He gained traction and pushed, throwing Bektic off.
The fighters scrambled to their feet. Jenkins swung looping punches that came from the side at odd angles. Bektic trained six days a week, most often morning and night, working on wrestling, jiu jitsu, and striking. He had several sessions a week with Muay Thai and boxing coaches, who taught him to circle, use head movement, and slip to avoid sloppy punches such as these. Still, they were dangerous—with the light four-ounce gloves used in cage fighting, a single punch landed in the right spot could put you to sleep.
“Be patient!” Barzini urged from the corner.
Bektic knew he should wait for his openings, but as the crowd brayed and Jenkins came at him, he wanted to brawl. He pressed forward.
Jenkins threw a right that hit flush on the side of Bektic’s face. Suddenly, Bektic’s momentum reversed and he was falling back toward the canvas.
In his bedroom back in Florida, Bektic had taped a printout of a title belt of the Ultimate Fighting Championship to his bulletin board. When he woke up, he liked to stay in bed for a few minutes and look at it, visualizing his route to the title, all the hurdles he would overcome, all the sacrifices he would make, how amazing it would feel when he achieved his dream.
In a different time and a different America, Bektic might have tried his luck on the Western frontier, shipped out to sea, or found himself in a boxing ring. Now, in a media-saturated world hungry for stories of personal triumph in the face of long odds, he was stripped down to his shorts, fighting for his future on cable television.
But fighting is a zero-sum game: For one fighter to move ahead, his opponent has to take a step back. Though unheralded, Doug Jenkins did not want to be another stone on Bektic’s path to glory.
Bektic fell backward, as if he’d been trying to sit down and somebody had pulled away his chair. With his ass inches from the canvas, he twisted his body, shot his left hand back to the canvas, and bounded back to his feet.
Jenkins charged, pushing Bektic to the cage. He grabbed Bektic behind the neck and pounded a knee into his stomach.
Bektic returned with an uppercut that knocked Jenkins a step back, and then tackled him to the ground.
The two struggled as the last seconds of the five-minute round expired.
Ubijte ga! Ubijte ga! Ubijte ga!—“Kill him!”—Bektic’s supporters chanted.
An older man with white hair stood in the front, waving a Bosnian flag and screaming. Two women in the adjacent section rose, pointed their fingers at the Bosnians, and told them to sit down and shut up. The rest of the crowd started its own chant: USA! USA! USA!
Mirso! Mirso! Mirso! the Bosnian fans countered. Ubijte ga! Ubijte ga! Ubijte ga!
“Jihad!” shouted one Bosnian.
A dozen yellow-shirted security officers and a handful of uniformed cops rushed between the Bosnians from Lincoln and the Kearney locals, forming a line to keep them apart.
Bektic sat on a stool in the cage as Barzini huddled beside him and gave instructions, calm and precise. Do not brawl with this guy. Wait for your opening, take him to the ground, get in position, and grind him down.
The second round began. Bektic charged again, landing a right cross that knocked Jenkins back against the cage. He took Jenkins to the canvas, got on top of him, and jammed an elbow into his face, opening a cut at the corner of his left eye.
Bektic stayed in position, grinding Jenkins with fists and elbows. Jenkins absorbed blow after blow.
The bell ended the second round. Jenkins, his face bloody and puffy, stood and waved his arms to rally the crowd.
USA! USA! USA! it roared.
The fans from the opposing cheering sections jostled to get at each other. Fed up, the security men grabbed the Bosnian supporters and, one by one, dragged them out of the arena.
In the cage, Bektic again took top position and pummeled Jenkins, who did his best to blunt the attack. Finally, after fifteen minutes of fighting, the bell ended the third and final round. Bektic pull
ed Jenkins to his feet, and the two exhausted fighters embraced.
Bektic won the unanimous decision. The crowd, now devoid of his fan base, jeered as his hand was raised.
Bektic hurried out of the arena, trailed by Kakai. Backstage, he crumpled in front of a locker.
It was the first fight in his career that had gone the distance—he had not been able to finish Jenkins. And being perfect meant winning by submission or knockout. A unanimous decision wasn’t good enough. On top of that, the Bosnians had embarrassed him. The “USA!” chants hurt, too: Wasn’t he also an American?
He draped his sweat-suit top over his head and cried.
Sirwan Kakai hovered near him. He waited a few minutes and then spoke.
“You know what you did wrong, and that’s good,” he said. “Seriously, you did a great fight. You fought hard.”
“I’m so much better than that,” Bektic said. “So much.”
“I’ve been in this position,” Kakai said. “People expect you to win; it doesn’t matter who you’re going to fight, they expect you to fucking win. You’re so hyped up now. And this is the thing, sometimes we face these tough guys, and we cannot expect to put them away.”
“I’ve got to get back in the gym right away,” Bektic said.
“No. You rest for three weeks,” Kakai told him.
Barzini entered the locker room. “You did a great job,” he said “Everything I told you after the first round, you did it.”
“He got me against the cage for a few seconds,” Bektic said.
“This kid was strong, man, this kid was strong,” Barzini said.
As they spoke, Doug Jenkins slipped into the locker room, his face red, swollen, and cut. Bektic hugged him.
“Nice fight, man,” Jenkins said, his voice a whisper.
“Thanks,” Bektic said. “It’s the toughest fight I had.”
They posed for a photograph, arms around each other, making fists with their free hands.
“Thank you so much,” Bektic said as Jenkins turned to leave. “Keep it up, man.”
Ricardo Liborio, the head coach of American Top Team, called to congratulate Bektic.
Bektic stood with the phone to his ear, apologized, and cried again. He felt he had found a place where people cared and watched out for him, something he had not often felt in his life. He knew that he’d earned that attention through his performance in the cage. He was scared it could go away.
“You did great,” Liborio reassured him.
“I’m sorry,” Bektic said. “I’m sorry.”
Part One
New Starts
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
—Mike Tyson
Steve Mocco
(Beowulf Sheehan)
The Anarchist Next Door
Jeff Monson was, as usual, running late. He was trying to get his two-year-old daughter, Willow, to eat.
“Here comes the plane, Willow,” he said in a singsong voice, holding out a spoon to the girl, who was sitting in her high chair. “Are you ready for the plane?”
Willow threw back her head, covered in red curly hair, laughed, and refused.
Monson wore shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt that stretched to cover his muscled frame. His head, which rose out of a triangular base of trapezius muscle, was bald. FIGHT was tattooed on the left side of his neck, directly above an exhortation to DESTROY AUTHORITY.
He lived in a home in a gated community in West Palm Beach. The backyard sloped down toward the waters of the canal system that snaked through the housing development, a reminder it had been built on backfilled Everglades. A book sat on the kitchen counter, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, in which Monson had scrawled notes inside the front and back covers. The living room was strewn with Willow’s books and toys. A three-foot-tall teddy bear, an impulse buy Monson had just made at Costco, leaned against a wall.
Monson’s wife, Dani, was a flight attendant, and childcare duties fell to him when she was working. Needing to get to the gym, Monson finally grabbed Willow and his duffel bag and carried them out to his battered Dodge SUV in the driveway. He strapped his daughter into a child’s seat in the back. I rode shotgun as Monson drove us out of the development’s palm tree–lined streets, past rows of identical, peach-colored houses with red Spanish tile roofs.
He pulled onto a six-lane road, bordered by a string of giant car dealerships. Willow giggled and shrieked from the backseat, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
“Okay, Willow, Daddy’s driving now,” Monson said. “We’re going to day care, Willow. Won’t that be fun?”
He parked in front of a one-story beige building that adjoined a small playground and carried Willow in, limping as he went, his left leg jutting forward with each step like a peg leg. Willow’s head poked above Monson’s shoulder, next to the tattoo at the base of his neck, which depicted one stick figure pointing a gun at the head of another. One word was written underneath: CAPITALISM.
On the playground, Monson set Willow down and followed her as she staggered to and fro, occasionally picking her up to swing her around. He loomed next to a worker as they watched the children cavort.
After several minutes, he finally turned, headed into the building, and then emerged into the parking lot.
He sighed as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “That’s always hard,” he said.
“For Willow?” I asked.
He shook his head. “For both of us.”
. . .
Monson merged onto the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, heading to American Top Team. Years of fighting had not only debilitated his hip, but reduced to rubble several vertebrae in his back. The most comfortable he could get while driving was to lean the seat as far back as it would go. Van Halen’s “Beautiful Girls” played on the radio.
Monson steered with his left hand while operating his iPhone with his right. The truck drifted across lanes. Conversation veered similarly, from government policy toward the mentally ill to his sixteen-year-old daughter’s progress in high school softball to the relationship between Christianity and anarchism.
Within a sport that tolerated divergent personalities, Jeff Monson diverged more than most. The most obvious outward manifestation was the tattoos that adorned his body. They included the political—a hammer and sickle on his left calf; across his back, a teenage girl inspired by Les Misérables propping her right foot on a prone Uncle Sam lying in a pool of blood; on his stomach, the anarchist slogan NO MASTERS. The personal: the handprint of his daughter Michaela on his left side. And the whimsical: a Hello Kitty tattoo on the top of his right foot.
For years, Monson had been a guaranteed lively interview for MMA websites. When asked what books influenced him, he cited Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a late work in which the author advocated personal revolution through living a life according to the example of Jesus. Other recommendations included Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, and Emma Goldman, the American firebrand. Queried about steroids, he replied that he had used them at times and thought they should be allowed within the sport as long as everyone had access, making the point that athletes were already pumping so many supplements into their systems it was impossible to keep track, anyway. When asked if there was something in life he thought everyone should try, he suggested magic mushrooms.
When Monson tweeted his support of the establishment of a Palestinian state, Pat Miletich, a legendary UFC fighter known for his conservative views, responded by calling him “pathetic.”
The argument escalated:
MONSON: Supporting the right for the Palestinians to be recognized is in no way supporting terrorist organizations. If you wanna learn about terror organizations read “The people’s history of the United States” by Howard Zinn. Our government is responsible for more oppression, global poverty, and deaths than any other ‘terror’ organization could ever hope to accomplish.
MILETICH: Listen, asshole. If you don’t like your country, take a hi
ke. Simple, bud. You rattle on about USA being evil yet you enjoy the fight money and sponsorship our capitalism provides. Walking contradiction.
MONSON: Don’t you read any more? US corporations and banks, the IMF, and the World Bank run economies, impoverish countries, and dictate government policy. Maybe when Uncle Sam is done fucking the Palestinians at the UN he can come over to your place so you can suck his dick.
MILETICH: You’re dead to me.
While fighting in the UFC in 2006, Monson appeared in a promotional video wearing a T-shirt that read ASSASSINATE BUSH, prompting a visit from the Secret Service. A few years later, ESPN The Magazine sent a photographer to his home in Olympia, Washington, where his first wife and their two children lived. During their afternoon together, Monson grabbed a can of spray paint and headed to the state capitol building, which he tagged with an anarchy symbol and the words NO WAR. When the government used the authority he hated to press charges, Monson pled guilty and ended up with three months of work release and a $21,894 fine.
One image, taken in September 2008, when Monson was in St. Paul, Minnesota, to protest at the Republican National Convention, had done more than anything to seal his image. Monson and a group of anarchists were on the streets downtown, heading to the convention hall with the hope of blocking the delegates’ access, when they were confronted by a group of riot police in full gear.
The photograph was taken from behind Monson, his anticapitalism tattoo in full view. It shows him facing off with six cops, one of whom has his face shield lowered and a hand on his Taser. (A moment later, the cops were told that all the delegates were inside the hall, and the riot squad stood down.)
