Iceman (9 page)

L
ATE IN
1996,
NOT LONG AFTER OUR SIT-DOWN ABOUT
my career, Nick sent me to see his buddy John Lewis, who was already one of the most respected names in the nascent world of the UFC. Like Hackleman, he was raised in Hawaii and was a street fighter turned martial arts expert. He began studying kickboxing, then picked up a Japanese style called sho kwan do—which is like Thai boxing—and then earned his black belt in judo and Brazilian jujitsu. In one of his early mixed martial fights he battled Carlson Gracie to a twenty-minute draw, in a fight between two of the best Brazilian jujitsu masters in the world. John had tattoos all over his body and a shaved head and looked like a seriously hard guy. But while he could take anyone down in less time than it took to say hello, he was incredibly generous. He normally charged around $200 an hour for his time as an instructor in Brazilian jujitsu, but if you were a fighter, he took you in and made you great (he still gives 15-percent discounts to anyone from Hawaii). He knew how exalted his stature was in the UFC world and also knew that if you trained with him, chances were good you'd get on the radar and get a fight. But he wasn't interested in guys who wanted to come in, work out for two weeks, get a fight, and then disappear. He wanted guys to practice their craft for six months and build their career. He was training people for a lifetime of fights, not just one.

Close to a dozen UFC guys were already training in his Las Vegas gym, called Jsect. It was a single room with one huge mat where everyone worked out. It was all about perfecting moves. He created a completely pure technical environment where we watched each other, trained against each other, and learned from each other. It wasn't the kind of place where you had to worry about getting hurt while you were working out or guys getting jealous of your skills or someone holding out when it came to sharing information. John wouldn't allow it. His place was known for guys helping each other. He studied martial arts because of the discipline it instilled, because he wanted to be well-rounded, and because he wanted to learn as much as possible. Kicking people's asses was secondary. And he brought those same principles to his school.

John had seen me kickbox and remembered me taking out a guy with a straight kick to the head in one of my earliest fights. He told me he thought I was tough and skilled—and definitely looked nasty. But we both knew why I was there. I was scrappy and fearless and mentally ready to take it to the next level as a fighter. But when I decided to make the transition from kickboxing to UFC, my ground game was just too one-dimensional. I was hard to take down, and because of my wrestling experience and understanding of a lot of maneuvers, I was equally hard to keep down when I fell. But I knew nothing about the intricacies and dangers of making someone submit while I was on the ground. I didn't know about joint manipulation or maintaining my guard. I could get out from under someone, but I could never win a fight from my back. And John was better than anyone else at teaching me how to do that.

At first, he wanted to teach me how to get off the ground if I was taken down. We worked on a lot of technical ways to maneuver my body and my arms and my legs so I could get up. For example, if I'm lying on my back and my opponent is on top of me, he is controlling my chest. But if I pummel him and get my arms under his armpits, I can begin to control him a little bit. It's all a matter of making space when you're on the ground. If someone is on top of you, they are naturally leaning over while punching you. So I learned how to get some room. I take my forearm across an opponent's face and then try to wiggle my body, getting him lower on my chest and toward my stomach. I keep wedging my hand between his face and mine, pushing him farther back every time I buck my body, even if it's less than an inch. Eventually I can drop my elbow inside—between my shoulders and his—and then I can get his arm under my arm. If I can hook him from underneath, then I've got the leverage and can practically throw him off me.

Even if I can't, the distance I've created now forces his punch to travel farther before it can actually cause any damage. Which means by the time it reaches me it's losing force. That's if the guy can even punch me. Because the more I'm moving, the more someone has to keep me still. And he can't hit me if he's working to make me into a target.

John and I worked for a month on groundwork, perfecting how to get off the mat when someone was on top. Then we spent time on submission moves and joint manipulation, and then on takedowns from the mat. Slowly, I was building up my glossary of moves, becoming more comfortable with Brazilian jujitsu and the concepts of the ground game. There are so many disciplines in the UFC: kickboxing, wrestling, and a variety of martial arts. For me, once I started training, it wasn't enough to be able to get off the ground. I wanted to dominate from the ground. I wanted to be as well-rounded a fighter as possible, eliminating any weaknesses.

As soon as I decided to fight in the UFC, I knew I wanted to become the light heavyweight champion. Getting a push from Nick was the first step. Training with John was the second. And getting a fight was the third.

I couldn't just call up the UFC and say, “Hey, I'm ready.” First I needed to get at least a little experience in an MMA fight. Luckily, Nick was promoting his first MMA fight and invited me to be on the card. He set it up at the Orleans, which held around fifteen hundred people. But just before the fight, the Nevada State Athletic Commission kept making Nick change the rules. Like a lot of state commissions, Nevada's was spooked by MMA's perceived violence. It objected to closed-fist punching because our bare knuckles were hardly covered by padding. Instead, they only allowed us to do open-palm hitting, which was essentially slapping.

Some other, more minor, rules changes watered down the event, too. But it didn't seem to impact the enthusiasm of the crowd. They were curious about the sport, and no doubt anxious to see some guys get their heads caved in. I, of course, was happy to oblige. Nick told me some big guy from Ohio, neither of us can remember his name, kept asking to fight me. He was always in Nick's ear pleading, “Gimme a chance with Chuck, gimme a chance with Chuck.”

Nick decided this MMA fight was the right time. For the first couple minutes of the first round, the guy kept trying to go low and engage me in some judo moves. But I wasn't having it. I may have come up as a wrestler—and after training with John I may have been even more comfortable on the ground than before—but my most basic stance is aggressive. That's when I'm comfortable and confident. The only time I'm going low is when I have no other choice. But this guy gave me plenty of other options, including just kicking him in the head every time he made a move to wrestle me to the ground. So that's what I did. Twice. Hard. Before the first round was over, I had knocked him out.

And my MMA career had officially started.

I
T WASN'T JUST UFC GUYS IN JOHN'S GYM. ANYONE
who loved combat sports and wanted to learn about martial arts was welcome. And in Vegas, that's a lot of guys. Not another town in the country loves a tough guy more than Las Vegas. Every night the casinos, the strip joints, and the clubs are packed with alpha males throwing around money, gambling fortunes, taking the kind of risks that scare most people. It's a city that appreciates the most basic and gluttonous instincts in all of us. And it rewards them, too. I think that's not only why big fights are drawn more to Vegas than other cities that sanction boxing or UFC, but also why the fighters themselves are so revered there. These days I'm recognized in a lot of the cities I visit. But for the first seven years I fought in the UFC, in most towns I was just a scary guy with a Mohawk. In Vegas, however, where a lot of the fights took place, I felt I was approached as often as Siegfried and Roy. People there love their fighters.

And it's not just the tourists who come to town for a big fight. The natives are the ones who truly appreciate risk. After all, a lot of them had moved out there to chase big dreams—just like a lot of the people who were working out at John's gym. They're the ones who approached him when he was walking through a restaurant just to shake his hand and tell him they liked watching him compete. They're the ones who wanted to learn how to do what he was doing and learn it from him. That's how Dana White and the Fertitta brothers—Frank and Lorenzo—wound up in John's gym studying Brazilian jujitsu alongside me.

The three of them had been friends growing up in Las Vegas. They weren't just fans of boxing, but amateur boxers as well. Dana was a wild kid who loved the fight game. In 1988 he was living in Boston, working as a bellman at a hotel near the harbor and trying to decide if he had the right skills to become a professional boxer. He trained at a club in town with a guy named Peter Welch, who now coaches UFC fighters. Welch let Dana know that although he might love it, he'd never be a pro. “For a long time it really messed with me that I hadn't fought a pro fight,” I once read in an interview Dana did with
Playboy
. “But to fight pro is a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of sacrifice. I didn't take that step. I've always felt I didn't have the balls to turn pro. It wasn't that I was afraid to fight. Fighting is what I loved more than anything. But I used to see guys at the gym who were thirty-five or thirty-six years old who hadn't made it. I would look around and think, damn, I don't want to be that guy.”

Instead he joined Welch as a boxing coach, and they started doing classes for inner-city kids as well as a fitness program for people who didn't know anything about boxing. Dana was making about $50K a year working as a bellman and had a good life doing the boxing stuff on the side. But, like most people from Vegas, he had a notion that life had more in store for him than carrying someone else's bags. He had big ideas, and he had the guts to go after them. He moved back to Vegas and started his own boxing gym. If you've seen Dana on TV hawking the UFC, you know the man can sell. He's a no-bs, fast-talking, great-storytelling pitchman. And, as a native, he had plenty of contacts in the area that would listen. He was still as wild as he had been as a kid. Only now his energy was focused on more than just getting into trouble. He didn't know it at the time, but he was putting together the connections that would make him the most important new sports executive of the twenty-first century. He convinced a lot of high-profile businessmen to come by his place. That included Lorenzo Fertitta, who was vice chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

One night Frank, Lorenzo, and Dana were at the Hard Rock and saw John Lewis walking through the lobby. Frank pointed him out. This was around 1995, and all three of them had been keeping up with this new sport that was just a couple of years old, the UFC. It was particularly big in Vegas, since that is where so many of the fights took place. It had piqued their interest in MMA, and right before John walked through the hotel, they had been talking about how they all wanted to learn new forms of combat sports, such as submission fighting. So Dana, who knew John because they both ran gyms in town, asked if he and the Fertittas could come by Jsect and do some training. As Dana says, “We became completely addicted to it.” Pretty soon they were working out with John three or four days a week. They'd practically rip each other's arms off and do other nasty joint manipulation and submission moves that most people wouldn't dare try if they weren't doing this for a living. But they loved it, and they loved the sport. It was impossible to see at the time, but this is essentially how, where, and when the modern version of the UFC was born. Dana and the Fertitta brothers started training with John, fell in love with the sport, met a lot of UFC fighters, and eventually bought the UFC and turned it into what it is today.

Of course, in the mid-to late 1990s the revitalization of the UFC was still a long way off. In fact, in 1996, before I had ever had a fight, it seemed more likely that the sport would disappear rather than beat major league baseball and the NBA in television ratings. The idea that it could become the next NASCAR was insane. That year Senator John McCain, a longtime boxing fan, called UFC bouts the equivalent to “human cockfighting.” Not long after that, George Pataki, then the governor of New York, had his state's athletic commission ban the sport. In time the sport became even more marginalized. The founders of the UFC had always marketed the extreme angle of the sport. They pushed that it was “no holds barred” and liked the idea that the fans were tuning in to see men go at each other with such unbridled ferocity. The original intent may have been to find out which style of fighting was the best in the world, but it quickly became obvious, to the men who ran the sport, that selling the blood and gore was the best way to go. But the problem with this strategy was that it reduced the fights to what they had been back in the 1920s in Brazil: They were circus sideshows. The fighters weren't considered athletes. Instead they were treated like badass bar brawlers who had a lust for violence; nothing more than hard-core weekend warriors. No one saw the training that was involved or the fighting science that was practiced or the skills that were exhibited. Tens of thousands of fans were buying the fights on pay-per-view and knew what the sport was all about. But to the vast majority of people, ultimate fighters were eye-gouging, head-butting, biting freaks who liked to hurt other people. This is what the owners were selling, much more than they sold the competitive nature of the sport or the skill of the guys in the cage. And it backfired.

The original owners of the UFC didn't worry about ticket sales. They didn't see filling stadiums as the best way to make money off the fights. They weren't even that interested in selling DVDs and sold off those rights to another company. For them, the clearest path to cashing in on the sport was through lucrative television deals.

But after McCain did his rip job and Pataki banned the sport in New York, state after state refused to sanction UFC fights. The commissions called it too violent, barbaric even, and they caved in to community activists who complained about having fights in their states. And when that happened, the TV execs couldn't help but be concerned. Before long, cable companies refused to put the UFC on pay-per-view. By the late 1990s, when I was finally ready to fight, the only way to see the UFC was on satellite TV. And if that revenue stream dried up, there was virtually nothing to keep the sport going.

For me, the politics didn't matter. I understood what was happening, but didn't care all that much. And I definitely didn't worry how it would affect my future. That's not how I think. It's not how I've ever thought. I don't plan, I just do. I was bartending, kickboxing, teaching, and training. To me, that was making a living as a fighter.

But that would change.