The Voice of Reason: A V.I.P. Pass to Enlightenment Read online

  INSIDE NOW

  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.

  The Mean Streets of West Linn, Oregon

  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.

  However, the one aspect I will share with you about my upbringing has to do with wrestling. And believe me, this has far more relevance to my current position as a fighter than does a story about how some haunting figure in my family used to beat me with a buggy whip every time I opened my mouth. I started wrestling for two reasons: because it was expected of me, and because there wasn’t much else to do. And when I say there wasn’t much else to do, I mean it. I grew up in West Linn, Oregon, which is pretty much the definition of “the boonies.” My daily routine went like this: get up at the crack of dawn, do some chores, go to school, attend wrestling practice, come home and feed the animals, and then go to bed when the sun went down. We had a television, but it was black-and-white. No remote. And I didn’t have neighbors, at least not any who weren’t a long bike ride away, so except for the time I spent on the mat, there was zero interaction with other children.

  I didn’t have friends, but I didn’t know that I didn’t have friends. That’s just the way things were. When I got to high school, I constantly heard people talking about crazy parties, and I thought they were nuts. The only type of party I knew about was the one where you showed up with your parents, gave some kid you barely knew a birthday present, ate some cake, and went home. Every time I heard someone mention a crazy party, I thought to myself, “I wonder whose birthday it was?” I had no idea that a group of my peers were going out into an abandoned field, lighting a huge bonfire, and plucking beers from a massive
cooler.

  Even if I had been invited to these parties, which I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have gone. My life was defined by wrestling. It’s where I got my excitement. I happened to live in the nicest place in all of Oregon (seriously, West Linn wins awards for its pulchritude), but when it came time to wrestle, I was transported to Northeast Portland. At the time, Northeast Portland was nationally infamous because it was home to two of the most violent, notorious street gangs, the Crips and the Bloods.

  Back in the day, Portland judges didn’t just drop the hammer on criminals and send them to jail for life. If a judge looked across the courtroom at you and saw even a hint of goodness in your eyes, he would often give you an option. If you were an adult, he would give you the choice of going to prison or joining the military. If you were a juvenile, he gave you the choice of going to a detention center or reporting at five-thirty every afternoon to Coach Roy Pittman’s wrestling practice.

  As a result, I spent my youth wrestling with hardcore gangbangers. I was one of the few white kids in practice, but I never thought anything of it because it had been my life since the age of nine. The Crips wore blue and the Bloods wore red, but they were not allowed to wear their colors in the training room, so I never knew a rivalry existed between them. I never even knew any of them were in gangs because when you were on Coach Pittman’s mats, you didn’t get a drink of water or tie your shoes, let alone talk. At the end of practice, the Crips would leave through one door and the Bloods through another. I didn’t even think anything might be amiss when I started routinely going to funerals. I had all sorts of teammates die, teammates who I looked up to, who were national champions and Olympians. I just thought it was all a part of growing up.

  But for every boy we lost, ten more were saved, which is why I truly wish there were a lot more men like Coach Pittman around. The world would be a better place, and there would be a lot fewer kids in prison, or in the grave.

  In addition to changing the lives of hundreds of youths, Coach Pittman was also a very interesting guy. Unlike most coaches, he had never wrestled in a single match. He didn’t even own a singlet. Despite having never wrestled, he was the best darn coach on the planet. Why? Because he was a master motivator, and even more important, he was consistent. He never missed a practice, not once. And he expected us to be at practice every single day, including Christmas Eve. The only day he allowed off was Christmas Day.

  I remember him showing up to practice one Friday night all dressed up. He arrived in his Corvette with a do-rag on and a beautiful woman in tow. He had asked Anthony Amado, who had placed fourth in the Olympics, to fill in for him so he could go on his date, but apparently he didn’t fully trust Anthony and wanted to make sure practice got off to a good start. Just as Coach Pittman was about to leave, he saw something he didn’t like. “I need more, Anthony,” he shouted. Immediately Anthony changed the warm-up, but Coach must have found it still unsatisfactory because he flung off his do-rag, and the next thing you know, he’s on the wrestling floor. His jacket comes off. Then he disappears for a moment and comes back dressed in his workout clothes. It doesn’t take more than ten minutes before he is fully immersed in practice and his hot date is walking out the door. At the time, I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t like Coach Pittman was leaving us high and dry—he had an Olympian overseeing practice, but he still couldn’t step away from the team for even one night.

  Coach Pittman’s commitment to the team was insane. At one point, he was invited to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss how his wrestling program was changing the lives of kids who’d had a rough go, and he agreed to appear. But when he found out that he couldn’t tape the show on a Saturday or Sunday, that he would have to show up at the studio during the week and miss wrestling practice, he canceled. Yes, Coach Pittman gave up a chance to be on Oprah to ensure that we snotty kids got the attention he felt we deserved.

  Another time after practice he held up two front-row center tickets to the Bulls–Trail Blazers game. The Bulls had Scotty Pippen and Michael Jordan then. With Nike’s headquarters in Portland, the only place Jordan was more popular was Illinois. So Coach Pittman holds up these tickets and asks which one of us wanted to go. Every last one of us held up a hand. Then he said, “The game is on Friday night at seven, the same time we have practice. Who still wants to go?” Every one of us kept his hand raised. And you know what he did? He ripped those tickets to shreds and vehemently threw the scraps to the ground.

  “Do you know why you won’t go watch Michael Jordan?” he asked. No one said a word. “Because when you are competing on Saturday, he will be at practice. And that is exactly where you will be when he is performing on Friday.” With that said, he made us all do twenty-five pushups.

  Excuses did not exist in Coach Pittman’s world, so he didn’t allow them to exist in ours. There were days when we could hear gunshots outside, and there were days when the windows high above us would shatter, either from bullets or rocks. We never knew the cause because we weren’t allowed to stop wrestling, not even for a moment. When sirens started howling outside, Coach Pittman would simply get up and lock the doors. He would say to us, “You can’t lose focus, not even for half a second. If you suckas think half a second isn’t a long time, then I want you to go home and turn on the burner on your stove. I want you wait until it is glowing hot, and then I want you to set your palm on that burner for a half a second. Then I want you to come back here and tell me half a second isn’t a long time.”

  I can truly see the wisdom behind his words now. A half a second of lost focus can be an eternity, and it can also shatter a man’s hopes and dreams. Need an example? Look no further than my fight with Anderson Silva.

  There were many such lessons Coach Pittman taught us, but perhaps the most important one was that you take your responsibilities seriously. It’s not about how you feel. There were dozens of times when the last thing I wanted to do was show up for practice, but I did because I had made a commitment. It’s the same now. When I make a commitment to fight, I fight. It doesn’t matter if I’m not feeling well or have a nagging injury. In the fight business, everyone feels sick before a bout and everyone has nagging injuries. That is why it upsets me so terribly when a fighter signs a contract to do battle on a certain night and calls in sick. And most of the time the reasons for backing out are pathetic. I’ve heard about guys calling in sick for staph infections. I’ve heard about guys calling in sick because they pulled their hamstring or hurt their hand. I have never missed a competition in my life because of illness or injury, and it’s not because I haven’t been hurt or haven’t been sick. If you say you are going to be somewhere, you suck up whatever pain or misery you may be experiencing and you show up.

  If it were up to me, I would write a forfeiture clause into the sport of MMA. Every other sport has it. If GSP signs a contract to defend his title on a certain day and at a certain time, he should have to do that. For Super Bowl 2013, the time and date of kickoff have already been set. Same for 2014, 2015, and 2016. If one of the teams that make it to the Super Bowl decides not to play because, say, the quarterback has a staph infection or a pulled hamstring or whatever the heck any of those excuses truly mean, a Super Bowl champion will still be crowned that day. The same thing should happen in MMA.

  These are the types of things I learned growing up. I didn’t have a tough life full of tough love, which doesn’t make for an exciting story. But at least I’m not a prima-donna crybaby who covers my body in tattoos and thinks he has the right to call in sick. I didn’t join the sport so I could cut in line at strip clubs. Fighting is an obligation, just like real life is an obligation. If someone were to kick in my front door right now, I couldn’t say, “Geez, you’re fifty pounds bigger than me, this isn’t really fair.” No, I’d get up off my ass and show him the way back out, which is what we should do with a lot of the current fighters.

  So I just want to say, thank you, Coach Pittman for making me a real man.

  Richard Nixon: Still My
President —and Here’s Why

  ixon was a man. Not a particularly handsome or well-spoken man like yours truly, but a true man who got the job done. Every documentary about the Vietnam era shows that same clip of Nixon getting out of a plane and flashing the peace sign with both hands, which is fine. But then immediately after this clip they always smash-cut to a montage of clips depicting various acts of ‘Nam-era derring-do by our courageous soldiers. In these clips they are either dropping load after load of bombs or fearlessly patrolling the fetid Southeast Asian jungle with their M-16’s (always with cigarettes dangling from their lips) or burning down “hootches” as “Charlie” flees in terror or on fire. They show clips of helicopters flying low, spitting death onto the enemy, the trees, the ground … well, onto just about anything and everything. Which is fine by me, but. …

  Richard Milhous Nixon, patriot and president, didn’t get us into the Vietnam War—he just did his best to win it. Nixon inherited Vietnam from … the Democrats.

  Tell me, my fine friends and readers, have you ever seen a documentary or clip that associates either John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson with the admittedly gruesome shenanigans in Southeast Asia? No, you probably haven’t. Now ask yourself if that makes sense, knowing that both of those rogues had a lot more to do with it than Nixon. Wondering why that is? Let me tell you. It’s because the people who make all those video montages are the direct philosophical descendants of the curs that brainwashed the country into thinking JFK and LBJ were good presidents and decent men. It’s the same media men and women who ran the patriot Richard Nixon out of the highest office in the land, which he won in an overwhelming landslide—in a “mandate from the masses” unlike any seen before or since.