Joining a Fight Club
And Breaking Rule Number One
I stepped into the nicest gym I have ever seen; a full octagonal mixed martial arts cage, indoor turf field, every weight/machine ever created, and massive posters of the some of the best football players and fighters on the planet. The ceilings were high and everything looked new and clean. In the corner, next to the cage, was a large wrestling area. There were about 20 athletes milling around the wrestling matts, gearing up and talking. It was the ultimate boys club. I then approached the most intimidating group of people imaginable, professional cage-fighters.
After signing a liability release, I awkwardly stood at the edge of the group. I didn’t know anyone there and had only been introduced to the coach by email. One of the fighters walked up to me. He was a tall and lean, one arm and one leg were covered in tattoos, and had an eight-pack and a red mohawk. He introduced himself as Brandon Thatch, a local fighter about to make his debut on the UFC, the world’s largest stage for mixed martial arts. The entire experience felt very surreal, I think I still hadn’t quite comprehended that I was going to train with these fighters.
I remember watching Fight Club and having some small, dark part of myself want to be in that club. There was something disturbingly therapeutic about watching these groups of men meet in basements and bar parking lots and beat each other up for some poetic form of anarchy. This is probably one of the reasons I played football for 12 years. This is probably also one of the reasons I decided to do my first mixed martial arts fight (in a cage?!?!) during my senior year of college. I only had three months to train for it and made a film about my journey. This ended up opening a lot of doors I never expected to walk through.
A few months ago I got the opportunity to join a real fight club. However, this wasn’t a small group fighting in a basement, this was an UFC, invitation only, wrestling practice at an elite athlete training facility in Denver. My skills were laughably under par but a friend had invited me, and I couldn’t say no.
Mixed Martial Arts is a sport derived from the basic question, “Which style of fighting is the most effective?” It started as a no rules, no weight classes, all out brawl between two fighters of different styles. It has since evolved into a much more competitive and technical sport. A typical MMA athlete will train across multiple disciplines, including wrestling, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, boxing, kickboxing, and Muay Thai. This has created a wide variety of different mixed styles and is one of the reasons MMA is one of the fastest growing sports in the world.
I remember the first time I watched someone I knew fight. It was the young fighter who had introduced himself to me that first day. I watched him walk towards a lit up octagonal cage in an arena filled with thousands of screaming fans. He looked confident but I felt sick to my stomach. I remember my friends telling me how horrifying it was to watch me fight, but I had not appreciated how intense the feeling was. My hands were shaking as I sat at my desk streaming this blurry, small window of the fight. Brandon won his first fight very quickly in the first round. I let out an audible sigh, but I still felt full of adrenaline and very high strung. I realized something after that fight, I had become friends with Brandon. I had become friends with most of the men and women at Elevation Fight Team. I went to their fights, was depressed over their losses, ecstatic over their wins, and always scared for them. I quickly realized there was a disconnect between the way they are portrayed, and how they actually are.
I was completely shocked, I realized I had these very different preconceptions of what kind of person a “fighter” was. Most of them were nice. Weirdly nice. They did not fit the mental image I had of “fighters”.
I think this last part has been the most interesting part of my experience with Elevation fight team. Here is a group of people who literally beat each other up for a living, and there is rarely animosity or anger between them. They laugh and joke with each other before and after practice. I have seen, multiple times, guys who fought each other professionally also train with each other afterwards and actually become friends. I was used to the highly aggressive and angry world of football where if one of my teammates on the other side of the ball got the chance to take a cheap shot, he usually did. There was a very serious anger in football that I haven’t seen in MMA. In football we were taught to hate, and to use the anger to make us stronger. In mixed martial arts one is taught to calmly and emotionlessly assess the situation as it unfolds and to react accordingly. Often the first fighter to get angry loses, whereas when I got angry in football I knew I was going to make a big play, run a little faster, or hit a little harder.
When I first started in the sport I could not quite reconcile with the violence of it. If you have ever seen a fight you know that they can be brutal and intense with one or both competitors often covered in blood. What I quickly learned is that large parts of the sport are misunderstood and the blood and violence are exaggerated. You don’t see the bruises of football players and hockey players after a game, but they are there. In MMA, the fighters are open books, you can easily read the hurt and pain and ecstasy after a fight. In this way I found it to be a much more open and honest sport. I hid in football behind the acceptance of the sport. I tried to hurt other players on the field simply because I was angry, and because what I was doing was completely accepted by society as a part of the sport. MMA has much less acceptance, and it has led the fighters to be much more honest about what they do and why they do it. Many of the men and women I have talked to fight simply for the love of the intensely physical competition. Of course there are those who fight because they enjoy hurting people, but they are usually weeded out by the intense training and dedication required to fight at a very high level. It turns out the desire to be violent is not a sustainable motivator.
A few months ago I asked Tom Murphy, a UFC vet, how he could justify the violence in the cage. He replied, “Violence is a state of mind, its not the outcome of my fist hitting your face. You can do anything violently. You can play volleyball violently”. We then proceeded to spar, and more specifically, he proceeded to punch me repeatedly in the face. After, we laughed and joked and I drove home with a big smile on my face, exhausted and content.
