“Sun King” is simply off the charts as a walkout song. The buildup is insane; this organ fugue (courtesy, I have no doubt, of the great Bob Rock, their producer) leads us into Billy Duffy’s guitar intro. This song is so good, as both a song and a piece of walkout music. It’s so profoundly perfect, that I’m wedging it into the Top Five using a little post facto reverse engineering, and I’m shoving “It Don’t Come Easy” by Ringo into the Number 3 spot, moving everything else down one. This makes “Sun King” Number 2 on my list. I’m listening to it as I type this. If this song isn’t just the greatest walkout song (with the possible exception of Number 1, “How Soon Is Now?”), I don’t know what is. Somebody better come out to this, and soon. Any up-n’-coming fighter out there, ya wanna make your mark? Wanna start standing out, like your big, mean ol’ Unka Chael? Build yourself, and your entrance, around this song.
eah, it’s that time, ladies ‘n’gentlemen, when I give you the lowdown on how I soared to the dizzying heights of ecstasy for twenty-five minutes or so, and then tumbled, like Icarus aflame, into the wine-dark sea of depression, regret, self-pity, misery, and horror, all courtesy of two interrelated, and irretrievably stupid, mistakes. The first mistake was mine; the second “mistake” belonged entirely to someone else.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, please step into the cage with Anderson and me on the infamous night of August 7, 2010. See that crazy look in my eye? Look charged, don’t I? There is good reason. By this point in my life, I’ve already been busted by the feds for a crime I didn’t even know existed, much less was capable of conceiving, carrying out, and covering up for five years. I’ve lost my real estate license and can never get another one, but they’ll give a chimpanzee one if he turns over a couple of properties a month. My political career has gone up in smoke, shutting off that potential career and revenue stream for life as well.
In about a year, I’ve gone from being a guy everybody was voting for to a guy who can’t even vote himself. I’ve been shamed and disgraced. It doesn’t matter that people knowledgeable of the inner workings of Oregon politics have ominously hinted that prosecuting me had nothing to do with one isolated, busted-ass-play of a real estate deal, but rather with taking out a young, charismatic, conservative (i.e., me) by foul means when fair means failed.*
So right now, standing in the Octagon set up in this arena in Oakland, I’m pretty much out of options. I’m out of real estate. I’m out of politics. I’ve got … fighting, and if that doesn’t work out, well, then I’ve got … fighting.
And I just happen to be fighting the best fighter in the world.
I’m ready. I’ve trained hard. I’m not going to leave anything in the tank; I’m going to pour it all out on that weirdo Anderson Silva. All the pain, all the rage, all the dissapointment, all the helpless, blind fury. All the regret. I am going to channel all of it into the performance of my life.
And I do.
I fight like I’ve never fought before. I surprise him with punches. I knock him down. I fling him to the floor and beat him like a rented mule. He, the master of deception, trickery, and mind games, is getting deceived, tricked, and mind-gamed right out of his title. I hold him down and beat him. I beat him until my hands feel like they are going to turn to mush. Over and over my fists rain down on his unprotected head, and he lies there like a lab rat with a severed spinal cord, waiting to be put out of his misery. I wait, and wait, and wait, as I punch, and punch, and punch. I wait for the referee to end the carnage. I have already hit Anderson with more unanswered, undefended strikes than anyone has every hit anyone else with in the history of the sport.
I cannot understand this. I’ve seen a thousand fights. I know how many times you should have to hit a guy without him hitting back, defending himself, or improving his position to make a referee stop the fight. I’ve exceeded that amount by a factor of five, and still there is no reaction from the referee. So I punch on. But a nagging fear begins creeping into my brain: Is this going to be another instance where I do everything right, and still get screwed?
My mind flashes back to working in the real estate office; trying to sell properties, trying to do a good job, being a “team player”—filling in the paperwork as I was instructed to, then getting a call from the feds. I start thinking about how I had to tell the kids I coach what happened, and how, because of it, I may not be able to coach them anymore. That society may decide I’m unworthy of their parents’, and their, trust. My mind flashes back to being booked and fingerprinted, and emerging, blinking into the daylight, a newly minted felon.
And still I punch on. But I am growing increasingly puzzled and distracted by the amount of punches I’ve landed, the rules concerning undefended strikes, and why I have to keep hitting this guy long after they should have pulled me off him and given me his belt. The gnawing sensation that something unnatural is occurring again in my life is creeping, like a fungus, into my psyche. Why the selective enforcement? If he had hit me a third as many times, he’d be out of the shower and on a plane back to Brazil by now, with his belt still around his waist. And I’d be on the next train to Prelim-ville. Where’s the justice? Where’s the fairness? Damn, where is the referee?
Four rounds of pounding. I’ve hit him more times than Bonzo hit the drums in “Achilles Last Stand.” Twenty minutes of one-sided pummeling.
The world is mine, in five minutes.
I look across the cage.
He’s shot. He’s blown out. All I have to do is stay away for five minutes. He’s too tired to even chase me down. He’s ruined. I have battered him out of the business. And yet, when the horn blows to start the fifth and final round, I fight on. I’m not a coward with an insurmountable lead looking to ride a bike for five minutes and leave town with a cheap “W,” like a certain champion whose name may or may not rhyme with “Peorge St. Gierre.” I came to fight. I engage. I don’t want to run and hide—in the Octagon, in my country, or in my life. I fling him down again, hoping that I am also flinging away my own bad fortune, my own errors of omission and inattention, my own faults. I pound him again and again. My mind wanders to my dead father, to whom, on his deathbed, I made a promise that I’d win a championship. To my mom, in the crowd. To my friends, my supporters, to the people who run the wrestling program who said to me, “We don’t care about the case, Chael. You belong here, coaching our kids. They’re your kids too. This is your home, and we are your family.” My mind wanders to this, and to many other things, as I fight in the waning seconds of the fifth round of the most important event of my life.
What my mind does not wander to, or register, is that Anderson Silva has been holding my right wrist with his left hand for about twenty seconds. By the time I register what’s happening, it’s already too late to fix.
His leg comes up and over my shoulder, squeezing my head like a vise. I begin working my escape, but it’s a waste of time. By the time I come back to the here and the now, here is the wrong place, and now is the wrong time. It’s over. It’s done faster than it takes to describe. Go watch the video. I’m in no mood to relive it for you second by second. I never will be.
It all comes crashing down: all the prep, all the training, the game plan, the sacrifice. It’s all … gone, like the real estate career, the political career. Down in flames I go, AGAIN.
The rest is routine. The sponsor’s hat perched crookedly on my sweaty, lumpy head. The bleeding cuts. Buffer screaming. The fury and resentment at my own lack of attention at the worst possible moment. I silently consider IRT (idiot replacement therapy). I consider asking my doctor if he has some serum that will replace me, molecule by molecule, with a new, improved version of myself that’s not so stupid, and that pays attention to the tactics of his opponent, who happens to be the best fighter in the world, whom you shouldn’t lose to by falling asleep and losing focus while you’re pounding him. Huuuuuge mistake.
Press conference.
Hotel.
Airport.
One big blur.
Home.
It’a baaaaaaaaad. I don’t have to tell you how bad.
Then, the letter arrives from California:
Dear guy who just blew the biggest fight of his life, which he had won,
Your testosterone levels are too high. If you can read this entire letter before the male hormones hurtling through your cheater’s bloodstream turn this paper into a crimson mist, consider yourself suspended indefinitely.
That’s not what it said exactly, but that was the gist of it.
The California State Athletic Commission
First things first. I was never accused of, much less found guilty of, taking anabolic steroids. Anabolic steroids are synthetic chemicals that mimic various natural bodily secretions, thereby fooling the body into producing more muscle, or scar tissue, or other stuff. I’m not a doctor. Look it up yourself. The short version, which I kinda just gave you, should suffice to give you an idea of what steroids are, and to let you know, once and forever, that I did not, nor would I ever, take them to gain an unfair advantage in a fight. I was not accused of that, and that issue never came up in any proceeding. Any connection between myself, and my circumstances, and anabolic steroids, is the product of the fantastical, nonsensical, and ridiculous speculation that runs rampant on the MMA Web sites.
I was, and had been for some time, under a doctor’s care for low testosterone levels, a naturally occurring male hormone. Low testosterone has nothing to do with virility, muscle mass, or endurance-related issues; it is merely a body-chemistry imbalance. It is extremely common, it is radically unrecognized and undiagnosed, and it is easily treatable with short-term, monitored injections of testosterone, known as testosterone replacement therapy (TRT). Low testosterone is a condition no different than sinusitis or athlete’s foot; and, like those conditions, it is treatable. So, when my condition was diagnosed a long time ago, and my doctor recommended treatment, I of course took his advice—as I’m sure most of you would have done had you been in a similar situation. If I had not taken his advice, I would be a very sick man, but I don’t feel like going into the details of my condition.
Knowing that TRT was perfectly legal in my situation, I went to the hearing to clear my name. I went with the knowledge that the banned list of substances in professional sports is extremely sensitive. Aspirin is banned. Nyquil is banned. Caffeine is even banned, but no one ever gets popped for it because it leaves your system in fifteen minutes. However, if you were to chug a vat of espresso right before your urine test, you would most likely get popped for caffeine. The point I am trying to make is that damn near everything is banned. Testosterone is not. It is legal in forty-six states.
I went to the hearing to plead my case to the California State Athletic Commission. What I didn’t know until I was standing before it is that everyone on the commission is either a friend of someone in a high place, or a friend of a friend of someone in a high place. Like most, I assumed that the commission was composed of a group of individuals who worked forty hours a week, trying to keep the board regulated. In reality, the executive director had a couple of cronies in his office, and the full commission met only twice a year. The members are from all over the state. To make matters worse, they aren’t all up to speed on the rules.
So I went into the hearing and showed them that testosterone was legal in their state. I pointed out that I hadn’t broken any rule; instantly they all began looking around, bewildered. Instead of dropping the issue on the spot, they switched the argument to one of “disclosure.” Now I am no attorney, but I am pretty certain you can’t do that.
For example, let’s say you charge someone with murder. That person comes into court and proves that he had nothing to do with the murder. You can’t suddenly say, “All right, you bastard, you might not have killed anyone, but we are pretty sure that you were speeding on that same day, so we are going to charge you for that.” If that happened to you, I am pretty sure you would be thinking, “Wait a second, I wasn’t charged with speeding. I don’t have time to prepare a defense for speeding. Truthfully, I have no idea if I was speeding or not. Let me go back and look at this. Let me sit down with my legal team, and we will come back to see you another day.”
Needless to say, I was frustrated. They switched the argument from whether or not I was taking TRT to whether or not I had “disclosed” the fact that I was taking the therapy. Well, they still didn’t have a case. I disclosed my testosterone use in California four different ways. I could prove three of them. Two of them were in writing, so there was no disputing that. Two of them were not only signed and dated by me, but also signed and dated by members of the athletic commission. So, there was no disputing the fact that we did in fact disclose the matter.
What happened then? The charges shifted again. It was no longer a matter of if I had or had not disclosed the fact that I was on TRT, but whether or not I had disclosed the fact properly. My disclosure was to the executive director, and it doesn’t get any higher than that on the food chain, but apparently I should have disclosed that information to the executive director’s doctor. I don’t understand why I would need to share my private medical information with a subordinate to the executive director, but if it had been put it in a rulebook somewhere, I would have obeyed. But it hadn’t. In any rulebook. As a result, I assumed that the commission just made it up on the spot.
The end result: I got a six-month suspension. Well, that’s not the way it works, guys. If I cheated, then it should be a year suspension, and I would gladly serve my time. If you can’t show me which rule I broke, then I should get nothing. For me to go in there and prove that they were wrong, and for them to split the difference with me, was ludicrous. Did I break a rule or didn’t I? There is no gray area here. If I didn’t break a rule, there should be no six-month suspension.
What I found out later is that in the history of the California State Athletic Commission, it has never been wrong. Never once have the members ruled against themselves. But what they did was wrong. You can’t recharge someone on the spot without due diligence. So immediately I began looking into my rights as an American. What were my options? According to a certain attorney to the stars, my options were vast. He charges something like a thousand dollars an hour, but he agreed to take my case for free. He told me that what they did was illegal, and that California had no cap, which meant I could sue them on a tort claim. I could sue them for an endless amount of money.
But was that a viable option? As an athlete, my days are numbered. If I sat out the six months, I would be done with the whole mess and I could go right back to fighting. If I took the commission to court, it might be a year before I saw a judge. So it would take twice as long to prove my innocence. I wanted nothing more than to fight back, but with the commission meeting only once every six months, and with any objection to their charges regarded as a “throwing of stones,” I decided to grin and bear it.
Then came the media. One reporter on ESPN blatantly lied. He said my testosterone levels were four times that of the legal limit. Once he did that, once he spoke that untruth, it became my reality. I have no idea where he got that “information” because the commission never said anything of that nature. Why? Because it wasn’t true. If my testosterone was truly that high, I would not be competing in the middleweight division. I wouldn’t even be competing in the light heavyweight division. I would be in the super heavyweight division. In high school, at seventeen years old, I wrestled for the state championships at 185 pounds. Now, I don’t know another person who can say that he weighs the same at thirty-four years of age as he did when he was seventeen. Not one. If I were on that amount of juice, I would look like … well, I would look like Jose Canseco. And for the record, I do not look Jose Canseco.
I understand when a reporter chooses to believe the government over the person being accused of doing something wrong, but the government never made the claim that my testosterone level was four times the legal limit. Naturally, I asked the reporter if he even knew what the lega
l limit was. I informed him that the legal limit for testosterone is so incredibly loose that it would be near impossible for a person to exceed it. I told him to ask any doctor. If any man were four times the legal level of the loose limit, he’d be dead.
Did that matter? Nope. The damage had already been done. A number of other media outlets picked up the story and ran with it. I couldn’t blame them—it was on ESPN for crying out loud. They just assumed it had to be true. The reporter who made the initial blunder promised to make it right. How did he do that? Did he go back on camera and tell everyone that he had made a mistake? No. He wrote a small article on the matter.
I was unjustly labeled a “steroid monger” and a “cheater.” That had become my reality, and I had two options. I could vehemently deny the allegations, but knowing what I know about the media, that would only cause them to write more articles and stories. None of them would give me the time that you, dear readers, are giving me in this book to explain myself. So to shut them up, I simply went with it. One reporter said to me, “They tested you at .7 and the normal limit is .6.” I said to him, “Retest that. You must have caught me on a low day.” It was like the kid you love to tease on the bus; you only bust his chops for as long as he gives you the reaction you want. By going along with the whole charade, I got them to stop talking about it.
The whole matter reminded me of a gentleman on Ronald Regan’s cabinet. They loaded a bunch of garbage on his back, and it absolutely destroyed him. When he finally got his day in court, he couldn’t have been more innocent. After his victory, he said something like, “Well, I’ve won the case, but now whom do I see about getting my reputation back?”
The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Page 11
