by Doug Merlino
Suada’s inclination to get out of Srebrenica was prescient. In July 1995, Serbian forces rounded up eight thousand men and boys around the area and killed them in a series of mass executions. Bektic’s mom estimated that three hundred of their relatives were murdered. It was the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War Two.
Bektic and his brothers were bussed with other refugee kids to a German elementary school, where the local German kids mocked the foreigners for their accents and darker skin. Bektic learned to fight early, often clashing with older, bigger boys.
In the late 1990s, the family received refugee status from the United States. They ended up in Lincoln.
The pictures in the albums showed Bektic working toward an identity in Nebraska. One, taken while Bektic was in middle school, showed him with slicked-back hair and a fake gun tucked into his pants, a short-lived Mafia phase. In another, taken a year later, he wore baggy pants and a baggy shirt, his gangsta look. A few years later, Bektic had gotten into body building. A photo showed a ripped, veiny Bektic posing with his arms flexed in front of his chest.
Kakai found them hilarious. But he also knew some of the pressures Bektic had faced as a foreigner in a new country.
Kakai had been born in 1989 in a refugee camp in the Kurdish part of Iraq. With the First Gulf War looming, his father had already left for Sweden with his older sister to seek political asylum. He sent for Kakai and his mother when Kakai was four.
They lived in a small town in the north of the country, where Kakai’s dad, a Kurdish intellectual, worked as a welder in an elevator factory. Kakai’s parents separated and soon divorced. When he was eight, Kakai moved with his dad to a much bigger city in the south. It had a large Muslim population in an area Kakai described as a ghetto. He didn’t like it. In the small town they’d come from there had been few foreigners, which meant he’d been treated like a Swede. Now he felt separate, different. And he missed his mom.
When Kakai was a teenager, he had downloaded the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, held in 1993, when the fighting was still close to no-holds-barred. The violence mesmerized him.
He soon saw a poster advertising a free trial class at a mixed martial arts school and put it together: This was what he’d watched on his computer. Kakai had a friend who wrestled and another who boxed. If he learned MMA, he thought, he could kick both of their asses.
Kakai was sixteen and directionless, not really committed as a student. He found MMA to be like a video game: If he practiced hard at a skill set, he could advance to the next level. His dad had always told him that the secret to success was to find one thing you have a talent for and dedicate yourself to it. Kakai looked around the gym and saw that all the other fighters were much older than he was. If I start now and stick with it, he thought, I could be good.
. . .
Having placed the albums back on the shelf, Bektic offered a tour of Lincoln, his thirteen-year-old sister, Medisa, now in tow.
We drove a few minutes and parked outside a three-story brick apartment building, where Bektic’s family had stayed when they first arrived. He pointed to a unit in the upper corner. “That’s it,” he said. “We had a sponsor family that looked after us. They took us to the grocery store. I don’t even know how much money they spent—they had their minivan, then two of the people who work at the grocery store had to take two of their cars for all the groceries they had.”
Nearby was a small park, with a fountain in the center and a few trees scattered here and there. “This was our place,” he remembered. “We used to play soccer here.
“I remember one time it was me and my brothers. We were hanging out and these three American kids came. I don’t know what happened, but they started pulling my brother Senad’s hair and spitting in his face. Me and my other brother were smaller and we were crying and screaming, we couldn’t help him.”
“They were racist?” Kakai asked.
“I think they heard us speaking Bosnian,” Bektic said.
We walked back to the car. “This area was called Mahala, it’s a Bosnian word that means like a little village,” Bektic said. “All the Bosnians lived here. The high school was like all Kurds, Pakistanis, blacks, Nigerians, everything.”
We drove on, passing a red apartment building. Medisa piped up from the backseat. “That red building used to be yellow and that’s where my dad lived and that’s how my mom and dad met, and then I was born,” she said. Bektic and Kakai ignored her.
“My mom worked in the morning and at night, so she’d never be home,” Bektic said. “We’d be running around until one or two, doing whatever we wanted to do. When I got in trouble at elementary school they’d call home to talk to her, but they’d give me the phone so I could translate and I’d tell her I did good, doing good today.”
Kakai and Medisa laughed.
“I’m serious!” Bektic said.
“I could never lie like that, straight open,” Kakai said.
“It was like you lie or get in trouble,” Bektic said.
Bektic drove by Lincoln High School. Many of the cliques at the high school broke down along ethnic lines—African Americans, Mexicans, and foreigners. Bektic’s brothers had joined a gang called the Refugee Riders, which consisted of immigrants from places such as Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
“You never worried about your brothers, like they were getting in deep shit, beat up bad?” Kakai asked.
“At that time I wasn’t really worried, it wasn’t really going through my mind. Everybody was trying to prove themselves,” Bektic said. “We were all trying to act tough, trying to be something we’re not.”
Bektic pulled up in front of a one-story brick building. A reader board across the top read: LONGORIA’S LACK BELT ACADEMY. The “B” in “BLACK” had fallen on its side.
Below were two banners:
FIGHTING … FITNESS … FUN and KARATE FOR KIDS.
“This is where I first started MMA,” Bektic said. He’d come at seventeen, with a friend he’d met in bodybuilding.
“A bit different than ATT,” Kakai joked.
We got out for photos. Bektic and Kakai both wore jeans and identical gray hoodies. They posed, playfully kicking and punching each other.
“Can I hit you?” Medisa asked Kakai, before smacking him in the arm.
“Ouch!” he yelled. “She hits hard!”
We returned to the house. Bektic’s mom was at the kitchen table, peeling a bowl of potatoes, which she was going to cook and serve with ćevapi, grilled links of minced beef.
She beamed at having her youngest son home. I asked if she ever went to his fights. No, definitely not, she laughed. She could only bear to watch after, when she already knew the outcome.
(Doug Merlino)
Hercules
The night before his fight with Aleksander Emelianenko, Jeff Monson was getting a tattoo.
It was nine P.M. and we were somewhere on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, in a grimy, two-story concrete shopping complex, the Russian version of a strip mall. It faced a series of Soviet-era apartment blocks. Trams rumbled by in the light rain. Streetlights lit the mist with a yellow glow.
Monson lay on his stomach on a table in the cramped room, his broad back exposed. His Russian girlfriend, Alecia, sat in a chair nearby, fiddling with her iPhone. She was in her early twenties, auburn hair falling past her shoulders.
Marcos Drake, a thirty-five-year old martial artist, gym owner, and osteopath from Lausanne, Switzerland, filmed the proceedings. He had met Monson during a grappling seminar in Switzerland and had traveled to Russia to make a documentary on the fighter. The plan was not entirely clear, but he was serious about it—he’d brought a seventeen-year-old student from his gym to assist in the production.
The tattoo artist could not believe he had a famous person in his shop. After a Russian actor or actress—the translation was somewhat garbled—Monson was only the second celebrity he’d ever tattooed, he said.
The artist locate
d some of the last free space on Monson’s back, to the right of Uncle Sam lying in a pool of blood. His tattoo gun buzzed as he pressed the needle into Monson’s skin, outlining in black the words ALECIA MONSON in Cyrillic letters, one on top of the other. He filled them in with red ink.
That Jeff would get the name of his girlfriend tattooed on his back seemed unwise, in spite of her obvious pleasure as she watched him have it done. But he was also willfully opening a wound on his body less than twenty-four hours before he was to fight a man he believed had hepatitis C.
Ricardo Liborio, who had known Monson for more than a decade, had told me he thought Monson needed to surround himself with chaos in order to perform—he thrived on being at the center of it.
The pattern was starting to become clear. Two nights earlier, Monson and I had been scheduled to fly out of JFK airport at the same time, though on different airlines. I called him before my plane boarded. He had just landed—his flight up from Fort Lauderdale had been stuck circling the airport. He told me he was going to miss his connection.
He spent the night in the airport, outside the gates, lying on the cold tile floor near a group of homeless who had their belongings stacked in grocery carts.
I arrived in Saint Petersburg, slept, and spent the day wandering around. The promotion put the fighters up in a Marriott hotel. That night I checked with the front desk: Jeff Monson had not arrived. He was not there the next morning, either.
I headed to the weigh-in unsure if he’d made it to Russia and was relieved to see him there. He told me that he had different accommodation: Apparently a Russian businessman who was friends with the promotion’s management had insisted that Monson stay in his boutique hotel.
We went from the weigh-in to lunch at a restaurant. He was so popular that the staff had to put us in a private room; throughout the meal the waitresses brought in blank sheets of paper that other diners had asked to have Monson autograph. When we stepped outside after we ate, taxi drivers waiting for fares jumped out of their cars to get pictures with him.
And now, the tattoo artist finished and taped plastic over his work. The night was far from over.
M-1 Global, which was putting on the fight, had told Monson it wanted him to make a promotional appearance that evening. It was an outrageous request to make of a fighter the night before a bout. Monson, however, agreed to do it.
Piterland, an upscale mall and waterpark, was a short ride from the tattoo place. We arrived a little after ten P.M. Monson limped forward, leading us inside. We passed stores peddling Lacoste shirts, Body Shop lotions, and Starbucks coffee before sighting the storefront of Affliction, a brand that produces licensed MMA clothing, at the far end of the mall.
A banquet table had been set up in front of the shop. Monson’s opponent, Aleksander Emelianenko, was not there, but his more famous brother, Fedor, sat at the center, accompanied by the head of M-1 Global and several other men. Security guards in black suits ringed the perimeter, stopping any of the several dozen fans gathered on the outskirts from getting too close.
Monson had not eaten in hours. After an exchange of pleasantries, the men ignored him as he scarfed food from the half-finished trays on the table.
Next to the store, people were test-driving a Segway on a strip of AstroTurf. Inside, among the T-shirts and hoodies, a few dozen young Russians drank beer from plastic cups and nibbled cubes of cheese. Most were still bundled in down parkas with fur around the collars. A DJ in the corner played Ozzy Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution.”
Monson took his place at a counter. The fans lined up, each taking a turn to get their free posters signed and have their pictures taken in the usual pose: one arm wrapped around the fighter, the other held up making a fist. After fifteen minutes, everyone was satisfied.
Monson went back into the mall and said good-bye to Fedor, who was escorted to the garage by his security detail, where a black Mercedes waited. Monson hobbled out the way he had come and caught a taxi back to his hotel.
. . .
We arrived after midnight. As soon as Monson walked into the lobby, two Russian men in their twenties rushed up to him. One wore a baggy blue shirt and combat pants, the other a skin-tight T-shirt with an image of Popeye flexing his muscles.
Monson was scheduled to do a screen test for a movie. The details were fuzzy: As far as Monson knew, it was some kind of gangster film to be shot in Ukraine.
We all went upstairs to Monson’s room, which was very tasteful: high ceiling, ornate molding, antique wood furniture. Paul Gavoni, who had arrived a few hours earlier, joined us.
The guy in the blue shirt handed Monson a one-page script. The man in the Popeye shirt connected with the movie director on his iPhone.
“HELLO JEFF!” a thickly accented voice boomed out.
“So you want me to just be kind of authoritative and calm, just matter-of-fact?” Monson asked.
“You can’t talk to him because he don’t understand English,” Popeye told Monson.
Blue Shirt gave instructions. “So in this scene you will drive through a crack and the special man from, I don’t know … You do very dirty things but you don’t take your energy for it. You quiet, you sure everything be good, and that’s it.”
Monson nodded as if the directions made perfect sense. Gavoni took a copy of the script to play opposite.
Gavoni started. “Behar, are you kidding me? Those two assholes fucked me up last time.”
Monson read the role of Behar. “Cool it, man. Last time they were hired by your enemies. Now I call the shots.”
The reading continued, Monson looking up briefly as he reached the end of each sentence.
“JEFF!” the voice from the phone boomed. A raucous laugh sounded from the speaker. “GOOD! VERY, VERY GOOD!”
There was a second scene to read. Blue Shirt explained Behar’s motivations. “So in this scene, you will try to crack the worst special man from, I don’t know, FBI or something like that,” he said. “And it’s very difficult to, you know, kill him, or something like that, and you try to find a way to ask what you want.”
The director spoke in Russian over the phone.
“Not any aggressive,” Blue Shirt translated. “Like a father speaking with his child.”
“FATHER AND SON!” yelled the director.
Monson sat and read, doing his best. “Listen, dear, why are you playing for time?” he said in a soft voice. “Look at your friend. You don’t wanna look like him, do you? He is about to die and you won’t be able to save him. So who sent you? What is your mission? Just tell us and go on living for as long as you wish.”
“THANK YOU! VERY GOOD! I LIKE IT VERY MUCH!” the director shouted.
Monson smiled.
“OKAY JEFF, SPASIBO! THANK YOU!”
It was now after one. Monson wanted to train. One of the downsides of staying at the boutique hotel was that there was no gym. There was, however, a reading room of leather easy chairs and couches.
We pushed the furniture to the side. Gavoni held pads and Monson worked on his left hook.
They trained for forty-five minutes. When they finished, Monson wanted to get something to eat. We headed to a restaurant, returning to the hotel at four in the morning.
. . .
Monson emerged the next day at noon. He had not slept well. But there was a new friend here, with a new request.
Sergey was a six-foot-four, 280-pound colossus of muscle, his shaved head set off by a long, bristly beard. He wore the chunky wristwatch of the Russian Hell’s Angels and a bracelet made of bullets.
Monson was not clear on the backstory: He believed Sergey, who was in his late forties, had been a KGB officer and paratrooper commando in Chechnya. Since then, he had run a security firm and had become a celebrity, acting in action movies and hosting a television show on martial arts.
Sergey wanted to get some footage of himself and Monson grappling for his show. They returned to the reading room of the hotel, Monson playing along as the mammoth Russian
jostled him.
In the hotel café, Marcos Drake, the documentarian, reflected on Monson’s popularity. Drake, in addition to his gym and osteopathic practice in Switzerland, told me he had spent two years studying with the Shaolin monks in China. His black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and he sported a long goatee and elaborate tattooing across his shoulders and chest.
There was a difference between a fighter and a warrior, Drake explained. The fighter’s goal was to win, the warrior’s goal to survive. Since life was hard for most people, they identified with the warrior. That’s why the Russians loved Monson: He had covered up and survived his fight with Fedor. Monson was like a modern Hercules, Drake said, half-man, half-God. He was almost cartoonishly muscular, but he was also human—he limped, he was humble, you could approach him. He inspired average people, made them feel that they could stand up for themselves.
Gavoni joined us in the café, and late in the afternoon, Monson returned, too. He settled in, detailing his relationship woes before veering into a story about doing hallucinogenic mushrooms in Amsterdam.
It was almost six o’clock, the time at which Monson was supposed to be at the arena. As Monson related his mushroom-inspired visions of death, Gavoni shifted in his chair. Maybe, he suggested, we should head over. Monson was agreeable.
We went outside to catch a taxi. It was rush hour on a Thursday night. The street was full of cars going nowhere.
Monson and Drake sat in the back as the taxi entered gridlock. Monson lay his head on Drake’s legs, closed his eyes, and began to snore.
. . .
Two hours later, a little after eight P.M., Monson walked into the service entrance of the Saint Petersburg Ice Palace. The main televised fight card for the evening, which he was headlining, had already started.
Tatiana, the woman who ran logistics for the promotion, stomped over.
“Jeff!” she yelled. “Where have you been?”
