The Laws of the Ring (9 page)

When I asked him what his main food was, he broke into a big smile and said, “Spicy Red-Hot Cheetos.” No lie—Spicy Red-Hot Cheetos. I tried to hide my disgust, but he must have noticed because he said, “Oh, and I eat at Jack in the Box, too.” He had grown up eating the cheapest and least-nutritious food available. Fast-food burgers, white bread, frozen dinners, school lunches, high-carb snacks full of high-fructose corn syrup. I wasn't surprised when Poppies told me he had nearly died due to a burst appendix when was only eighteen. He had been exposed to very few fruits and vegetables. And those he had tried he wasn't interested in eating again.

I took this as a challenge. As with most every other lifestyle choice, I'm pretty fanatical about my diet, and I believe I get a lot of my strength and durability from the food I put in my body. I take diet very seriously, and seeing Poppies repeatedly toss garbage into his body made me cringe. It was a bad habit that was getting in the way of his purpose. For him to compete, change was needed.

But like many lifelong habits, this was difficult to break.

I'd give him tomatoes.

“I don't eat that, bro.”

I'd give him lettuce.

“I don't eat that, bro.”

This was frustrating, and the more difficult he became the more intent I was. I definitely needed to take a new approach, and one day it dawned on me: He'd turn down any fruit or vegetable he had tried in the past. The routine was almost reflexive. If he'd had apples before, he refused to eat them. If he'd had carrots before, he'd refuse to eat them.

Okay, Poppies,
I thought to myself.
I think I've figured out a way to make this work.

There are a lot of fruits and vegetables in this big wide world. I didn't have to focus on the common ones. If I brought Poppies something he'd never seen before—kale or acorn squash, say—he couldn't refuse it by telling me he didn't eat it. How would he know he didn't like it if he'd never seen it before?

It worked. I'd prepare something he hadn't seen before and—perhaps to please me—he'd eat it. I would hide stuff, too—mix zucchini into eggs or spinach into meat. In the process, Poppies discovered a taste for “unusual” vegetables. Once he did, he saw a huge difference in how he felt and performed. Once he saw the results, the rest was easy. Something he was originally forced to do became something he
wanted
to do. The bad habit was broken and replaced with a great habit.

Changing his diet changed his life. I firmly believe what we put into our bodies is that important. Just as my brother, Ryan, has been able to maintain a more stable mental state through diet and exercise, Poppies' new diet has made him healthier, both physically and mentally.

Poppies talked about his people a lot. It was partly because our world was so different from his; he felt the need to explain those differences to us. Little things related to bigger things. Our lighthearted needling of each other always got him talking about the attitudes of his people. But I quickly learned that people and place were intrinsic to who Poppies was as a human being. To paraphrase the old saying, we could take Poppies out of the reservation, but we couldn't take the reservation out of Poppies.

He had one desire: He wanted to fight. When we first met, he couldn't really articulate why, but the more time I spent with him the more I understood that his desire linked back to his home and his people.

“Everyone in my tribe is fighting all the time, always at each other's throats,” he would say. He laughed about it, but his fighting career allowed him to find a bigger purpose. He developed a following among his people and fought some big fights at the Tachi Palace. On the nights he fought, nobody else in the community did. They all got under the umbrella with Poppies.

“When I fight, everything changes,” he told me. “They all come together to root for me, and I bring my people closer.”

Poppies lived with us for three years and I spent a lot of time with him, most of it focused on his development as a person. He was a good fighter, and he got better under the umbrella of Team Alpha Male, but the most important improvements Poppies made were out of the cage. When I first met him, he didn't have a productive focus in his life. But during our time together, he became better all around. He even extracted himself from the abusive relationship he was in with his wife and married another woman, named Lucy, who happened to be sweet and educated. She has a great job as a pharmacist's assistant. I was the best man in their wedding and gave a truthful speech about Poppies when I first met him. Everyone laughed at the story while Poppies kicked me under the table. Together they have eight kids—her four and his four. Today, he puts his family first, and
everyone
is better for it.

Conscious Incompetence

If you're exhibiting signs of conscious incompetence, you need a serious self-assessment. You're doing the wrong thing, you know it's the wrong thing, and yet you continue to do it.

The popularity of MMA and the UFC has decreased the number of wild-eyed guys who think they can fight. The barroom brawler mentality has diminished as people understand the varying skills needed to be good at the sport. But back in the early days of my career, every guy who'd ever dropped someone in a bar believed he was the next Randy Couture.

As I started to make a name for myself in the sport, I was contacted by a lot of guys who thought they could fight and wanted to use my connections to get into the game themselves. These were mostly old friends from high school who had wrestled with me, or discovered weight lifting or martial arts after they graduated and felt they had developed physically enough to be contenders. Now, I was more than happy to help if someone showed interest and a willingness to train, but I was less comfortable with acquaintances and old friends looking to use my status as a means of improving their luck in the bedroom or fattening their bank account. There was a pretty clear difference between the serious and the frivolous.

I'll tell you a cautionary tale about an old high school acquaintance I'll call Jack. Jack appeared at the gym one day, asking me if I remembered him and wanting to know if I could hook him up with a fight.

I remembered him. Good guy. Well meaning. But not on anybody's most-likely-to-succeed list. I recalled him being in all the remedial classes and barely managing to get through high school.

I had no idea whether Jack could fight. I had no idea
why
he wanted to fight. I asked him if he'd had any experience fighting.

“I've been training,” he said.

I asked him where.

“In my garage.”

Great. I didn't have much to say to that, and I'm sure Jack could sense my lack of commitment to his cause.

Admittedly, my struggle to get a fight—as a former successful Division I wrestler—was always at the forefront of my mind when I was faced with these situations. I mean, I was polite with everyone, but there was a thought nagging at the back of my mind:
How can all these guys think what I do is so easy?

But I told Jack what I tell everybody: “Show up at the gym and start working out. We'll see what happens from there.”

He came to the gym the next day, and I watched him just long enough to know it was never going to happen. When he was finished, I said, “Dude, you need a lot of work.”

He looked up at me and said, “I don't care. I just want a fight. That's all I want: one fight.”

“It's not that easy, Jack. There are a lot of guys with experience who have trouble rounding up fights.”

This was where Jack played his ace.

“I don't really want to train to fight,” he said. “I just want to fight. And if you get me a fight, I'll repay you by landscaping your backyard for free.”

Much to my surprise, Jack had turned into a very successful businessman. He was working as a landscaper, and he had no problem coming right out and telling me he was making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Now, while I can honestly say that money isn't my primary motivation, this was shortly after I'd opened the gym and shortly after I'd quit my job busing tables, and I was living pretty frugally with my buddies. A hundred grand seemed like a million bucks to me.

Okay, so . . . moral dilemma? Do I seek out a fight for a guy who isn't equipped for it just for my own benefit? How much was a backyard worth to me?

Ultimately, I assessed that he was fully competent and that if it meant
that much
to him, I had enough pull to get him a low-level fight that few would ever see and nobody but Jack would remember.

When I had it arranged, I called him and told him. He was ecstatic, but before he could thank me for the twentieth time, I said, “Jack, I got you the fight, but I really want you to come into the gym and train. You need to train.”

I didn't want him to go out and get hurt. He could embarrass himself—that was
his
problem—but an injury would weigh on my conscience. But once I got him the fight, I never saw him at the gym.

I called him a second time and he said, “I'll be good. I've been training in my garage.”

By then, I gave up.
Okay. Whatever. Suit yourself.

Jack's fight was at an Indian casino called Konocti Vista, in a parking lot. When I saw him before the fight, he was shaking. I swear I've never seen a human being more scared than this guy was in the minutes leading up to this fight. It was like all his bluster and confidence leaked out of him onto the ground and he was left with nothing.

I tried to talk to him. “Hey, man, how you feeling?” He wouldn't even respond with words. He was making these guttural sounds that conveyed no information whatsoever—except that he was scared out of his mind. His face was completely white. I gave him the option of backing out, but he shook his head vehemently and said nothing. He was going to go through with it, apparently, no matter what.

Jack walked into the cage as slow as I've ever seen anyone approach a fight. It wasn't a psychological ploy either. This was like a walk to the gas chamber. It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if he'd thrown up right there on the canvas.

And it only got worse. When the ref said, “Fight,” Jack came charging forward. His opponent punched him a couple of times, slammed him, beat him up a little bit more, and then choked him out. There was very little resistance. Jack's philosophy was unique: He would get in there and get his fight over as quickly as humanly possible. I stood there shaking my head, not sure whether to laugh or cry, as he got up and walked back to his corner, defeat covering him like a blanket. This was something he wanted so badly—until it was actually happening. And then there was nothing in the world he wanted less. Thankfully, he didn't get hurt.

Clearly, Jack's priorities were messed up. He was a ridiculous, fun-house-mirror example of misguided priorities and lack of planning. Not even three weeks later, he reappeared. He told me he knew what he did wrong and how to fix it. He was going to “go back into” training and work hard. And oh, by the way, he wanted me to get him another fight. At the same time I was hearing from friends back in my hometown that he was hanging out in the bars, telling everyone he was a professional fighter. That, of course, had been his motivation in the first place.

I didn't want to be involved with anything like this. I washed my hands of the operation. But Jack somehow managed to get himself another fight, and of course, he got his ass kicked again before deciding to hang it up for good. He fought twice and lost twice, simple as that, but I guarantee you he got a lot of mileage out of the stories in the bars in Lincoln. Who knows what happened in those stories. I'm guessing they bore little resemblance to the fight I watched.

I got my backyard done, though.

The 10th Law of Power

Use Your Head . . . Whatever Way You Can

A
mong the many things you could do to your opponent in the old, Wild West days of MMA: head-butt, kick a guy in the head when he was down, elbow from any position. Professional fighting was a slightly more refined version of Senator McCain's “human cockfighting” by the time I arrived in 2003. You couldn't head-butt or eye-gouge, but the sport still had a ways to go before it became what you see today. I entered an ever-so-slightly modified version of those days: mean, somewhat vicious, borderline sadistic, with just a few more rules than a bar brawl. There was great demand to see these early fights, since there weren't many places to see them and there was never a scarcity of bloodthirsty, beer-soaked fans willing to pay for the right. The ticket I bought to see my friend Tyrone Glover that night in the crowded, smelly ballroom in Colusa? It cost seventy-five bucks.

Tickets that expensive meant fans wanted to be treated to a show they could say justified the cost. That led to one of the most dangerous aspects of the old MMA: referees who allowed fights to last way too long.

The changes came about for a simple reason: In order to survive, the sport had to adapt. So many organizations jumped in when they recognized the economic potential of the sport, and so many of them lost their asses because they didn't understand the market or couldn't maximize its potential. The UFC saved it. People like Dana White and the Fertitta brothers (Frank and Lorenzo) stepped in to usher it toward a more fan-friendly, mainstream sport. MMA was either going to change and become more palatable to the general public, or it was going to be a freak show of sadism with the fighters as sacrificial lambs.

The evolution of the UFC is a broad example of people who got creative with their passion (I'll describe some of the specifics of those creative beginnings later on). My personal evolution as a competitor is a more specific example. Like many MMA fighters, I came from a college-wrestling background. Despite the number of fighters who have taken that route, it's not a seamless transition. College wrestling is regimented and regulated, while MMA is a free-flowing combination of many different disciplines. Creativity is key.

Two legendary fighters in my profession are Randy Couture and Mark Coleman. Couture is renowned for having one of the most adaptive and creative minds in mixed martial arts. He spanned different generations and rules, and in the process, not only defied Father Time, but thrived until the very end of his career. Coleman, on the other hand, while a legend of the sport whose brash personality and gritty toughness likewise kept him in the sport into his late forties, didn't fare as well with the changing tide in MMA. This was evident when they met in the twilights of their careers in a historic UFC bout.

Coleman started fighting in 1996, when the sport was truly anything goes. His nickname was “The Hammer” and his tool of choice was his head. His signature move was a heat butt, which became illegal about the time Coleman hit his prime. But his career dropped off considerably when the rules changed, and by 2004, he started losing close to as many fights as he won.

I once hung out with Coleman in a Las Vegas club, long after his best days in the game were behind him. He had a group of buddies around him, and these buddies were some of his loyal friends. They were proud of him, boosting him up, doing anything for him, and eager to talk about the good old days.

They'd had quite a bit to drink, and one of Coleman's guys told me, in a wistful tone, “You know, Urijah, things really changed for Mark when they took away the head butt.”

Coleman heard him, and he kind of rolled his eyes. I'm not sure he agreed, though I don't remember him disputing the claim, but it's a matter of record that he was a far more dangerous fighter before the sport changed. I'm not sure his troubles arose when the head butt was outlawed—you'd have to ask Mark to get the whole story—but as an observer, I see him as an extreme example of a guy who didn't use enough creativity to adapt to a changing environment. He had worked his whole life so diligently in the world of wrestling that he was able to compete at its highest level—and his grappling skills coupled with his infamous head-butting technique and his ground and pound were enough to compensate for his lack of mastery of all the martial arts for a time.

But in fighting and in life, you have to be able to change. Couture went on to win several world championships and was a contender well into his late forties because of his creative willpower and ability to adapt. As he aged, his hands got better and his submission game improved. He was undoubtedly smarter about how he used his body as it aged. You, like Couture, have to be flexible. You have to be able to improvise. Whether it's developing another signature move or rethinking the way you deliver pizzas, you need to have a strong-willed creativity to thrive. In a way, you need to be strongly flexible. I know that sounds like a paradox, but it's not.

No matter how well you plot out your path, things will change. You can define your sense of purpose and have the most positive attitude imaginable, but you're still going to face challenges. You're going to hit roadblocks. You're going to have to adapt.

How
you adapt is key. The
how
defines the level of success you are likely to reach. If you've reached a point where you are committed to pursuing your passion, you've undoubtedly compiled a mental or written list of pros and cons (if not, you should!). But somewhere in between those two black-and-white sides of the ledger, there's a vast gray area. Once you make the decision to incorporate your passion, that area in between—every if/then scenario that forces you to think on your feet and requires compromise and flexibility—becomes the most important place in the world.