Raw combat : the underground world of mixed martial arts

147 Pages·2013·1.28 MB·English

by  Genia

RAW COMBAT THE UNDERGRGOUND WORLD
OF MlXED MARTlAL ARTS

JIM GENIA

CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
This book is dedicated to Gaby and Emmy,
my perfect wife and my perfect daughter.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
TRADITION
NEW YORK
PETER
A TALE OF TWO FIGHT SHOWS
TSK
TAP OUT
LYMAN
JAMES
KIMBO
SUBMISSION ATTEMPTS
BAMA FIGHT NIGHT
EPILOGUE
Copyright Page
T
Acknowledgments hanks to Farley and Richard, an agent and
an editor who believed. Thanks to Dale Peck, Peter Carey, and
Roger MacBride Allen, three writing instructors who bade me to
not suck. And a very special thanks to everyone who’s ever
stepped into the ring or cage and fought, bled, won, and lost. The
word inspiration doesn’t quite describe it, but it comes close.
TRADITION
I
paid thirty bucks to the big, burly man at the door and walked into the
South Bronx boxing gym unsure what to expect. It was February of 2003 and I
was playing the role of curious spectator, my hidden notepad and pen and digital
camera the only indicators otherwise. Around me sat a few dozen in bleachers,
some of them cheering, all of us transfixed by the ring in the center of the room
and the occupants within. And when the judo black belt in traditional kimono
had his arm suddenly and violently twisted and broken by the kickboxer clad
only in Lycra shorts, that was it. The New York underground fight scene had me
hooked. It was beautiful, a poetry of violence, calligraphy with karate for
brushstrokes and jiu-jitsu for ink.
Seven years and close to thirty editions of something called the Underground
Combat League, watching hundreds of men throw everything they had at each
other, and from the start I knew was gazing upon something special. If you live
in the Five Boroughs, the UCL is the only game in town, the only place to see a
Five Animal-style kung fu instructor get clobbered by someone who knows how
to fight for real, the only place to see a personal trainer from the David Barton
Gym on his hands and knees, blood leaking from his forehead and mouth and
dotting the canvas. The UCL, not the first but for sure the most resilient, what
you’d get if you made Fight Club a sport (but don’t ever call it “Fight Club”;
doing that shows how much you don’t really know) and gave the thing a life of
its own, made it a magnet for thugs looking to pound someone, for aspiring
fighters and wannabes, for the ignorant and disillusioned, for the psychotic. A
tradition, like when they’d gather in dojos in post-feudal Japan and scrap, or
when they’d meet in back alleys in Brazil or under tents at fairgrounds in
Europe, only a modern, up-to-date version where the party crashers wear blue
uniforms and carry Glocks. A tradition, practically a Big Apple institution, and
when mixed martial arts is legalized there will be no more need for it.
Puchy the bouncer (left) taking on a Five Animal kung fu instructor. (Jim Genia)
On a Sunday night I’m there, at the edge of a boxing ring somewhere in the
Outer Boroughs. An endless array of cheap multicolored event posters cover the
walls, warped and pitted floorboards squeak with each footfall, and the faded
blue Everlast canvas stinks like meat gone spoiled, a side of beef long on dried
blood and tetanus. Close by is a diminutive 135-pound Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black
belt named Emerson, there in the ring, so close I could reach out and touch him.
He’s an instructor, and his students present number over a hundred, a hundred
and they’ve vacated the bleachers to crowd around the ring, a mad rush in the
seconds before combat. If anyone is cheering for the karate fighter from Harlem,
it’s lost, whispers amidst crashing ocean waves. The referee yells “Go!” In the
span of thirty-six seconds the Brazilian takes his opponent down, straddles him,
and rains down punches until the karateka taps the canvas with his hand
indicating “No mas, no mas!” It’s all over but for the mayhem of celebration,
and the tableau is so stunning, so charged and evocative, it could be a
Caravaggio hanging in the Louvre.
Vale tudo, they had called it in Brazil in the 1900s (Portuguese for “anything
goes”), but by the end of the century it was called something else here in the
States, sometimes Ultimate Fighting or, disparagingly, human cockfighting, and
now mixed martial arts (MMA) since the outrage over the spectacle has faded.
The entire world went nuts over a SpikeTV reality show involving aspiring
fighters battling it out in a cage called the Octagon, a more palatable thrill easier
to swallow, and it’s legal to hold such matches in Nevada, California, New
Jersey—legal almost everywhere but New York. And I’m here thanks to a
clandestine text message revealing time and place, clandestine because the New
York State Athletic Commission isn’t too keen on these sorts of shindigs.
The karateka and the Brazilian shake hands and hug, according each other all
sorts of respect and gratitude. The vanquished is as much a victim of the
Brazilian’s technique as of his own outdated training methodologies (punching
and kicking imaginary opponents usually gets you a big fistful of fail), and he’ll
never step into the ring unprepared again. But it isn’t about who wins or who
loses as much as it’s about the intensity of the battle, and this one has provided
all with an up-close and hugely satisfying dose of it. In Las Vegas, superstars
like Brock Lesnar and Randy Couture are captivating millions from within the
cage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but here, at the lowest levels and in
the trenches, the frontline skirmishes are all about local heroes giving it
everything they’ve got and giving fans of fighting a glimpse of the reality of
mano a mano combat.
Peter Storm is the man behind it all. Some say he’s a villain, his secret events
in ghetto-tastic boxing gyms deservedly criminal. But he’s just someone you
eventually stumble across if you live in the Big Apple and tote around a love for
all things fighting. In the fourteen years since the first UFC graced the pay-per-
view airwaves, promoter wannabes have sunk millions into organizations that
crashed and burned and failed in spectacular fashion, but Peter took aim at a
target more attainable, aimed square at the demographic hungry for intimate and
personal action and an atmosphere of “Holy crap, these are some badass
underground fights!” A feint, a body blow, and then a bare-knuckle hook to the
chin and he’s scored a knockout.
“We’ve never had a problem with the athletic commission or the police,” he
tells me, alluding to more of a “catch me if you can” than a “go ahead, try to shut
me down, mother-fucker” way of thinking. For Peter has never and would never
advertise. You’re either on his list to get a text message or you’re not—and if
not, the only way you’ll ever know there was a UCL event last weekend is if
your friend fought or maybe, just maybe, you scour the Internet for MMA-
dedicated news sites and find results. It’s the Keyser Soze of fight shows.
Peter (right) taking on a street fighter. (Jim Genia)
At mixed martial arts events in states where sanctioning is a way of life,
where an athletic commission official oversees the urine samples for drug
screening and someone with a conscience—or at least a concern about tort law—
has matched up the competitors, the fighters will be more or less athletes of
near-equal degrees of skill and commitment. But at an underground show
anything goes and there are no weight classes. So if you agree to face someone
with a hundred pounds on you, well, more power to you, brother.
Who are these people willing to risk their health and wellbeing in the
unsanctioned wilds of unarmed combat? At a New York City underground show,
words like motley crew, varied assortment, and wretched hive of scum and
villainy barely scratch the surface.
On one Sunday afternoon in June, at a martial arts school in Midtown, the cast
of characters includes a massive Puerto Rican judoka, a lithe black boxer from
Gleason’s Gym, a short kickboxer from Jackson Heights, and a scrawny Tae
Kwon Do practitioner. This UCL installment doesn’t have the benefit of a
boxing ring, so the forty-five or so spectators sit in white molded-plastic chairs
around a large blue mat scarred with what could be a century of use. Peter, the
maestro in the judo uniform, roams the room while his right-hand man, an
amiable Hispanic named Jerry, talks of the task of rounding up competitors. If
Peter is the bad cop in the equation, Jerry is the nice one who offers you coffee
and hears your confession.
“The fighters who normally compete at these shows already know about
mixed martial arts and most of the time they contact us because they want to
fight,” Jerry says. “Certain traditionalists are the ones that I find it hard to
explain it to, because a lot of them have unrealistic thoughts of fighting,” he
says, alluding to every karate or kung fu practitioner rigid in their beliefs that all
that’s needed to win lies within one esoteric and outdated martial style.
“To be honest,” Peter interjects, “we find a lot of guys who just want to fight.”
Or, more accurately, those guys find him.
Most aspiring combatants know how to find Peter. When not working
nightclub security, he teaches private lessons at a school in Manhattan called the
Fighthouse that rents out space to a wide variety of martial arts instructors, a
repository of senseis without dojos of their own. It’s a point of convergence for
almost everyone who’s ever donned a gi, slipped on padded gloves, and stuck a
battered Bruce Lee′s Fighting Method into their knapsack. If you’re interested in
MMA in the Five Boroughs, one way or another, your path will lead you to him.
Today’s match-ups would seem set to answer the age-old question of “Which
style is best?” and Jerry informs me they’re waiting on a fighter named Manny
to arrive, Manny the ace in the hole, Manny the supposedly baddest man on the
roster. In the meantime, the boxer from Gleason’s Gym takes on the kickboxer
from Jackson Heights, a fisticuff that deteriorates into something resembling a
mugging, ending only when the boxer lands a right cross that drops his
opponent, the boxer refraining from taking his foe’s wallet and instead breathing
a deep sigh of relief. The massive Puerto Rican, nervous and sweaty and a
nightclub security worker himself, is up next, and he needs just a minute and a
half to hyperextend his opponent’s arm and force capitulation. Someone in the
crowd shouts, “Break his fucking arm!” but that never comes to pass. (The
Puerto Rican tells me his lady gave birth the night before and he got no sleep.)
There’s a lull in the action and I’m informed that they’re still waiting on
Manny, Manny the heretofore unheard of Hercules and Gilgamesh of New York.
Meanwhile, the scrawny Tae Kwon Do fighter squares off against someone
called Iron Will, Iron Will shirtless and possibly even scrawnier than his
opponent, like the “after” photo of someone who spent a few years on meth. The
audience is subjected to frantic images of a cartoonesque melee, with all the
chaos and flying limbs, and the Tae Kwon Do man goes down from a kick to the
groin. There are only four rules of engagement in this league, practical
restrictions labeled as “gentlemanly,” and they are: no biting, no eye-gouging, no
fish-hooking, and no groin strikes. The bout is ruled a “no contest,” although
things could’ve played out much differently if these underground fighters had
deigned to wear cups.