It was me and Cesar Gracie blue belt (under shooto champ Jake Shields) Sal Russo. Think Hunter S. Thompson and Dr. Gonzo. Except the destination and the journey had nothing to do with Las Vegas and everything to do with Los Angeles and its soulless excess of excess. And we were probably half as high and twice as handsome. At least I was. We were working the twin engines of the good ol’ American sex and violence game over at Playboy radio’s satellite channel, where we were being interviewed by porn star Julie Ashton and some Penthouse pet for reasons that are now only hazily apparent to me. We moderated while the porn broads parried questions from truckers about proper etiquette for owning and keeping sex slaves and other late-night lonely-road ephemera.
On the way back, though, sitting blear-eyed in the airport at Burbank, we stared across the aisle at this guy who looked at once totally familiar and completely unknown to us. Like the way it is sometimes with celebrities. Like the time an old girlfriend of mine ran into Brad Pitt and thought she had gone to high school with him. I mean, sometimes that happens. But this time it was the cartilaginous bundle of cauliflowered ears on either side of his head that was the tip off. Sal said it right as I was thinking it.
“Cung Le.”
Background: if there was a poster boy for K-1, a kickboxing combat sports group (heavily represented in Vegas and on pay-per-view worldwide) that lets fighters lift from the worlds of karate, tae kwon do, kickboxing, and traditional boxing, Le was it. All high-flying scissor kicks and acrobatic throws, knees and god-knows-what-else from his time as an All-American high school and JC wrestler, Le’s specialty is san shou, a combo art that actually ties wrestling in with kickboxing and kung fu. And when I say specialty I mean three bronze medals in amateur san shou world competition with a 13–0 record as a professional, eight of them knockouts.
Let me spell that out for you: his record, including amateur fights, is 36–2, with twenty-six knockouts.
Though his detractors whisper that he’s amassed that record on the backs of unworthy opponents, there’s no doubt that the 5′10″, 182-pound Le can kick a solid yard’s worth of ass.
We introduce ourselves and flank him on the matchbook-gray molded airport seats and by conversation’s end we’ve convinced ourselves that we’ve convinced him to move beyond K-1 and venture into the world of mixed martial arts.
“But I’m going to need some help with the ground game. The submission portion.”
And these are the words I’ve been waiting to hear, as I now offer up my services, on a quid pro quo basis. He’d teach me the finer points of the stand-up game, which, despite my background boxing at the Boys’ Club in Brooklyn, seven years of kenpo karate, and a year of the deadly southeast Asian art of muay thai, was possibly a little lacking. While I, in exchange, would throw him all of what I knew about all of the wrestling, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and catch wrestling I had gotten my hands on.
It was a deal.
A deal that had me making the trek to his fight emporium twice a week. That should have been a tip-off right there, as if I needed more: a man with his OWN fight emporium is probably not to be trifled with. But, to his credit, he did also utter those words that any two men say to each other before they’re about to embark on a “casual” run, or a “light” one-on-one, or a “no pressure” pickup game: Yeah, we’ll just take it easy.
Take it easy? As if. As if he got to be a world champion by taking it easy. As if I hadn’t already put myself, multiple times in fact, in harm’s way by challenging the best in the world in some sort of Aguirre-like hallucination connected to delusions of my indestructibility. As if. (This is what we, in the literary field, call “foreshadowing.”)
And so it went. My stand-up hadn’t suffered as much as I would have thought after a few years of doing nothing but grappling. But it wasn’t my stand-up that was the real problem. It was the head trip. The skull game. I mean, the average person, when hit with a sternum-crushing side kick, a kick so solid that the center of your chest burns like a poker was driven through it in some old Hammer vampire flick, would do everything in his power to avoid said sternum-crushing kick.
Not me, though. Not me because it was inconceivable to me that he would catch me with it again. Even after he had caught me with it again. Even more so, maybe. You see, my brain was completely incapable of getting it. “It” here being that another man was better than me in anything, much less a combat art that had as its sine qua non the singular quality of WILL.
And “will” will get you hurt. Because just as hard as he had been kicking me mid-chest to drive off my head-hunting barrages of jabs and crosses, he had also been kicking my lead (left) leg with a roundhouse kick. The standard defense for this in muay thai or kickboxing or san shou is to raise the knee up at the moment the kick is delivered so that it’s not delivered full on the flank of the thigh.
But knowing this and doing this are two very, very different things.
And figuring out why you would NOT do it if you KNEW it would save you is something else entirely and probably all goes back to will. Or what my great-grandmother would have called “hard-headedness.”
I didn’t do it because I used to be able to squat 405 pounds for many, many reps.
I didn’t do it because I believed I could take more punishment than he could deliver before I delivered him the punishment that was going to deliver unto me a win.
I didn’t do it because, as a Georgian named Time Allen I used to play rugby with once painstakingly explained to me, I was “a goddamned stupid son of a bitch.”
I didn’t do it for any reasons that might have obscured the mechanical and material functioning of reality, because, you see, what happens to the side of the thigh when it is clear that the owner of that thigh will NOT take the precaution to save it is that the muscle starts to spasm to protect itself. It draws itself up tight. Knots itself in sort of a thickening bulge. Which works at the site of the offense. A site that was getting no rest as Le was Dead-Eye Dick with the kicks, and they came with sickening regularity on that one spot, deviating neither left nor right.
And so the muscle hit spasm, and I refused to have it not spasm by refusing to defend it the way I know I should until one morning when the angry ball of a thigh muscle finally gave way the only place it could: at the tendon. And it was like a sniper had shot me. We had been working around each other in the ring and I had not even been kicked. In fact the first thing he said to me post facto was, “I didn’t even TOUCH you.” I was just moving, from the right to my left, when I was shot. Or maybe it was more like when a bridge goes, trundled under as a result of the proverbial last straw on the proverbial camel. In any case, I heard it go through the din of blaring hip hop, round buzzers, and the grunt and struggle of life in the squared circle.
I fell to the canvas and, like an animal, I started crawling. I didn’t know where or for what reason, and when I finally tried to stand up and put weight on the leg I immediately fell down. And of course, I refused to NOT try to stand up on the leg, and so I stepped and fell, stepped and fell, stepped and fell all the way to my car in the parking lot, where I drove my ass to the hospital and where the lying doctor said it was just a strain and ice and aspirin would help me immeasurably.
Especially if by “immeasurably” he meant not at all.
A subsequent MRI revealed a ruptured quadriceps tendon (“The last guy I saw with an injury like this had been kicked … by a horse”), while a subsequent visit to a surgeon and a warning that I was looking at “being crippled for life” if I was going to choose to do without the surgery prompted me to do the surgery. Then six months of rehab after the surgery and the learning to walk again. All pointing me toward the day we all knew was coming.
And when I stepped into that very same ring with the very same Cung Le, I really could not have felt better. He had, in my time away, started training for his first mixed martial arts fight, and as of this writing has fought twice. Fought twice and won twice. Yes, yes. And I’d like to think that I had a little bit to do with that. Almost like someone might like to think that because they voted for the president that they’ve made policy. Yes, despite the presence of Hall of Famer Frank Shamrock as an infrequent training partner along with Brazilian jiu-jitsu great Garth Taylor and a host of others, I’d like to think that it was ME. Me and my humble contribution that awakened in him an awareness of the, um, possibilities … the possibilities inherent in fucking up some punk whose reach overextended his grasp.
CUNG LE’S FAVORITE KNOCKOUT SHOTS AND
HOW TO DELIVER THEM
SPINNING HOOK KICK … PREFERABLY TO THE HEAD: “I hit one of these in a 1998 fight I had against Ben Harris. He kept circling to my left and I aimed it at his neck, clipped his head instead, and he was out. This kick is generally felt to be a low-percentage move and it’s very rare that it works, but I only needed it to work once and it probably worked because of my speed. And to defend against it? Either block it with both hands or just get out of the way.”
RIGHT HOOK: “I knocked out Arne Soldwedel with this in the seventh round but I switched up on this. I was standing southpaw. And delivered it to his head. And he was out. Simple.”
RIGHT KICK … AGAIN WITH THE HEAD: “It was fifty-two seconds into the first round against Minaro Tauro and I set him up with a jab-cross-hook and then a left kick to the body and finally a right kick to his temple that put him out. I thought it just clipped his head but it did the job. You know, it’s funny. If I LOOK for a knockout, I never get it. So I just take what I get and if he’s out when it’s over? Well, fine.”
SHIN KICK: “This was a setup straight up. I was punching his [Dan Garrett’s] head and then leg kicks to his legs. Either high or low so, that he wasn’t thinking at all about his mid-section. And then I threw it all behind a shin kick to his body and I heard two GASPS and that was it.”
BODY SLAM: “You know, there’s this tendency to think that a body slam is just some bullshit professional wrestling move,” said Le, shaking his head quickly from side to side. “But you can FINISH someone with one of these. If I’m slamming you on the ground from my height [5′10″], you’re going to get hurt. In 1999 I had a fight with Scott Sheeley and slammed him down and he broke his cheekbone. That was it.”
SPINNING BACK FIST: “I set this up with a hook. When I was fighting Jeff Thorn-hill I did the hook and just kept coming around with the other first.”
DOUBLE KICK TO … YOU GUESSED IT … THE HEAD: “I got Mike Altman in the third round with a double kick to the head. They stood him up after that and what they should have done is stop the fight there because he was done. But they gave him the standing eight count and let him come back out and so while I ultimately put him out with a left hand to the body, he was finished with the kicks. Why didn’t I finish him with the kicks? Well, I knew him and he was a competitor and I was just trying to show him some respect.”
If I am thanked for anything in the future it should be this.
And in the interim, of course, I plan for the rematch that will restore me atop the whale of my destiny again.
I must be high?
Maaaayyybbbeeee.
“Yup. It’s all fun and games until you find yourself bleeding from a hole I just bit in your cheek.” The speaker was, um, me. The occasion was a show being played by my band, Oxbow.
Hunh?
What? Band?!?
Yeah, yeah, Oxbow’s been a chicken, or maybe an egg, of sudden and violent action and activity. Like the running of the bulls in Pamplona or some such thing …
Or maybe like some wild western where The Kid presents himself as the new boss, Oxbow shows were, on occasion that was almost more than an occasion, beset on all sides by the iniquity of foolish men who—in various fits of hysteria passio—felt compelled to, in the heat of a show that touches on suicidal longing, deep sorrow, and a sometimes animal rage, stick their hand into the cage.
And when they did, the response was as predictable as it was rapid: somebody getting hurt (and I’m not talking about feelings. Or me.) and art and the creation of it being defended by non-standard bearers of Eros who righteously embraced the hard truth that whether the rock hits the glass or the glass hits the rock, it’s probably not going to work out so well for the glass.
So while my injury at the hands of Cung Le, or rather the flung feet of Cung Le, was as predictable as getting burned when you’re playing with fire (and most ring fights are; predictable, that is), it’s the exact opposite trade when plied in the streets. Or on the stage. Or anywhere where the amateurs are pressed into believing it’s “their night.” The injuries are eccentric and frequently horrific examples of what happens when good fortune runs out and bad fortune rushes in.
Don’t believe me? Fine. My infrequent instances in such-like street involvement could be only anecdotal or hyped hyperbole. Not so for our resident medical authority on all things related to ass and its kicking: Dr. Steven G. Ballinger, M.D., who knows nothing if not his way around a goddamned emergency room.
Is there any sort of pattern to the fight injuries you’re seeing?
“Most of the really awful fight injuries I have seen are the result of one of three things: A freak punch, a lopsided donnybrook, or an unexpected act of God superimposed on boys being boys.
“For example, the most remarkable freak punch injury I saw was a guy who smarted off to a skinny wimp in a bar in front of the wimp’s girlfriend. The wimp roundhoused the guy, who wasn’t expecting it, and he went down.
“Dead.
“From a single punch from a 150-pound pencil-armed weenie. The punch was just right: full force, directed through a bony fist into the guy’s upper lip, and straight on. Two of the guy’s dural arteries tore off and his brain was getting pushed out the hole in the base of his skull by the time he hit the floor. Witnesses said that the dead guy didn’t even make a sound, except when he went ‘whump’ on the floor.”
Oh big friggin’ deal. That sounds like Friday night at my house. What else you got?
“There was another time when a guy came in who had been head-butted in the side and his lung was punctured. He had four broken ribs, a chest full of blood, and his right lung and all the blood were pushing his heart into his other lung, collapsing it. The guy with the bum lung was about 6′7″, the guy who head-butted him was about 5′2″, but pretty wiry. We stuck a chest tube in the right side and sucked out all the blood, his lungs blew back up and he did all right.
“But in the lopsided category a lot of the really ugly stuff comes from a guy being down on the ground with three or four guys kicking him. My dad always told me never to kick anyone on the ground unless you intended to kill him, and there is a lot to that. …
“One guy came in who was still alive, but his head had been kicked so much that it was hard to tell where his face was. He had a shaved head, but the skin had been degloved from his face and head and his lips and jaw were all pulverized. His nose was just a couple of round holes. One ear was gone and the other looked like an old rag. Amazingly, he was awake and trying to talk, but his tongue was just writhing around in a wet bloody hole, with spit and blood dribbling out.
“We wired his jaw and sewed everything back up. His eyeballs weren’t ruptured, and when I saw him a few weeks later he looked fairly humanoid. He had a picture of what he looked like before the beating that he brought to help the doctor, and he was an ugly fucker anyway. ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit,’ he said. I always wondered why those guys were so pissed at him.”
Okay. Now there is a possibility that I am completely nauseated.
“Oh no. WAIT … In the act-of-God category one really stands out—he was a rapper in the ‘Biggie’ mold who was bustin’ a few rhymes at the expense of some thug in the audience. The thug met him in the parking lot and proceeded to rap with his fists. The victim tried to run away, and stepped off a five-foot wall into a hole. His ankle dislocated, the bone broke, and his ankle bone tore through his skin. He was so big that he didn’t stop falling until he hit the bottom of the mud-and-God-knows-what hole, and when I met him his foot was up halfway to his knee, sticking out like a flipper, and there was about eight inches of bare bone hanging out of the wound. The end of his bone, with the joint cartilage on it, had a bottle cap embedded in it. He patched up nice, and went on to rap again.”
And the world thanks you, I’m sure.
“I got two more for you, though. This kid challenged a classmate to a kung-fu battle for stealing his twelve-sided die or something. He showed up to the fight with nunchucks, but his opponent said, ‘No way, dude, fists only’ The kid set his chucks down and proceeded to enter the dragon. At some point his opponent kicked him and he fell back on the nunchucks. One of the handles got stuck right into his side and tented out his stomach right under the ribs. The paramedics brought him in with a bandage wrapped around him, the nunchuck handle strapped to his chest. The fight was over, and the kid lost a few feet of intestine.
“Which leads me to the worst one of all. Some kids in the back of a pickup truck were driving around, throwing stuff at adult pedestrians and generally deporting themselves like juvenile delinquents. One of the kids yelled something at a forty-ish Asian man, and threw a bottle at him. The Asian man shouted something back, and the kid, obviously hopped up on something, jumped out of the truck and rushed the guy, yelling ‘What are you gonna do about it Chinkee?!?’ or something to that effect. The Asian guy pulled out a snubnose .357 and shot the kid right in the eye. There was hole bigger than my fist in the back of the kid’s head. The guy was a Cambodian gangster. The wrong guy to mess with, apparently.”
Apparently.