There is a secret to the success of Sam Stout, a method to the madness that’s defined his career. A five-time Fight of the Night winner – three consecutive at one point – the “Hands of Stone” has gone the distance in all but one of his three fights sin…
There is a secret to the success of Sam Stout, a method to the madness that’s defined his career. A five-time Fight of the Night winner – three consecutive at one point – the “Hands of Stone” has gone the distance in all but one of his three fights since 2007. Even in defeat, Stout rarely leaves an opponent unscathed. The last time he cried uncle was to Kenny Florian in 2006, and the next time he sees stars and counts ceiling lights after a knockout loss will be his first.Two elements are conditioning and resolve. If you ever expect Stout to quit or his gas tank to reach the letter E, think ag … Read the Full Article Here
There came a point when Sean Pierson had enough of the fight business.To be clear, it wasn’t the first time “The Punisher” contemplated walking away from his livelihood. At one time Pierson was an older fighter lost in the shuffle of a young person’s game, plodding through the independent circuit with thoughts that the Ultimate Fighting Championship was a mere pipe dream – and others telling him he wasn’t going to make it.Pierson persevered until eventually becoming a Zuffa fighter, but it was a year ago when he nearly decided he was through. Days before a scheduled match with Jake Hecht at UF … Read the Full Article Here
There came a point when Sean Pierson had enough of the fight business.To be clear, it wasn’t the first time “The Punisher” contemplated walking away from his livelihood. At one time Pierson was an older fighter lost in the shuffle of a young person’s game, plodding through the independent circuit with thoughts that the Ultimate Fighting Championship was a mere pipe dream – and others telling him he wasn’t going to make it.Pierson persevered until eventually becoming a Zuffa fighter, but it was a year ago when he nearly decided he was through. Days before a scheduled match with Jake Hecht at UF … Read the Full Article Here
It’s been a long and crazy road for Derek Brunson. He was a three-time Division II wrestling All-American at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, but spent most of his young athletic life as a cheerleader and didn’t hit the mats until his senior year of high school. After turning to mixed martial arts, Brunson won his first nine matches, seven coming in the first round. Competing for Strikeforce, Brunson stood at 3-0 and destined for a spot on The Ultimate Fighter, until being notified that his contract would not allow him to compete for a six-figure contract in the UFC. Brunson then … Read the Full Article Here
It’s been a long and crazy road for Derek Brunson. He was a three-time Division II wrestling All-American at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, but spent most of his young athletic life as a cheerleader and didn’t hit the mats until his senior year of high school. After turning to mixed martial arts, Brunson won his first nine matches, seven coming in the first round. Competing for Strikeforce, Brunson stood at 3-0 and destined for a spot on The Ultimate Fighter, until being notified that his contract would not allow him to compete for a six-figure contract in the UFC. Brunson then … Read the Full Article Here
For one of the rare times in his life, Clay Guida was on his couch between hours of slumber when the call arrived. His junior college wrestling team at William Rainey Harper College had a shot at a national championship and a teammate was 10-15 pounds overweight. A week before national qualifiers, Guida had lost a wrestle-off to be on the U.S. National team and his weight fluctuated, so the call from his coach was a concurrence of good luck and bad timing.
Guida’s phone rang the day before the national qualifier. He was asked if he can make weight. Weighing at 160 pounds, Guida had wrestled at 149, so he deduced the challenge was just too daunting, even for someone whose motor could replicate the RPM of a Formula One. Assuming a drastic weight cut was unrealistic at the time, Guida passed on a challenge for one of the few times in his life.
To this day, the tinge of regret that pains the UFC’s current featherweight contender, one who was on the doorstep of a lightweight title shot, is unrelenting – and highly inspiring.
“I kind of gave in and didn’t even give it a try,” Guida said. “I was on the couch when I got the phone call, sitting there eating and didn’t even try. That really motivated me after that to not let something like that happen ever again. It was tough for me to handle, knowing if I would have maintained my weight I could have gone in there and maybe helped a little more in the national title and been more a part of the team than getting bumped the last week of the season.
“That’s always motivated me, especially in this weight cut and this diet now. I’m going to make good on it, the commitment I made to myself, my team and my family.”
A three-sport athlete at Johnsburg High School, Guida’s career took awhile to take traction, but the seeds to what’s been a memorable journey through the world of Mixed Martial Arts were rooted by osmosis. He shared the same room with a group who knew what it took to become JUCO champions in 2001 and has parlayed it into a UFC experience that’s – win or lose – pushed virtually every opponent to the brink of their limits.
“I’m making up for things now. Simple,” Guida said.
Such simple words were spoken deep into preparation for The Carpenter’s inaugural UFC bout as a 145-pound contender this Saturday at UFC on FOX 6 against Hatsu Hioki. Hailing from Japan and heralded as the top featherweight outside of Zuffa’s boundaries, Hioki’s UFC experience has been lukewarm at best. He managed a split decision over George Roop at UFC 137, looked awesome in defeating Bart Palaszewski at UFC 144 in Saitama, Japan, but comes off a loss to Ricardo Lamas at UFC on FX 4 last June that dealt a body blow to his chances at a featherweight title shot.
That shot at what’s been elusive gold is up for grabs for Guida. He chose the dropdown after a run as a UFC lightweight with notable victories over Nate Diaz, Takanori Gomi and Anthony Pettis mixed with defeats to Diego Sanchez, Kenny Florian, Benson Henderson and Gray Maynard. A title at 155 may have evaded him, but Guida insisted his road there didn’t come to an end, but rather made the decision to create a new beginning.
“I absolutely did not hit a ceiling at lightweight,” Guida said. “Once you hit a ceiling in life, you need to kind of rewind and we haven’t done that. Anyone who’s seen my fights, they’ve seen we’ve never fought the lesser competition. We’ve always gone after the bigger and better guy. That’s not going to change now in the featherweight division. It had to do with seeking out another challenge, so we figured we shed a few more pounds off and test the waters at featherweight.”
If you choose to spar with Guida, you better be in triathlon shape. He doesn’t walk the aisle, he runs in place slapping hands with fans. Until selecting a more calculated approach against Maynard, Guida has come at his opposition with the fury of an elephant gun, hair dancing to the beat of a hurricane, difficult to read, and inexorable in both his striking and ground game. After his frenzied split-decision loss to Sanchez, one where Guida took an onslaught of punches and survived a fierce head kick that would have knocked a lesser man out cold, Guida still had the energy to run in place upon Bruce Buffer’s decision announcement.
How is that humanly possible? Simple, says Guida, good old work ethic – along with that painful reminder of what it feels like to not even try.
“The hard part is getting the skill set down,” Guida said. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but if you can’t go out there and push yourself to your limits and get yourself in shape, then you’re in the wrong sport. If you can’t go hard for 15 or 25 minutes, you’re not a mixed martial artist. It’s not getting through the workouts. It’s what you get out of your workouts.”
An average wrestler in high school, Guida found himself at Harper, and sharing a room with multiple state champs and medal winners was critical to his growth as a wrestler and a man. He looks no further than the story of his Johnsburg High teammate and best friend, Jared Karlen, a successful freestyle and Greco-Roman All-American national finalist. The first day at nationals, Karlen dropped a match to the eventual individual national champion before winning his next four. The next day called for a weigh in and Karlen had to burn eight to 10 pounds by eight in the morning. Guida helped by running in tandem up and down a 12-story hotel stairwell for 45 minutes in three layers of sweats – and then came a date with the treadmill.
After making weight, Karlen won four more matches before losing a consolation match, but the vicious cycle led to him losing the weight and helping Harper to a national title.
“Seeing his motivation really drove me in a positive direction,” Guida said. “I know I should have been right there with him, cutting that weight for my own good, to wrestle in the second day or that tournament too. That was a huge point in my wrestling career. My season was over, but to see him … he could have just thrown in the towel and blown weight the next day, and we wouldn’t have won a national title.
“Without him, I wouldn’t have this national championship ring on my finger as a reminder to never be satisfied. To win a national championship is a reminder to me to seek out the best training and always look for the best teammates and keep working hard towards my goal. It motivates me to win a UFC belt at featherweight or lightweight, or whatever weight it might be, and to help those around me.”
Defeating Hioki is motivation enough. Having to do it off a roundly-criticized performance against Maynard during which he chose tactics over excitement serves as new incentive. If anyone deserves a mulligan, it’s Guida. Five Fights of the Night, two Submissions of the Night, and Fight of the Year honors in 2007 (Roger Huerta) and 2009 (Sanchez) are proof solid that Guida is off the couch for good.
“Some fights are barnburners and then you’ve seen me using a little more tactical approaches in these past few,” Guida said. “We’ve been criticized, but we finish fights, we’ve beaten some top contenders and we’ve lost to some of the best. But we go out there knowing I fight every fight like it could be my last. That’s how I played football every down. That’s how I practiced in football growing up. That’s the approach I take in life, to get the most out of every day.”
For one of the rare times in his life, Clay Guida was on his couch between hours of slumber when the call arrived. His junior college wrestling team at William Rainey Harper College had a shot at a national championship and a teammate was 10-15 pounds overweight. A week before national qualifiers, Guida had lost a wrestle-off to be on the U.S. National team and his weight fluctuated, so the call from his coach was a concurrence of good luck and bad timing.
Guida’s phone rang the day before the national qualifier. He was asked if he can make weight. Weighing at 160 pounds, Guida had wrestled at 149, so he deduced the challenge was just too daunting, even for someone whose motor could replicate the RPM of a Formula One. Assuming a drastic weight cut was unrealistic at the time, Guida passed on a challenge for one of the few times in his life.
To this day, the tinge of regret that pains the UFC’s current featherweight contender, one who was on the doorstep of a lightweight title shot, is unrelenting – and highly inspiring.
“I kind of gave in and didn’t even give it a try,” Guida said. “I was on the couch when I got the phone call, sitting there eating and didn’t even try. That really motivated me after that to not let something like that happen ever again. It was tough for me to handle, knowing if I would have maintained my weight I could have gone in there and maybe helped a little more in the national title and been more a part of the team than getting bumped the last week of the season.
“That’s always motivated me, especially in this weight cut and this diet now. I’m going to make good on it, the commitment I made to myself, my team and my family.”
A three-sport athlete at Johnsburg High School, Guida’s career took awhile to take traction, but the seeds to what’s been a memorable journey through the world of Mixed Martial Arts were rooted by osmosis. He shared the same room with a group who knew what it took to become JUCO champions in 2001 and has parlayed it into a UFC experience that’s – win or lose – pushed virtually every opponent to the brink of their limits.
“I’m making up for things now. Simple,” Guida said.
Such simple words were spoken deep into preparation for The Carpenter’s inaugural UFC bout as a 145-pound contender this Saturday at UFC on FOX 6 against Hatsu Hioki. Hailing from Japan and heralded as the top featherweight outside of Zuffa’s boundaries, Hioki’s UFC experience has been lukewarm at best. He managed a split decision over George Roop at UFC 137, looked awesome in defeating Bart Palaszewski at UFC 144 in Saitama, Japan, but comes off a loss to Ricardo Lamas at UFC on FX 4 last June that dealt a body blow to his chances at a featherweight title shot.
That shot at what’s been elusive gold is up for grabs for Guida. He chose the dropdown after a run as a UFC lightweight with notable victories over Nate Diaz, Takanori Gomi and Anthony Pettis mixed with defeats to Diego Sanchez, Kenny Florian, Benson Henderson and Gray Maynard. A title at 155 may have evaded him, but Guida insisted his road there didn’t come to an end, but rather made the decision to create a new beginning.
“I absolutely did not hit a ceiling at lightweight,” Guida said. “Once you hit a ceiling in life, you need to kind of rewind and we haven’t done that. Anyone who’s seen my fights, they’ve seen we’ve never fought the lesser competition. We’ve always gone after the bigger and better guy. That’s not going to change now in the featherweight division. It had to do with seeking out another challenge, so we figured we shed a few more pounds off and test the waters at featherweight.”
If you choose to spar with Guida, you better be in triathlon shape. He doesn’t walk the aisle, he runs in place slapping hands with fans. Until selecting a more calculated approach against Maynard, Guida has come at his opposition with the fury of an elephant gun, hair dancing to the beat of a hurricane, difficult to read, and inexorable in both his striking and ground game. After his frenzied split-decision loss to Sanchez, one where Guida took an onslaught of punches and survived a fierce head kick that would have knocked a lesser man out cold, Guida still had the energy to run in place upon Bruce Buffer’s decision announcement.
How is that humanly possible? Simple, says Guida, good old work ethic – along with that painful reminder of what it feels like to not even try.
“The hard part is getting the skill set down,” Guida said. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but if you can’t go out there and push yourself to your limits and get yourself in shape, then you’re in the wrong sport. If you can’t go hard for 15 or 25 minutes, you’re not a mixed martial artist. It’s not getting through the workouts. It’s what you get out of your workouts.”
An average wrestler in high school, Guida found himself at Harper, and sharing a room with multiple state champs and medal winners was critical to his growth as a wrestler and a man. He looks no further than the story of his Johnsburg High teammate and best friend, Jared Karlen, a successful freestyle and Greco-Roman All-American national finalist. The first day at nationals, Karlen dropped a match to the eventual individual national champion before winning his next four. The next day called for a weigh in and Karlen had to burn eight to 10 pounds by eight in the morning. Guida helped by running in tandem up and down a 12-story hotel stairwell for 45 minutes in three layers of sweats – and then came a date with the treadmill.
After making weight, Karlen won four more matches before losing a consolation match, but the vicious cycle led to him losing the weight and helping Harper to a national title.
“Seeing his motivation really drove me in a positive direction,” Guida said. “I know I should have been right there with him, cutting that weight for my own good, to wrestle in the second day or that tournament too. That was a huge point in my wrestling career. My season was over, but to see him … he could have just thrown in the towel and blown weight the next day, and we wouldn’t have won a national title.
“Without him, I wouldn’t have this national championship ring on my finger as a reminder to never be satisfied. To win a national championship is a reminder to me to seek out the best training and always look for the best teammates and keep working hard towards my goal. It motivates me to win a UFC belt at featherweight or lightweight, or whatever weight it might be, and to help those around me.”
Defeating Hioki is motivation enough. Having to do it off a roundly-criticized performance against Maynard during which he chose tactics over excitement serves as new incentive. If anyone deserves a mulligan, it’s Guida. Five Fights of the Night, two Submissions of the Night, and Fight of the Year honors in 2007 (Roger Huerta) and 2009 (Sanchez) are proof solid that Guida is off the couch for good.
“Some fights are barnburners and then you’ve seen me using a little more tactical approaches in these past few,” Guida said. “We’ve been criticized, but we finish fights, we’ve beaten some top contenders and we’ve lost to some of the best. But we go out there knowing I fight every fight like it could be my last. That’s how I played football every down. That’s how I practiced in football growing up. That’s the approach I take in life, to get the most out of every day.”
“What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny.” — Tony Robbins
Jamie Varner was getting a tattoo done on his arm to pay homage to his mother’s side of the family, which hails from Greece. His great grandfather came to Chicago from Sparta to open a Greek restaurant, before moving to Tucson, where his mother was born and raised. Varner is half Greek, half Irish, but a lot closer to his Greek side, so the ink was a tribute to the Spartan warrior.
The Spartan represents more than Varner’s heritage. In ancient times Sparta was the dominant Greek city state that ruled with the country’s greatest military power that, starting at age seven, bred its soldiers to fight to the death. The way of the Spartan was to fight like hell without thinking twice. That’s long been a part of Varner’s essence until he fell into a ditch that had him questioning the warrior within.
Once he got it back, there was no stopping a competitor who once ruled the WEC lightweight division, especially not three weeks’ notice in accepting a fight with a top contender on national television. Varner got the call to replace an injured Terry Etim and fight Joe Lauzon at UFC on FOX 4 in August, so he abruptly left the parlor with the intention of finishing four weeks later, put a wrap on his arm and went straight to the gym.
Varner lost a three-round war to Lauzon by submitting to a triangle choke, but the Spartan mentality that previously led him to gold had returned, one that will be severely tested on Saturday at The Ultimate Finale, and odds are this one will not go the distance.
Careers could be at stake as well. Once a win away from a shot at the UFC lightweight title, Guillard is 1-3 in his last four with all three losses coming in the first round. Varner justified an invite back into Zuffa with May’s stunning upset of the Edison Barboza, heralded as the latest next big superstar, but is 1-4-1 over his last five competing at MMA’s highest level.
“You win by the sword, you die by the sword. The guy comes out hard, looking for the finish and looking for the win,” Varner said. “Sometimes he gets caught because he’s so aggressive, so I’m expecting a reckless abandon-type Melvin Guillard.
“Sometimes having that reckless abandon isn’t always good,” Varner continued, speaking for himself. “Sometimes you do have to play it safe, but more often than not it works out in my favor when I’m going for the finish.”
Because it wasn’t working for Varner for too long, there were no feelings of disrespect when it was considered an upset that a former champion handed Barboza his first career loss. There was a time when Varner was 16-2 (2 NC) and king of the WEC mountain, winning the title with a third-round knockout of Rob McCullough on February 13, 2008. He enjoyed a two-year reign until WEC 38 in January 2009 when he dropped the title to a rising star named Benson Henderson. Another first-round loss, this one at WEC’s December 2010 swan song to Shane Roller, and Varner was released.
From champion to a has-been still in his 20s, Varner understood the doubts when he accepted the Barboza fight after Evan Dunham’s injury re-opened the door to the UFC. Barboza was the newest unstoppable force to invade the sport and Varner was considered finished.
Relegated to the independent circuit to begin his post-Zuffa career, Varner’s fighting days were on life support. He scored a first-round submission of Tyler Combs on an XFO show, but four months later reached the abyss. He agreed to headline Titan Fighting Championships 20 on September 23, 2011 against Dakota Cochrane and eventually realized there was a difference between having to fight and wanting to fight. At a catchweight of 165 pounds, Varner lost his first regional bout in eight years — and a whole lot more.
“I just didn’t want to fight anymore,” Varner said. “The fight with Dakota was just out of necessity and not out of want, will or desire. I shouldn’t have taken the fight, but I took it anyway because I needed the money. I said I never wanted to fight for the money. I wanted to fight for the will, the passion and the desire. I kind of went back on everything that made me who I was and everything I believed in.”
Being a perfectionist was working against him. He’d get hit once in sparring, frustrations would immediately boil over. He’d make a mistake, he’d self-sabotage. Desperate for a fresh outlook, his belief system distorted, Varner moved from the AMA Fight Club in Whippany, N.J., to suburban Phoenix to train with the MMA Lab and Arizona Combat Sports. It was in his new surroundings where Varner learned he had to allow himself to make mistakes and reclaim how and why he loved fighting. Or as Tony Robbins once wrote, “Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.”
“I had to not associate fighting and the competition with pain and associate myself with pleasure, telling myself this is what I wanted,” Varner said.
“I’m getting what I wanted. Once I started changing my beliefs, enjoying what I was doing for a living and respecting the fact that I was given another opportunity, this gift from God to go out there and compete and have these abilities, it made me appreciate myself and appreciate it so much more.”
Varner roared back with consecutive first-round wins for XFC that set up the call back to Zuffa and Barboza. It took him three minutes and 23 seconds to proclaim his return to prominence by smashing the previously unbeaten prodigy with punches to score the TKO victory. For the first time in a long time, even when many remained skeptical, Varner refused to doubt himself, not for a second.
“I had a lot of growing up to do,” Varner said. “I totally respect the doubts from people because I would have doubted myself. If I was a betting man and I saw that this guy, his last two years, his record was 1-4-1, I probably wouldn’t have put money on him against ‘the next Anderson Silva of the UFC.’ (The doubters) had a right to their opinion and I had to prove a lot of them wrong.”
Seeds for redemption were planted at both Arizona Combat Sports and the MMA Lab, where respective head instructors Trevor Lally and John Crouch — “Those two, it’s like fire and ice,” Varner said. “I can find a happy medium that really works well and has got me in this place mentally.” – reignited Varner’s love for MMA by changing his ideas and approach. Despite the loss to Lauzon, Varner’s effort moved him back into the upper echelon of the lightweight division. The fight was taken on three weeks’ notice, and in the second round Varner fractured the fourth metacarpal in his right hand.
Neither stopped the Spartan within from going for the kill.
“That was a fight I was clearly winning, but because of my burning desire to finish the fight, put on a show, I went for one too many takedowns in the third period with a broken hand and got caught in a triangle,” Varner said.
Varner’s pain became a breakthrough, finally taking him to a place of inner peace and pleasure. There’s only one final destination and Guillard is the next rocky mountain standing in the way.
“I’m not taking easy fights. I’m looking for the fastest way to get to that title,” Varner said. “I want that 20 pounds of gold around my waist. I want to be world champion again.”
“What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny.” — Tony Robbins
Jamie Varner was getting a tattoo done on his arm to pay homage to his mother’s side of the family, which hails from Greece. His great grandfather came to Chicago from Sparta to open a Greek restaurant, before moving to Tucson, where his mother was born and raised. Varner is half Greek, half Irish, but a lot closer to his Greek side, so the ink was a tribute to the Spartan warrior.
The Spartan represents more than Varner’s heritage. In ancient times Sparta was the dominant Greek city state that ruled with the country’s greatest military power that, starting at age seven, bred its soldiers to fight to the death. The way of the Spartan was to fight like hell without thinking twice. That’s long been a part of Varner’s essence until he fell into a ditch that had him questioning the warrior within.
Once he got it back, there was no stopping a competitor who once ruled the WEC lightweight division, especially not three weeks’ notice in accepting a fight with a top contender on national television. Varner got the call to replace an injured Terry Etim and fight Joe Lauzon at UFC on FOX 4 in August, so he abruptly left the parlor with the intention of finishing four weeks later, put a wrap on his arm and went straight to the gym.
Varner lost a three-round war to Lauzon by submitting to a triangle choke, but the Spartan mentality that previously led him to gold had returned, one that will be severely tested on Saturday at The Ultimate Finale, and odds are this one will not go the distance.
Careers could be at stake as well. Once a win away from a shot at the UFC lightweight title, Guillard is 1-3 in his last four with all three losses coming in the first round. Varner justified an invite back into Zuffa with May’s stunning upset of the Edison Barboza, heralded as the latest next big superstar, but is 1-4-1 over his last five competing at MMA’s highest level.
“You win by the sword, you die by the sword. The guy comes out hard, looking for the finish and looking for the win,” Varner said. “Sometimes he gets caught because he’s so aggressive, so I’m expecting a reckless abandon-type Melvin Guillard.
“Sometimes having that reckless abandon isn’t always good,” Varner continued, speaking for himself. “Sometimes you do have to play it safe, but more often than not it works out in my favor when I’m going for the finish.”
Because it wasn’t working for Varner for too long, there were no feelings of disrespect when it was considered an upset that a former champion handed Barboza his first career loss. There was a time when Varner was 16-2 (2 NC) and king of the WEC mountain, winning the title with a third-round knockout of Rob McCullough on February 13, 2008. He enjoyed a two-year reign until WEC 38 in January 2009 when he dropped the title to a rising star named Benson Henderson. Another first-round loss, this one at WEC’s December 2010 swan song to Shane Roller, and Varner was released.
From champion to a has-been still in his 20s, Varner understood the doubts when he accepted the Barboza fight after Evan Dunham’s injury re-opened the door to the UFC. Barboza was the newest unstoppable force to invade the sport and Varner was considered finished.
Relegated to the independent circuit to begin his post-Zuffa career, Varner’s fighting days were on life support. He scored a first-round submission of Tyler Combs on an XFO show, but four months later reached the abyss. He agreed to headline Titan Fighting Championships 20 on September 23, 2011 against Dakota Cochrane and eventually realized there was a difference between having to fight and wanting to fight. At a catchweight of 165 pounds, Varner lost his first regional bout in eight years — and a whole lot more.
“I just didn’t want to fight anymore,” Varner said. “The fight with Dakota was just out of necessity and not out of want, will or desire. I shouldn’t have taken the fight, but I took it anyway because I needed the money. I said I never wanted to fight for the money. I wanted to fight for the will, the passion and the desire. I kind of went back on everything that made me who I was and everything I believed in.”
Being a perfectionist was working against him. He’d get hit once in sparring, frustrations would immediately boil over. He’d make a mistake, he’d self-sabotage. Desperate for a fresh outlook, his belief system distorted, Varner moved from the AMA Fight Club in Whippany, N.J., to suburban Phoenix to train with the MMA Lab and Arizona Combat Sports. It was in his new surroundings where Varner learned he had to allow himself to make mistakes and reclaim how and why he loved fighting. Or as Tony Robbins once wrote, “Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.”
“I had to not associate fighting and the competition with pain and associate myself with pleasure, telling myself this is what I wanted,” Varner said.
“I’m getting what I wanted. Once I started changing my beliefs, enjoying what I was doing for a living and respecting the fact that I was given another opportunity, this gift from God to go out there and compete and have these abilities, it made me appreciate myself and appreciate it so much more.”
Varner roared back with consecutive first-round wins for XFC that set up the call back to Zuffa and Barboza. It took him three minutes and 23 seconds to proclaim his return to prominence by smashing the previously unbeaten prodigy with punches to score the TKO victory. For the first time in a long time, even when many remained skeptical, Varner refused to doubt himself, not for a second.
“I had a lot of growing up to do,” Varner said. “I totally respect the doubts from people because I would have doubted myself. If I was a betting man and I saw that this guy, his last two years, his record was 1-4-1, I probably wouldn’t have put money on him against ‘the next Anderson Silva of the UFC.’ (The doubters) had a right to their opinion and I had to prove a lot of them wrong.”
Seeds for redemption were planted at both Arizona Combat Sports and the MMA Lab, where respective head instructors Trevor Lally and John Crouch — “Those two, it’s like fire and ice,” Varner said. “I can find a happy medium that really works well and has got me in this place mentally.” – reignited Varner’s love for MMA by changing his ideas and approach. Despite the loss to Lauzon, Varner’s effort moved him back into the upper echelon of the lightweight division. The fight was taken on three weeks’ notice, and in the second round Varner fractured the fourth metacarpal in his right hand.
Neither stopped the Spartan within from going for the kill.
“That was a fight I was clearly winning, but because of my burning desire to finish the fight, put on a show, I went for one too many takedowns in the third period with a broken hand and got caught in a triangle,” Varner said.
Varner’s pain became a breakthrough, finally taking him to a place of inner peace and pleasure. There’s only one final destination and Guillard is the next rocky mountain standing in the way.
“I’m not taking easy fights. I’m looking for the fastest way to get to that title,” Varner said. “I want that 20 pounds of gold around my waist. I want to be world champion again.”
One afternoon in Montreal, Jonathan Brookins stepped into a spiritual shop, a common occurrence for a meditative 27-year-old and one who spent the summer of 2011 as a nomad. A month earlier, Brookins sought interaction from his mixed martial arts breth…
One afternoon in Montreal, Jonathan Brookins stepped into a spiritual shop, a common occurrence for a meditative 27-year-old and one who spent the summer of 2011 as a nomad. A month earlier, Brookins sought interaction from his mixed martial arts brethren when he tweeted the question, “Why do you fight?” Answers ranged from the typical (food on the table, testing the limits of body and mind), to out of the box (to overcome fears by the “ultimate test of manhood”).
A response left blank was from Brookins himself — until that fateful visit and conversation with the shop’s owner. Brookins was asked what he wanted to do with his life. After stating his current occupation as a UFC featherweight, he expressed an eventual desire to go to India and study Yoga.
“I’m on a spiritual path,” Brookins said.
That’s when he was led to the door. The owner explained his perspective of fighting and MMA as a spiritual pursuit and how people view it as the essence of breaking down other people or barriers. Brookins learned he was different due to his unique journey to break down barriers within himself.
“I realized that’s really why I fight,” Brookins said, “to break down negative things within myself. It really has nothing to do with anybody else anymore. I’ve ceased to even care about any other opponent or anything else because the battle is always internal. The more I can balance myself and better myself then life is always going to be okay.”
Six months ago, Brookins suffered a devastating defeat in the same building he achieved his greatest victory. His first visit to the Palms Las Vegas he defeated Michael Johnson to win Season 12 of The Ultimate Fighter. When he returned he said uncle to Charles Oliveira’s anaconda choke in the second round, and that’s when Brookins (14-5 MMA, 2-2 UFC) hit rock bottom. When he steps back inside the Octagon on the TUF 16 Finale card on December 15 against Dustin Poirier (12-2 MMA, 4-1 UFC), he’ll be in need of a statement victory if he harbors any hopes of becoming a serious contender in the UFC featherweight division.
“It’s been hard on me,” Brookins said. “I’m not going to lie. It’s been tough these past couple of months when I was essentially homeless for a couple of months. It was really, really tough to even keep fighting inside of me. I even told a matchmaker my situation in life right now — I’m not going to take a fight with just anybody, but they gave me a really tough fight, so here I am.”
Life got hard for Brookins after the Oliveira fight, which he called “an unexpected loss,” but also revealed he “wasn’t prepared for much of what the UFC had to offer” because he brought some inner demons to the sport and never broke any ground. Light years before The Ultimate Fighter, Brookins was an ordinary kid provided enough to enjoy childhood growing up in a mobile home park in Hillsboro, Ore., 30 minutes west of Portland. He was gifted physically, excelling in athletics despite not making Century High School’s basketball team.
There were also times when Brookins mentally checked out. Years before summoning the emotional strength to persevere for six weeks isolated from the world outside of Las Vegas, somehow finding the will to defeat five men to earn six figures, there were many who did not believe in Jonathan Brookins, including the man in the mirror.
“For him his biggest battle was his mind. He would quit. He would break,” Guy Takahashi, Brookins’ wrestling coach at Century High, said in a 2011 interview. “You don’t know what the body is capable of doing. He kept on taking a step back and questioning himself. He wouldn’t see himself with those expectations to win. He didn’t know what it meant to be mentally tough. Not just in wrestling, but in life, and that dragged him down.”
Brookins had nearly dropped out of high school as a senior, the pressures of fitting in as a bi-racial kid combined with the drama of teenage life within the hallways had broken him. Once in college, Brookins’ grades and performance was falling. Then he lost a sister, one of seven siblings, during childbirth and left school to relocate to Florida with his family.
As a matter of fact, the best time in Brookins’ life was the six weeks spent in the TUF house. The confinement from the real world allowed him to get away from everything. Little did he realize it wouldn’t be the first time he decided to run away. He became the Ultimate Fighter — and his head swelled big enough to allow demons from the past to return and torment.
“As soon as I got out of the house I went so hard in the opposite direction and let my negative habits kind of flourish,” Brookins said. “It all caught up to me and it showed in the cage. I wasn’t coming to fight and I wasn’t coming prepared.”
That’s why he left his house and everything behind to do soul searching. He spent time in New York and eventually Montreal, where he connected with the renowned Tristar Gym to train with a roster that includes UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre and rising star Rory MacDonald. As he trained his body to prepare for Poirier, his soul was being renewed.
“When I come here it feels like I haven’t done anything in two years. That’s how far behind I am and it’s real humbling,” Brookins said. “I can envision myself as becoming a master of sorts at everything.
“It was very liberating to lose everything the way I did, to lose attachments to certain people who were kind of negative for me and situations that were negative. I had to hit that bottom to look and access things fully for what they were and putting certain things behind me so I can make some positive, solid ground. I’m not just rebuilding from one loss. I’m rebuilding my life as a whole.”
Brookins once described himself on Twitter as a 27-year-old standing motionless, but, upon a closer look, one moving at the speed of light and old as the universe. When he crashed into the wall in June, the man who emerged as the TUF 12 champion and fan favorite stood broken at a crossroads. For all but six weeks of his 27 years, Brookins placed limits on himself, failing to realize his potential. On December 15, his performance against Poirier will determine if he’s truly evolved as a winner after spending a lifetime figuring out how to lose.
“One path might lead only to a certain height and you can only get to say, 10 feet high. But there’s another path parallel to you and it’s infinitely high,” Brookins said. “You have to walk back down the path that you’re on, go over and then you’re on the path that goes as high as you can. I had to go down a little bit and walk back over to the other path, and now I can go as high as I want to go. The path I was on had a cap and I hate that cap. I don’t want to be there anymore.”
