Cheap Seats

(originally published on BloodyElbow.com on March 7, 2011)

March 2011, a Saturday night. Illinois is deep in cloud cover, awash with snow and icy rain. Forty minutes west of Chicago, inside the Odeum Expo Center of Villa Park, ex-champion Jens Pulver is hounding local palooka Wade Choate around the ring. It’s the closing minutes of the three-round main event, a mixed martial arts fight, but the arena is already half emptied out.

Pulver can’t bother himself with the audience now, though. He’s been eating jabs the whole round and, with only a few minutes left in the fight, he’s desperate to make an impression. Pulver needs this win. Up until just recently, the featherweight went three years without a single victory, and hasn’t won two consecutive fights in nearly half a decade. Suffice it to say, Jens Pulver has seen better days.

Indeed, around the turn of the century, Pulver, known as “Li’l Evil,” was considered by many to be the best lightweight mixed martial artist in the world. In a combat sport that combines, among other things, the martial disciplines of boxing, wrestling, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Pulver excelled, and in February of 2002, he took the lightweight title in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, today the world’s biggest and best mixed martial arts organization. Even back then, though, the undersized Pulver was never seen as the most talented fighter. He fought up the ranks tooth and nail, pulling off surprising victories thanks to a granite chin, explosive hook, and the gravel in his guts—that gritty, inexhaustible will that is his trademark. But, where today his will remains vigorous, Jens Pulver’s body betrays him. After so many years of hard competition, Jens Pulver is, at only 35, an old man.

Pulver and Choate fight it out for a final, lonely couple of minutes before a thinning, indifferent crowd. When it comes time to hear the judges’ decision, Pulver heavily favors his left foot as he walks to the referee. It’s a close fight to call, hard to tell who’s ahead on the judges’ scorecards, but people are nevertheless crowding the exits. Win or lose, it’s clear that there’s been no resurgence for Pulver. We may not have known it at the time, but we didn’t buy tickets to witness some great comeback. We’ve come to see the darkening embers of a once great career.

***

Arriving in Villa Park, IL, we are presented with a contrast in prosperity. Three-story houses with large picture windows and sprawling lawns stand across the street from discount clothing outlets and dreary ninety-nine cent stores. We’ve pulled into town with an hour until doors open at the Expo Center, and decide to kill some time at Swap Mart, an indoor flea market.

Rows of booths are set up in an echo-y, cement-floored space. The vendors’ shelves are crowded with squirt guns and stuffed animals, airbrushed portraits and votive candles, soccer cleats and blue jeans with rhinestone butterflies on the rear pockets. Life-size statues of a Roman solider, of Elvis Presley and of John Wayne, are posted around the market, apparently not for sale, but not for taking pictures with, either (that’s prohibited). Today, Swap Mart is hosting something called Metal Fest, a battle of the bands with a metal theme. The sounds of crash cymbals and muddy guitar work emanate from the back of the building, drowning out the vendors’ little radios. It’s time to go.

As it happens, we’re destined to hear the musical stylings of at least one more would-be Metallica. Inside the Odeum Expo Center, a live band is screaming and grunting their way through a cover of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” while, backstage, the fighters warm up. Compared with the makeshift bar set up at Swap Mart, this band got the prime gig.

Men of Illinois, pot-bellied, barrel-chested, carry beer five plastic cups at a time. They take seats next to their wives, and on their knees they bounce little sons and daughters who cover their ears against the arena’s blaring stereo system. Someone’s girlfriend is arguing with a security guard, something about them being caught in the wrong seats, when the house lights dim and a spot light shines on the fenced-in ring, the cage. We settle into our hard, plastic stadium chairs as the evening gets officially underway.

The undercard, the night’s earliest bouts, tend to be populated by inexperienced fighters. The novices tonight are mostly small, pale and slight of frame, skittish but resolute young men fighting out of towns called Northlake, Granite City, and Buffalo Grove. Into the cage they carry the old, hard names of their families: the names Pitz and Graves, Grindstaff and Kreigermier. An aficionado would call them rough, or green, or raw. They take chances, throwing wild punches while leaving their own jaws exposed. Many are wrestlers in the Midwestern tradition, and dive for their opponents’ legs, dragging them to the mat. From there, they latch themselves onto their opponents’ backs before sliding an arm under the chin. With bicep and forearm they constrict the carotid arteries in a popular submission hold called a rear naked choke, forcing their opponents to either tap the mat in surrender or go unconscious.

It becomes immediately apparent that this event is more of a family affair than one might expect. In a small town, at an event like the Chicago Cagefighting Championships tonight, most of the audience can be broken down into factions of family and friends, each dedicated to the support, invested in the fate, of one young fighter, be that a son or nephew, grandchild, neighbor boy, or old high school buddy. With the introduction of each fighter, these groups, in small pockets across the arena, erupt in applause. Across the aisle to our right, elderly men and women cheer for lightweight Will Brooks of Libertyville, Illinois, who, in his second professional fight, obliges the calls of his mother in the stands—“Put him to sleep!”—and submits fellow novice Guillermo Serment with a rear naked in the second round.

Down in the floor seats, Carson Beebe’s mother is less fortunate. The twenty-two year old bantamweight’s family falls silent as the previously unbeaten prospect passes out inside Giovani Moljo’s inverted triangle choke, a complex Brazilian jiu-jitsu maneuver that involves using one’s legs to clamp down on an opponent’s neck. Beebe failed to tap, and now his legs have gone stiff, stuck at a gruesome thirty degree angle in the air.

Such personal stakes, such family drama, lend a strange intimacy to the populous arena, and for a moment I feel like I’m intruding. And it’s the absence of such personal stakes that determines the audience’s boredom in the main event. Now fighting in the lighter featherweight division, Pulver has recently relocated to a new training camp in Illinois with the hopes of rejuvenating his career. However, he’s originally from Nampa, Idaho, and he has no hometown contingent to support him. By the time he makes his entrance, the remaining audience has grown a little chilly.

For Pulver, having just snapped a six-fight losing streak last January, this fight is his first chance in nearly five years to put two wins together and begin to change the story of the end of his career. His opponent Wade Choate is in a hole almost as deep. Dubbed “The Last Dog Man,” he also just recently emerged from a stretch of losses, which saw his record fall to 12 wins and 12 defeats, before a victory last August. He’s a little younger than Pulver, but he’s never reached the heights the former UFC champ has seen. As if he’d like to erase the past two years of his career, Choate’s introduction states his record as it stood in January of 2009, before his five-fight skid: twelve and seven. It’s easy to imagine how desperate he is to string a couple of wins together, and though outside the cage he may have observed Pulver’s recent downward spiral with due sympathy, in the fight it’s every man for himself. Hence Choate’s stubborn adherence to a stick-and-move game plan that sees him make use of his reach advantage, peppering Pulver with jabs while constantly backpedalling out of Pulver’s reach. It’s been surprisingly effective. Pulver’s had trouble chasing him down all night, and the power punches for which he was so famous have come slow and fallen short time and again. It’s enough to draw angry boos from the crowd.

One would think that, having been a former champion, Pulver would excite more fans into attendance. Indeed, if mixed martial arts websites and message boards are any indication, Jens Pulver has almost become more popular, more beloved to the devotees of the sport, since his tumble down the ranks. But it seems that he’s tumbled a little further than most of those hardcore fans would care to admit. The name Pulver holds little weight for these people. His two-tone eyes and crooked grin that so endear him to the diehards fail to tap any vein of sentiment here tonight. Unthinkably, the words “You suck” rain down from somewhere in the audience. Someone behind us asks, “Does the guy in green wrestle much?”

Pulver, in green shorts, limps his way to the final bell. He reveals later that he broke his foot, somewhere in the first round by his reckoning. The handicap nearly sticks him with another loss, but the third judge’s scorecard reads 29-28 Pulver, and “Li’l Evil” scrapes by with a split-decision victory. In his prime, Pulver would have probably flattened Choate in a single round.

Pulver apologizes to the near-empty stands, and confesses that he’s taking small steps to rebuild his career. Strange to see him like this, down in that small-time cage, rendered anonymous before so many small-town Americans. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that Pulver didn’t mind a bit, as he flashes a smile and says he hopes to fight here again real soon. For whatever reason—a pinch in his wallet or the non-stop ruckus in his heart—Jens Pulver can’t walk away.

Report: Cut Throat MMA's Brawl at Bourbon Street

(originally published on MMANuts.com on March 24, 2011)

March 23, Wednesday. It’s amateur night at 115 Bourbon Street, a large bar-and-grille joint 45 minutes outside Chicago, IL. The president of Cut Throat MMA, Mike Davis, is pressing palms when we get to the ticket table. He hands us a couple of passes and with a pat on the shoulder sends us in. “Go wherever you want,” he says, “ just so long as you’re not in the way.” He looks awfully familiar, and I realize that I’ve met him before, a couple of years ago at something called the Wes Sims Fan Expo—a gathering of about four fans and a dozen homeless people under an interstate overpass, where UFC-veteran and modern-day flaneur Wes Sims handed out sandwiches and engaged in arm-wrestling contests. That was the first mixed martial arts event I ever covered. “Oh yeah, that was me, I organized that, ” Davis says. “God, don’t remind me.”

Young men with broad shoulders and ropey forearms, dressed in garish t-shirts, mill around, do mild horseplay. Some of the older men, curious and unwinding after a day of work, stumble in from the bar the next room over. To my left, preternaturally tan young women in form-fitting sweatpants make small talk and inspect the ring cards. I take a spot by the blue corner. It’s the corner typically reserved for the fighter that’s introduced first—almost always the less popular of the two, or the underdog. Sure enough, across the first nine fights, not a single fighter from the blue corner manages a win.

Evan Eckhoff, of watery physique, makes an ill-advised debut at heavyweight against six-foot-seven, 252-pound Quinn Corbett. Corbett, undefeated in his amateur career, is a monster, heavily muscled and surely a head taller than his pot-bellied opponent. If Eckhoff shares my reservations, he doesn’t much show it, as the starting bell sounds and he walks right over to Corbett, clubbing him with an overhand right. It startles Corbett into a double-leg, and he lands in side control. Eckhoff holds onto an ineffective guillotine, and Corbett decides to clamp onto Eckhoff’s neck in turn. They ring each other’s necks until Corbett lets go in favor of some light ground-and-pound. He passes to mount and fires away as Eckhoff turtles up. The referee stops the bout at a minute and forty-six seconds into the first round. Eckhoff’s cornermen maintain a sunny disposition, and one says to the other, “He did good for his first time.”

Spencer Debendetti and Kyle Geary are fighting at a catch-weight of 160 pounds.

Debendetti, representing Victory Martial Arts, comes out trailed by a group of eight or ten, all wearing matching t-shirts. Debendetti’s coach takes a seat next to me, the first of three times he’ll conduct an underdog to the cage tonight. Geary walks out to what’s probably the dirtiest song of the evening. I do believe the n-word was uttered at least four times, along with ample references to fellatio and various forms of intercourse.

The fight is brief. Debendetti eats a jab before finding himself planted on his back. He closes up his guard and locks up what looks like a fight-ending guillotine joke, but Geary explodes out and transitions to side control. He pins Debendetti in the crucifix position and lets loose with short punches. They don’t seem to be doing much damage but, with Debendetti unable to buck out, the referee decides to call it early in the first round.

J.L. George looks uneasy standing across from Jimmy “Slice” Moreno. The heavyweight tilt runs for just over two rounds, and sees Moreno threatening with heavy punches on the feet before swiftly planting George on the mat. George very nearly stages a comeback in the second, taking Moreno’s back in a scramble and almost sinking in a rear naked choke, but he fails to slip the forearm below the chin, and burns himself out. Moreno reverses into George’s full guard, stands, and dives in with a heavy right. George wilts, covering his face and turtling up. Moreno wails away for the remainder of the round.

Moreno looks a little winded coming out for the third, and George advances too zealously, with his chin up in the air. Moreno clips him with a straight right that sends George crashing to the mat only seconds into the final round.

Lightweight Louis Robles makes the mistake of hanging around in Bobby Moffet’s guard. Too intent on ground and pound, Robles ignores the cries from his corner to stand up, and Moffet slaps on an arm bar. Robles can’t punch his way out, and submits in the first.

Bobby Andrews, of Victory Martial Arts, finds himself in over his head against Jason Ignacek, the fourth-ranked featherweight in the promotion. Ignacek’s much-improved striking leaves Andrews desperately working for a double-leg along the fence. Ignaceck takes advantage, jumping into full guard and trapping Andrews in a guillotine choke. The tap comes at 2:10 of Round 1.

Representing Coalition MMA, Zac “Three Piece” Feece, six feet tall and weighing in at a prodigious 245 pounds, wins the award for nickname most resembling a KFC value meal. His opponent, Chris “The Clinch” Hill, weights in at a similarly stupendous 270. Hill immediately dives for a takedown, and the two tumble into the corner right in front of me. Feece tries for a triangle, but Hill shrugs it off. He makes like a jackhammer and forces the referee to stop the fight after 34 seconds.

Lightweight A.J. Masters is the second Coalition MMA fighter to take to the cage, a slight young man tasked with the barrel-chested Jake “The Simian Smasher” Frias. Masters’s corner eggs him on: “He’s a short fucker, come on A.J.” Cold comfort, as Frias shoots in for a single leg right out of the gate, dumping Masters onto the mat before posturing up and unloading with punches. The fight is stopped within the first minute.

Heavyweights Tim Williams and Mike Petersen come out slugging. Petersen, the heaviest fighter of the night at 280 pounds, gets the better of the exchanges, and Williams resorts to a bull rush. He drives Petersen into the fence, and the cage shakes violently. They tumble to the mat, where Williams struggles out of a rear naked choke and into Petersen’s full guard. He postures up and lands a punch before the bell sounds.

Williams starts the second with a couple of lackadaisical kicks. Petersen promptly counters with a right. A second lands flush and Williams slumps to his knees. The doctor cradles the supine William’s head as the fighter answers questions through a mouthful of blood. TKO at seventeen seconds of Round 2.

There’s a distinct pattern developing, where underdogs are consistently drawn from the same training camps, as if these groups yet lack the savvy or clout to put their fighters in favorable matches. Victory Martial Arts has produced three such over-matched fighters this evening. The same goes for Coalition MMA, which suffers it’s third and final loss of the night, as lightweight Brian “Two-Time” Titus falls in the first round to the Uflacher Academy’s Derrik Malert. Titus started the round showing off, with a silly jumping front kick. Malert remained unimpressed, and surged forward with a flurry of punches, throwing Titus off-balance. Malert followed with punches as Titus stumbled to the mat. Titus was unable to scramble away, and Malert continued to level shots to the head, forcing the referee to stop the fight.

An intermission before the title fights get under way. As the night wears on, deciphering the verse tattooed on the ring girl’s upper thigh is becoming an increasingly important mission. Conducting this operation in a fashion both sly and gentlemanly is a tricky business that I handle with great aplomb. Congratulations all around. She’s wearing a skirt that falls far short of her rear end. She seems totally un-phased by this insufficiently tailored garment. A true professional.

In the co-main event, the undersized David “Baby Ruth” Booth takes on the Cut Throat MMA Light Heavyweight Champion, Bill Johnson. Booth draws laughs from the crowd as he walks out to the Lion King soundtrack. Johnson draws approximately zero laughs by walking out with Top-10 bantamweight Miguel Torres in his corner.

Despite the pair’s supposed grappling acumen, the fight takes a quick turn for the riotous. Johnson is strongest at range, with straight rights and uppercuts breaking through Booth’s guard. When Booth manages to collapse the distance, he makes a hockey fight of it, with looping punches in the clinch that frequently stagger the defending champion. He drops Johnson twice, once in the beginning of the second and again in the fourth, but absorbs tremendous punishment in the interim. By the fifth round, chants of “Simba” roll through the crowd, and Johnson is badly gassed. Booth takes the initiative, marching forward with slow but heavy hooks that win him the round and put an exclamation point on the fight.

The crowd is so moved by Booth’s tireless efforts that they forget how handily Johnson folded Booth up with kicks to the body, how often his uppercuts sent Booth’s head snapping back in the first few rounds. The judge’s suffer a similar bit of short-term memory loss, and Booth is awarded a split-decision victory and the Cut Throat MMA light heavyweight title.

Headliner and welterweight champion T.J. Rowley wins the award for best entrance song of the night, walking out to a metal version of Hall of the Mountain King, which has increased the room’s zaniness quotient ten-fold. He’s defending his belt against Ryan Storey. Both sport impressive amateur records—Rowley with nine wins, one loss, and Storey at twelve and three. Storey is the more impressive physical specimen, a rocky 170 pounds, but the more slender Rowley has the distinction of already having beaten Storey once before, by unanimous decision back in January of 2010. Both are poised to make professional debuts.

Rowley opens the fight with a lead-leg kick to Storey’s mouth. Storey doesn’t like the taste and takes the fight to the ground, where Rowley threatens briefly with an omoplata. Rowley cannot sweep, though, and has to content himself with full guard. He inches his legs up towards Storey’s shoulders, but Storey is mindful of any impending submissions and stands up. On the feet he plasters Rowley with a hard right cross that persuades the champ to dive for a takedown. Storey sprawls and slaps on a guillotine, but Rowley remains calm, advancing to half-guard and bruising up Storey’s rib cage until he lets go. They find themselves back on their feet only briefly, as Storey eagerly clinches up and slams Rowley to the mat. He begins to tighten up an arm triangle choke, but he’s short on time, and the round ends just as Rowley pops his head free.

In the second, Rowley again tries to kick and punch at range, but Storey barrels forward and drags Rowley back to the mat. Storey advances to full mount, where he puts Rowley to the guillotine. The choke is in tight, and though Rowley, only some twenty-four inches away, is likely falling into unconsciousness, his eyes are open wide, gazing I guess on some alter-earth, all the good things that must slip away as he taps out. The submission comes at 1:45 of Round 2.

With this victory, Storey has become the new Cut Throat MMA Welterweight Champion, improved his record to 13-3-0, and avenged every loss ever suffered in his amateur career. Before exiting the cage, he announces that, with this final bit of business taken care of, he’s leaving the amateur circuit behind.

Hard to Watch: Fedor Emelianenko and the Fall of MMA's First Great Generation

(originally published on Bloodyelbow.com on February 18, 2011)

Tough year for the diehards. Tough for the old-schoolers and the true-blues. Tough for the midnighters, all of us who stay up to catch a glimpse of PRIDE's glory days, played out in evermore sparsely attended Japanese arenas. And tough for the dearly devoted who swear that the ultimate heavies still have one good ruckus in the tank. Tough for the also-rans and almost-weres we didn’t love enough. Tough for those old champs, the Renaissance bruisers, who bore our sport out into the bright lights of the mainstream, and showed us what mixed martial arts could become.

Saturday night, Fedor Emelianenko, a one-man institution in the world of mixed martial arts, lost for an unprecedented second fight in a row, falling in the first round of Strikeforce’s heavyweight tournament to Antonio Silva. The loss prompted him to seemingly retire before some ten thousand protesting fans. Whether or not he has, in fact, taken his final bow is largely beside the point. Should he enter the ring again, it will be as a different man, diminished in the eyes of many. The man he was, the greatest heavyweight of all time, is an artifact of what we must admit is a bygone age. This last fight of his may act as a sign of the times, a seal, fastening shut the book on his generation’s exploits.

Truth be told: for those of us who rhapsodize about Chuck Liddell's rise to power, Wanderlei Silva's reign of terror, or B.J. Penn's quixotic, multi-division ambitions; for those who envisioned a UFC belt around Cro Cop's waist, kept a soft spot for Tim Sylvia, or relished the twisting of many limbs under Kazushi Sakuraba's hands, this past year merely caps off a near half-decade of disappointments and growing pains. Cruel years, wherein a whole era of heroes--the names Pulver and Arlovski, Sakurai and Silva, Franklin, Ortiz, Yamamoto, Nogueira--has been gradually rendered, not unskilled, never powerless, but suddenly old.

Some, like Pulver and Sylvia, or one-time contenders Hermes Franca and David Louiseau, have stumbled their way into irrelevance, relegated to the obscurity of regional fight promotions. Others, like Hidehiko Yoshida, were able to bow out with relative grace. Most, however, continue to work on the sport’s largest stages, with all their hampered motivations, all their nagging injuries and old wounds there for everyone to see. Consider Cro Cop, whose thoughts wander more and more towards his hometown, a quiet lake, a fishing rod in his hands. Consider deposed middleweight Rich Franklin, rudderless between two weight classes. Consider Rodrigo Nogueira’s softening jaw, Matt Hughes’s slowing double-leg, all that tape holding Sakuraba together. Take a look at the scattered remains of Chute Boxe, the thinned ranks of Brazilian Top Team, the shuttered windows of Miletich Fighting Systems. By degrees, the old standards have relinquished their place, effaced themselves, and our efforts to hold on to the past have been undone, time and again, by the likes of Frankie Edgar and Junior dos Santos. The Strikeforce tournament, itself something of a conceptual relic, looked to be a final chance for Emelianenko, perhaps the finest specimen of his generation, to stake one last claim not only for himself, but for that crop of mixed martial artist that drew tens of thousands of fans to the Saitama Super Arena, and who served as the first coaches on The Ultimate Fighter. Yet, if there was even a sliver of hope that the old guard had one more lesson to teach the up-and-comers, it’s gone now, lost somewhere under the hammer falls of Antonio Silva’s fists upon Emelianenko’s head.

We’re on the edge of an exciting, new time for mixed martial arts. The sport receives greater media attention every year, and tremendous athletes such as Jon Jones and Cain Velasquez prove that MMA is worth all the attention. But for we sentimental knuckleheads—and surely every good fight fan has at least a touch of nostalgia in them—this period of time has been a dirge five years running.

What can you do? Don't look for a comeback. These young bucks and new-fashioned killers are too hungry to let it happen. The new MMA order, it's here. It's been here all along. May it be glorious and violent. May it be worth the bitterness of giving up all our old heroes.