The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment (4 page)

Room’s dark. So are my thoughts.

I go through my mental checklist of things that can go wrong, like a doomed pilot figuring out how he’s going to crash. I’m hungry enough to eat the hotel carpet—and I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s been on the hotel carpet.

I’m in a non-smoking room on a non-smoking floor in a completely non-smoking hotel. Yet, my neighbors in an adjoining room have decided, rather abstractly, to interpret the term “non-smoking” as “no
cigarette
smoking.” I can hear them mumbling, stumbling, and coughing through the chintzy, quarter-inch-Sheetrock hotel wall. Living up to my low expectations of them, not a single one of the stoners had the courtesy to stuff a hotel towel under the door like Dylan did at the Delmonico Hotel when he turned on the Beatles. As a result, the nimbus cloud of pot smoke does not remain in their room. The acrid, THC-laden fog spills out into the hallway, and from there into every room on the floor, most namely mine.

So now
my
room smells like I’m holding a Cannabis Cup. If the reek of pot is this bad in my room, where there is no pot smoking going on, how can the pot-heads even see through the smoke in their room? It explains why I keep hearing strange crashing noises.

I get off the bed and open the windows to minimize my exposure to secondhand smoke. But open windows = draft, and weight cut = no body fat for insulation. I lie back down on the hard bed and begin shivering in the darkness like a penitent monk. I have a choice to make: I can either be cold or be stoned
^*
. I can’t turn in a postfight urine sample that smells like Ziggy Marley’s guitar case, so nothing changes. I allow the frigid night air pouring into my luxurious, temperature-controlled hotel room to battle the eye-stinging reefer smoke coming in from the hallway. Weigh-in is tomorrow. Pretend to sleep. Can’t eat. Wish I had been born Saudi Arabian rich, or Asian smart.

The UFC runs a well-organized, well-paced, completely-packed-with-fans weigh-in, which consists of fourteen to sixteen parched palookas milling about distractedly, shoving up against one another, waiting impatiently to get weighed like cattle in a stockyard. After the scale comes a moment or two of making angry faces at one another for photographers. Although it can be fun to an extent, it’s also a trifle silly, like a really catchy pop song. I’m just grateful it’s never too heavy. (The next day is always heavy enough.) The good part of weigh-ins is that they offer a chance to catch up with old friends, troll for sponsors ($), repeat unsubstantiated rumors and irresponsible gossip, tell outright lies as if they were the Gospel truth with a concentration of people with itchy Twitter fingers, snipe at your opponent and his camp (which is always filled with the same similarly deranged, useless cornermen/retainers as mine is), and look forward to gorging on all the foods that you’ve avoided for six weeks.

The weigh-ins usually include one or two hometown heroes who are fighting on the undercard. They are added to the roster to give the event a touch of local “flava,” and these bumpkins can be seen wandering around wide-eyed, which is very sweet and innocent. There they are, fighters among fighters, and I think that is great. Enjoy the feeling for a while, kids … then go get ready. Tomorrow you will fight someone who has done some fightin’. Thanks to Joe Silva, the UFC has some great matchmaking, and every once in a while one of the hometown heroes goes out there and beats a solid, established guy, and the prelim crowd, which has a high concentration of the hometown hero’s family and friends, goes absolutely nuts. And that’s great for him, and them, but this isn’t my hometown. I’m hungry, tired, thirsty, and cranky. I just want to get the weigh-in over with.

Knowing that the scale is waiting for me, my increasingly annoying and swelling entourage and I navigate our way into the cramped elevator and head toward the lobby, seemingly stopping at every floor. Once in the lobby, we make haste for the arena—through the casino, past the banks of slot machines, gaming tables, and the buffet my room-service-stuffed louts can never seem to find, even though it’s
RIGHT THERE!
I just want to get this done, and then this guy walks up with his kid.

The kid is ten, maybe twelve, years old, and he’s wearing a shirt with my name on it. He’s got a Sharpie marker clutched in one hand, and a poster in the other. And in that instant, I don’t feel hungry or tired or thirsty or cranky anymore. I’m overwhelmed and humbled that the kid and his dad care. They start walking alongside me, and I feel strength and a sense of happiness that is hard to describe.

Immediately, I stop to talk with them, oblivious to how many cornermen or UFC functionaries are trying to hustle me along by telling me that I’m late. This kid is getting an autograph and a picture with me, and whatever else I can give him. And you know what? I walk away feeling like
I
got the better part of that deal. How can you not get overwhelmed by someone who came all that way to meet you, to wish you well, and yell your name as you take your lumps, win or lose? The scale can wait.
Take one more pic for safety, Dad. Now you get in the picture with your son and me; that’s where you belong. Hand the camera to my cornerman—he’ll take the picture. It’s the only useful thing he’ll do all weekend. Just give him a second to get his focus mitts off. There. Got it? Lemme see. OK, good. What, you’re thanking me? No, thank you, sir, for letting me in the picture with you and your son. It’s my honor and pleasure. You keep believing and I will keep fighting.

My name is called—here we go. I waltz out and quickly remove my sweats. I’m a jock, so that is what I wear. What I have always worn. Easy on, easy off. Over the years I’ve watched guys wrestle harder with their clothes and shoes at weigh-ins than they do with their opponent the next night in the Octagon. Some guys show up in what can only be described as costumes.

One particular fighter regularly comes out dressed like a cowboy. He’s donning the whole OK Corral getup—garish “row-DAY-oh” shirt; tight, dark “gunfighter” vest; even tighter Wrangler jeans; a dinner-plate-size belt buckle (purchased, not won at an actual Rodeo, which is where genuine cowboys compete for such things); shiny, super-pointed cowboy boots that have never seen a stirrup; and, of course, to protect him from the blazing sun at an
indoor
weigh-in, a ridiculous, ten-gallon cowboy hat (black, of course, so we understand what type of badass he is).

The first time I saw him in that outfit, I wanted to give him some candy because I was positive it was his Halloween costume. It was startling, and more than a little embarrassing. Naturally, I assumed he had lost a bet, and having to appear in public dressed like a fool had been the wager. Sure it would be a one-time affair, I wanted to rib him by asking where his broomstick horse was, but I figured that after losing such a terrible bet he wouldn’t be in the mood for humor. A few months later, my whole losing-a-bet theory was shattered when I saw him at other weigh-ins dressed in that same silly getup. I’ve since come to realize that it’s his gimmick. I guess I also have a gimmick, which can best be described as the persona Pontificating Loudmouth. So, to be fair and honest, me and my gimmick are probably more annoying and distracting than him and his. Regardless, it is too late for either of us to stop now. He’s got to keep dressing up like Bat Masterson, and I’ve got to keep talking a world of garbage whenever a microphone is shoved anywhere near my mouth.

All of us who fight for a living need to find a way to get ourselves out there. To each his own. Good luck tomorrow, Cowboy. Don’t know whom you’re fighting, and having to focus on my own circumstances, I won’t find out how you did for a while. But good luck.

Just took off most of my clothes. Time to get on the scale, Chael. I notice that rhymes. Maybe that should be a new game on the Price is Right. The Chael Scale. Plinko’s getting old. And yes, I am getting punchy from starvation and dehydration. Dizziness and minor hallucinations? You betcha. I move toward the scale.
Easy now, one foot at a time. Right, now left. There you go, big guy.
Did it. Watch as the commissioner moves the little brass weights back and forth. He looks puzzled by the scale’s mysterious operational intricacies, much like I was when getting weighed in the doctor’s office when I was seven. The weights finally even out, and as always, I come in right on the nose at 185 pounds. God is in heaven and all is right with the world. Flex the bones where my muscles used to be and mentally transport myself to the McDonald’s in my mind.

Step (stagger) off scale. Head across the stage to have one more nose-to-nose stare down with my opponent for the cameras, the crowd, and the kids on the Internet. Raise my fists as high as my thirsty, atrophied muscles will allow. If I can’t raise them higher than this tomorrow, it’s going to be a short night. I’ll wake up in the middle of the Octagon, horizontal, with a crowd around me. Don’t want that. Need fuel. Last few pictures, backslap from Dana White, the boss. He’s really buff now, and I’m really dizzy, so when his palm strikes my shoulder, I just about pitch forward and do a face-plant on the stage.

Then it’s done, and my opponent and I are replaced by two other sucked-dry, cantankerous combatants who have waged their own battles with travel, entourages, starvation, dehydration, insomnia, anxiety, fear, and fear’s meaner, older brother, panic. Any fighter who tells you he doesn’t have to deal with each and every thing I just typed is a liar.

The lead-up to fights is hard, but after the weigh-ins a sense of calm comes over me. I feel that calm on the surface because I can finally EAT, and I feel it on a deeper, more philosophical level because matters are kind of out of my hands at that point. I’ve gotten on the scale. I’ve made a contract with my employers and fans that states I will show up the next day and let them lock the cage door behind me and another guy a lot like me, and we will thrash each other senseless for their pleasure. It’s like letting gravity take over. There’s no way out but
down
.

I’ve heard that many people who commit suicide seem strangely upbeat in the days leading up to the actual task of killing themselves, and having been a fighter for some time, I’m pretty certain it’s because the decision has been made, the hard work’s been done, and the pressure is off. The only thing left is that act. I can understand and appreciate that mind-set. After the weigh-ins there is nothing left to do but eat and defend myself—in that order. Those are very basic, primal directives, and when you know that those two things are all that is expected of you, it brings a kind of tranquility and focus.

sk any stripper why she made the horrible decision to start taking her clothes off for a living and ninety percent of the time she will tell you it’s because she is trying to put herself through college. It doesn’t matter if she is eighteen or fifty-three. (And yes, there are fifty-three-year-old strippers—and yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth.) If there were actually that many strippers receiving higher educations, the professional business world would be a lot more attractive. In reality, there are only a handful of reasons strippers do what they do, and none of them have to do with earning a degree in astronomy. The same is true for MMA fighters. Fighters are constantly going on and on about why they feel they were destined to become fighters. It’s all rubbish. A guy chooses to climb into the cage for a living because he was either a) loved too much or not enough or, b) because he is an athlete who simply wants to keep doing what he loves.

I fall into the latter camp, which doesn’t allow me to recount a grandiose tale of woe on the coming pages. I wasn’t smuggled across the border in a backpack, nor did I spend the first nine years of my life in a closet. My story is rather bland, and I think that is a good thing. Personally, I don’t think the general public has any more tears left to shed for fighters who had it rough on the mean streets of Malibu. Even if I did have such an upbringing, which I didn’t, I wouldn’t tell you about it in this book. Personally, I feel there are far more important matters to discuss. Matters that would probably make the United States a better place to live if we all gave them just a few moments of attention.