It’s a rarefied club. If you’re a real fighter who fights real fights, it’s a club you’ll eventually probably be knocked the fuck out of. That being: The Undefeated. And so it is that any fighter who is undefeated after ten fights is either fighting worked matches (a.k.a. fixed fights) or is a true phenom.
Gilbert Melendez is this phenom. A mixed martial arts phenom. A 10–0 phenom, though, given the frequency with which he fights, that could radically have changed by the time you read this. But that’s almost immaterial to everybody else, or at least the everybody else who knows that beating ten men, shit, forget about men, ten professional fighters, in a row, seven by KO or TKO, one by submission, and two by decisions, is the kind of thing everybody else would gladly say is good enough. Everybody, that is, except him.
What makes Sammy run?
“I go out to kill.”
And for this to have any weight at all you have to hear him say it when you can see him say it. The first time I saw Melendez fight was only the second time he had fought. It was March 27, 2003, and he had just come back from spring break. He was wearing surf jams. And smiling as he walked into the caged ring. He was 5′9″ and 155 pounds. He reminded me of a muppet. My pre-fight prediction was that he was going to lose. Badly.
Except he did not.
He won. Badly. His opponent, one Mr. Jeff Hougland, virtually disappeared under a hail of blows. And after the ref stood him from where he had been delivering aforementioned bombs to the face of Mr. Hougland, he was smiling again.
So the whole “killing” thing seems out of character. Until you start to track his whole march uphill. One win after the next. Here in the States. In Japan. And with each step you can feel something working its way through.
“Well, I can’t deny that I think about it now. I’m thinking ‘no way can I lose now.’ That’s what I’m thinking about when I train. I’m also thinking of how much I hate whoever it is I’m fighting.”
And the smile again.
At twenty-four, Melendez is training in San Luis Obispo with one of the world’s premier fighters, Chuck Liddell, a fellow traveler. Liddell, who had been looking at the same sort of future that Larry Holmes saw—always winning but never getting any respect for doing so—before he drove home in the most definitive way possible that he didn’t care whose body he had to walk over to get to where he is now, is arguably one of the best two or three fighters in the world at his weight class. And his quiet desire to crush, kill, and destroy matches Melendez’s quite well.
“You want to know what I do before the fights that I win? I have Jake Shields [a world champion] hit me in the face. I stay in my little room backstage. I like to keep it like a jail cell. Shut up or get the fuck out. I cage my beast inside and try to turn my nervousness into energy. I listen to some music …”
Classical?
“Haha … no. Some rap. Or some Rage Against the Machine.”
And gone is his smile of old. In fact, he no longer smiles at all when he enters the ring, instead preferring to run into the ring, his eyes like the backs of match-books, all gray and shark-like, over a mouth that silently mutters what I imagine are the kind of words you whisper to God about something you really, really want.
“I want to kill whoever it is I’m fighting.” And in front of 25,000 people at the Tokyo Dome, or in front of 14,000 in San Jose, this has been made aggressively apparent. Time after time after time after time after time (and now double that). With his father in his corner (so the whole Freudian thing is shot to hell right there), Melendez does exactly that.
And losing is not really an issue at the same time that it is really the only issue, but this kind of hunger is a bitch, and whatever it is about Melendez that makes winning such a tonic for whatever it is that might ail him, we can only imagine that he hates losing much more than he loves winning. Which, as of this writing, he was still doing.
Well, that and riding limos to shows, dating models, and beating the crap out of larger men on the street just because they don’t know any better.
Welcome to the hall of champions, goddamnit.
MODERN CINEMA’S LONGEST CONTINUOUS SINGLE-SHOT FIGHT SCENE STARRING A MAN WHO MADE HIS LIVING IN A KILT AND THE BLACK MICHAEL CAINE, KEITH DAVID
THEY LIVE (1988) DIRECTED BY JOHN CARPENTER
Screen time is alternate reality time. If the average conversation seems interminable when you’re talking about someone else’s dreams, or Star Trek or something else you give not the slightest shit about, ON screen it would seem like a lifetime. Or a Lars Von Trier film. But nowhere is this LESS true than in the parallel universe of screen fight scenes.
Flash to: waiting at some dusty California train yard. Two railroad workers are angrily jawing in the front seat of a pickup truck. They exit their respective doors like the truck was on fire and begin throwing off various articles of clothing in the world’s oldest pre-fight ritual of ramping. Also known as getting up the nerve. The words rumble across the parking lot, and when they’ve both thrown off the gloves, the hard hats, the vests, and the shirts they have absolutely no other option but to start swinging.
And they do.
Swinging, missing, slowing, and then the harsh reality: the average person cannot even swing their arms vigorously for sixty seconds, let alone hit another human being, without doing what we in the biz like to call GASSING. Which they do. The fight having ended inconclusively, the two begin redressing with the shirt, the vests, the hard hats, and the gloves before, like some weird kinescope that’s been run in reverse, they’re sitting in the front seat of the pickup truck, only this time, they’re completely silent.
Total elapsed time: one minute and seventeen seconds.
Which is why this movie, They Live, starring former “professional” “wrestler” Rowdy Roddy Piper, is sooooo goddamned unusual. Sure there was the rolling and rollicking fight scene between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen in John Ford’s 1952 flick The Quiet Man, but this occurs over changes in scenario and therefore falls out of consideration in this here category.
Over a great potboiling theme of aliens disguised as humans that are revealed through the use of special glasses in a scene that features the non-kilted Mr. Piper trying to convince the hardest-working black man in Hollywood, Keith David, that the aliens DO exist, they begin an alley fight that while it was only meant to last twenty seconds in the original script, clocked in at an amazing five minutes and twenty seconds of screen time.
Add to that the fact that “method actors” Piper and David decided to fight for real, only faking face punches, and it emerges as a stunningly Proustian bit of filmmaking, and for this, and his total lack of interest in the governorship of Minnesota, we give a tip of the hat to The Rowdy One.
This was a head shot. Plain and simple. Because you could talk to the next ten fight gamers you meet and not get the same kind of unapologetic depth that you get when you get an Eddie Goldman. And every sport’s got an Eddie Goldman: bodybuilding had Ricky Wayne, baseball had Billy Martin, tennis had McEnroe. Guys that are—if not honor-bound to do so are then constitutionally incapable of NOT doing so—going to give you the straight shot and fuck you if you don’t like it.
Right or wrong, lucid or snockered, their unfettered opinionating usually marks them as guys that either have to make their mark where they can’t be touched—on some field of play—or they get hustled off, stage right, to make room for more accommodating (read: bought) voices. Or they die in fiery car wrecks with a bottle of Smirnoff clutched to their chests.
In any case, with Goldman, thus far, feel free to check none of the above (www.secondsout.com/radio/).
He also, thus far, has managed to, wait, let’s put that between quotes … “has managed to” stay out of any significant amounts of limelight despite being knee deep in almost every fight game there is—amateur wrestling, real pro wrestling, fake pro wrestling, real fake pro wrestling, ultimate fighting, kickboxing, boxing, real, fake, fixed, and otherwise. And his Rolodex of people he’s touched just goes on and on and on. Despite his dyspepsia. Despite his continued lack of interest in the vicissitudes of the business world that guides sports— in particular, fight sports—and finally, despite every single prevailing trend there is that’s connected to sports entertainment, Goldman perseveres, jeremiads and all. When I ask him, after finally getting hold of him, if there are any sports untainted by the bony hand of avarice, he says without missing a beat:
“No.”
Which is why he had to be tracked down. Like that cereal Life that was foisted on the Madison Ave.-manufactured Mikey back in the ’70s on the grounds that because he hated everything, if he LIKED the cereal it had to have something going for it, Goldman could be counted on to deliver nothing but: head shots, that is.
You’ve got a history that goes back in the fight game forever it seems, fading in and out according to your whims, focusing on this fight sport or that. Did you have a Pearl Harbor moment when you came out of the cold this last time? For me it was in the early ’90s when I saw the first UFC.
I missed the first UFC. I later saw it but I missed the first one. But my Pearl Harbor moment was when I was reading about extreme fighting, whose press conference I had been to early on in the year, at Kahnawake, the Mohawk Nation near Montreal. And there’s been a whole history of political struggles there and the government didn’t want them there and I’m sitting around in my apartment with the TV on, thinking “What the hell am I doing sitting here? I got to get myself up there,” and that really sort of marked a turnaround because I had already started covering this a bit. That, of course, was the event where eight participants—Ralph Gracie, Zinoviev, and so on—were arrested, which led to this whole huge struggle, and it ended up getting an article in Penthouse because of that … but what was important, what was gotten across, was the pleas by the members of the Mohawk Nation for their people to fight against genocide and for self-determination. For their rights as a people.
And that to me was the centerpiece of the whole issue and that’s why that whole thing was so important beyond just the battle to legalize mixed martial arts, because it wasn’t even known as that then, and the whole promoting of combat sports …
So was the upshot, then, that fight sports and social activism lived happily ever after?
The upshot was that most of the charges were thrown out, and a lot of the people saw that it was absurd that these people were arrested. … I think one fighter had to pay a fine or something like that. The prison that they were thrown in was shortly thereafter closed down because it was found to be inhumane. … I mean, look, Canadians, who don’t have as much of a cowboy attitude about these things as Americans do, were asking “What? We’re arresting people because they’re going to a live sporting event? That was open to the public and was shown on television? What’s going on here? You don’t like it? You don’t have to watch it. You didn’t have to fight in it. You didn’t have to go there. What’s the big deal?”
So in ’96 there was a whole battle and eventually it got legalized but this was part of a whole broader struggle that was going on between the Canadian and Quebec governments against the native people in Canada. But this turned around and rules were adopted for no-holds-barred fighting, which were then adopted, in most cases, in California in 2000, which lead to New Jersey adopting them, then Nevada unified the rules, which opened the whole door up.
But this door-opening thing is not to your liking, it seems. You’ve told me you won’t even watch the UFC anymore. Is it because it failed on some sort of social-relevance scale?
All you have to do is go back to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Back then there were three major sports in America: baseball, boxing, and wrestling. Now, all of these sports faced crises of their own and all went in different directions as a result of it. Baseball had the fixing of the 1919 World Series. In response they brought in a commissioner and outlawed gambling, and they laid down the law.
Boxing had been illegal in many places so what they did then was legalize it. But instead of creating a league or a commissioner or something like that, it was regulated by the state commissions.
Professional wrestling had this problem of real and fake matches, and look, the problem with a lot of these matches back then was that the fans found them dissatisfying because they were real; they usually lasted a really long time, and were slow on the action. Promoters said, ‘We’ll make it more entertaining by making it fake.’ And they did this more and more up until the late 1980s, when they dropped any pretense that it was real.
So these were three different routes taken for combat sports, actually all sports in general. But boxing, under the state commissions, was able to legalize itself without having a central body, but this eventually has led to its downfall: now you have multiple champions. It’s the only sport where you don’t have a single champion. Not having a central body has really hurt boxing. You don’t have the best guys fighting the best guys, you have these sanctioning bodies pushing mandatory fights, multiple titles, and utter confusion. You know what question I get a lot? ‘Who’s the heavyweight champion today?’ And when you try to explain … the WBA, the IBF, and WBC and WBO and guys from the Ukraine, and guys from Belorussia, and Kazakhstan, and St. Petersburg— Russia, not Florida—it just gets very, very confusing. No unified titles. No central governing body.
And here’s something: the networks in particular don’t want it. Because it’d be very hard for them to control one guy. Most of the promoters don’t want it either, except for, ironically, Don King. Now, he has contracts with a lot of these guys either promoting or co-promoting a number of these different guys.
So Don King’s interested in a central body?
No. NONE of these guys are interested in a central body. King’s interested in unifying the titles. There was a proposal a few years ago put forth by boxing promoter Lou DiBella to hold a meeting among different boxing promoters and none of the other major promoters even wanted to HOLD A MEETING together. It’s very self-destructive. But there’s hope for boxing because it’s still the most polished and professional of the combat sports on the top level. The skill you see among the top fighters when you have top people matched up against each other, in terms of punching, is unmatched. And many people in mixed martial arts recognize this. [MMA champ] Frank Shamrock said the same thing. The striking, very often, in mixed martial arts sucks. The striking sucks and these guys have no chins.
Is that why [HBO and NBC sports commentator] Jim Lampley hates it?
Well, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he doesn’t approve of it and he doesn’t like it. I don’t think he understands grappling and I think as a boxing guy he’s appalled at the use of strikes that are not legal in boxing. Not only dirty boxing, like holding and hitting, but knees and elbows, and he doesn’t understand grappling, and so when it goes to the ground and takedowns and submission moves … look, it’s, for him, probably like when an ugly American starts making fun of someone Chinese by talking faux Chinese or something. It just seems kind of insulting. I’ve tried to goad him on when I talk with him about it, because he IS a big supporter of wrestling at the Olympics, but he just didn’t get it.
Well the early-stage knock against it had very much to do with this idea that fighting for the sake of fighting was somehow irredeemable. That if you removed the mask that’s provided when you add a ball or a stick or something and just had two men going at it, well it was, to quote John McCain, “Human cockfighting.”
Let me just make clear that though I follow the business aspects because it’s important, and the media aspects, I take a broader view. To me whether something is socially positive and useful and desirable is not based on the ratings that it gets. It could be totally the opposite. Or it could be totally the same. It could be important from a business perspective for the media to follow the ratings and so on, and so I report on these things, but when I see what a group like IFL [International Fight League] is doing by emphasizing SPORTSMANSHIP in MMA versus what the UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] is doing, which is emphasizing stupidity and trash talking and all kinds of negative values, well I … Look, I don’t care that all of the music today emphasizes negative values. I look at things broader historically, and not according to some MTV short-attention-span clock. There’s a real softness, a real parasitic attitude of enjoying having people doing everything else for you, and yeah, a fixation on negative values. The US government is afraid of having a draft for their failed war in Iraq that’s even more unpopular, I guess, than Vietnam was, but nobody’s saying anything because there’s no draft. So we rely on air power, which never works, and this was the Rumsfeld strategy and he should have known better. I mean this is a guy who was a wrestler.
So was Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
Well, Rumsfeld was a wrestler at Princeton, I think he was captain of his team and then later he won some kind of Navy championship, but he became this corporate guy who was serving these corporate interests and his intelligence got trumped by all of this stuff. And he was, to his credit, though I’d never vote for him or his people, instrumental when the liberal types were trying to get rid of wrestling at Princeton. He and the alumni got together to get wrestling back. But my point is that even outside of the business, fighting or sports can have a tremendously positive effect upon you.
How?
“It builds self-confidence, it shows you the connection between mental and physical fitness, it’ll give you an attitude of struggling for your rights, it’ll show that you’re not someone who’s going to be pushed around, it’ll teach you when to fight, how to fight. That was [Nelson] Mandela’s point about it. He was an amateur boxer and he credited that for teaching him strategy and tactics. He wasn’t a fan of the violence, but that was part of it, and when you’re involved in political struggles and revolutionary wars, you’re not a fan of violence but you realize it’s necessary.
By any means necessary and No holds barred are very similar slogans, and that’s not a coincidence. A lot of this is not new, but particularly in our parasitic age … we have a so-called financial-services industry that’s huge and that creates nothing of value. … You have a lot of people who are parasites. Particularly in one of the richest countries in the world, but not only. But this is something that goes against that and relates more to the culture of the working-class people. People who still have to work for a living, whether it’s a physical job or service, or retail, or whatever.
But traditionally combat “sports” have always been the purview of the upper classes: think dueling and fencing and so on.
Well … yeah, you had Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but it existed on different levels. If you’ve ever read any of Frederick Douglass’s writings he talks about how boxing and wrestling were really popular among the slaves. Between Christmas and New Year’s and so on when the slave owners were drunk and so on, the slaves would have competitions in their time off. So it was popular on all levels. But I don’t make fighting an abstract ideal. You do it because you HAVE to. It is a practical necessity. Fighting to live, for most people, is a practical necessity. And sports combat is just the way to teach you how to do that for whatever kind of battle you’re in.
But to play devil’s advocate here a minute, isn’t that supposed to be one of the values of civilization? That we create social structures so that we DON’T have to fight to live?
We create social structures today, and the ones that dominate are all designed to confuse the majority of people into making a minority of the people rich and powerful. And dividing them up to get them to kill each other on the behalf of various ruling groups. This [fight training] helps build an attitude of defiance as well to conventional thinking. Or it can.
But I’m an elitist at base level and start to think that when you talk about wanting to free the common man, it’s an incomplete discussion if you’re not also talking about advancingthe common man. Which nobody is. And so whose fault is it if we’re stupid?
“It’s all supposed to be dumbed down, though. That’s the whole point. In the early days of the UFC, for example, it was an incredible atmosphere. It was like the United Nations at these events. Fighters and fight fans from Brazil and Japan and from Europe sharing techniques and this and that. It was an incredible thing. And it was the same thing when I went to Brazil or Japan. Now they put a few people on a reality TV show and they say, “Uhhh … I wanna mess him up, man … uhhhh …” And some people might say this makes it successful, but I don’t. I don’t think it’s highly successful. I know it has good ratings and good buy rates. To me it’s socially not successful.
Look, is the WWE [World Wrestling Entertainment] successful for combat sports?
They draw more people than the UFC does. They did better than that. They’re a publicly traded company. They make a ton of money. Is that more successful? That’s not the issue. What are they promoting? They’re not promoting honor. They’re not promoting something that you could point out to people as something that will improve you as people. And particularly a people that are disenfranchised, that are out of control and that need a warrior culture to help them battle for their rights and livelihood. Not this. This has been remade in the image of their—the gambling casino owners’ and their ex-boxercise instructor’s—gods.
Yes, sports IS entertainment and it has to have entertainment value. If it doesn’t have entertainment value, people won’t pay money to go watch it. But there’s a social value to it as well that I’m more concerned with; that for me trumps everything. In other words, I’m not a capitalist. I’m not interested in maximizing profits and the accumulation of capital. That’s what they’re interested in and that trumps everything else for them and that’s the direction that’s led it, especially in the culture we have today, to the lowest common denominator. Especially with a network like SpikeTV.
I don’t know that what you’re even asking for is possible. Something with a high social value, high financial value? And is entertaining? What does that even look like?
Look at Muhammad Ali’s career. That was key to him being viewed as the most popular and most important professional athlete in the twentieth century. Maybe the best-known person in the whole world. For his struggle—even though he was misguided into the Nation of Islam—against racism, white supremacy, the Vietnam War. All of these things added in to the whole allure of Muhammad Ali.
But intra-sport controversy concerning his legitimacy surrounded even him from the beginning. Did you read Nick Tosches’s book on Sonny Liston and the bit on the so-called phantom punch that led to the defeat that made Ali’s bones?
I didn’t read it. And I don’t know how much that was based on fact … because I remember trying to interview him [Tosches] on it and he wasn’t interested in talking about it and so I’ve spoken to people who knew what he wrote and were involved at the time and they said that he really didn’t know a lot about what he was talking about. Now people have different opinions about whether or not those first fights with Ali and Liston were fixed or not. But that to me, even if they were true, doesn’t stain his legacy at all, because what did he do after that?
Well, I’ve chatted with Howard Bingham [noted Ali photographer], as well as a former sparring partner of Liston’s and gotten two highly entrenched, but persuasive positions on either side.
I’ve heard both sides of the argument too. In a fixed fight it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get punched. You know the other guy’s going to be throwing punches, so if you want to fix the fight you get hit and you go down and you stay down. But … I don’t know enough. I do know that even if it was fixed it doesn’t change his legacy because not all the fights were fixed. But … you know, we’re in a period of cynicism. Look what people have done with freedom? Hiphop music that calls each other the names that are used now.
Is there any sport that’s a standard bearer for our higher yearnings, then?
No.
And that’s not cynical? What about baseball?!?
I can’t watch baseball anymore. Not because it’s slow but because it’s corrupt. I’m not going to pay a bunch of money to watch a bunch of steroid guys play. From 1957 to like 1993 I used to go to baseball games all the time, every year. And then one game I noticed that they had Steve Howe pitching and I knew he already had been busted six or seven times for drugs and I’m asking, “Why am I watching this?” I didn’t go back.
But for combat sports, for all these sports I’m not saying there’s no hope. I’m just saying it’s an uphill battle, but anything decent in society usually is. That doesn’t mean you stop struggling, or fighting. It just means you want to start to lay out lessons from this retrograde, regressive period we’re in. I mean, who knows when things will start to turn around? I’m never without hope. I think we should just be more focused on making a contribution that’s lasting, that’s all.
