It was like the Fourth of July. There was a silvery burst of light and then ease. And quiet. A tremendous ease. The mat was cool against my face, and as unseen hands lifted me upright I heard myself murmur. Almost whisper even, “I’m okay. I slipped. I tripped.” And because these unseen hands now seen, but whose owners are unknown to me believe me, they let me go, and down I go again. And again there’s the intrusion of hands and I feel like someone who’s had a nap interrupted. Twice. And so, more forcefully this time, “I’m fine. I tripped.” And my legs are unsteady under me and someone makes me watch what just happened, or rather, the video of what just happened, and I can see that I’ve been knocked out. Or abducted by aliens for all I know. In any case, I was out. No more than ten seconds, but clearly out, out for what felt like a lot longer than ten seconds.
I was in Fight Club SF and I had been knocked out by a pro, Chris Sanford. And later in some cagefight in Fresno I run into him again backstage, immediately before he goes out and submits with an armbar a cat named Jack Cardenas. And then again and again: in Las Vegas, in LA, in bars here, there, and everywhere. His name keeps coming up and eventually he’s on TV, the first season of The Ultimate Fighter TV show.
Now, I’d been knocked DOWN before but never knocked OUT, and of course never knocked out by someone so goddamned ubiquitous, and in being knocked out I had never guessed that the first and most definitive missile delivered to thems that would have it delivered no other way would be so life-changing. Once you’ve been knocked out you fight differently. You fight like someone who then fully takes fighting now, finally and in good measure, seriously. I’m not saying that you win any more than you did before. I’m just saying that you’re finally willing to die trying, and this can make all the difference in the world for some men. Or for me, at the very least. And so in the name of closure, um, redemption, and, ultimately, revenge, I seek him out to find out if it was as good for him as it was for me.
Now, did it feel as good to knock me out as I think it’d be for me to knock you out?
He laughs and shrugs his shoulders “Hey, man. No. I felt bad. I didn’t want to fight anybody that night.”
But you knew the rules, everybody had to fight.
Well, I had never been there before that night, so I thought I could just watch and check it out. But you came over and said something like, “C’mon, let’s fight.” And I tried to beg off and you asked again and, so I said, “Okay.”
Do you remember what happened after that?
Yeah. You kicked the fuck out of me and that’s when I said “Okay” for the second time, and you came in with your hands a little low and that was it.
Well, not to make any excuses … but if I had known you were a pro I would have been a LOT more cautious. You said you hadn’t trained before.
“Did I? I don’t remember saying that.” And he doesn’t say it but he doesn’t have to say it because I’ve already shamed myself enough by even bringing it up. Rule Number 478: If you got your ass kicked, do not equivocate around the ass-kicking.
And what did you all do after that?
Well, you challenged me again. And I beat you again.
You didn’t knock me out again!
No. I tapped you out with a choke. I felt bad about that too, because you were in NO shape to go again, but you kept challenging me.
And I could repeat this sad mockery, making sound bite after sound bite, and it’d tell you the same thing in the same way, a way that would not and could not be changed. Ever. I had gotten my ass kicked. And then I had gone back and got my ass kicked again. And it was pretty clear I’d have gone back as many times as I could to get it kicked as many times as I could before I’d give over to the understanding that I wasn’t going to win this one.
But what of Sanford? Known was the fact that he had moved into sports management and had recently started tooling around town in a Benz, an expensive one, and that he had had some mortgage business or some such thing as well. Would he be interviewed?
We going to spend much time talking about me knocking you out?
Uh, no. I mean, whatever you want.
Good. You know what was wild, though? All of that shit that went down in New Orleans.
Is the water so hot it is cold, or so cold it is hot? I mean, is there something going on in post-Katrina Louisiana that I had missed? … You were there?
Yeah. Steel sent me there.
And then the scales started falling away in big ol’ chunks from my eyes. You see, the Steel Foundation was like the defunct Sandline International. Or KBR. Ringing any bells for you? Supplier of “contractors” for corporate contracts. Be it in Iraq, Central America, or, I guess in this instance, southern states America. They usually draw their employee base from the ranks of the formerly ranked: SEALs, Rangers, and so on. Sanford was in the service?
Um…
It signaled a pause, a pause that I had heard before when I’ve asked CIA guys stuff that was politically inopportune for me to have asked. So I asked it again: Were you in the service?
Yeah. I was in the army.
And they sent you to New Orleans?
No. Steel sent me. All of the large hoteliers wanted to secure their properties, up to and including their employees, who it was felt may have been in some sort of peril. I mean, no one knew, right? So I got the call and signed on. I was supposed to be there for ninety days, but after about fifteen, I said, “So long. I’m leaving.” It was crazy, dude.
I thought a lot of that so-called craziness had been debunked as never having happened.
Bullshit. It was sheer lunacy. We pulled some guy off of a roof. We did this extraction, you know, rappel in and we get this fool and he’s shooting at rescue workers and so we get him and I asked him, “Why the fuck were you shooting at the rescue workers?” And you know what he said to me? “Because they had a green boat.” A GREEN BOAT. This is not what was written about.
Isn’t it lovely what happens when the old laws and then even convention cease having any sort of meaning anymore?
Actually, no. It’s not. It was fucked up. I was THERE at the Superdome and I saw credible proof of instances where one woman had been raped several times. I was watching them stack bodies. We were drawing and returning fire … fighting from block to block …
What? Who? How?
He shrugged his shoulders slowly. “We never knew. And here’s something else that wasn’t reported, and that’s that while we were totally vested up, armed, and equipped, we weren’t the only ones there. I remember once we came across these guys lifting luxury cars off of one of our parking lots and I go up and say, ‘Excuse me. What are you guys doing?’ And right away they’re drawing on me and my guys are drawing on them and I’m like ‘Whoa, whoa, wait, we don’t need to fight. We just need to see some ID.’ And they showed us something and …”
Who were they?
“They were cops.” And he smiled. “Hey. I don’t know. They said they were afraid looters were going to get their cars, or something, so they were loading them onto some commandeered truck. But there were like gangs. Gangs of guys outside of the random crazies. Random crazies don’t steal forklifts, okay. They shoot green boats. Forklifts were stolen to yank up security gates. Gun stores were empty. But gangs just descended on the city from Mississippi and wherever and were stealing a lot more than the beer they were showing you on TV. We chased some Vietnam vet through the halls of one of the hotels we were securing. It was full-on Rambo shit. He had gotten one of our radios and gotten on our channel and so he was one step ahead of us always. Besides, we knew he knew some shit because he was making no mistakes when we were making sweeps.”
How’d you know he was a vet?
Well, we found his diary at one point. And IT was crazy. And full of crazy shit. We never caught him, though. He was good.
So, it sounds sort of like merc heaven. Why’d you leave?
“I could make $180K easily going to Iraq right now, but I’m not too interested in doing that, either. Life’s too short and the fight game’s keeping me busy here and sooo …” He trails off. “But I left New Orleans because there was no way it was going to be controlled. I had shit for local staff. I told one guy to do something and he told me, ‘Where I’m from in Mississippi, we don’t have uppity niggers talking to good white folks like that.’ Keep in mind, as his boss I had asked him something real basic: ‘Please wake up and do your job.’ I had guys posing with high-powered firearms on the top of cars. There was just no way to control the place and there was no sign at all that there would be. So you get tired of having the bad guys shooting at you, the good guys shooting at you, and the crazy guys shooting at you. So fuck that. I left. Steel was pretty unhappy with me, but I was pretty happy to be out of there.”
We were standing at a local cage-fight event, more visible now since California’s athletic commission okayed mixed martial arts sporting events statewide. The PA was pumping that kind of generic angry-guy music that’s the perpetual soundtrack for monster truck events, while high-channeled ginch flowed by on heels with either too much, or the wrong kind of, attitude. Damien Noorkabash, CEO of fightwear gear company Konjo was there, Sal Russo from Cesar Gracie’s fight team was there, and someone finally said, amid talk of matchups, rematches, and potential matches, “Ah, these’ll be some good fights.”
Undoubtedly.