by Doug Merlino
Back in the United States, the family settled near Olympia, Washington. His step-dad worked as a corrections officer. Monson was a good kid, an altar boy and honor student, didn’t smoke or drink. The worst thing he remembered doing was egging a car.
But his stepfather was a rigid man. Everything, from the way Monson cut the lawn to how he organized his closet, had to be just so. There were no “I’m proud of you”s or pats on the back.
As Monson explained it, the desire for that had been transmuted into an intense athletic competitiveness. His freshman year in high school he made the varsity wrestling team at 122 pounds. But he failed to make weight for the team’s first match of the season and was devastated when the coach demoted him to junior varsity.
In response, he started to purge. For most of a year, he vomited every meal he ate. He would throw up water because it was weight. He wouldn’t lick a postage stamp. His parents put him under lock and key, but he would sneak freezer bags into his room and heave into them in the middle of the night. His weight dropped to ninety-nine pounds. He was hospitalized, near death.
It stopped his junior year, when Monson realized the obvious: Starving himself had only made him worse at wrestling. He decided instead he needed to get as big and strong as possible.
“Oh man, I lifted, lifted, lifted, didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. But at that point when you got all that testosterone and you’re seventeen years old, you’re going to get bigger and stronger just by doing any kind of exercise. The same determination, same sickness I had for not eating and getting one calorie, I turned that right around into a fanatical, ‘I got to get bigger and stronger, gotta train.’ Sucking down to nothing didn’t work so now I gotta do the opposite thing. And kinda showing the dark side to that—my back is fucked, trying to lift the world, and look at me, I’m an old man. I put my body through hell.”
He felt his competitiveness as compulsion. There was no enjoyment, no feeling of accomplishment. When he won, the high barely lasted—a brief respite, maybe, but then he picked apart everything he had done wrong. Before long, the thought that someone else was out there looking to beat him came into his mind. When he lost, he was crushed, worthless.
He sometimes daydreamed of having one more big fight that, for some reason, he would know was going to be his last. Maybe he could just enjoy it. Maybe the nagging in his head—Man, you can do just one more—would finally go away.
As it was, he had no idea how he was going to stop.
A Mauling in Vegas
Ricardo Liborio and Roger Krahl stood next to a backyard swimming pool in Las Vegas, admiring a substantial palm tree in the far corner of the yard. The sun was setting. A few miles away, the lights of the Strip lit the encroaching dusk.
In addition to coaching striking at American Top Team, Krahl owned his own satellite gym in Sunrise, a Fort Lauderdale suburb. His days often ran from nine to noon coaching at American Top Team, and then from the afternoon until ten in the evening at his own gym. He had two young children. Once or twice a month he flew off to corner a fighter. This time it was Steve Mocco, scheduled for his first fight.
“My wife wasn’t happy about this one,” he told Liborio.
“At least with Misti she knew it was going to be this way when she married me,” Liborio said. “It’s hard when your wife is used to you being at home and then you start traveling.”
Liborio had arrived a day earlier, and he’d been worried about leaving his family, too. The night before he left, his daughter Bella had run a high fever; he and Misti had rushed her to the hospital. Her temperature had come down, but Liborio was constantly checking his phone for updates from his wife.
The pool and adjacent house belonged to Joey Mocco, Steve’s brother, and they had gathered there for dinner, which, as usual, their father Joe had brought from New Jersey, this time on the airplane.
It was, indirectly, due to Steve’s wrestling career that Joey owned this house in Vegas. Since he’d graduated from college and taken responsibility for keeping an eye on Steve while their dad was incarcerated, Joey had been to almost every single one of Steve’s wrestling matches—high school, college, international freestyle competition, and the Olympics.
Joey applied to law school during Steve’s senior year in high school. When Steve chose Iowa, Joey decided to attend law school there, too, and the brothers roomed together. Joey traveled to all the matches with the wrestling team, a sort of big brother for the whole squad.
And, as law school graduation approached, Joey interviewed with a few firms, but didn’t want to take a job that would stop him from attending Steve’s matches. He instead got a job with an acquaintance who was starting a direct marketing business in Vegas. The guy said he had no problem with Joey taking off from work to support his brother.
Joey had gotten married and was starting a family. He didn’t want to raise his kids in Vegas, so he commuted on weekends to Rhode Island, where his family stayed, and continued to travel with Steve. Eventually, however, his boss told him he could no longer leave for Steve’s wrestling matches. Joey left the company and started his own direct marketing business, which focused on clients in Eastern Europe. But he’d bought the house before the property crash and had held onto it waiting for the market to recover.
In the kitchen, his dad served up the first course, heaping plates of spaghetti with red sauce. Steve, who had been in another room speaking on the phone with his wife, Katie, came in and sat down next to his brother at the table. They were a contrasting pair—Steve, with his thick frame, blond crew cut, relaxed manner, and Joey, shorter and more compact, with straight black hair and a look of worried attentiveness.
The conversation turned to a trip Steve and Joey had made to Dagestan, a republic of Russia in the Caucasus region, for a wrestling tournament. While there, Steve had been invited to another event the following day, in neighboring Chechnya.
They were picked up in the morning and driven more than six hours, passing through several military checkpoints before arriving at a town in the mountains. The tournament was attended only by men, many of whom were armed with AK-47 rifles.
In the first round, Steve faced a top Russian wrestler and lost on a questionable call that he decided it wouldn’t be wise to argue about. At the banquet to honor the wrestlers held afterward, Steve and Joe were told they were not only the first Americans to ever visit the town, but that it would be more likely for aliens to land there than Americans.
“They had a whole lamb, the whole body, the head on it and everything, they were pinching meat off it,” Steve said. “And then all kinds of side dishes, the whole table was full of food, they were making us drink. We didn’t want to do it. Every person was like a militant. I was like, ‘We don’t want to get drunk here.’ We’d had like six or seven shots of vodka. We were there twenty minutes and then we got up and left.”
Their driver floored it to get back to Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, screaming over the mountain roads. When Steve went to put his seatbelt on, the driver slapped his hand as if it was an insult.
When they got to the outskirts of the city, something was wrong.
“Remember when all the tires were burning?” Joey asked. “The guy told us that the people there started rebelling a little bit so they cut off all the electricity. And then to counteract that they put up these tires in the middle of the street and just burned them, there were flames like thirty feet high.”
“Black smoke, it was crazy,” Steve said.
“This guy who was driving through these back streets,” Joey said. “We were like, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
“Remember what he said?” Steve asked. “ ‘Sit! Shhh!’ He got out of the car to talk to somebody, he told us just to sit and be quiet. He talked to the guy for a few minutes, and then we drove through a side street and they moved a car out of the way so we got into the city.”
The smoke alarm blared. Joey rushed to silence it.
His father removed a tray of steaks from
the stove.
“Anybody like it rare?” he asked.
. . .
The UFC holds its Las Vegas fights at the MGM Grand. Steve Mocco was fighting in the Resurrection Fighting Alliance, the same promotion for which Mirsad Bektic competed. It was holding its event at the Texas Station Casino, located on the outskirts where Las Vegas craps out among trailer parks, pawn shops, and payday loan establishments, quite a distance from the bright lights of the Strip.
On the morning of Steve Mocco’s first MMA fight, the casino’s electronic sign advertised one-dollar hot dogs. Inside, Liborio and Krahl drank weak coffee and picked at plates of scrambled eggs and bacon scooped out of stainless-steel containers at the buffet.
Both men were feeling anxious. Krahl was responsible for Mocco’s striking, which was still rudimentary. Mocco needed to keep his hands up and move his head: Beginning strikers often make the mistake of throwing a punch and remaining stationary for a moment to see if they connected, enough time to allow an opponent to counterstrike.
He was fighting a kid named Tyler Perry, a former college wrestler at the University of Missouri with an MMA record of 1-0. It was a good matchup for Mocco—like him, Perry did not have great hands, and Mocco was clearly the superior wrestler. Still, there were always questions before a first fight.
“Sometimes it’s better to lose early than to get nine or ten fights in and then lose,” Krahl said. “Once you get a reputation, it gets that much harder. Some guys don’t come back from that.”
Liborio told Krahl he’d started to talk up Mocco to the writers from MMA websites; he was looking at a three-year time frame for Mocco to be in title contention in the UFC. He wanted Mocco to get in four to six fights at lower levels before making the step up to the big promotion.
“He’s improved a lot in four months,” Krahl said. “Let’s see where he is in another four.”
Liborio’s phone rang as they left the restaurant. It was Dan Lambert, the owner of American Top Team. He’d spoken to a contact at the UFC who said they were sending someone to watch Mocco fight. The hype was building faster than expected.
Krahl returned to his room. Liborio made his way through the casino floor and placed forty dollars on a roulette table, receiving four stacks of chips in return. The wheel spun as the coach spread his bets.
Liborio was unusually on edge before Mocco’s debut. He and Mocco had become close friends, and more than being just a fighter Liborio hoped would do well, Mocco represented what he wanted the gym to be: solid, decent guys that were good people as well as good fighters, guys you would be proud were wearing your colors.
Tonight was the first test.
. . .
The fights were held in the casino ballroom, brown carpeted and dimly lit, rows of chairs arranged around a cage.
The fighters gathered in an area partitioned off from the main space. Krahl taped Mocco’s hands as his brother and father watched. Liborio paced, trying to calm his nerves.
Rows of plastic cups for drug testing sat on a table in a room nearby. Fighters pissed into them in a corner, watched by a member of the state athletic commission.
Mocco stared into the middle distance, repeating in his head what he needed to do:
You sparred with guys who are way better than him, so just relax, breathe.
Stand up with him for a little bit, see what’s up, play it by ear, then take him down.
Don’t be afraid to stand up, don’t panic, because it will be worse if you get clipped and then panic and need a takedown.
Just do what you do.
When the bell rang, Mocco bulled across the cage, hitting Perry with a left followed by a right cross to the chin. They circled.
Perry stepped forward. Mocco popped him with another right and took him to the ground.
Mocco started to grind Perry down, working his way into top position while delivering punches to Perry’s body. Perry struggled to keep Mocco close to prevent him from getting leverage.
They stalemated and the ref stood them up. Mocco again landed several straight punches into Perry’s face. Again, they went to the ground.
Mocco got full mount, his legs on each side of Perry’s hips, and battered him in the face. The ten-second warning sounded. Perry covered up and tried to deflect Mocco’s assault, which ended when the bell sounded.
Mocco climbed to his feet and walked to his corner. Perry staggered to his, blood dripping from his face to his chest.
The mat was splattered red. Two attendants hurried into the cage and knelt to wipe it up with towels.
The bell for the second round sounded. Perry emerged from his corner and smiled, his grin showing a mouthful of blood.
Mocco again moved forward, delivering blows, but his head remained stationary. Perry clipped him with a punch. Mocco took him down.
Perry was on his knees, Mocco to his left. He reached over, grabbed Perry’s right arm, and torqued it back like he was wrenching apart a wishbone. Perry tapped out.
Mocco rose as the several hundred people in the casino ballroom shouted approval. He raised his arms in the air. His blond hair now appeared to be the color of rust: It had been dyed with his opponent’s blood.
. . .
“His face hurt your fist!” Steve’s dad joked in exultation.
They were crowded into Mocco’s hotel room—Liborio, Krahl, the two Joe Moccos.
Steve hopped from foot to foot.
“Twice you hit him and he staggered,” Krahl observed. “And when you get him on the fence, that’s when you make that little adjustment to slide over and then you, Bang, Bang!! That’s it. Beautiful for a first time.”
“After that first hit he was afraid,” Joe Mocco added.
“Steve,” Liborio said, “you did a real good job. You fucked him up.”
“Yes he did!” Krahl said.
“You fucked him up good!” Liborio said, laughing this time.
“Beat down!” Krahl enthused.
“Look at your hair!” Joe Mocco said.
Much later that night, Steve Mocco and his older brother drank bottles of beer at a bar in the Texas Station. MMA fans drifted through the casino. Several recognized Mocco and went up to congratulate him. One told him he had followed his career since high school and recounted the details of several of his great wrestling matches.
“Thanks, man,” Mocco responded to all.
“You wanna go someplace else?” Joey asked.
They drove to the Hard Rock Casino, overflowing with Friday night revelers. Women in naughty schoolgirl outfits danced on platforms, humping poles to the sounds of Guns n’ Roses.
Joey watched the bar, spotted a couple getting ready to leave, and moved in on their seats. The brothers set down their bottles of Bud Light and fed twenties into the built-in video poker machines.
After a few hands, Steve was cleaned out. Joey had won a hundred dollars.
Joey, seeing how his brother was doing, handed Steve a twenty. He fed it into the machine and kept playing.
Lincoln
The day after Mirsad Bektic’s victory over Doug Jenkins in Kearney, Nebraska, he, Sirwan Kakai, and I drove to his mom’s home in Lincoln, two hours east on Interstate 80.
Bektic’s disappointment in himself at not getting a finish had diminished somewhat as he realized he was the only one who thought he’d done poorly. It was still a dominating win, and the failure to finish would do nothing to dim his stock as a top prospect. He admitted that people posting on Facebook that he was going to smash his opponent had gone to his head.
“People think you’re just going to go crush every fight like you did before in your career, but it’s at a different level, it’s going to be tough fights, all the time,” Kakai said. “That’s why you fight for yourself, you don’t fight for anyone else.”
In spite of their close friendship, there was an underlying competitiveness between Bektic and Kakai, which they openly acknowledged: They compared themselves to brothers who wanted to outdo each other. At the
moment, Bektic was receiving mounting attention in the sport—from coaches at the gym, older fighters, and, increasingly, MMA websites—which Kakai recognized.
It was easy to feel sensitive about it. Fighters were alert to seeing their standings rise and fall in the eyes of the coaches with their wins and losses. Coaches had finite amounts of attention and energy to invest in fighters; they gravitated toward the most promising.
Bektic’s mom was still at work when we arrived at her townhouse. We sat in the small living room, decorated with family photos, sports trophies, and ribbons. Bektic filled a bowl with homemade Bosnian cookies, two thin layers of waffle filled with sweet jam.
Bektic’s brother, Suvad, two years older, came down the stairs in sweatpants and a T-shirt.
“That was crazy last night,” he said. He explained that he’d been dragged out of the stands with the rest of the Bosnians and taken to a room in the arena, where the cops had written him a ticket for disorderly conduct. “I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“Sure,” Bektic said, rolling his eyes, “you didn’t do anything.”
Bektic wanted to show us the family photo albums, full of pictures of him and his brothers as kids, charting the family’s trajectory from Europe to the United States.
Bektic was born in early 1991 in Srebrenica, Bosnia, just as the Yugoslav civil war was breaking up the country. Bektic’s mom, Suada, had a bad feeling about where things were headed. She took Mirsad, who was not yet a year old, and his two older brothers—Senad and Suvad—and fled over the border.
Her husband stayed behind to fight in the army. For several years, Suada thought he was dead. Later, she learned he had remarried. Mirsad would not meet him until he visited Bosnia while in high school.
The family was sent to a refugee camp in the former East Germany, a compound out in the woods, ten miles from the nearest village. They lived in a room and shared bathroom and kitchen facilities with other refugees from the Yugoslav war, Afghanistan, and the West African wars of the 1990s.
