by Doug Merlino
The fighters ran in place, lifting their knees high.
“Sprawl!” Barzini yelled.
They hit the mats, bounced back up, and shadowboxed.
“Sprawl!”
They went down and returned to high knees.
“Find someone near you and pummel!”
“Pummel pummel pummel pummel, dig in! Thirty seconds physical, dig in, dig in!”
A Brazilian walked to the garbage can, hunched over, and dry heaved.
“Five single-leg finishes!”
“Five double-leg finishes!”
“Body lock!”
The fighters threw each other to the floor.
Sweat pooled on the mats, glimmering in the light.
One night in 2009, Barzini was pulled over in Broward County, Florida. His visa had expired long before. He was arrested and locked up in a detention center for immigrants, issued an orange jumpsuit and flip-flops.
By the next morning, ATT owner Dan Lambert had arranged an attorney. The outlook wasn’t good. Barzini feared that if he was deported to Iran, he would be imprisoned or executed. He saw an elderly Nicaraguan man who had been in the United States for forty years get shipped back. He looked after a sixteen-year-old South Korean kid who had autism. The kid had grown up in the United States and his family all lived in the country legally; he was sent back to Seoul.
Francesca rallied support. People in the MMA and wrestling worlds sent hundreds of character references. Barzini had spent 155 days in jail, dreading every night that the authorities would come and put him on a plane to Iran, when his lawyer told him the case was being reopened. Barzini would be released. The lawyer did not even believe it himself.
“After you’re done with your body lock, fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, that’s it!”
Sirwan Kakai stood and ran to the side of the mats, where the floor was dry, and started his push-ups.
“There you go, Zohan!” Barzini said, using Kakai’s nickname. “Good ones!”
Other fighters lolled around on the mats, struggling to do their sit-ups. Mirsad Bektic powered through his like a piston.
Barzini was grateful for his life in Florida—coaching and living in peace. At night, he lay awake, the fan circulating above his bed, worrying about the young men he trained, about the harm they faced every time they stepped into the cage. Barzini saw his job in the same manner that his mentor, John Smith, did: He wanted to get the gold from his fighters, to push and mold them into their best selves.
“Bring it in, guys, good work!” Barzini yelled.
They huddled, their arms out, hands piled together. “One, two, three—ATT!”
I Don’t Want to Be in an Exclusive Club
On a blazingly hot day in early July 2012, Jeff Monson and I pulled into a Bank of America drive-through in West Palm Beach. We were in my rental car since the air-conditioning in Monson’s truck was shot.
I handed Monson the capsule from the pneumatic tube. He opened the beat-up duffle bag on his lap and pulled out an envelope packed with one-hundred-dollar bills. He stuffed a wad in the tube and gave it to me to send back.
A few moments later a woman’s tinny voice sounded over the speaker. “Sir, you need to fill out a deposit slip.”
She sent the tube back. We hunted for a pen so that Monson could complete the form.
Monson had neither a bank account nor a credit card: He thought it would be hypocritical since he railed against the evils of the banking system so much in his interviews. When he had money, though, he deposited some into the account of his first wife, Jen, who lived in Olympia, Washington.
Monson had just returned from fighting in a big event in Russia. Fedor had headlined the card—it had been six months since his comeback fight against Monson—and it was rumored to have been the Russian legend’s last bout before retirement. Vladimir Putin, who had latched onto Fedor, had attended the event in Saint Petersburg, arriving with great fanfare just before Monson was scheduled to go on.
Monson had chosen the old Soviet national anthem as his walk-out song. Though the words had since been changed, the tune was still used for the current Russian national anthem. That obliged everyone in the arena, including Putin, to stand.
Be glorious, our free motherland
A reliable stronghold of peoples’ friendship!
The Party of Lenin, the strength of the people
Leads us to the triumph of Communism!
As Monson had finished his walk-out and arrived at the ring, the song had continued on and on through its many verses—the promoters, out of respect, could not cut it short. Many in the crowd had sung along. Millions had watched on national television. They were treated to the sight of a heavily tattooed American fighter waiting for the Soviet anthem to end as Putin looked on from a few feet away, the corner of his mouth cocked up in what seemed to be amusement.
Monson had won the fight, easily submitting his inexperienced local opponent. His Facebook page had again filled with love notes from admiring Russians.
Jeff, thank you for USSR! It’s our Real homeland. You are more Russian than any of our politician! It was good and excellent fight, wish to see you continue performing in MMA. Good health and luck, bless you Comrade!!!
MONSON MONSON MONSON. Respect from Russia. You our brother.
Congratulations on your recent win and thank you for making all the usurpers, traitors and other scumbags that were present during the fight extremely uncomfortable and, hopefully, fearful!
While in Russia, Monson had met a boxing coach named Paul Gavoni, who was there to corner another fighter. Gavoni had shown Monson some striking techniques in Monson’s hotel room the night before the fight. Monson was impressed and had decided to work with Gavoni upon his return to Florida.
American Top Team included the flagship in Coconut Creek and more than seventy satellite gyms in Florida and other states that licensed the name. Most were run by former fighters and jiu jitsu masters who needed to make a steady living. Gavoni coached out of one of these gyms, one hundred miles up the freeway in the town of Vero Beach.
We headed north through the fetid South Florida summer, the expanse of Lake Okeechobee to our west, the Atlantic Ocean to the east. The conversation, led by Monson, consisted largely of flights into the ills of capitalism, tackled with the fervor of a dorm room discussion of Noam Chomsky.
I asked about what drew him to Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which Monson said was his favorite book. In it, Tolstoy denigrates organized religion in favor of simply living according to the directives of the Gospels. The world will only change, Tolstoy writes, when individuals transform their own consciousness. The book had influenced Gandhi, who developed his theories of nonviolent resistance out of it, and via Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.
“I underlined a bunch of parts,” Monson said. “The one statement that sounds out most in my mind in that whole book, he says, ‘People who say Christianity failed, it sucks, look who they’ve murdered, the Crusades, the Inquisition.’ He goes, ‘These people haven’t carried out Christianity.’ He goes, ‘Christ is the first Christian and this is what he laid down: Christ said, ‘Throw out all these other rules and just do this: Love God above all else, and love each other as I’ve loved you. Not love each other as you love yourself, but love each other as I have loved you.’”
Growing up in Olympia, Monson had been devout, an altar boy in a family of practicing Catholics. His grandmother had wanted him to be a priest. But he started to question the religion in high school when he had to take confirmation class. He found the adults, with their insistence that the Pope was always right and warnings against the dire consequences of masturbation, to be smug and judgmental. He questioned if the robes, tradition, and incense were signs of holiness or just the accessories that conferred power to a small group of people.
“I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t believe this,’” Monson said. “The people running it were ultra-right-wing Christian. They treated me nice, but it wa
s like an exclusive club. The more Christian they are, the more exclusive they get. And I just felt like, ‘Man, I don’t want to be in an exclusive club.’”
During high school, Monson worked Saturday nights at a grocery store, so he missed evening church services. His mom told him to go on Sunday mornings, but he ended up driving to the church and sleeping in the parking lot. Religion had not fulfilled his underlying desire for love and acceptance; those yearnings still remained.
. . .
The satellite gym was located in a shopping mall, not far from a Sunglass Hut and a Cinnabon. There were two rooms—a larger one with mats for jiu jitsu, a smaller one with heavy bags and a cage in the corner.
Paul Gavoni was waiting. In his early forties, he was a little over six feet tall, his head shaved like Monson’s. He wore black shorts and a black muscle shirt. The names of his wife and nine-year-old son—Nikki and Niko—were tattooed on his shoulder above and below an anchor.
Coaches in combat sports are usually different personality types than the fighters, who, due to the nature of their work, have to be intently focused on themselves and the tasks in front of them. The primary job of a trainer is to figure out how to get the best out of the fighters, who can at times display attitudes that would embarrass prima donna ballerinas.
Gavoni had a master’s degree in social work and a job with a Florida school district, where he helped teachers come up with strategies to connect with troubled students. He was a devotee of the psychologist B. F. Skinner, who founded the field of behavioral psychology. Skinner believed that human beings, like the dolphins at Sea World, could be shaped by reinforcing desired behavior and punishing that which was not.
For example, in school, a disruptive student might get up and run around as a way to get the teacher’s attention. Thus, one possible way to stop the behavior would be for the teacher to lavish attention on the student when he remained working at his desk and deny it when he ran around.
Gavoni used the same principles with fighters, breaking down their behavior into small units such as hip and foot pivots, drilling the fighters on them, praising them when they got it right.
He’d long wished to work with Monson. Though Monson had been fighting for fifteen years, his boxing was not effective: He’d been trained in a traditional technique that was of little use to a five-foot-nine heavyweight who almost always fought taller men with longer reach. Monson simply stood and tried to trade punches, invariably coming up short, until he got a chance to take his opponent to the mat.
Gavoni’s plan was to teach Monson a limited arsenal of power punches and some movement that would allow him to get inside. He thought Monson could surprise his opponents and possibly land a knockout. At the very least, it would help him get close enough to take the fight to the ground.
Monson climbed into the cage. “We’re going to start with some body mechanics,” Gavoni said.
He had Monson hold out his arms and swing them side-to-side, pivoting from the waist. This was the full-body motion Gavoni wanted behind Monson’s hooks. He picked up a pair of paddles. Monson hit them, left and then right.
With each punch, Monson exhaled—Shee!—and hit the paddles—Pop!
Gavoni backpedaled as Monson pursued him around the cage, twisting his body to unload on the paddles.
Shee! Pop!
“That’s it, that’s it,” Gavoni encouraged.
Shee! Pop!
“Open it up, swing!” he told Monson.
The fighter turned, cocked his fist, exhaled—Shee!—and cracked the paddle—Pop!
“Don’t hold back. Forward, forward, forward!”
Fighting had changed Gavoni’s life. As a kid in Fort Lauderdale he’d been bullied, and he had never forgotten the horrible feeling of being scared and powerless. In the eighth grade, after running away from a fight, he decided it needed to stop. The next time the neighborhood tormenter picked on him, Gavoni knocked the kid down with a punch, jumped on him, and pummeled him. He was left alone after that. Gavoni had carried the lesson ever since: You can be a nice guy, but you also have to stand up for yourself.
He’d started boxing in college, won the local Golden Gloves amateur contest in 1998, and fought on cards in Fort Lauderdale bars. He had considered going pro but realized he would always be up against guys who were fighting for survival. He had decided to go to graduate school and started coaching.
Gavoni explained his plan to Monson. “We’re going to use the overhand right to set up the takedown. We force the angles on him. You’re not going to walk out of here a professional boxer, but if I can teach you to swing the overhand, you’re going to surprise some people.”
Monson was encouraged. He wanted to be considered a serious fighter and was disappointed that his popularity in Russia was based on a fight in which Fedor had given him a beating.
Monson’s next fight was scheduled for September in Bangalore, India. Two businessmen—a cricket team owner and an Indian film star—were trying to bring cage fighting to the subcontinent. Their promotion would intersperse fighting with bouts of Bollywood-style dancing. Monson had never been to India and was excited to go: He had heard about the country’s extremes of wealth and poverty and was curious to see for himself. He and Gavoni made plans to train two days a week.
My Motivation Was to Kill Everybody
Steve Mocco was in the cage at American Top Team, working with a Slovak kickboxer as his training partner. The European was tall and slender. Mocco’s stout physique was accentuated by his fashion sense: His red wrestling shoes matched his T-shirt, which was tucked into black shorts pulled up high on his stomach in the style of an old man at a lunch buffet.
Mocco’s first fight had been scheduled for four months after he joined the gym. The coaches were pushing to get him ready. The Slovak tested Mocco with long jabs. He threw a right kick to Mocco’s body. The wrestler used the opening to move forward. He bulled his opponent back to the fence, grabbed him around the body, and slammed him down. Boom! The reverberation echoed through the gym.
Mike Brown looked on. One of the team veterans, he’d moved down to Florida from New England a decade earlier, working the front desk at the gym when he arrived. In 2008, he’d won the World Extreme Cagefighting 145-pound championship with a dramatic win over Urijah Faber, a future UFC star. It was a high point of American Top Team history. Brown was one of the fighters honored with a huge banner of himself hung in the gym—a photo of him having the belt wrapped around his waist.
Brown was now thirty-seven, fighting in the UFC. He’d just had a surgery to fuse two vertebrae in his neck. He was a calm presence and had an obsessive’s love of his sport: If you named a UFC event, he could recall from memory the evening’s results. Ricardo Liborio wanted him to take a full-time coaching position, but Brown hated to give up fighting, not only for competitive reasons but because finally, at the end of his career, the paychecks were decent—one night in the cage could pay as much as a year of coaching.
(Beowulf Sheehan)
Kami Barzini walked over and stood next to Brown.
Brown was worried about Mocco’s training partners. “They go one round and they quit,” he said.
“They’re too small,” Barzini said.
“We’re down from eight to two,” Brown answered.
Barzini was familiar with the struggles of Mocco’s training partners. At Oklahoma State, Mocco had owned the wrestling room. His appetite for training was insatiable, especially for a man of his size. Day after day, he simply ground down those who tried to keep up with him.
Muhammed “King Mo” Lawal had been an extremely talented college wrestler at Oklahoma State; he had narrowly missed making the 2008 Olympic team. At Oklahoma State, he had spent months studying Mocco, watching films at night, trying to figure out how to get the best of him. Finally, one day in practice, he succeeded in taking Mocco down a few times. He knew he was in trouble the next day when Mocco walked into the wrestling room with a scowl. Mocco dominated him so much that
Lawal was glad that they were soaked in sweat at the end of the session; at least Mocco couldn’t see that he was crying.
Mocco’s most reliable training partner for the time being was Devin Cole, a thirty-six-year-old journeyman—he had lost to Jeff Monson back in 2005—ATT had flown in from Oregon to train with him. Though Cole usually got the worst of their confrontations, he went round after round without complaint.
Brown pulled the Slovak and sent Cole in. They started on the mat, Mocco on his back, with Cole between his legs, poised over him. The idea was for Cole to keep Mocco on his back and work for a submission hold.
As soon as they started, Mocco reached up, grabbed Cole by the shoulders, twisted his hips, and tossed the six-foot-four, 250-pound fighter off as if he were toying with a child. Cole pounded the canvas in frustration.
. . .
After practice, Mocco and I got into his beat-up gold Honda CRV, the appearance of which was made worse by deep scratches all along one side. Someone had viciously keyed it, for no reason that Mocco could discern, in the ATT parking lot soon after he arrived in Florida. A Frank Sinatra CD started as he turned the key.
After our first abrupt encounter, I’d learned that you shouldn’t expect conversation from Mocco in the gym. He loosened up away from the workplace. We got to know each other dining at a series of all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants, which were abundant in South Florida. He took me to one he had just discovered in Boca Raton.
