Now I’m backstage, warming up in the dressing room as the co-main event fight is going down. I passively watch it on the TV as I do some light sparring and Jiu Jitsu drills, and the roars of the crowd builds my anticipation of getting out there myself and having the performance of a lifetime.
A submission—a rear naked choke—ends the fight, and that only means one thing.
It’s five minutes until I’m up.
I do a few drills to pass the time, so I don’t have to think about how nervous I am, and I keep my sweat up so I’m not cold when I get out there. By the time my muscles are warm and ready to put a hurting on the guy across from me in the cage, I get the call.
“You’re up, Lucas.”
My music starts playing—Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name—and I walk to the octagon, my team behind me. I’ve never been so nervous for a fight. I don’t feel like myself. Normally I’m cocky—sure of myself—ready to beat the guy across from me to a bloody pulp, but I’m not feeling that right now. I’m not feeling like ‘The Ghost’ — I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a long time—like I’m out of my league.
What makes this match even more exciting is the fact that we’re both undefeated. My opponent—the light heavyweight champion of the New York Cage Fight Championships, Wes Finley, has an undefeated record of 9–0, and I have a record of 11–0. They titled tonight’s event ‘Someone’s O has to go!’ I plan on being Wes’ first defeat, but as I see him walking to the cage my heart is in my throat.
Our names are announced, and the fight begins. . .
Chapter Two
Lucas
Ten Minutes Later
What happened? Where am I?
I open up my eyes, and the lights from the doctor’s little flashlight are shining so brightly that my impulse is to close them again. My team is standing over me, and the noise is deafening.
They lift me up on a stool and I sit, disoriented, looking around. The crowd is going nuts, and Wes is running around the octagon with his hands up and hugging his team. He comes up to me, as I try to balance on my stool, and leans in. “Good fight, bro. You’re a tough kid, you’ll be a champion one day.”
My head is so fucked up that I can’t really understand what’s happening, but I understand the only part that matters—I lost.
I didn’t just lose a fight. I lost an opportunity that I may never get back.
A little while later, with my senses coming back to me, I sit in the locker room with only Matt, my striking coach Al, and my wounded ego.
“What was it?” I ask.
“Left high kick. It was sneaky. He threw a punch first to get your hands blocking your right side, then he threw high to your left.”
There’s an old expression in fighting—the most dangerous strike is the one that you don’t see coming. I didn’t even know what hit me. I had to wake up and be told by my team. This is the most unforgiving sport there is.
Wes comes by my dressing room one more time to basically say the same thing he’d said in the octagon after he’d knocked me out cold. He’s got the championship belt slung over his shoulder, and he doesn’t even look like he’s been in much of a fight. He looks like he just had a hard cardio day at the gym. Fuck. He comes over and hugs me again.
“You’re a great fighter man, don’t be disappointed. You’ll be back.”
I want to hate the guy who just slammed his giant shin into the side of my head and cost me my dream, but there are two reasons I can’t—one, Wes is a super nice guy despite the fact that he looks like a character from Mad Max. And two, this is the fight game. Sometimes you’re the hammer, and other times you’re just the fucking nail.
As I get up to shower, get dressed, and get the hell out of there—with my ego bruised and my heart broken, I see Sean Graham standing by the locker room door with a bunch of suits. I recognize him immediately, only he’s not here for me.
“Wes!” he shouts. “Come on, we have some business to discuss.”
Yeah. I know exactly what that business is. That should be me walking over to Sean right now. That’s how it was supposed to go. That’s how I visualized it. And that’s exactly what didn’t happen. This really is the hurting game.
As I turn my back, I hear Sean’s voice one more time, and this time it is for me.
“Lucas,” he says. I turn around. “You were doing well until you got caught. It happens. You’re an exciting fighter. Keep at it, alright?”
“Thanks, Sean. Thanks for coming out.”
Those aren’t the words I was meant to say to him. I was meant to say . . . of course I’ll sign the contract to fight in the UFC. I’m so happy! I won’t let you guys down!
The universe had other plans for me.
Oh, well. Back to the drawing board we go.
Time to climb back up the ladder.
Chapter Three
Mila
I struggle to open my eyes, and when I try, only one does what I want it to do.
The other eye—the one I’m trying to open— is sealed completely shut. I hear a beeping around me, and I can’t move my body to do much except blink. My eyelid will still listen to me, but the rest of my body isn’t responding. When my one good eyelid lifts up, I see my family standing over me. My mom is holding my hand, and my dad is standing near my feet, looking upset. I hear them calling my name, and my brother yells for a doctor or nurse to come into the room because I’m awake.
I’m confused at first, and when I try to talk it’s a struggle. It’s like my brain knows what I’m trying to say, but my ears hear a jumbled mess of sounds. I try again and the same thing happens. I start to get upset and try to move my body around but I can’t. That’s when I really start to panic.
My mom puts her hand on my shoulder to comfort me. It doesn’t work. That’s when I hear her voice in my ear.
“Stay still, baby. You’re okay. You’re at the hospital. Something happened and you were hurt. Don’t be afraid, the doctors are working to make you all better.”
The doctors come in and try to soothe me also. A bunch of nurses flood the room. The beeping of my machine gets louder, and that makes me panic. I try to move for a second time but nothing happens at all.
My mom is still talking to me, trying to tell me everything will be okay, but I know something bad happened and nothing will be okay again. Adrenaline is coursing through my body as I try to get it to respond to me.
I don’t see it happen, but they must have given me something to calm me down. My eyelid—the only part of my body that I can control, starts to close. As it does, I feel nothing but fear, but soon that’s replaced by total blackness.
Chapter Four
Present Day
Four
Lucas
My coach, Matt, says that staying humble is everything.
I’m not so good with humility.
There are a few ways that coaches can help with that. Really old school coaches—which luckily Matt is not—would have beaten you down—literally—or had other guys in the gym work you over until both your body and your ego were bruised up nicely, and you’d learned your place in the pecking order. No one trains like that anymore. Instead, Matt keeps my ego in check by having me teach privates and classes.
Even though I can teach all of the disciplines, mostly I teach Jiu Jitsu, which is a grappling and submission art. It’s one of the four main disciplines used in MMA, along with boxing, Muay Thai and wrestling. Jiu Jitsu is called the ‘gentle art’ because you can win a match with a submission, and your opponent can tap out to end the fight. Not all sports are like that—there’s no giving up in boxing. You just keep getting hit until the fight is over. Because Jiu Jitsu teaches discipline, body control, and is the best martial art for self-defense, there are kids classes offered all the time.
The truth is I really love the kids that I work with, and they love training with a real-life MMA fighter. I have a class of three boys and six girls, and even though I protested for a long time when Matt asked—forge
t that, when Matt told me that I was teaching—I love helping the kids build up their confidence and self defense skills.
But, at first, my ego was too big—I admit it now. It was a year and a half ago. I’d just won three fights in a short time, all by knockout or submission. My head was too big to even fit through the door, and Wes hadn’t knocked me back down to earth. At the time I thought I was better than all my team mates, thought I knew more than my head coach (who knows almost everything about the game), and I definitely thought that I was too good to teach some kids’ class. I remember how the conversation went with Matt.
“Get James to do it,” I’d said defiantly. “I don’t want to teach. I’m a fighter, not a coach.”
“James is busy.”
“Busy? Busy doing what? He doesn’t even have a fight coming up!”
I heard the arrogance in my voice when I asked the question, but I wasn’t capable of not sounding that way. Matt looked up and took his glasses off.
“It doesn’t matter what,” he said. “I’m telling you that I need you to do this, so asking me if someone else can do it sounds like you’re trying to ignore your responsibility.”
“Responsibility? To who? I didn’t sign up to teach some stupid classes.”
“Your responsibility it to this gym—to me, and all of your other coaches who give you a platform to train and get where you want to get. We put hours into you and your career, that we don’t charge you for. Hours spent watching film of your opponents, phone calls to each other to strategize for your upcoming fight, and a million other things you don’t see. We do that for you, because it’s our job to make you better. But you owe it to give back to the gym that’s given to you, to help the next line of future champions, or whoever walks through those front doors to learn. You understand me?”
Matt has a way of putting me in my place that doesn’t make me want to fight him. He’s probably the only man on earth who has that capability. I’ve never gotten along with authority figures—I got suspended in my freshman year of high school for stupid stuff like ‘insubordination’, which is basically a nice way of saying I acted like a dick to my teachers. The next year is when my parents finally had enough and took me to the gym as a last-ditch effort. So, I met Matt when I was a sophomore—fifteen years old—and almost got kicked out of school for some serious stuff.
My parents didn’t know what to do with me, and even though we got along, they just couldn’t get through to me, so instead they tried something that turned out to be the best decision of my life—they brought me to my first martial arts class. That’s when I met Matt, and that’s when I learned how to respect authority figures.
Matt kicked my butt into shape—made clay into something resembling a statue—but it took some time. I’m a stubborn man, and I was even worse at fifteen, but Matt found a way to break through when he asked me a very specific question. To this day I have no idea how he even knew to ask me. This is why I call him ‘Splinter’, like Master Splinter from Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles—the old wise rat who always knows how to say the right thing.
“Lucas, I want to ask you something, and you don’t have to tell me the answer if you don’t want to, alright?”
“What is it?” I ask, scared as to what this guy I barely knew at the time was going to ask.
“Have you ever been bullied?”
It was like he was seeing into my life, seeing something that I never told anyone, not even my mom and dad. I was so freaked out by the question that I didn’t say anything. I looked at him like an idiot, my mouth hanging open like I was going to say something, only nothing would come out. All that time, Matt just kept looking into my eyes, asking the question again without actually asking it again out loud. He just waited, patiently, until I finally answered. Well, sort of answered.
“How. . . how did you know?”
“Because I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve seen what happens when kids get bullied.”
“What do you mean ‘what happens’?”
I’ll never forget what he said to me next. “Insecurities. You’re filled with them. I can see it all over you, from how you carry yourself, to how you behave, to how your parents tell me you behave at school. You’re an insecure young man.”
I’d never heard anyone say anything like that to me. No one ever suggested anything so preposterous to my fifteen-year-old mind. Like most things I wasn’t comfortable with back then, I just rejected it outright.
“Insecure? Me? Are you nuts?”
“I’m not nuts, and when you talk to me I need you to respect me. Otherwise you can’t train here.”
“But my parents told me that if I don’t train here then I have to see some shrink to fix the problems I’m having at school.”
“Then you have a choice,” he told me. “What happens from here on out is up to you, and no one else—not me, not Mom, and not Dad—just you. If you want to avoid seeing a shrink, or whoever else your parents are going to drag you to, then you have to show me respect when we talk. No reverence or obedience, but respect.”
“What do those words mean?” I asked.
“You can disagree with me—I’m not some master in a Kung-fu movie from the 1970’s. You can have your own mind and your own opinion on things. But how you express those disagreements needs to be done respectfully. Let me be plain with you, Lucas. If you act like an asshole, you’re out. Plain and simple, no questions asked. The next drive will be to a psychologist. Simple as that. If you want to avoid that, then I’ve told you how you need to behave. It’s really very simple.”
I’d never had anyone take the time to speak to me like that—not yell, not punish, but just give it to me straight, with no emotion involved. I responded to that right away.
“Okay, I get it. And look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be an asshole.”
“It’s okay. But we need to go back to what I was saying. Do you disagree that you’re an insecure person?”
“Well, kind of, yeah. I mean, isn’t insecurity for girls? I always hear that. She’s sleeping around with half the football team because she’s insecure, or has no self esteem. I’ve never heard it said about a guy.”
“Now you have. And that’s only one way insecurity can change the way you behave. For some girls, it’s things like you just described, but for boys, it’s how you carry yourself.”
“And how do I carry myself?” I asked.
“Arrogantly. You act like you’re better than everyone, but you don’t believe that at all. You think the opposite, actually, so you overcompensate by puffing your chest out and mouthing off to teachers. That’s arrogance, and it comes from a lack of confidence.”
This dude was blowing my mind, so much so that I actually forgot that we were talking about me. I just got into the things he was saying. “I thought those were the same thing. I mean, not exactly, but I thought that arrogance was just someone with too much confidence.”
“No,” he told me without missing a step. “That’s not true. Confidence is quiet. Confidence just is, and a confident man doesn’t have to tell you how great he is at anything, or how much better he is than other people. Only arrogant men do that. Only insecure men.”
“You’re freaking me out right now.”
“Good,” he said. It was the first time in all of that time that he really smiled. “If you stick around long enough, I’ll do that a lot. But understand that I was just like you. I got into fights. I got into trouble. I was arrogant also. It took someone to take me under their wing and show me that I was wrong about almost everything in my life. Maybe I can help you in that regard.”
“Dude, you’re like Master Splinter.”
“Who?” he asked.
“Master Splinter. Like the Ninja Turtles, you know? He’s a rat.”
“So, you’re calling me a rat?”
“No. . . I mean, I guess, sort of but I. . . dude, it was a compliment. Please don’t throw me out.”
He laughed hysterically. “I’m not going t
o throw you out. . . yet.” When he’d finished laughing, he just looked at me and waited for an answer.
“Yeah,” I finally admit. “I was bullied. For a while. I finally got sick of it and I handled things.”
“Did you now? Is that what you call what happened? Handling the situation?”
“Those kids needed to learn a lesson. They’d given me shit since 8th grade and I was fucking sick of it!”
“Excuse me,” Matt told me. “Don’t curse when you’re talking to me. You haven’t earned that privilege yet.”
“Privilege? Since when is it a privilege to curse?”
“Is it something you want to do?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well it’s not something I want to listen to. So, if you want to curse, you have to earn it. That makes it a privilege. Outside say whatever the fuck you want, but in here you have to earn your right to be angry.”
“But you just. . .”
“I know I did. It’s my gym, and I’m older than you.”
“That’s not fair, man.”
“No,” he agreed. “From your perspective, I don’t suppose it is. But if you’re going to be in a martial arts dojo, you have to understand something important. There’s a pecking order here. This isn’t our soft little society where everyone gets a participation trophy—this is the wild, where every animal knows his place in the pack, and if you forget that place, everyone will remind you. That’s what I just did. Don’t curse around me. Not until you’ve earned it.”
“Fine, whatever.”
“And here’s lesson number two—getting into fist fights isn’t the way to solve problems. It’s just not. If you’re going to swing on everyone who picks on you, we’re not going to get along.”
“But. . .”
“No buts for right now. I need to know that you’re not going to get into any fights while you train here. In fact, I want you to do everything you can to avoid situations like that. If you can’t agree to those conditions, then you can talk to the psychologist your parents are dying to take you to to deal with your anger issues.”
The Savage Gentleman Page 2
