Filed under: UFCNo fight fan is in any danger of confusing Miguel Torres for Muhammad Ali. One’s a skinny bantamweight MMA fighter with a mullet, and the other is Muhammad Ali. But even though they might be separated by a few decades and many, many pou…
No fight fan is in any danger of confusing Miguel Torres for Muhammad Ali. One’s a skinny bantamweight MMA fighter with a mullet, and the other is Muhammad Ali. But even though they might be separated by a few decades and many, many pounds, both owe the genesis of their fight careers to a specific type of childhood anguish: the stolen bike.
Torres’ bike had been a gift from his uncle. It wasn’t exactly top of the line, but it had the word ‘Ambush’ written across the side, which was undeniably cool for reasons Torres couldn’t quite explain. He’d made it even cooler by covering much of the bike in duct tape.
“You know, so it was camouflaged,” he says.
One Friday afternoon he rode his bike down to a local shrimp joint to get a basket of french fries to split with his friends, but the proprietor wouldn’t let him bring his bike inside. Torres didn’t have a lock, so he left it just outside, where he could see the front tire through the window.
“But this was when [arcade game] Mortal Kombat first came out,” he says with a sigh. “I came in for the food, but all I heard was ‘Finish him!'”
You know where this is going. Torres had some change in his pocket, and what kid in the early 90s could resist the magnetic pull of a good video game — especially Mortal Kombat? Torres tried to keep an eye on that bike tire through the window, but he got absorbed in the game, taking on one challenger after another. When he glanced over his shoulder at the end of it all, no more bike.
“It was the first time I’d ever had anything stolen from me,” he says. “I was crushed. I ran around the whole block screaming, ‘Where’s my bike!?'”
When that didn’t yield the result he was hoping for, Torres went home to “lift weights.” And by weights, he means bricks. It was the closest thing he could find to a weight set in his neighborhood, and all he knew was that he needed to get stronger if he was going to be ready when he finally came face to face with the bike thief. He also convinced his parents to let him take some Taekwondo lessons, “until I found out it was all bulls–t.”
He’d go to school and his friends on the wrestling team would taunt him, calling him ‘karate boy’ and challenging him to show them his stuff.
“Then they’d take me down and get me in just the worst holds you can imagine. It sucked.”
But little by little, Torres was learning different art forms from whatever sources he could find. A little taekwondo here, some wrestling there, even a trip to a local boxing gym where they sparred on bare feet on a concrete floor. During one such session Torres so angered an older sparring partner with his frantic Jeff Speakman routine that the man threw off his gloves and double-legged him onto the concrete floor before choking the teenage Torres with his own t-shirt.
Afterward, “the guy told me, ‘That’s jiu-jitsu.’ I was like, I have to learn that.”
Somewhere along the way Torres became a martial arts junkie. He read all the books, held himself to a rigid diet he didn’t fully understand, took challenge matches wherever he could find them. All that was left was to find a real fight, a pro fight, something that would test him. This is where Finke’s came in.
If you look at Torres’ record, it’ll tell you that his first fight was against Larry Pulliam at Finke’s Full Contact Challenge in March of 2000. That sounds pretty official, at least until you realize that Finke’s was the name of a local bar in Highland, Indiana, and the “Full Contact Challenge” was more or less a gimmick to try and drum up a crowd for those slow Monday nights.
“I had this idea about how it would be, but I walked in that bar and it was almost empty. It was just these shady characters — bikers, gang-bangers. They gave me this form to fill out, and it was basically a cheap contract saying I wouldn’t sue if I got hurt or killed. After that, it was: real name, stage name, height, weight, and age. That was it. There was no scale to check your weight. No athletic commission. You could wrap your hands if you wanted or you could not wrap your hands. All they checked was mouthpiece and cup.”
Even that requirement proved difficult for some of the fighters. Some of them had brought boil-and-bite mouthpieces — the cheap ones that you can form to your teeth after a quick dunk in hot water — but they hadn’t even bothered to take them out of the package before fight night. Maybe it was just as well, because they ended up passing the mouthpieces back and forth, among other things.
“There were guys literally saying, ‘Hey, if you let me use your mouthpiece, I’ll let you use my cup,'” Torres says. “And they’d be there after the fights swapping mouthpieces and cups. Guys who weren’t even wearing jockstraps were just shoving someone else’s cup in their shorts.”
As Torres was warming up backstage, one of his coaches stretched him out while attempting to impart various Eastern philosophies. Ebb and flow. Yin and yang. That sort of stuff. His boxing coach had different advice, and it involved “[expletive]ing this guy up” and then befriending the strippers who’d been hired to serve as ring girls. Only maybe it wasn’t quite so delicately put.
“That was the last thing I heard before I went in there. And in my mind I had this idea of what a fight should be, just this war. I had images of me hitting him and him hurting me and me getting cut and bleeding, but coming back and winning the fight. Like a Rocky movie or a kung fu movie. I thought the whole 15-minute fight would be like that. I was thinking of all the Bruce Lee books I’d read, The Art of War. All that.”
Instead what happened was that Pulliam came forward, was backed off by a Torres head kick attempt — “the worst kick you can imagine,” he says — and then came forward again, straight into a Torres left hook. That was all it took. Pulliam went down, attempted to get back to his feet, then collapsed again. The ref had no choice but to stop it.
“I looked at my corner like, that’s it?” Torres says. “I didn’t want to get out of the ring. I was so upset. I wanted to fight again.”
The crowd loved it. So did his coaches. But Torres left the ring with a disappointed feeling in the pit of his stomach. That disappointment continued when Finke’s employees explained that, while he was old enough to fight in their establishment, he wasn’t old enough to drink there.
“I thought at least I’d get to hang out in the bar. But no, they kicked me out because I was underage. They were all hanging out, drinking with the strippers, but I was outside in the car eating McDonald’s.”
Torres stayed there waiting for his coaches to return for, by his estimation, “about four hours.” Not exactly the victory party you imagine for yourself after your first professional win, but Torres was already hooked. Even though ‘MMA fighter’ wasn’t much of an actual job description in the spring of 2000, Torres “knew right away that this was what I wanted to do.”
He’d go on to fight many more bouts at Finke’s while trying to keep it a secret from his family, but word spread about the skinny Mexican kid who never lost a bout. Not long after, Torres’ father was injured by a crane at a construction site where he was working. When Torres went to see him in the hospital one day he found that his father had had a visit from a work friend who told him all about seeing his son fight down at the sports bar. The secret was out.
“So I told him all about it,” Torres says. “He said, ‘How much are they paying you?’ I was like, I don’t fight for money. I fight for the art, for respect. I was an idealist. And my dad, from his hospital bed, he reached out and smacked me on the back of the neck.”
Torres’ father’s friend had told him all about how the guys from the construction crew loved these fight nights, how they paid $25 a head to get in, how the young Torres was quickly becoming a major draw.
“My dad said, ‘You’ve got to get paid. This guy’s making money off you, and you’re the one getting hurt.’ So I went back and talked to the promoter and told him I wanted to start getting paid.”
And he did. For his next fight, Torres made the princely sum of $100. It was enough to fill his Camaro up with gas and still have enough to take a girl out on a date. Plus, it was money he’d earned with his art, his skills. It was perfect. It was everything he thought he needed at the time, and it was just the beginning.
One look at Jason “Mayhem” Miller and you can tell he was probably never the prom type. Just picturing him doing something as normal as pinning a corsage on a date or squeezing into a rented tux seems wrong, like imagining a dog eating with a knife and fork.
That’s why it shouldn’t surprise many fight fans to learn that while his high school classmates were attending the senior prom in April of 1998, a 17-year-old Mayhem was fighting a man named Al “Superman” Dill for $300 cash in Virginia Beach, Va.
His girlfriend at the time? She was in the audience watching, Miller says. And she didn’t even mind missing the prom since, as he puts it, “We were weirdo kids. We weren’t going to the prom, anyway.”
For Miller, this night had been years in the making. He’d wanted to be a fighter ever since he knew it was a real thing people did without going to jail. Maybe he’d seen too many Van Damme movies as a kid, he admits, or maybe he just enjoyed unarmed combat a little too much. So much, in fact, that it got him kicked out of his first high school.
“I was kind of just an idiot kid,” he says. “If somebody was trying to mess with me I would step up and fight them, and with very little provocation. Like, okay, let’s go.”
After Miller was expelled for fighting, his family had to move 40 miles to a new school district just so he could finish high school, something he now realizes he might owe his family an apology for. At the time though, it might have been the best thing for him. He discovered high school wrestling, which only stoked his desire to learn other martial arts.
“I would go to karate schools and try to fight the guys. Looking back I see how stupid I was. But I really thought that all the karate people, the goal was to be a fighter, to be able to fight people. And I didn’t care so much if that was their goal, because my goal was to test my skills against theirs. I didn’t get that nobody wanted to do that; they just wanted to have a karate school and make some money.”
It turned out that local karate instructors did not want to fight some gangly, wild-eyed teenager who came in off the streets, asking them to “put on the little bootie things and kick me.” The people in the judo classes inside a local gymnastics academy were slightly more accommodating, but only to a point and only for a little while.
“The problem was, at the judo school all I wanted to do spar. I kept breaking all the dorks noses and stuff. They were trying to do this traditional martial arts stuff, and I was trying to tear everyone’s heads off. I thought, we have to treat this like a fight, because that’s what it is. It’s a fight.”
Even though Miller was paying his membership dues, eventually the instructor decided it was better for business to lose one crazy student rather than a bunch of normal ones.
“He pulled me aside and said, ‘Jason, I know you want to be an ultimate fighter, so there’s a gym right down the street, like a block away. Go there.’ I was like, what? Why didn’t you tell me this before?!”
Miller went that very night, now that he was no longer welcome at judo. The gym was closed, but as he cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass he saw walls covered in pictures of Frank Shamrock and Royce Gracie, cutouts from magazines and early MMA promotional materials. Right away he knew he’d found a home.
“I started going there every day, and I would not leave,” he says. “The summer before that, I spent all my time on skateboarding, something I was terrible at. Then the next summer I spent learning how to fight, which I was pretty good at. It was a crazy time in my life.”
The gym, Miller says, turned out to be “a tax write-off for some veterinarian,” but it had what he needed, which was mostly a matter of attitude and a little skill here and there. He got boxing lessons at the hands of a man known only as “Boo-Boo,” though the sparring sessions were so punishing he had to wear a chest protector just to survive them. There was another man who had learned what submissions he could from the ‘Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action’ VHS tapes. A “fat dude who was in the Army” stopped by from time to time. A real dream team of trainers and sparring partners, in other words.
Miller soaked up everything he could, but he knew that in order to take it to the next level he needed a real fight against a real opponent. This is how he ended up in the ring with “Superman” Dill on prom night.
“He was a grown man, and I was a little boy. I was 17 years old,” he says, though that wasn’t what worried him the most. Dill not only showed up wearing a gi, which right there suggested some level of jiu-jitsu sophistication that was unknown to Miller, but he also had a colored belt around his waist.
“To me, it seemed like he was almost magical. I think he had a blue belt or a purple belt, and I was like, oh no. I was a little concerned. There was no blue belts or purple belts in my neighborhood. Nobody knew that stuff. It wasn’t until months later when I went to a Gracie school and was tapping out blue belts and purple belts that I realized, oh wait, that doesn’t actually matter that much.”
Once the fight got started, the gi and the belt soon became the least of his concerns. Miller might have been a skinny kid with “a blonde afro,” but Dill had put a little more time and thought into his appearance that night.
“I realized when I threw a punch at his head that he had a Superman logo painted on the back of his head. At first I thought he was bleeding, but then I realized I had paint all over me. It was just like, what the hell? Paint?! You come in here with paint on you?”
The fight went the full eight minutes, during which time Miller mostly relied on his high school wrestling skills, taking Dill down, punching him every now and then, but mostly “holding on for dear life.”
When it was over, he raised his own hand, was pronounced the winner, and enjoyed a few brief moments of joy and relief. Later, while relaxing in his free hotel room with the girlfriend who seemed not at all impressed with the idea of professional fighting in general, Miller finally had a chance to reflect on what had happened.
“It was the same thing as today when I win a fight. I just thought about all the things I could have done better. I thought it was boring, I didn’t do any of my moves. I was nervous and I played it safe. It didn’t feel right. I told myself I’d never win a boring fight again. I’d take risks and try stuff, whatever happened.”
The difference between Miller and most 17-year-olds was, even then, he knew this was the start of something. The sport may have been in its nascent stages in the U.S., but he knew without a doubt that he had a future in it.
“I knew that there was a long career in this for me, and I also knew that mixed martial arts was going to be a huge sport eventually. My dad was telling me I was an idiot, and at the time he made a lot of sense. If you’re not in the sport, you can’t see how things are taking shape. He told me to go to computer school. I told him, ‘Kiss my [expletive], I’m going to be a fighter.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re an idiot. Get out of my house.'”
Miller did, eventually, though not by choice at first. He eventually worked his way to California, where he lived in his van in the gym parking lot and began the long process of becoming the fighter he is today. The girlfriend who skipped out on the prom to watch his professional debut? She lives in San Francisco now, he says, and is still not particularly impressed with anything he’s accomplished.
“She always thought fighting was just this stupid thing I was doing. She just loved me for my Justin Timberlake curls. She didn’t care what I was doing.”
One look at Jason “Mayhem” Miller and you can tell he was probably never the prom type. Just picturing him doing something as normal as pinning a corsage on a date or squeezing into a rented tux seems wrong, like imagining a dog eating with a knife and fork.
That’s why it shouldn’t surprise many fight fans to learn that while his high school classmates were attending the senior prom in April of 1998, a 17-year-old Mayhem was fighting a man named Al “Superman” Dill for $300 cash in Virginia Beach, Va.
His girlfriend at the time? She was in the audience watching, Miller says. And she didn’t even mind missing the prom since, as he puts it, “We were weirdo kids. We weren’t going to the prom, anyway.”
For Miller, this night had been years in the making. He’d wanted to be a fighter ever since he knew it was a real thing people did without going to jail. Maybe he’d seen too many Van Damme movies as a kid, he admits, or maybe he just enjoyed unarmed combat a little too much. So much, in fact, that it got him kicked out of his first high school.
“I was kind of just an idiot kid,” he says. “If somebody was trying to mess with me I would step up and fight them, and with very little provocation. Like, okay, let’s go.”
After Miller was expelled for fighting, his family had to move 40 miles to a new school district just so he could finish high school, something he now realizes he might owe his family an apology for. At the time though, it might have been the best thing for him. He discovered high school wrestling, which only stoked his desire to learn other martial arts.
“I would go to karate schools and try to fight the guys. Looking back I see how stupid I was. But I really thought that all the karate people, the goal was to be a fighter, to be able to fight people. And I didn’t care so much if that was their goal, because my goal was to test my skills against theirs. I didn’t get that nobody wanted to do that; they just wanted to have a karate school and make some money.”
It turned out that local karate instructors did not want to fight some gangly, wild-eyed teenager who came in off the streets, asking them to “put on the little bootie things and kick me.” The people in the judo classes inside a local gymnastics academy were slightly more accommodating, but only to a point and only for a little while.
“The problem was, at the judo school all I wanted to do spar. I kept breaking all the dorks noses and stuff. They were trying to do this traditional martial arts stuff, and I was trying to tear everyone’s heads off. I thought, we have to treat this like a fight, because that’s what it is. It’s a fight.”
Even though Miller was paying his membership dues, eventually the instructor decided it was better for business to lose one crazy student rather than a bunch of normal ones.
“He pulled me aside and said, ‘Jason, I know you want to be an ultimate fighter, so there’s a gym right down the street, like a block away. Go there.’ I was like, what? Why didn’t you tell me this before?!”
Miller went that very night, now that he was no longer welcome at judo. The gym was closed, but as he cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass he saw walls covered in pictures of Frank Shamrock and Royce Gracie, cutouts from magazines and early MMA promotional materials. Right away he knew he’d found a home.
“I started going there every day, and I would not leave,” he says. “The summer before that, I spent all my time on skateboarding, something I was terrible at. Then the next summer I spent learning how to fight, which I was pretty good at. It was a crazy time in my life.”
The gym, Miller says, turned out to be “a tax write-off for some veterinarian,” but it had what he needed, which was mostly a matter of attitude and a little skill here and there. He got boxing lessons at the hands of a man known only as “Boo-Boo,” though the sparring sessions were so punishing he had to wear a chest protector just to survive them. There was another man who had learned what submissions he could from the ‘Gracie Jiu-Jitsu in Action’ VHS tapes. A “fat dude who was in the Army” stopped by from time to time. A real dream team of trainers and sparring partners, in other words.
Miller soaked up everything he could, but he knew that in order to take it to the next level he needed a real fight against a real opponent. This is how he ended up in the ring with “Superman” Dill on prom night.
“He was a grown man, and I was a little boy. I was 17 years old,” he says, though that wasn’t what worried him the most. Dill not only showed up wearing a gi, which right there suggested some level of jiu-jitsu sophistication that was unknown to Miller, but he also had a colored belt around his waist.
“To me, it seemed like he was almost magical. I think he had a blue belt or a purple belt, and I was like, oh no. I was a little concerned. There was no blue belts or purple belts in my neighborhood. Nobody knew that stuff. It wasn’t until months later when I went to a Gracie school and was tapping out blue belts and purple belts that I realized, oh wait, that doesn’t actually matter that much.”
Once the fight got started, the gi and the belt soon became the least of his concerns. Miller might have been a skinny kid with “a blonde afro,” but Dill had put a little more time and thought into his appearance that night.
“I realized when I threw a punch at his head that he had a Superman logo painted on the back of his head. At first I thought he was bleeding, but then I realized I had paint all over me. It was just like, what the hell? Paint?! You come in here with paint on you?”
The fight went the full eight minutes, during which time Miller mostly relied on his high school wrestling skills, taking Dill down, punching him every now and then, but mostly “holding on for dear life.”
When it was over, he raised his own hand, was pronounced the winner, and enjoyed a few brief moments of joy and relief. Later, while relaxing in his free hotel room with the girlfriend who seemed not at all impressed with the idea of professional fighting in general, Miller finally had a chance to reflect on what had happened.
“It was the same thing as today when I win a fight. I just thought about all the things I could have done better. I thought it was boring, I didn’t do any of my moves. I was nervous and I played it safe. It didn’t feel right. I told myself I’d never win a boring fight again. I’d take risks and try stuff, whatever happened.”
The difference between Miller and most 17-year-olds was, even then, he knew this was the start of something. The sport may have been in its nascent stages in the U.S., but he knew without a doubt that he had a future in it.
“I knew that there was a long career in this for me, and I also knew that mixed martial arts was going to be a huge sport eventually. My dad was telling me I was an idiot, and at the time he made a lot of sense. If you’re not in the sport, you can’t see how things are taking shape. He told me to go to computer school. I told him, ‘Kiss my [expletive], I’m going to be a fighter.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re an idiot. Get out of my house.'”
Miller did, eventually, though not by choice at first. He eventually worked his way to California, where he lived in his van in the gym parking lot and began the long process of becoming the fighter he is today. The girlfriend who skipped out on the prom to watch his professional debut? She lives in San Francisco now, he says, and is still not particularly impressed with anything he’s accomplished.
“She always thought fighting was just this stupid thing I was doing. She just loved me for my Justin Timberlake curls. She didn’t care what I was doing.”
Filed under: UFCIt wasn’t supposed to happen this way for Kenny Florian. Back when he took up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby in the late ’90s, it wasn’t because he was hoping to find himself here, just a few days from a UFC featherweight title fight. I…
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way for Kenny Florian. Back when he took up Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby in the late ’90s, it wasn’t because he was hoping to find himself here, just a few days from a UFC featherweight title fight. It was because he wanted to do jiu-jitsu, and not much else.
Things changed after one of his teammates at a Gracie Barra gym in Watertown, Mass., took an MMA bout against local fighter Nuri Shakir, who, as Florian remembers it now, was “pretty well known in the New England area for fighting very often.”
The bout ended in some controversy after Shakir was disqualified for an illegal knee, and soon after a rivalry was born, if only in Florian’s mind.
“I kind of had that old school mentality of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu versus everybody else,” said Florian. “That was my mentality at the time, so it was kind of a revenge match for my school and my buddy John Frankl. That was what was going on in my head, anyway, and that’s why I wanted to do it so badly.”
Shakir was game, and so was Florian, and in February of 2002 they met at an event entitled Xtreme Fighting: Battle in Taunton 1, which took place inside a nightclub in Taunton, Mass. There was this kind of machismo thing about it, like kind of entering into manhood. — Kenny Florian on his first MMA fight
Not that the venue mattered much to Florian, for whom the bout was both a matter of honor and a rite of passage. He’d been doing jiu-jitsu for about four years by then and had earned his brown belt. Taking an MMA fight — even if he only did it once — seemed like something he almost had to do in order to prove his tough guy bona fides.
“There was this kind of machismo thing about it, like kind of entering into manhood,” he said. “I thought I just had to try it once. There was something inside me that wanted to be able to say, I really did apply my martial art at least once against another man who was training to beat me up.”
Florian’s training, however, wasn’t exactly all-inclusive.
“My striking training consisted of people trying to punch me during practice, and that was about it,” he said. “I think I did that for two weeks and then fought. …I didn’t know how to go about preparing for a mixed martial arts bout at all. I had no interest in it, really. I was there to prove that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was going to work. That was it. I didn’t want to learn the other arts or be a pro fighter. I was just there to see if my jiu-jitsu would work against another skilled fighter.”
Only this wasn’t exactly the MGM Grand that Florian was fighting in. He did his warm-up in the narrow entrance of the nightclub, as did every other fighter, and in such close quarters there wasn’t much privacy to go over the game plan one last time, assuming anybody had one.
“It was funny, because you could see guys getting their medicals done, guys warming up, and everybody was right there together. I didn’t think much of it, because being new to fighting, I didn’t have a standard for what was right or wrong. I just went with it.”
Maybe that’s why, as he walked to the ring, Florian wasn’t even all that nervous. It may have been his first MMA bout — and he may have been, in retrospect, woefully underprepared — but looking back now, Florian remembers feeling “actually pretty relaxed.”
Then the fight started, leaving Florian to do his best Rickson Gracie impression as he approached Shakir in the opening seconds. Looking back, it’s crazy. The way I trained, the way I ate, it was terrible. It was so far from what I do now. — Kenny Florian
“I just went out there with that old school Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu style, plodding and probing with my hands and kicks a little bit to get him to come forward,” he said. “At one point he rushed me and hit me and I kind of got stuck under the rope. That was early on. Like, the first 30 seconds.”
After the referee restarted them in the center of the ring, Florian managed to get the clinch he was looking for, then took the fight to the mat, where he was finally in his element.
“I clinched with him, took him down, got the mount position, and just started raining down punches from the mount. Then he tapped out.”
Just that easy, Florian had won his first MMA bout. But he didn’t necessarily consider himself a fighter afterward, nor was he in any hurry to get another fight. He’d set out to win one for his team and prove himself as a martial artist, and he’d done both. He’d even had a little bit of fun in the process.
“I have to say, it felt pretty cool to be able to hit somebody in the face without any repercussions. There was also definitely a bit of pride to know that your skills really work. There was certainly an adrenaline rush that went with it, but I didn’t really know whether I’d do it again. It felt good, but a few days later I was back to just doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.”
So what happened? How did the kid who just wanted to fight once so he could say he’d done it end up in the UFC, a veteran of more than 20 pro bouts and, come Saturday, a challenger for Jose Aldo‘s 145-pound title?
The answer is, gradually at first, and then all at once. Nearly a year after his first fight, Florian took another, winning by knockout in the opening seconds. A year after that he took yet another and won that one too. It was after his first loss — a split decision against MMA veteran Drew Fickett — that he caught the UFC’s eye for a new reality show on Spike TV called The Ultimate Fighter.
Even then, Florian said, he still didn’t consider himself a professional fighter. And he definitely didn’t prepare like one, he would soon learn.
“Looking back, it’s crazy. The way that I trained, the way I ate, it was terrible. It was so far from what I do now.”
But then, maybe that’s the only way he could have done it. Maybe if he’d had any idea what he was getting himself into, he wouldn’t have.
“Ignorance is bliss, I guess, even when I was fighting on The Ultimate Fighter, weighing in at a chubby 178 pounds for a [185-pound fight],” he said. “it was all kind of like I was just too dumb to know better.”
Filed under: UFCIf you had asked Mark Coleman what he was up to in early 1996, he probably would have told you he was gearing up to earn a spot on another U.S. Olympic wrestling squad after his seventh-place finish in the 1992 games. But looking back n…
If you had asked Mark Coleman what he was up to in early 1996, he probably would have told you he was gearing up to earn a spot on another U.S. Olympic wrestling squad after his seventh-place finish in the 1992 games. But looking back now, “The Hammer” can admit that this is only partially true.
“I was still trying to be a competitive wrestler at 31 years of age, but really I was fooling myself,” he said. “I just wasn’t putting in the grind and the time I needed to put in. I wasn’t really training like an Olympic champion. I was training like a bum, to be perfectly honest.”
When he lost in the semifinals of the Olympic trials that year, Coleman knew he had only himself to blame. He hadn’t worked hard enough, hadn’t wanted it badly enough. Now his wrestling career was over and he had no idea what he was going to do with his life next. He didn’t have to wait long before he got an offer that changed everything.
“I went and lost at the Olympic trials, and that’s when a manager approached me and said, ‘You want to fight in 30 days at UFC 10?’ He also put this to [American wrestlers] Mark Kerr and Tom Erickson the same day and asked them the same question. I don’t think they gave him the right answer. I think they wanted to take the contract home and show it to some attorneys or something. But I talked my way into the UFC. I told this guy, I’m the man for job.” Take these cats down and pound them out. That was the plan from day one. — Mark Coleman
That guy was trainer/manager Richard Hamilton, who’d already helped shepherd several decorated wrestlers into the UFC. He was at the trials looking for his next big pickup, Coleman said, after his past relationships with fighters had fallen apart.
“Everybody had a falling out with this guy for a reason. I won’t give what the reason was, just a reason. Dan Severn left him. Don Frye left him. I’ll say this for him, he did notice that wrestlers were the wave of the future and he did go after us.”
After watching the UFC on TV for the past couple years, Coleman had a vague idea of what to expect. The first time he saw a UFC fight, he said, he thought “it couldn’t be real.” The concept of cage fights with no rules and no weight classes just seemed too far out there, yet the fights themselves also seemed too brutal and too messy to be choreographed. Once he realized it was legitimate, it seemed like a wrestler’s dream, and Coleman couldn’t wait to try it. He wanted a spot in the tournament so badly, in fact, that he said he didn’t closely examine the contract he’d signed with Hamilton.
“I just wanted in UFC 10. I wanted in there and thought the ramifications for signing a bad contract was something I’d deal with later, which I did.”
In the month between signing the contract and stepping in the Octagon for the first time, Coleman didn’t have a lot of gym time to learn striking technique or submission defense. He did, however, have a pretty solid game plan.
“Take these cats down and pound them out,” he said. “That was the plan from day one.”
On July 12, 1996, Coleman showed up at the Fairgrounds Arena in Birmingham, Ala., feeling pretty good about his chances. He’d have to win three fights in one night to claim the UFC 10 tournament title. His first opponent was Israeli heavyweight martial arts champion Moti Horenstein, who Coleman felt couldn’t possibly stop him.
“All the wrestlers, we were a family and we really felt like we were unappreciated, like we were some of the toughest cats in the world. Not just me — a lot of my friends. So I walked in with a lot of confidence, especially knowing I was fighting a stand-up guy. I knew the game plan and I knew it was going to work. I walked in thinking, this really isn’t going to be fair. But as I was walking to the cage, that worm of doubt worked its way into my head. It got pretty tense then.”
With just over 4,000 people in attendance and a meager pay-per-view audience at home, it wasn’t the bright lights of the big time that had Coleman nervous. After all, he’d wrestled in the Olympics and won an NCAA championship at Ohio State. He had plenty of experience in big matches with big stakes. What had him worried was a sudden fear of the unknown. Despite his long career as a wrestler, he’d never done this before. Maybe he wasn’t ready for what was about to happen.
“I was very confident walking in, until right when I got on the ramp and that’s when it hit me: holy s–t, I’m fighting a karate world champion. What if he does have some Bruce Lee crazy spinning back kick or something that’s going to knock me out?”
If Horenstein had such a move in his bag of tricks, he never got to use it. Coleman took him down and pounded him out exactly according to plan. A little under three minutes after it had started, Coleman’s MMA debut was in the books and he was on to the semifinal round at UFC 10. There he would face “Big Daddy” Gary Goodridge, who, with five UFC fights to his credit, was a veteran compared to Coleman. What if he does have some Bruce Lee crazy spinning back kick or something that’s going to knock me out? — Mark Coleman
In the years since, Coleman and Goodridge have become close friends. They spent time together on the Japanese circuit in Pride Fighting Championships, and they really got to like one another. But that night in Alabama, there was no fellow feeling. There was money at stake, after all, and they spent a grueling seven minutes in the cage together to decide who would go home with it.
Coleman’s superiority on the mat and conditioning edge eventually proved to be the difference-maker, as Goodridge finally gassed out and submitted. The bout took its toll on Coleman too, but he still had one more fight before he could claim the tournament title. This time he’d be going up against the man his manager had conditioned him to despise: UFC 8 winner Don Frye.
“[Hamilton] had a student come in and tell me Don Frye broke his knee on purpose and this and that. Honestly, I’m not a hateful person, but they tried to create some anger and some hate in me towards Don Frye and it kind of worked,” Coleman said. “I thought Don Frye was a bad guy, a cocky guy, and I went in there with bad intentions. Nothing more than normal I guess, but I really wanted to beat him for this guy who had his knee broken. But I think in the end it was all made up. I don’t know for sure.”
Both men came into the cage for the final fight looking worn down and battle weary, but after a combined 15 minutes in the cage between his two earlier fights, Frye seemed to be the worse off of the two. Coleman quickly put Frye on his back, pinned his head against the fence, and went to work with right hands on Frye’s already damaged face.
When the action drifted over toward Coleman’s corner, Hamilton was there to berate Frye from outside the cage, screaming for Coleman to punish him from the top. Even when the fight returned to the feet, Frye couldn’t keep it there against the much larger Coleman.
But no matter how Coleman tried, he couldn’t make the other man quit. Frye kept taking whatever Coleman dished out, and soon even Coleman had to admit that he was dealing with one tough individual, no matter what he’d been told about him before.
“At the eight to ten minute mark, I was looking this guy in the eye and feeling a lot of emotions go through my body,” Coleman said. “Like jeez, why aren’t they stopping this fight? I wanted them to stop it. I wasn’t really enjoying it at that point. But back then, you know, you had to tap out. They didn’t like to stop it unless you tapped out. I wanted them to stop it because I couldn’t finish the cat.”
After a brutal and exhausting eleven and a half minutes, a couple of Coleman headbutts (totally legal at the time) finally convinced referee “Big” John McCarthy to call a stop to it. Frye had taken a severe beating at the hands of Coleman, but he’d also made a lasting impression on the man who’d come into the cage hating him that night. Stopping was the furthest thing from my mind. I couldn’t wait until the next show. — Mark Coleman
“There’s a difference between the best and the toughest. Don was very good, but he wasn’t the best. He was certainly the toughest guy I ever fought in my life though, and he proved that many times. Thank God Big John stepped in and stopped it.”
Though Frye and Coleman gained a measure of begrudging respect for one another that night, they didn’t exactly become best friends. Not yet, anyway.
“Don Frye, as I understand, did not like me for a long time after that,” Coleman said. “He hated me, in fact. He wanted a rematch real bad, because that’s just the kind of cat he is. By the time we rematched four or five years later over in Japan, by that time we were good buddies. To this day, I respect him about as much as I respect anybody.”
After it was all over, Coleman was utterly exhausted from his frantic first foray into MMA. He was also “addicted” to the budding sport, and he knew he’d found his new career, even if he had no idea that it would one day take him across the Pacific to Japan and into the UFC Hall of Fame. All he knew at the time was that victory in the cage was a great feeling, and he had to have more.
“This was something I grew up wanting since I was five years old, even though there wasn’t this sport then,” Coleman said. “It’s respect, I guess. It’s knowing no one’s going to mess with you. Stopping was the furthest thing from my mind. I couldn’t wait until the next show.”
On Sunday night in Milwaukee, the internet would have you believe that bantamweight Joseph Benavidez will be participating in his 17th professional bout at UFC Live: Hardy vs. Lytle. The Internet would also have you believe that his first professional fight was against Brandon Shelton in June of 2006.
The Internet is wrong.
Then again, maybe it depends on what your definition of ‘professional’ is. If you mean professional in terms of the overall quality and credibility of the event, some vaguely official quality that separates the serious promoters from the amateurs, then okay, the Shelton fight might have been it.
But if you mean professional in the sense that it was a fight for which a fighter was paid (and to the man who is or is not going home with money in his pocket, this distinction often matters a great deal), then no way.
For that definition of professional, and for the very humble beginning of Benavidez’s MMA career, you’ve got to go all the way back to 2005 in Silver City, N.M., and into a slightly terrifying bar called the Brown Derby.
“It’s this place where it’s actually kind of scary to go in there by yourself,” Benavidez recalled. “And then they just put a boxing ring in the middle of the bar, which only made it scarier.”
Benavidez might never have ended up there that night had he not had a job as a screen printer in Las Cruces, N.M. It was a good job and he liked it, mostly because he could make his own clever T-shirts when the mood struck him. But one day a man came in looking to make some posters advertising a kickboxing event, and Benavidez started asking him about it.
“He looked at me and was like, ‘Hey, aren’t you that wrestler?'” I was literally bouncing his head off the ground — boom, boom, boom — and his corner threw in the towel. — Joseph Benavidez
In Las Cruces, Benavidez was that wrestler. He’d won a state championship in high school, which was the kind of thing people in a relatively small town tended to remember. The man asked Benavidez if he’d be willing to help out his teenage son, who’d been kickboxing for a while but wanted to move into MMA. First he needed someone who could help him with his wrestling, and who better than a former state champ?
It sounded like fun to Benavidez, but after two months of training with this rag-tag MMA club, he decided he’d like to find out whether he could win an actual fight. He was beating all his training partners, and he’d seen the sport on TV, so how hard could it be?
“I figured that if I was fighting guys around my size and from around my area and my state, and I was the best wrestler in my state, that at the very least I could out-wrestle them,” Benavidez said. “Even if I didn’t know a whole lot else, I had that.”
Benavidez asked around and, sure enough, someone was putting together a night of MMA fights down at the Brown Derby in Silver City. It wasn’t the kind of deal where they offered you an opponent and you could accept or decline. Instead it was the kind of deal where you were either in or you were out. And if you were in, it meant you showed up an hour before fight time and got a look at your opponent for the first time across a crowded bar.
No weigh-ins. No rules meeting. No sanctioning. Not even a locker room to warm up in.
“I get there, and I’m the first fight, so I’m warming up in the bar,” said Benavidez. “There’s people around me drinking beers. There’s this old drunk Mexican dude in my face, telling me what to do. And this is probably 20 minutes before I’m going to go out, and he’s totally drunk, trying to give me advice and tell me what to do. It was bizarre.”
It probably didn’t help matters that, instead of normal fight trunks, Benavidez was wearing a pair of underwear he’d bought at Target. That was a trademark of his all the way until he entered the WEC, he said. Even in his fight at Dream.5 in Japan he came in sporting the Target underwear.
“I just thought they looked so good, no one would know,” he said.
When the event was finally ready to get started, Benavidez and his opponent, who at least looked to be around his size, were called into the ring. There were chairs set up at ringside, but the bar patrons quickly ignored them in favor of crowding as close to the action as they could get.
“The people just ended up hanging off the ring like it was Lionheart, the [Jean-Claude] Van Damme movie. There’s no security, nothing like that, so they’re just all up on the ring.”
Once the fight started, Benavidez wasted no time. He threw a leg kick, went for a takedown, then stood over his grounded opponent and started hammering him with elbows to the head.
“I was literally bouncing his head off the ground — boom, boom, boom — and his corner threw in the towel.”
The whole thing took maybe a minute and a half. One of Benavidez’s teammates acted as the referee — not that he was actually called to do any officiating other than peel Benavidez off the guy once the towel flew into the ring.
“So I’m happy, I got my first win. Then some cops come in. They’d been watching the whole thing, and they went up to whoever was in charge and said, okay, you guys can keep doing this, but all the fighters from here on out have to wear headgear.”
Apparently the police were a little taken aback by the brutality of Benavidez’s fight. When the fighters complained that no one in MMA wore headgear, the cops gave them the choice of gearing up or getting shut down.
“All my teammates were pissed at me then, because they had to do MMA with headgear after my fight,” said Benavidez. “I thought it was pretty funny and unique. It just showed how bush league the whole thing was. Like, oh no, that was too hard and too violent. Wear headgear and it’s okay. I guess the drunk people cornering me was totally fine, though.”
Bush league or not, when the night was over Benavidez left the Brown Derby with two hundred dollars in his pocket. Considering that he was pulling in around a thousand bucks a month at his screen printing job, it was a nice boost to his regular income. It also had him thinking about how far he might be able to take this thing with a little more practice. I had a little ‘Lionheart’ moment of my own where I was like, man, I’m a prizefighter now. — Joseph Benavidez
“It felt good and it gave me some confidence, like I could do this. I had a little Lionheart moment of my own where I was like, man, I’m a prizefighter now. I’m getting money to beat people up.”
It wasn’t more than two or three weeks later that Benavidez had his second fight, then his third and his fourth. By the time he fought Shelton in what the internet records identify as his debut, he’d already had five bouts.
“So I actually have five fights that aren’t on my record, which kind of sucks because it would look a lot cooler if I was 19-2 than 14-2,” he said. “They just weren’t documented, and honestly, some of them probably shouldn’t be.”
Things didn’t start to get serious for Benavidez’s MMA career until he went to visit a friend in Sacramento in November of 2006. They bought tickets to UFC 65, where they watched Georges St. Pierre take the welterweight title from Matt Hughes.
For Benavidez, it was a glimpse of what the big time really looked like, though he didn’t know if a 135-pounder like himself could ever even dream of getting there. The UFC had only recently reopened its doors to 155-pounders. Below that, the best you could hope for was the lesser-known WEC, and even that seemed far away.
Before he left Sacramento and returned home to New Mexico, Benavidez made it his mission to seek out the then-WEC featherweight champ Urijah Faber, who he’d heard ran a gym in the area. If Faber could make a living as a smaller mixed martial artist, then maybe he was someone who could help, or at the very least, give Benavidez some idea of where he stood as far as skill level.
So he looked in the phone book for Faber’s gym, but couldn’t find it.
“I went into the first gym that I found and basically beat up everybody, all the instructors, whoever. Those guys told me, hey, we got nothing for you. You need to go get with Urijah and his guys.”
When Benavidez explained that this was exactly what he’d been trying to do, they gave him Faber’s contact info. By then, however, it seemed too late. He had a 7 a.m. flight back to New Mexico in the morning. He was out of time, and he hadn’t even managed to lay eyes on Faber.
But when Benavidez showed up to the airport in the morning, he became the rare traveler to regard it as good news when he saw that his flight was cancelled. He took the opportunity to stay three more days in Sacramento, which allowed him the chance to finally get on the mat with Faber.
“I definitely think it was fate,” he said. “I went in and we had a roll, and Urijah basically told me, ‘You need to come out here and get serious about this. You’ve got a lot of talent, so stop wasting time.’ That was pretty much it.”
After that, Benavidez returned home only to get his things and head for California. He was about to start a new life in MMA. From here on out, all the fights would be for real, with no doubt as to what counted and what didn’t. From this point on, he was definitely a professional. Even if he was still fighting in underwear he bought at Target.
On Sunday night in Milwaukee, the internet would have you believe that bantamweight Joseph Benavidez will be participating in his 17th professional bout at UFC Live: Hardy vs. Lytle. The Internet would also have you believe that his first professional fight was against Brandon Shelton in June of 2006.
The Internet is wrong.
Then again, maybe it depends on what your definition of ‘professional’ is. If you mean professional in terms of the overall quality and credibility of the event, some vaguely official quality that separates the serious promoters from the amateurs, then okay, the Shelton fight might have been it.
But if you mean professional in the sense that it was a fight for which a fighter was paid (and to the man who is or is not going home with money in his pocket, this distinction often matters a great deal), then no way.
For that definition of professional, and for the very humble beginning of Benavidez’s MMA career, you’ve got to go all the way back to 2005 in Silver City, N.M., and into a slightly terrifying bar called the Brown Derby.
“It’s this place where it’s actually kind of scary to go in there by yourself,” Benavidez recalled. “And then they just put a boxing ring in the middle of the bar, which only made it scarier.”
Benavidez might never have ended up there that night had he not had a job as a screen printer in Las Cruces, N.M. It was a good job and he liked it, mostly because he could make his own clever T-shirts when the mood struck him. But one day a man came in looking to make some posters advertising a kickboxing event, and Benavidez started asking him about it.
“He looked at me and was like, ‘Hey, aren’t you that wrestler?'” I was literally bouncing his head off the ground — boom, boom, boom — and his corner threw in the towel. — Joseph Benavidez
In Las Cruces, Benavidez was that wrestler. He’d won a state championship in high school, which was the kind of thing people in a relatively small town tended to remember. The man asked Benavidez if he’d be willing to help out his teenage son, who’d been kickboxing for a while but wanted to move into MMA. First he needed someone who could help him with his wrestling, and who better than a former state champ?
It sounded like fun to Benavidez, but after two months of training with this rag-tag MMA club, he decided he’d like to find out whether he could win an actual fight. He was beating all his training partners, and he’d seen the sport on TV, so how hard could it be?
“I figured that if I was fighting guys around my size and from around my area and my state, and I was the best wrestler in my state, that at the very least I could out-wrestle them,” Benavidez said. “Even if I didn’t know a whole lot else, I had that.”
Benavidez asked around and, sure enough, someone was putting together a night of MMA fights down at the Brown Derby in Silver City. It wasn’t the kind of deal where they offered you an opponent and you could accept or decline. Instead it was the kind of deal where you were either in or you were out. And if you were in, it meant you showed up an hour before fight time and got a look at your opponent for the first time across a crowded bar.
No weigh-ins. No rules meeting. No sanctioning. Not even a locker room to warm up in.
“I get there, and I’m the first fight, so I’m warming up in the bar,” said Benavidez. “There’s people around me drinking beers. There’s this old drunk Mexican dude in my face, telling me what to do. And this is probably 20 minutes before I’m going to go out, and he’s totally drunk, trying to give me advice and tell me what to do. It was bizarre.”
It probably didn’t help matters that, instead of normal fight trunks, Benavidez was wearing a pair of underwear he’d bought at Target. That was a trademark of his all the way until he entered the WEC, he said. Even in his fight at Dream.5 in Japan he came in sporting the Target underwear.
“I just thought they looked so good, no one would know,” he said.
When the event was finally ready to get started, Benavidez and his opponent, who at least looked to be around his size, were called into the ring. There were chairs set up at ringside, but the bar patrons quickly ignored them in favor of crowding as close to the action as they could get.
“The people just ended up hanging off the ring like it was Lionheart, the [Jean-Claude] Van Damme movie. There’s no security, nothing like that, so they’re just all up on the ring.”
Once the fight started, Benavidez wasted no time. He threw a leg kick, went for a takedown, then stood over his grounded opponent and started hammering him with elbows to the head.
“I was literally bouncing his head off the ground — boom, boom, boom — and his corner threw in the towel.”
The whole thing took maybe a minute and a half. One of Benavidez’s teammates acted as the referee — not that he was actually called to do any officiating other than peel Benavidez off the guy once the towel flew into the ring.
“So I’m happy, I got my first win. Then some cops come in. They’d been watching the whole thing, and they went up to whoever was in charge and said, okay, you guys can keep doing this, but all the fighters from here on out have to wear headgear.”
Apparently the police were a little taken aback by the brutality of Benavidez’s fight. When the fighters complained that no one in MMA wore headgear, the cops gave them the choice of gearing up or getting shut down.
“All my teammates were pissed at me then, because they had to do MMA with headgear after my fight,” said Benavidez. “I thought it was pretty funny and unique. It just showed how bush league the whole thing was. Like, oh no, that was too hard and too violent. Wear headgear and it’s okay. I guess the drunk people cornering me was totally fine, though.”
Bush league or not, when the night was over Benavidez left the Brown Derby with two hundred dollars in his pocket. Considering that he was pulling in around a thousand bucks a month at his screen printing job, it was a nice boost to his regular income. It also had him thinking about how far he might be able to take this thing with a little more practice. I had a little ‘Lionheart’ moment of my own where I was like, man, I’m a prizefighter now. — Joseph Benavidez
“It felt good and it gave me some confidence, like I could do this. I had a little Lionheart moment of my own where I was like, man, I’m a prizefighter now. I’m getting money to beat people up.”
It wasn’t more than two or three weeks later that Benavidez had his second fight, then his third and his fourth. By the time he fought Shelton in what the internet records identify as his debut, he’d already had five bouts.
“So I actually have five fights that aren’t on my record, which kind of sucks because it would look a lot cooler if I was 19-2 than 14-2,” he said. “They just weren’t documented, and honestly, some of them probably shouldn’t be.”
Things didn’t start to get serious for Benavidez’s MMA career until he went to visit a friend in Sacramento in November of 2006. They bought tickets to UFC 65, where they watched Georges St. Pierre take the welterweight title from Matt Hughes.
For Benavidez, it was a glimpse of what the big time really looked like, though he didn’t know if a 135-pounder like himself could ever even dream of getting there. The UFC had only recently reopened its doors to 155-pounders. Below that, the best you could hope for was the lesser-known WEC, and even that seemed far away.
Before he left Sacramento and returned home to New Mexico, Benavidez made it his mission to seek out the then-WEC featherweight champ Urijah Faber, who he’d heard ran a gym in the area. If Faber could make a living as a smaller mixed martial artist, then maybe he was someone who could help, or at the very least, give Benavidez some idea of where he stood as far as skill level.
So he looked in the phone book for Faber’s gym, but couldn’t find it.
“I went into the first gym that I found and basically beat up everybody, all the instructors, whoever. Those guys told me, hey, we got nothing for you. You need to go get with Urijah and his guys.”
When Benavidez explained that this was exactly what he’d been trying to do, they gave him Faber’s contact info. By then, however, it seemed too late. He had a 7 a.m. flight back to New Mexico in the morning. He was out of time, and he hadn’t even managed to lay eyes on Faber.
But when Benavidez showed up to the airport in the morning, he became the rare traveler to regard it as good news when he saw that his flight was cancelled. He took the opportunity to stay three more days in Sacramento, which allowed him the chance to finally get on the mat with Faber.
“I definitely think it was fate,” he said. “I went in and we had a roll, and Urijah basically told me, ‘You need to come out here and get serious about this. You’ve got a lot of talent, so stop wasting time.’ That was pretty much it.”
After that, Benavidez returned home only to get his things and head for California. He was about to start a new life in MMA. From here on out, all the fights would be for real, with no doubt as to what counted and what didn’t. From this point on, he was definitely a professional. Even if he was still fighting in underwear he bought at Target.
Looking back now, Jens Pulver can’t say exactly what he was expecting that day. A test, maybe. A way to find out something about himself that he’d only guessed at before.
The name of the event – The Bas Rutten Invitational 2 – sounded official enough….
Looking back now, Jens Pulver can’t say exactly what he was expecting that day. A test, maybe. A way to find out something about himself that he’d only guessed at before.
The name of the event – The Bas Rutten Invitational 2 – sounded official enough. If the Dutch Pancrase fighter was affiliated with it, and if they’d already done it once without anything terrible happening, how bad could it be?
But since this is small-time MMA in 1999, we’re not talking about a fancy event at a civic center. We’re talking a couple hundred people packed into a Muay Thai gym in Littleton, Colorado, a town where just four days earlier two heavily armed teenagers had walked into Columbine High School and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.
No fight fan is in any danger of confusing Miguel Torres for Muhammad Ali. One’s a skinny bantamweight MMA fighter with a mullet, and the other is Muhammad Ali. But even though they might be separated by a few decades and many, many pounds, both owe the genesis of their fight careers to a specific type of childhood anguish: the stolen bike.
One look at 
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way for 
If you had asked 
On Sunday night in Milwaukee, the internet would have you believe that bantamweight 
Looking back now,