by Doug Merlino
The photo was the best branding tool Monson could have wished for. It accompanied nearly every story written about him and was posted and reposted in anarchist forums. Monson liked it so much he had it printed on his business card.
. . .
In 2012, Monson was forty-one and had been fighting for fifteen years. He had long been one of the best submission wrestlers in the world, having twice won the prestigious Abu Dhabi grappling tournament. He had fought for the UFC heavyweight title in 2006, but lost. Other fights had taken him to Japan, Israel, Ireland, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, France, and the Philippines. His record was 43-13. Nearly everyone from his generation of fighters had retired, but Monson still took whatever fights came his way, a recognized name promoters used to draw fans to the gate.
In November 2011, just as Monson seemed to be in twilight, he got the fight he had craved for years—against Fedor Emelianenko, the Russian heavyweight considered one of the greatest MMA fighters ever.
From April 2001 to June 2010, Fedor, fighting mostly in Japan, won twenty-eight fights in a row. He was a complete fighter, equally strong on the ground and on his feet, with a face that rarely expressed anything more than a Mona Lisa smile. He seemed to be an imperturbable destruction machine.
But time had caught up with Fedor, too. He had lost three in a row starting in 2010. He retreated to Russia and signed with a Russian promotion, looking for a turnaround. The promoters needed a respectable but beatable opponent. Jeff Monson fit the bill.
For years, Monson had been public with his desire to fight Fedor. A win over the Russian, he felt, would be the career-capping achievement that had eluded him. The offer was even more appealing because not only would the pay be good, but he had always wanted to go to Russia, the cradle of Communism and anarchism.
The fight took place in front of a capacity crowd of twenty-two thousand at the Moscow Olympic Arena and was broadcast to millions more on Russian national television. Vladimir Putin sat in the front row. Monson emerged from the locker room first, hobbling to his corner. As Fedor came out, the lights dimmed and smoke gushed onto a platform. A group of men and women in Cossack outfits whirled around as the legend materialized in their midst.
The fight was never close. Fedor stayed outside of Monson’s reach, punishing him with punches and leg kicks. Every time Monson tried to get his hands on the Russian to take him to the mat, he grasped at air.
In the second round, Fedor broke Monson’s lower right leg with a kick. Monson pressed on, and the punishment continued.
By the third round, Monson was a mess. His lower lip had been cleaved in two and blood ran down his chin. Still, he came forward to receive more beating.
After the bell rang to finish the fight, Monson’s corner men rushed in to prop him up. He draped his arms over their shoulders as they dragged him back to the locker room.
Putin climbed into the ring and took the microphone to congratulate Fedor, but the fired-up crowd seemed to take offense at the politician grabbing the spotlight. Boos and hisses rained down. It was reported around the world as the first time the Russian president had been jeered in public.
Monson needed medical care, which he later described in a note he posted to his fans:
Well guys I had a very frustrating fight as you know. … Ended up breaking my leg in the second round from the one kick I checked in the match. After the fight I had a choice of two hospitals. One for everyday folks and one for visitors and government officials. I picked the local everyday folk hospital as I was told it was closer to the arena.
I’m obviously not a big fan of the medical industrial complex in the US as it is profit driven however the experience at this hospital did make me appreciate the comfort of health care in this country. Upon arrival there were ER staff smoking in the lobby. The hallways were full of wandering patients that looked like they were just out of a civil war battle. I had to fight with one of the doctors to avoid having my skull x-rayed.
Eventually I got an x-ray for my leg which showed it was broken (something I already knew) and had it casted. I got 16 stitches on the inside and outside of my lip with a material that could of passed for chicken wire. It was so sharp it was making my gums bleed so I took them out myself.
In the meantime, a Kremlin spokesman claimed the fans were not actually booing Putin, but Monson for leaving the ring before the decision was announced. This prompted an angry reaction from thousands of Russians, who took to Monson’s public Facebook page to express their support:
Jeff, I respect you!
You are strong, hard fighter.
Putin—the coward and the liar who tries to be covered with you. He is—a country shame.
Yours faithfully, Martin.
St. Petersburg, Russia
Mr. Monson, respect from all russian anarchists. Your intentions are honourable, you are admirable. No one can live without defeats, but you are a real man, and this one will make you even stronger. Don’t give up!
Jeff, you’re a great fighter and a very kind person. You fight with a lot of respect, and Russians will never disrespect a great sportsman who lost. We boo the one who has no respect and fight for our freedom.
Jeff, greetings from Russia.
You are a nice guy, polite and attentive.
Great, brave, strong-willed fighter. I was amazed that you fought the fight with a broken leg, all three rounds! It was painful to you.
Now, I’m your fan! I will watch all the fights, past and future.
I want to tell you important words: the Russian people have always respected their opponents.
Get well soon!
The day after the fight, Monson lay in bed in his Moscow hotel room, his face swollen, leg broken, feeling sick that he had blown the biggest fight of his life. The phone rang but he let it go. A hotel security guard knocked at the door. Pick it up next time, he said.
It was Putin. He told Monson it had been a good fight and he should be proud of his performance. Furthermore, he was always welcome in Russia. Repeating the phrase Monson would hear over and over in the country, Putin told him: “You are a real man.”
The Bear Goes South
At the start of July 2012, Steve Mocco drove into Florida with Johnny Cash on the stereo, his black lab, Bear Cub, riding shotgun, and all the belongings he could stuff into his Honda CRV behind him.
A threadbare yellow T-shirt, the word FLY written across the chest in blue, hugged his broad torso. His older brother, Joey, had given it to him two decades earlier.
As a kid, Mocco had been terrified of flying. When, as a young wrestling prodigy, he was slated to compete in a tournament in Belarus, he’d chosen to wear the shirt on the flight because of the word on the front. The plane did not crash, and the shirt had been Mocco’s good luck charm ever since.
He’d worn it as he’d gone on to become perhaps the most dominant high school heavyweight wrestler in American history, won two NCAA championships, and earned a spot on the 2008 team at the Beijing Olympics, where he’d finished seventh in heavyweight freestyle wrestling.
The shirt was so tattered that Mocco rarely wore it anymore. But now that he was entering into another major change in his life, he’d pulled it on for the trip.
Mocco had been on the traditional path followed by many premier wrestlers. A few years earlier, he had gotten a job as an assistant coach at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he could expect to put in a few years before working his way up to a head coaching job somewhere, becoming one of the royalty in the small world of elite American wrestling. In the meantime, he continued training with the goal of making the wrestling team for the 2012 London Olympics.
He caught a glimpse of a different path soon after arriving in Bethlehem, when he was approached by Carmelo Marrero, a heavyweight MMA fighter. Marrero had trained in Florida at American Top Team, but as he neared thirty, he had started to think about a future beyond competition. He had moved back to Pennsylvania and opened an American Top Team affiliate gym, trai
ning college students and other locals looking to learn jiu jitsu and striking.
Marrero, who still planned to take fights, needed a wrestling partner and offered Mocco boxing lessons in exchange. Mocco liked learning how to punch. He started to train at Marrero’s gym.
After more than two decades in the structured world of competitive wrestling, Mocco found fighting to be fun and novel. One night, when he went to meet Marrero at a bar, he found the fighter had gotten into words with some local toughs. Instead of taking it outside, they decided to go back to the gym, where Marrero had the guys from the bar sign waivers. They all pulled on boxing gloves and took turns fighting, drinking beers between rounds. The guys from the bar, who couldn’t make it more than a minute or two without gasping for breath, got beaten bloody.
The experience exhilarated Mocco. And Marrero was excited about him. A number of former wrestlers—among them many of Mocco’s college and Olympic teammates—had gone on to great success as cage fighters: Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal, Ben Askren, Johny Hendricks, Daniel Cormier. Moreover, Mocco—nicknamed “The Bear” for his ferocious demeanor on the mats—was a heavyweight, always a coveted prospect.
Weight classes in MMA run from 125 pounds at flyweight to a maximum of 265 pounds for heavyweights, and there was always a glut of talent in the middle divisions. It was rarer to find an exceptional fighter at either end of the bell curve.
Marrero guessed he had unearthed a nugget of gold. He called Ricardo Liborio, the head coach of American Top Team. “You need to see this guy,” he said.
Liborio flew up to Bethlehem under the pretense of visiting Marrero and checking out the gym. He watched Mocco work out and saw the potential for a fighter who could take his opponents to the mat, gain top position, and beat them into submission. The coach immediately offered Mocco a place on the team, but the wrestler was set on returning to the Olympics. Liborio bided his time, checking in by phone every few months.
As the trials to make the 2012 U.S. Olympic wrestling team approached, Mocco’s family was in crisis: His mother-in-law, who lived in Illinois, had just been diagnosed with cervical cancer at fifty-nine and given only a few months to live.
Mocco and his wife, Katie, were both close to their families. The two had been together since they were students at the University of Iowa, where Katie had received an athletic scholarship for track. Steve, even as a freshman, had been a campus celebrity. He’d been the country’s most-recruited high school wrestler, and wrestling was a major sport at Iowa, where thousands of zealous fans sold out every match.
Steve and Katie had met in an environmental sciences class in the spring semester of his sophomore and her junior year. He had asked her to tutor him. That spring, he won the NCAA title, and they started dating that summer.
Katie enjoyed learning about the sides of Steve others didn’t see. He was a curious mix of urbanite and redneck, having grown up in North Bergen, New Jersey, just over the Hudson River from Manhattan. As a kid, he’d trained weekly at the New York Athletic Club, across the street from Central Park. Wrestling was where he excelled in a high-achieving and athletic family. Joey Mocco, also a wrestler, had graduated from Brown University. Other siblings had gone on to advanced degrees in law, education, medicine, and psychology.
Katie recognized a boy who was thoughtful, sly, and funny. Yet he slipped with ease into the mean, meathead persona for which the Iowa wrestling team was known, and with more intensity than most.
In an ESPN documentary series that followed the Iowa wrestling team for a season during Mocco’s time there, he speaks straight to the camera with a crazed gleam in his eye: “They’re trying to destroy me, and I got the right to kill ’em,” he says, adding: “I think wrestling is a good sport because you can break somebody. You can break their spirit and make them be a different person for the rest of their life.”
Katie watched him use this persona strategically—not just in competition, where it petrified his opponents, but in social situations. She suspected that letting people see him as a crude athlete gave him a chance to size them up and decide if they were worth his time. In the end, if he wanted you to know him, you would; if not, you got the facade.
After a coaching change at Iowa, Mocco transferred to Oklahoma State, the school’s arch rival, for his last two seasons. Katie graduated from Iowa and followed. They had been together ever since and now had three young children.
For Katie, life had seemed orderly: You went to school, got married, had kids, took one step to the next, everything in its place. But her mother’s diagnosis had disrupted all of this. Her condition deteriorated as Steve trained for the Olympic trials, held in April 2012. He placed third in his weight class, failing to make the team.
Ricardo Liborio called from Florida to renew his proposal to join ATT, offering housing and financial assistance. Steve was receptive: At age thirty, he was not ready to be finished with competitive athletics. Katie, with a profound sense of the shortness of life, thought they might as well take the chance.
With a moving pod in place outside their home in Bethlehem, Katie got the phone call that her mom had died. She loaded the kids into the family minivan and drove to Illinois to stay with her dad and help with the arrangements for the memorial service, which was to be held in a month. Mocco finished loading the pod, called the company to have it shipped, and drove south with the dog.
He arrived on the third of July. American Top Team had rented a house for the family in a development near the gym. Mocco threw an air mattress on the floor and set up a television on a milk crate. He went to Walmart and bought a lawn chair and a single-serve coffeemaker.
We met a couple days later. The gym had been buzzing about Mocco’s arrival for a few weeks; Kami Barzini, who had been a trainer for the Oklahoma State wrestling team while Mocco was there, knew him well. Several other fighters who had been college wrestlers were excited about having one of the celebrities of the sport join the team.
Barzini introduced us after one of Mocco’s first training sessions. Mocco’s squat frame was dripping with sweat. We sat on the first row of the aluminum bleachers next to the mats. Mocco, who had short blond hair and expressive blue eyes, stared at the ground.
The plan, he said, was to get proficient at striking and jiu jitsu as quickly as possible. The coaches were talking about him taking a fight within a few months. They’d see how it went from there.
As Long as I Don’t Get My Face Broken
“Fighting is one of the purest things in the world. It’s the purest way to figure shit out,” Daniel Straus said. “It’s like, in that world out there I’m nobody, but in my world, you can’t tell me who I am. Because whether you like it or not, you can lose to me, or you’re going to have to beat me.”
We were sitting on a concrete bench in a strip mall around the corner from American Top Team, outside a fast-food Peruvian chicken restaurant. The temperature hovered at around ninety in the shade. An occasional car crawled through the parking lot toward Walgreen’s. He spit tobacco juice into a Styrofoam cup.
Straus was twenty-eight years old, five foot eight. He fought at 145 pounds, but walked around twenty pounds heavier. His legs were skinny, his torso muscled. Shoulder-length dreadlocks framed his face. His shoulder bore a tattoo of two street signs, the intersection of Ridge and Cardiff, the location of Vision Mixed Martial Arts, the gym in Cincinnati where he’d started. Psalm 144 ran down his arm: Blessed be the Lord, my strength, who teaches my hands to war and fingers to fight.
Straus had grown up with a twin sister, two of the few black kids in the white suburbs of Cincinnati, where their mom raised them; their dad was around only occasionally.
Straus started tae kwon do when he was six, played on a select soccer team, and ran cross country in middle school. More than anything, though, he excelled in wrestling. In high school, he quit everything else to dedicate himself to the sport.
In his junior year, Straus went 42-1 and placed third at 135 pounds in the Ohio state high school
wrestling tournament. He should have been primed to take off, but his life was falling apart. His mom struggled to keep a steady job. The electricity was continually cut off at home. A tornado ripped the roof off one apartment they were living in. They were evicted from others. Sick of it, the teenaged Straus moved out, essentially becoming homeless. He slept in parks and spent longer periods with a few families, parents of friends and fellow wrestlers, who took him in for a time. Some floated the idea of getting his mother to give up her guardianship rights.
He went 9-0 in his senior year, but low grades kept him from competing for most of the season. Still, he had his hopes pinned on winning the state tournament, and, by the end of the season, he was academically eligible. But when he got into a squabble with a school administrator, he was blocked from competing. “I told him, this is my life, wrestling is the only thing I have,” Straus remembered. “I don’t get along with my parents, don’t get along with nobody else, don’t have anything else and you’re gonna take away the only thing I have. And he did.”
Straus believed his wrestling career was over, but a few weeks later, he received an unexpected invitation to compete in the Senior Nationals, a yearly tournament for the country’s top high school wrestlers. Straus won his weight class, stunning the wrestling community: That someone could sit for almost an entire season and then beat the best competition in the nation was nearly unthinkable.
He received letters from the biggest wrestling programs in the country, but didn’t have the grades to get in. Iowa Central Community College recruited him, sending a ticket to go visit. Straus had never been on a plane. The night before he was set to go, he stayed up partying and blew it off. “I was a dumbass,” he said, looking back at it.
After high school, Straus held a series of low-wage jobs at places such as Captain D’s Seafood Kitchen. And he got in trouble. When he was nineteen, he was pulled over for speeding. A search of his car turned up a gun. While on probation for that, he was arrested for breaking into an apartment. He was sent to the Ohio state penitentiary for three years.
