by Doug Merlino
Many coaches and observers of mixed martial arts believe that wrestling is the best entry point for the sport. Unlike jiu jitsu practitioners and strikers, who usually come from martial arts dojos, wrestlers have the experience of regular training for athletic competition. They are thought to be more disciplined and amenable to hard work; it is easier to teach a wrestler striking and jiu jitsu than the other way around, many insist.
American Top Team had paired Mocco with Roger Krahl, a striking coach, who was giving him a crash course. Krahl wanted to teach Mocco to gauge distance in order for the wrestler to keep himself out of range of an opponent’s punches, and also to use openings to get inside and take the fight to the ground. The coach was focusing on the essentials—stance, foot movement, and basic punches. Mocco, at 260 pounds, was only six feet tall, short for the heavyweight division, so his opponents would most likely enjoy a reach advantage, making fights even more dangerous for him while they remained standing.
Ricardo Liborio, who was revered for his jiu jitsu skills, was teaching Mocco that aspect of the sport, drilling him on various locks and choke holds. He found that the wrestler was learning the moves as fast as anyone he had ever trained.
But though Mocco was an agile and powerful athlete, it was his unwavering dedication to training that had made him a college champion and an Olympian; whatever success he might enjoy cage fighting would derive from the same commitment, which, for Mocco, had begun early in childhood and had only intensified as he grew up.
His brother Joey, eleven years older, was a New Jersey high school wrestling star. As a little kid, Steve had loved to tag along to practices. Joey and his teammates had been heroes to Steve. “They were like gods,” he remembered. “People treated them different, they were cool, everybody laughed at their jokes.”
In 1989, Joey won the New Jersey state 142-pound wrestling title. He was the first person from his high school to win a state championship, and the town went all out: They renamed a street “Mocco Way,” threw a parade, and held a banquet in Joey’s honor. At seven years old, Steve was awed.
All the kids in the Mocco family were taught by their parents to achieve. When Steve was young, his dad, Joe, took him and his little sister Katie to a high school track early every morning before elementary school, where they did calisthenics, ran laps, and sprinted up the stairs in the stands. This way, their dad told them, they would start the day with a jolt of energy.
Steve began wrestling the same year Joey won the championship, looking to follow his older brother. That first year, he not only lost most of his matches, but was pinned in the majority of them—since he was big for his age, he usually had to wrestle kids several years older.
He routinely walked off the mats in tears. “Why can’t I be like Joey?” he asked his dad.
“Hard work, Steve,” his dad told him. “You work hard, you win.”
Steve wrestled five days a week, and had judo practice the other two—he would become a junior national judo champion; his sister Katie became a national champion and barely missed making the 2008 Olympic team. His dad told him always to be the first into the gym and the last out, a message Mocco took to heart, sprinting from the van if he thought they were arriving late. He quickly improved.
In the early 1990s, some of the premier wrestlers in the world lived in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, where the wealthy John Eleuthère du Pont had built a training camp on his eight-hundred-acre Foxcatcher Farm estate. More than eighty wrestlers trained there on salary.
Joey had gone to Brown University, where he was an All-Ivy League wrestler but aspired to be an All-American. In the summer before his senior year, his dad drove him the 110 miles from North Bergen to Foxcatcher to see if Joey could train there. Steve, still in elementary school, went along for the ride.
As Joey auditioned, Steve messed around. He challenged Valentin Yordanov, a Bulgarian multiple-time world champion and future gold medalist, to wrestle and caught the eye of Dave Schultz, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist.
Schultz, as high-level coaches would for years to come, recognized something in Steve Mocco. He told Joe Mocco that Foxcatcher had a youth practice two nights a week and that he should bring the “little giant.”
Schultz took a personal interest in Mocco, training him for an extra forty-five minutes after the youth practices finished. He took him to the Tulsa Nationals, the American youth wrestling championships. Steve won. He was in the fourth grade.
At home, Mocco was imbued with an ethic of duty and honor derived in part from his dad’s collection of old Western movies. One of them was The Alamo, the story of a small group of Texans holding off the Mexican Army.
One scene in particular grabbed him. Before the Mexican Army attack, the commanding officer gathers the men and tells them the reserves aren’t coming. Death seems certain. The officer says that anyone who wants to leave is free to do so, they won’t be judged. Everyone chooses to stay. Mocco, by his estimation, watched it hundreds of times.
His favorite character was Davy Crockett, played by John Wayne as tough, wry, clever, and bound to principle. As he says in one of the movie’s big speeches, “There’s right and there’s wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat.”
Mocco’s identification with the frontiersman—as portrayed by John Wayne—was so total that for a few years he wore a buckskin vest and a coonskin cap everywhere.
The family had a weekend home in upstate New York. Early one morning when Steve was a young boy, he put on his Davy Crockett outfit and took out his .22 rifle. He asked his dad, who was working on the roof, if he could go hunting for deer. His father gave him a few bullets and told him he could only load the gun if he saw a deer. As Steve walked off, he joked: “Hey Steve, we’re counting on you for meat for the family.”
Mocco walked a few miles down the road and dipped into the woods. Suddenly, a deer jumped out in front of him. A buck, around a year old, it stood and gazed at Mocco, who loaded a bullet into the rifle, raised it, and fired. The deer, hit between the eyes, fell over dead.
In the early evening, Joe Mocco panicked when he realized his son hadn’t returned. He and his wife rushed to their car, thinking of all the things that could go wrong with a child with a gun out in the woods. They drove until they spotted some grass moving. Joe ran toward the spot, scared he would find his son lying there injured.
Steve was there with the deer. He had been dragging the animal by the legs for several hours. Soaked in sweat under the summer sun, with nothing but a peanut butter sandwich to fuel him, he was still going.
. . .
The large Mocco family was extremely close, perhaps more so because of the tremendous losses they had suffered.
When Steve was less than a year old, a babysitter took Michael and Diana, his older brother and sister, out to get ice cream. A driver fleeing the cops in a stolen car ran a red light and killed all three of them.
Seven years later, at Christmas time, Joe Mocco was driving the family van through North Bergen when the kids spotted a man in a Santa Claus suit and asked to see him. Joe double-parked so they could get out.
Steve, his younger brother, and his younger sisters all hopped out. Steve remembered sprinting to see Santa. His brother Peter, the last out, slipped on the ice, but no one saw. As other cars honked at Joe Mocco to get out of the way, he started to pull around the block. Peter was still under the vehicle. Joe rushed him to the hospital but he could not be saved.
Not long after, when Steve was in sixth grade, their lives were thrown into further disarray when Joe, an insurance salesman and also North Bergen’s town clerk, was charged, along with several other men, with racketeering, accused of taking bribes to allow illegal dumping in the Meadowlands. Joe Mocco, who insisted he had been set up, was convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison. (He was released after serving five.)
Before he was sent away, Joe Mocco made arrangem
ents so that Steve could continue his wrestling training. Since Steve would no longer have his dad to drive him out to Foxcatcher, Dave Schultz hooked up the boy with a former Belarussian wrestler, Roman Ruderman, who coached at the elite New York City Athletic Club, just south of Central Park in New York City. Steve could take the bus into the city on his own. (Steve’s first coach, Dave Schultz, would die in 1996, shot and killed by John du Pont, the sponsor of Team Foxcatcher, who had grown increasingly mentally disturbed. The story is retold in the 2014 movie Foxcatcher.)
Ruderman looked after Steve like the son he never had. Joey, who had graduated from Brown, also stepped in. He moved back to New Jersey and managed a bar owned by their uncle while he helped his mom watch over Steve.
Steve learned he had to take responsibility for himself. “My dad was very charismatic,” he remembered. “When he got locked up, so many people that were friends with him came out of the woodwork and said, ‘We’ll do anything you want, this or that.’ They all disappeared a week after he went to jail, ninety percent of them did.”
Up until the time his dad was incarcerated, Steve was talented at wrestling but not totally devoted to it. That changed when his father went away. He reflected that, after all the family had been through with the terrible accidents and the stress of his dad getting locked up, he wanted to do something constructive—both for the family name and to alleviate some of his parents’ suffering. Although his family prized academic achievement, he knew he wasn’t going to be the best doctor or lawyer. Wrestling, on the other hand, he was very good at.
His deer-dragging work ethic and John Wayne code of honor fused with a new desire to push back against the world.
“I wanted a positive thing to show people,” he remembered. “For my family, for me. My motivation was to fucking kill everybody.”
Potluck
On a Sunday afternoon, Ricardo Liborio’s house buzzed with fighters and their families. His wife, Misti, hurried about the kitchen, preparing food. Joe Mocco, Steve’s father, sat nearby on the living room couch. He’d come to see how his son was getting on, bringing along Steve’s two younger sisters, Katie, who was now finishing law school, and Colleen, who had just earned a Ph.D. in psychology.
A sliding glass door led onto a backyard patio enclosed with mosquito netting, where Sirwan Kakai and Mirsad Bektic relaxed at a table. A strip of grass sloped to a small lake. Steve Mocco watched Michael and Peter, his five- and three-year-old sons, chase each other among other kids at play. Mary, Mocco’s toddler, waddled among the melee.
Liborio burst into the backyard. “Who wants to go on a boat ride?” he asked. The kids jumped up and down.
Everyone at the gym felt they had a special relationship with the coach. It could take him an hour to walk from one side of American Top Team to the other, stopping for everyone with an issue, a question, a personal problem. Liborio greeted all with a smile and a hug, like an old friend after years of separation, whether they were a championship-level UFC fighter or a four-year-old kid.
He led the children to a paddleboat pulled up on the grass. Nathan Coy, a fighter with a young daughter, ran over and helped drag it into the water. They set off, Liborio and Coy pumping the pedals to carry their excited passengers toward the playground on the other side of the lake.
Katie Mocco, Steve’s wife, stood with an eye on Mary’s proximity to the water. Though she looked poised, she was in a daze, still shaken from her mother’s sudden sickness and death. The move to Florida had provided some relief, or at least distraction, in that it had given her concrete things on which to focus: getting the kids into school, setting up the house, figuring out the intricacies of a new town—where the library was, where you could get deals on groceries, the places to go on weekends.
Since she’d met Steve they’d lived in Iowa City; Stillwater, Oklahoma; Colorado Springs; Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and now here. Katie did not begrudge her husband his pursuit of an MMA career. It wouldn’t last forever and she wanted him to have the best run he could. She just hoped the toll on his body would be as minimal as possible.
Liborio and Coy reached the other side of the lake. The kids spilled off the boat and sprinted onto the playground as the two men lumbered after them.
. . .
Weekend activities—the potlucks at Liborio’s house, fighters and coaches hanging out at the beach, get-togethers at people’s houses to watch fights, team dinners at ATT owner Dan Lambert’s favorite Brazilian steakhouse in Fort Lauderdale—were an essential part of the gym; they made the grinding training regimen more bearable, and gave a sense of family to the fighters and coaches.
Though there were always fighters who trained elsewhere and came to ATT for a few weeks or months to hone their skills, the core group of several dozen fighters was there to stay, most likely for their whole careers. This was due not only to the quality of coaching and facilities at American Top Team, but also to the fact that there was little money in the sport to lure fighters anywhere else.
Though the UFC was estimated to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and Bellator was owned by corporate giant Viacom, the pay scale for the vast majority of fighters resembled that of minor-league hockey more than a sport watched by millions of people. At the lowest level, small-time local promotions might pay only a few hundred dollars for a fight: Often fighters only got an allotment of free tickets to sell to their friends and supporters. At the regional level at which Mirsad Bektic was fighting and that Steve Mocco was soon to join, fighters made around three thousand dollars a fight. Fighters beginning in the UFC were paid “eight and eight”—eight thousand dollars to show up and another eight if they won.
More established fighters a little farther up the ladder, such as Daniel Straus in Bellator or mid-level UFC fighters, made anywhere from ten thousand to thirty thousand to show up, with matching win bonuses. An established name in the UFC—a fighter with several years’ experience and many wins—might make between forty thousand and sixty thousand dollars to show up and the same if he won.
Of the more than five hundred fighters on the UFC’s roster, a small number—perhaps thirty—got a cut of pay-per-view revenue. These were the sport’s biggest stars—names such as Georges St-Pierre and Anderson Silva—the ones who could be counted on to inspire viewers to shell out fifty dollars to watch a fight on TV. They might make several hundred thousand or even millions of dollars a fight. In economic terms, the sport was a few George Clooneys supported by a lot of role actors and even more walk-ons.
Fighters were independent contractors, which meant there was no retirement plan or health insurance (the UFC did pay for accident insurance). Though promotions usually flew one corner man to a fight, any other people a fighter wanted to bring came out of his pocket. Fighters also had to pay for the medical tests they submitted to state commissions in order to be licensed to fight, which often cost them several hundred dollars.
Most gyms in the sport took a fee of 20 percent of a fighter’s purse in exchange for providing management, coaching, and training facilities. In 2011, a wealthy businessman had started a fight gym in Boca Raton and lured away several ATT fighters. In response, Dan Lambert had cut the fee ATT charged fighters from 20 percent to 5 percent, which enticed even more aspirants to try out for the team and ensured that those already there were unlikely to leave. It was obvious that Lambert was subsidizing the gym with large amounts of his own cash. Still, it didn’t take much math to figure out that many fighters at ATT were living on little or no money.
. . .
Inside the house, Misti Liborio lay the kitchen counter with food, including two trays of Joe Mocco’s signature dishes, eggplant and chicken parmesan.
When Steve had wrestled at Iowa and Oklahoma State, Joe Mocco had been known for his traveling kitchen. He’d bought a Ford van, had the back cut off, and welded on the rear of another van he’d gotten at a junkyard, creating an extra-long vehicle his kids called the Frankenvan. He outfitted it with beds, a sink, and a refrigerato
r and drove it to all of Steve’s matches.
Joe had developed a concern for food hygiene as an insurance agent. One of his clients, the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, had once put in a claim after dozens of customers came down with hepatitis. An investigation revealed that a disgruntled worker had laced the soup with urine and fecal matter. Joe figured that if you had a competition coming up, it was best to prepare your food yourself.
On nights before Steve’s college wrestling matches, Joe cooked steaks and reheated the chicken and eggplant parm casseroles he’d frozen and carried from New Jersey. He fed not only Steve, but the coaches and the other wrestlers on the team.
That evening, most of the fighters cleared out after they finished eating, going home to rest ahead of the coming week. Liborio, a barrel-chested man with a head of steel-gray hair, stood in the living room and fiddled with his remote controls. He had recorded the previous night’s UFC fight, which had taken place in Rio.
Steve Mocco, his dad, and I settled into Liborio’s sectional couch, along with Mike Brown, who stuck around to watch.
Joe Mocco had never sat down to watch a UFC fight. He had been distressed when his son told him he was going to take up fighting. One of Steve’s older brothers, a neurosurgeon, had warned about the damage inflicted by punches to the head: Every single one takes a toll, he said. And it was a family that valued their brains. Steve joked that even as an NCAA champion and an Olympic wrestler, he was the black sheep of the family for only having a bachelor’s degree.
Though Joe had ardently supported Steve’s wrestling career, he had felt relief when Steve landed his coaching job at Lehigh. His son had made it through with his health and now had a respectable job with a salary and benefits. Joe was not shy about sharing his reservations about this new turn of events. But he’d concluded that his son, for better or worse, needed this challenge.
