by Doug Merlino
Straus hated to talk about his time in prison except to say that it was terrible and most everyone in his life had deserted or forgotten about him, as if he had never existed. He didn’t see it as a point of turnaround or find a redemptive arc in it. It was just something he wanted to forget.
He got out on November 13, 2007, and returned to Cincinnati, where he got a job at a Steak ’n Shake. On the street one day he bumped into a guy he knew from high school, who told him he was training at an MMA gym and that Straus, with his wrestling skills, should try it. Straus was not interested. “It wasn’t my cup of tea,” he said.
But the guy had the gym owner call to encourage him. Just to get him off his back, Straus agreed to stop by. “When I first started doing it, it just wasn’t fun at all, especially the whole jiu jitsu thing, I hated it,” he said. “But the more and more I did it, the more and more it was coming to me. I started going every day, started doing everything.”
At the Steak ’n Shake, one of Straus’s managers, a white woman, seemed to take pleasure in ordering him here and there. Straus was unhappy and let it be known through his body language. One night, the manager grabbed him and said, Boy, you’re going to listen to what I say.
It enraged Straus. “I’m a grown man,” he said, remembering it. “I’m not your son, I’m not your boy, we’re not even friends.”
He quit and walked out on the spot.
Without a job, Straus moved into the gym and slept on the mats. He was fighting at the amateur level and having a hard time finding new employment when the owner of the gym told Straus that if he went pro, he’d get paid for fighting. That caught his attention.
Straus first fought for money in February 2009 and lost. Two weeks later, he fought again and got his first win. That year, he took eleven fights, winning seven of them. “I told myself I really don’t have another option, so I have to make it. I worked and worked and worked. Everyone knew me as a guy who would fight regardless, they would call me up two days before,” Straus said. “I figured even if I lose, I get paid, as long as I don’t get my fucking face broken.”
He scraped together enough to rent a $250-a-month apartment and planned his next step, making a list of top fighters in the area that he needed to beat to move his name ahead. Then he went out and did it, winning twelve fights in a row.
He made it into the Bellator promotion, which aired weekly fights on MTV2. In 2011, he was invited to American Top Team. He was fiercely loyal to his gym in Cincinnati, but he was entering a new level and needed the coaching and training partners he could get in Florida. He still lived in his hometown but he traveled to ATT to do his camp for six weeks before each fight.
Straus had won Bellator’s featherweight tournament competition in May 2012, which had guaranteed him a title shot. But he had to wait for the champion, Pat Curran, to recover from a broken orbital bone. He asked the promotion for an interim fight because he needed the money: He had a four-month-old daughter back in Cincinnati to support.
Fighting was a business now, with the need to be active on Facebook and Instagram. The fans wanted to see everything—fighters out in their cars, playing with their dogs, cutting weight before a fight, partying afterward. For Straus, it was an uncomfortably public life.
“People don’t realize how stressed we get,” he said, “because every time I look at my Twitter someone’s talking about how this guy is going to knock me out—it’s not like I can’t see it because they’re adding my name to the list, so it’s like now I got a hundred people talking about how this guy is going to knock me out tonight and I’m already insecure about losing in front of people. It turns into entertainment, when before it was just fighting.”
If fighting was something pure for him, a way of leveling things, I asked what he thought people got from watching it.
“They get their bloodbath, they get their kick to see somebody get beat up, they get their itch of controlled violence,” he said, looking out over the parking lot. “I think that’s what it is, people like to see other people get hurt, people like to see other people victorious, people like to see blood, people like to see pain.”
Part Two
Grind
I fear not the man who has practiced ten-thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten-thousand times.
—Bruce Lee
Sirwan Kakai and Mirsad Bektic
(Beowulf Sheehan)
Monday
A little after eight A.M. on a Monday, Mirsad Bektic sprayed Lysol on the chipped white Formica counters of his kitchen and wiped them with a towel. He worked methodically, cleaning around the toaster, coffeemaker, and rice maker. Soft morning light filled the room. A sliding glass door led to a small backyard with an old swing set. A crinkled black-and-white poster of Rocky, raising his arms in triumph, hung on the wall. The legend read: HIS WHOLE LIFE WAS A MILLION-TO-ONE SHOT.
Bektic moved cups and plates from the sink into the dishwasher. He measured soap into the machine, shut and latched the door, and clicked it on.
When Bektic was in high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, his mom worked full time as a housekeeper at a hospital, then came home and would have to clean up after Bektic and his brothers and cook dinner. One day, Bektic decided to tidy up before she arrived, and it made her so happy that he kept doing it. After a while, he started to cook as well. His mom lost weight and looked healthier, which encouraged him even more. These kitchen rituals still calmed him.
Bektic lit a burner and heated a frying pan. He cracked four eggs, stirred them, added some spinach, and cooked it down. He ate at the kitchen counter. Taz, Bektic’s bulldog, sprawled on an ottoman nearby, snoring.
Sirwan Kakai emerged from his room in his underwear. He grunted a morning greeting, weighed himself on the scale in the living room, and went back to bed.
Bektic returned to his own room. The walls were purple, the windows shaded to block outside light. A copy of the book The Warrior Athlete: Body, Mind & Spirit: Self-Transformation Through Total Training, was on a stand beside the bed.
Every Monday morning, Bektic took time to review his goals for the week, thinking about the techniques he planned to hone and what he wanted from his personal relationships. It was a practice he had picked up from his brother Senad, who had learned it when he started selling Amway products.
He’d tacked up inspirational mementos on the wall: a sheet of paper on which his younger sister had drawn a star and written “Way to go Miko!”; a plaque with a wrought-iron key attached and the exhortation, ACHIEVE: BE DETERMINED. LIVE THE LIFE YOU IMAGINED, which had been given to him by head coach Ricardo Liborio’s wife, Misti; his printout of a UFC championship belt; and a handwritten note that read: “I was made on purpose, For a purpose!!!!”
One of Bektic’s goals for the year was to read the entirety of the Bible. He’d found a website that prescribed daily amounts. His assignments for the day were from Isaiah, Galatians, Psalms, and Proverbs. He picked up the book and read.
Sirwan Kakai returned to the kitchen and cooked his own breakfast of eggs and spinach. He sat at the kitchen table watching a European MMA fight on his iPad, a device that was never far from his hands.
American Top Team owned the house and used it to put up young prospects. At the gym, it was known as “Mirsad and Sirwan’s House,” though they’d had a series of other roommates.
The current one was Jake Heun, who was just now getting up and going to the refrigerator for his own supply of eggs and spinach, which he proceeded to cook. He’d grown up in Anchorage, the son of the police chief, and had played linebacker at the University of Hawaii. He was brash and outgoing and sometimes was exasperated with the straitlaced ways of Bektic and Kakai, whom he referred to as “the Puritans.”
His Bible study finished, Bektic emerged from his room at a little after ten o’clock. The trio gathered their gear. It was a ten-minute walk to American Top Team. With their large backpacks strapped over their shoulders, they could have easily been mistaken for c
ollege students heading to class.
. . .
American Top Team was located in an industrial park with gray buildings trimmed with burgundy, anonymous businesses hidden behind reflective black glass. Palm trees lined the parking lot.
The gym’s logo—a man with his arms raised in triumph—hung over the door, along with a sign reading MARTIAL ARTS FITNESS AND EDUCATION. In addition to training professional fighters, the gym offered a full array of classes to the general public, jiu jitsu, boxing, Muay Thai kickboxing, and fitness training among them. It also ran a busy after-school program for kids, complete with a fleet of vans to shuttle them from their schools.
Bektic, Kakai, and Heun entered the cavernous space. A display case to the left was stacked with trophies and championship belts. Behind the front desk was an arch painted to look like a rippling American flag.
Past the desk, they skirted around a fenced-off weight-lifting area and entered the main part of the gym, about half the size of a football field. A line of six heavy bags stood to their right. Above them a row of huge banners hung from the thirty-foot ceiling, printed with photographs of the gym’s most successful fighters, who glowered down, shirtless, muscles pumped. Among them:
Jeff Monson, who had fought for the UFC heavyweight title in 2006
Thiago Alves, UFC welterweight contender in 2009
Mike Brown, former World Extreme Cagefighting featherweight champion
Hector Lombard, Bellator middleweight champion, now with the UFC
Straight ahead were three separate areas of practice mats, the largest running the length of the back wall up to a regulation-size UFC Octagon cage, which occupied the far corner of the gym.
The three fighters added their packs to the ones already strewn on the floor and stripped off their sweat suits. Others fighters sat on the mats or stood in groups, some chatting, recounting weekend exploits, others staring at their phones. A few young and eager ones kicked a Muay Thai bag nearby.
It was a timeless scene. Combat athletes in Olympic sports in Ancient Greece—boxing, wrestling, and later, pankration, which, like mixed martial arts, combined wrestling, boxing, kicking, and submission holds—trained at palaestrae, purpose-built facilities that included areas with sand and mud surfaces for wrestling practice; a room with sand-filled heavy bags and smaller punching bags for building hand speed; a separate area for strength training, including climbing ropes and chin-up bars; and a changing room.
Whatever else has changed in the last few millennia, the art of preparing the human body for combat is essentially the same.
The week at ATT ran on a schedule, practices twice a day Monday through Friday, one practice on Saturday morning, rest on Sundays. There were wrestling, jiu jitsu, kickboxing, and strength and conditioning classes, each attended by several dozen fighters. Most also worked one-one-one with the trainers, hitting mitts with the gym’s array of striking coaches, taking smaller jiu jitsu classes with Ricardo Liborio, or developing specific wrestling skills with Kami Barzini.
Monday morning was set aside for wrestling, one of the three essential legs on which mixed martial arts stands. All fights began with the opponents on their feet, striking with the techniques of traditional Western boxing and also incorporating elements of Muay Thai kickboxing, which include kicks to the legs, body, and head and the use of elbows and knees.
Wrestling came in when a fighter chose to “shoot” on his opponent, ducking down and surging forward to get his arms around the other fighter’s waist or legs and drag him to the ground, a move for which points were awarded. Wrestling skills were also used when fighters struggled for leverage while tangled up on their feet, and as they positioned on the ground.
Jiu jitsu included the array of arm, leg, and choke holds fighters used, usually while on the ground, to force their opponents to submit by tapping out.
A little before eleven A.M., Kami Barzini parked his olive-green Jeep behind the gym. He entered through a back door, seeming to materialize in the midst of the fighters. He went to a bench, dropped his duffel bag, and changed from sneakers into wrestling shoes.
The fighters started running circles to warm up. Barzini took his place in the middle, digital stopwatch in hand.
Barzini had started wrestling when he was thirteen, in one of the hundreds of neighborhood wrestling clubs in Tehran. In Iran, wrestling was a national obsession, with roots running back to Ancient Persia, and was followed by everyone from gas station attendants to old ladies. Barzini loved it. It was an unforgiving, draining sport; but unlike the unforgiving, draining country in which he grew up, wrestling rewarded skill, strength, endurance, and heart.
Kami Barzini
(Doug Merlino)
“Pummel! Let’s go!” Barzini shouted. His voice was naturally soft; when he raised it, it was as if he turned up a small speaker to full volume, the unit straining with the output.
The fighters paired and stood chest to chest, each hooking an arm underneath his partner’s, switching the position back and forth as they banged their chests together.
Barzini was an infant during the 1979 Iranian Revolution. His father worked at a Tehran dealership that sold Mercedes-Benz minibuses. Until then, the family had a good life. After, like many Iranians, they were beset by a series of tragedies.
A cousin who had been a student protester was arrested and executed. Barzini’s much older brother was accused of plotting against the regime and imprisoned with his wife. The family took in their young son. When his parents were freed after six years in prison, he didn’t know who they were.
“Find a spot on the wall!” Barzini yelled. “Spread out!”
Barzini demonstrated a throw, tossing a fighter over his knee.
“Take him down, get back up!”
The fighters grabbed their teammates, muscled them to the floor, and repeated.
“Use your knee!” Barzini instructed a fighter who struggled.
The Iran-Iraq War started in 1980 and ran for eight years. Barzini watched boys from his neighborhood, barely teenagers, get drafted. Hailed as heroes off to stop the Arab invasion, they were sent to the front lines without training, ripped apart by bullets, blown to pieces, scorched with mustard gas. They died by the tens of thousands. Had he been a little older, Barzini thought, he would have been right there with them, proudly marching off to the slaughter.
In Tehran, there was bombing. At first, a siren would give a few minutes’ warning, enough time for the family to hurry to the basement. Later, it would be only thirty seconds, or there would be no alert at all.
Barzini’s family became fatalistic, figuring that if their time came, it came. In their bedroom, Barzini and his sisters watched through a window high on the wall as missiles arced over the city and split, the bottom halves separating to deliver their payloads.
The bombs shook their home, destroyed buildings all around them. Bodies lay in the street, neighbors staggered in shock, bleeding from their wounds.
“Switch! Other guy go!” Barzini yelled.
As a teenager, Barzini had been a national champion youth wrestler. He loved the sport in part because it was a piece of the Persian culture, there before the Islamists and sure to be there when they were gone. But in Iran, everything was tied up in politics. The Islamists ran the national wrestling federation and chose who would get opportunities. For a time, they made wrestlers for the national team grow beards so they would look more Islamic on the medal stand.
Barzini’s parents had tried to provide a normal life for their kids, but Barzini could see that the stress of living under the regime corroded his father. He died of a heart attack when Barzini was nineteen. His mom soon left the country, flying as a tourist to Germany, where she received refugee status. Barzini escaped with smugglers over the Turkish border and joined his mother.
He demonstrated a suplex, bending down and lifting a fighter to throw him. The fighters copied his example.
“Come on! Lift! Lift! Lift! Lift! Lift!” he yelled.
&
nbsp; The humidity in the room climbed, the effort overpowering the air-conditioning, the stench of perspiration dueling with that of disinfectant.
Barzini stayed in Germany a few years, where he wrestled on a professional team, before traveling to Dallas to visit a cousin on a six-month tourist visa. He liked the United States. He enrolled in college classes and applied to change his status from tourist to student. He went to watch the 2004 U.S. Olympic wrestling trials in Indianapolis, where he met John Smith, the coach of the Oklahoma State wrestling team.
Smith was one of the greatest wrestlers the United States had ever produced, winner of Olympic freestyle wrestling gold medals in 1988 and 1992. In Iran, he was known and respected. Since 1991, Smith had coached at Oklahoma State, the most storied wrestling program in the country. Smith invited Barzini to Stillwater, Oklahoma; Barzini jumped at the chance.
At the time, Smith led what was one of the greatest American college wrestling teams, its members including future UFC welterweight champion Johny Hendricks and Steve Mocco, who had transferred from Iowa for his junior and senior years. Barzini visited and stayed on as a team trainer.
Oklahoma State wrestlers were famed for their technical prowess, drilling over and over until their technique was exactly right. In the practice room Smith often came across as harsh, and he told Barzini he knew that he could be hard on people. That didn’t matter, he said. The school had won thirty-four NCAA titles, a record in sports unmatched even by franchises such as the Boston Celtics and New York Yankees. The tradition was bigger than they were. You didn’t just walk in and wear the Oklahoma State colors. You had to prove yourself. Barzini took this credo as his own.
Barzini had come down to American Top Team in 2008 to help welterweight Thiago Alves prepare for a fight and had remained. He lived with his wife, Francesca, in a meticulously kept apartment with Buddhist and Moroccan decorating touches. He enjoyed fine bourbon, Cuban cigars, the Rolling Stones and the Sufi poet Hafez. At the local World of Beer, he had sampled more than 250 different types of brews, which entitled him to a plaque on the wall. He had chosen a Hemingway quote to adorn his: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
