THE ERIK KOCH WHO EXISTED IN THE mysteriously named “Xbox” was not so good-looking as the man I knew; he was thicker about the nose, and possessed of a permanent snarl. Like the real Erik, he was fluid, but the middling portraitists commissioned to create “UFC Undisputed 3” managed only an excessively uniform fluidity that lacked the perfect cadence of human movement. Which is not to say that there was no resemblance; there was in fact enough resemblance to make watching one Erik play another Erik a rather ghostly thing to endure. One day in Wisconsin, many months from the time I want to tell you about here, I sat upon a dirty futon and watched a lackadaisical, sore-from-practice Erik Koch direct his hyperactive doppelgänger in the bloody undoing of José Aldo. The powers of virtual world-making had recorded Duke’s voice, such that one could hear him shouting from the corner; they had found some generic techno music to play as virtual Erik walked to the virtual cage; and they had gotten Erik’s prefight walk-out head-bop rather eerily right. Erik hit a button on the controller, and his digital double threw a punch; flesh-and-blood Erik moved a finger, and his doppelgänger kicked Aldo in the stomach.
Now this situation—a warm-blooded yawning daemon utterly controlling a figure made in his image—had some Cartesian implications, as you will have already surmised; for who was to say that some still greater game-player was not directing us; that flesh-and-blood Erik, not to mention flesh-and-blood Kit, were not in fact being played by some greater god being watched by a greater spacetaker on a more elevated, presumably cleaner, futon? It wasn’t until later in our story that I saw Erik play himself, but I relate it here because the image of Erik Koch, outside his body, directing that body toward a competent violence, is the image that comes to mind when I recall the events of that spring.
What I saw in Erik’s Vegas victory scream was less a fighter who loved the encounter than one who reveled in the rapt attentions of 2,000 heads, 4,000 eyes; and what I saw in Erik’s win was a man knocking out another man because until he did he was forced to share the stage. “I hate losing,” Erik had told me again and again, which I had taken to be the mere expression of a competitive spirit, but ever since Vegas when I think of those words I see a stadium full of heads turning away from Erik and toward someone not Erik. I hear the rip of it, the quick flick of an eye unpeeling itself from an object. With every fight Erik found a bigger audience, more heads, more eyes, and so the potential pain of their turning from him grew.
I redoubled my spacetaking efforts, though my aversion to Milwaukee remained in force, and so I had to play the part of patient, interested listener many miles away. I had at least bought some goodwill with a Cedar Rapids Gazette news article inelegantly headlined “Koch earns first KO in WEC” and employing all the clichés, colloquialisms, and redundant quotations I thought necessary to the task. “The solidly pro-Cisco crowd,” I wrote in passable imitation of a journeyman sportswriter, “watched in horror at the Palms Casino as Koch finished the Californian, funneling two months of training into little more than a minute of relentless striking.”
After knocking Cisco flat with a high kick, Koch pounced. Cisco failed to defend himself against Koch’s blows, and the match was stopped at 1:36.
“That was perfect,” the 22-year-old Koch said moments after his win. “That was a pretty good kick.”
“He followed the game plan to a T,” added coach Duke Roufus. “The plan was to kick him in the head.”
The word Erik used to describe the piece was “sick,” which he intended as an expression of emphatic approval.
On the phone he was excitable, jumping from subject to subject with associative leaps I could not always follow, and I imagined him shadowboxing with the hand not holding the phone to his ear. He continued to offer admiring updates on the exciting life of his housemate Anthony Pettis, whose fame had grown tenfold following an awe-inspiring fight in which he had run up the cage like some kind of Parkour stuntman and, before falling back to earth, kicked Ben Henderson in the head, knocking him out. The kick was played all over television and always played twice in a row; it was an eminently filmic moment. Pettis was technically the champion, yes, but he was even more universally known to casual fans as an acrobat of perfectly executed violence. He was really and truly famous. And I cannot say whether it was a desire to look more like brown-skinned Pettis, or because those aforementioned tweets about his paleness stung, but Erik soon began to provide unsolicited updates on his melanin levels. “I go tanning every single day,” he told me over the phone. “I am addicted to it. Everyone knows me there, the owner Jeff, the girl at the front desk, everyone. Jeff says he is coming to my next fight.”
I never asked about a next fight, knowing that the news would spill forth from Erik the moment it came to him, but it was what I hoped to hear every time I felt the trill of a call in my blazer pocket. I had by the time filled three notebooks with my observations, and had begun to consider the tradition in which my work of phenomenology would fall. Too bold for conventional academic minds and the nonsmoking, healthy-minded, hidebound thinkers therein, it would harken backward to comprehensive works of genius such as Inner Experience and The World as Will and Representation. The glorious heightening of the senses, I had come to believe, was only the first stage of an ecstatic moment, after which the feeling changed from that of a body made extraordinarily powerful to escape from that body altogether. It wasn’t enough to say that one could see a flow of dancing atoms where others saw a static cage, or hear the squishy whisper of colliding cells where others heard only the dull thump of a landed strike. The categories of sight and sound no longer applied, for a mind in the throes of ecstasy had expanded outward, beyond these rough tools of perception, to greet the universe without the interference of anything so frail as an eye or an ear.
When the fight finally came, it came on the heels of news that would ensure a plenitude of watchers such as neither Erik nor I had yet seen. It was as if a team of benevolent deities were conspiring to create just the conditions necessary for my ecstatical experiments. I won’t bore you with the administrative particulars, but before spring there had been Big Shows for lighter fighters and Big Shows for heavier ones. That spring the two promotions quite sensibly merged to form one monster promotion that would fill far bigger stadia. The bonuses would be larger, the sponsorships more lucrative, and the cagefighting reality show more prominent in public consciousness. And Erik Koch, said some shadowy figure at the helm of the newly behemothic promotion, should start preparing for a fight in Not-New-York.
Why Not-New-York, you ask? The statesmen of Albany had banished MMA from New York’s considerable jurisdiction, and so promoters edged right up to the line, in Newark, not ten miles from Manhattan. There in Jersey, though no law prohibited our presence, the public was not particularly educated in our chosen variety of ecstatic encounter; each taxi driver I encountered in that outermost borough of the world’s greatest city asked me for what I had come and then, with no prompting whatsoever, condemned the enterprise. “We haven’t advanced since the Colosseum!” said one, though it was rather my impression that the prisoners of war and unfortunate Caspian tiger thrown together into the Colosseum were not there by choice, nor that any man (or Caspian tiger) in the Colosseum might escape certain dismemberment by the gentlest tap of his hand (or paw), but far be it from me to challenge the well-wrought histories of Newark cabbies, fine storytellers all, and in their Italian patrimony more closely tied to any bloodthirsty Roman emperor than I. In any case, when we arrived in Newark we found the weekend was dominated by another activity; we saw crowds swelling round the stadium for that eminently peaceful enterprise, professional hockey.
The hotel where Erik, Pettis, Duke, and I stayed was a fine vertical Hilton, top-of-the-line, and doubled as a train station to the city. You could walk from the hotel elevators, through a couple of double doors, past a Subway and a Starbucks and some delis that serve lunches in clear plastic boxes that close with a snap, to the train. Down below the Hilton was all dead space—great wide streets, a “riverwalk” on which no one had ever actually walked, discarded styrofoam cups stuck in untended grass. Were you to stand in that grass you’d see empty space and then great vertical masses of concrete huddled for no obvious reason other than every structure longs for proximity to the train station, and thus to Manhattan.
The Hilton barely had a lobby; it was just elevators and guards who kept people off the elevators. But in that small space not fewer than twenty shadows huddled with programs to be signed. Every time a man descended from the Hilton, the twenty pulled out their phones and searched for his face among a gallery of fighter photos. Though not fighting in Jersey, Pettis was recognized and asked for autographs (“badass kick, man, seriously”), whereas Erik and I would glide through sadly unmolested. “Perhaps,” I said, “they do not recognize you with your tan.” Erik, rather agitated by the entire Eastern milieu, did not respond.
To understand the discomfort of Erik in Not-New-York one has to be able to see how much more alien Jersey is to a young man from Iowa than even Vegas. Vegas is a bigger Branson, Midwestern-transplant-packed, made merely of flashier versions of Davenport casinos Erik knew well. But Newark. Erik had never heard men who, standing at the deli counter, stress every syllable of every word—“You gettin’ a sandwich? What kinda meat?”—had never seen mentally ill homeless people conversing with themselves on the sidewalk, had never been in a public bathroom and left it without urinating because a man proffering a bag of something made him unsure of how to proceed. And all of this while he was near-to-starving with his eye bones bulging and his knee-hinges poking out of his stick-legs.
“I could never live here,” he said to me in the Hilton lobby, as men stared at him, then at their phones, then at him, and as a couple of very large officials wheeled out of the hotel a scale on a cart, a sign hanging off it that read, “This scale is official. Do not ____ it up.” It is unquestionable that all this unwarranted stimulation, all this odd novelty, contributed to Erik’s distraction and eventually the misstep that would confirm so many of my fears about his constitution.
Coach Duke, on the other hand, had no problem adjusting. The day before the weigh-ins Erik and I sat in the hotel room as Duke wandered from subject to subject like a coked-up life coach. There was a silence for a while as he showered, but the minute he emerged from the shower the silence was broken.
“Can’t I shower so fast?” he said. “I had five brothers.” Then a moment later, “This is such a mess. I wore two different shoes this morning, I brought so many pairs of sneakers. I’m going to clean this up, I always clean when I’m nervous. I’m way more nervous than Erik right now.”
Perhaps it was Duke’s stream-of-consciousness narration that allowed him and Erik to be so openly intimate. “Love you coach,” Erik tweeted at least once a week. “Love all my fighters,” Duke tweeted back, and then always some inspirational nostrum about the rewards that redound to the hardworking. Erik relaxed into his coach’s warm presence. But even Duke wouldn’t know what exactly happened that evening; he would be cloaked in ignorance nearly as long as I would.
That afternoon Duke and Erik and Pettis were training in a Hilton conference room the organizers had filled, for the week, with mats. Duke ran Erik through some striking maneuvers, holding bright red pads for Erik to slam with side-kicks and jabs.
“Niiice,” Duke kept saying, “doin’ some work tonight, doin’ some work tonight.”
Erik was visibly weak with hunger, and Duke stopped him after a short while. Duke turned to Pettis, who had a fight coming up in three months against a particularly squirrelly fighter named Clay Guida. Guida was a bouncy, raggedy, long-haired Tasmanian devil of a man who barreled into each punch, getting deep inside his opponent’s range and then striking with a wild hook that looked sloppy but seemed to knock out enough people to warrant respect.
“Move like Guida,” Duke told Erik, intending to demonstrate for Pettis how best to catch him. So Erik jerked back and forth in a manic Guida-like manner. Duke faced Erik and matched his swaying motion for a moment, then turned back to Pettis. “So it just takes a quick jab,” he said, and jerked his right hand in a tight quick motion meant to catch a moving target. Duke had not realized that Erik was still directly in front of him, swaying. And so Duke, a 6′4″ 220-pound champion kickboxer jabbed 145-pound Erik in the head. For the first time in his life, Erik staggered backward as if tripped.
“Whoa whoa whoa,” said Pettis.
“Oh no, sorry,” said Duke.
“You aright bro?” asked Pettis.
Erik smiled as he steadied himself against the wall, which gave Duke and Pettis permission to laugh. It was not terribly uncommon to punch someone slightly too hard in practice, to “get one’s bell rung,” to accidentally unleash one’s power in a setting meant for gentle play. “I’m OK, I’m OK,” he said, laughing. “Whoops!”
With this assurance, Duke and Pettis continued to practice for another fifteen minutes while Erik watched, and then Erik went back to his hotel room to make lists of foods he would enjoy the following evening. He made weight at 145.5, caught a glimpse of his opponent—a Brazilian named Raphael Assunção—and returned to his room, where Wes, having just arrived, waited with a massive order of sandwiches. There too were Cliff and DJ, two Hard Drive friends who had, in the end, refused to take sides in the Kochs’ fraternal feud.
Of everyone assembled, only I had ventured to New York City, and that was years before I had become Iowan. We together left the hotel, its Starbucks and deli and nail salon now closed, and headed toward the train platform, where the wait served as further evidence that Iowa was cradle to a superior civilization.
“Is it ever coming?” asked Cliff.
“Are we on the right side?” asked Wes. “I don’t think we’re on the right side.”
“Maybe we’re too late,” said DJ.
“I could never live here,” said Erik.
We arrived at the greatest city on earth and commenced our principle New York activity, which was staring. In Times Square Erik and Wes and Cliff and DJ cocked their heads to take in the scrolling marquees, the flashing light-lined block-sized billboard for Mamma Mia!, the Toshiba sign rising up from a bulbous sea of yellow cabs. To see New York City for the first time in the dark is to be liberated from any limiting sense of scale; one sees only lights and no edges, as if the night sky had lowered and arrayed itself about you. In this inverted bowl of light we walked the sidewalks with no particular destination. We stopped on some stairs to watch a lady wearing a knitted red cap chatter to herself: “Venus system,” she said over and over as Wes looked to Erik in alarm. We waited for Cliff as he went into a McDonald’s bathroom, then ran back out because “someone was drying his dick off with the hand dryer.” We stared at a massive rat running circles around a dumpster. We watched, on a bit of concrete beside Penn Station, a small white plastic-bag-toting man being shoved by a larger black man, an altercation Erik called a “bum fight.”
I suppose to the shuffling natives, their hands in their pockets, their heads down, we seemed unmannered gawkers from some rude, probably militia-ridden sinkhole. And surely there are spectacles toward which one should not turn, such as the curious interstitial moans of a disabled wheelchair-bound conversationalist. But surely too there is more evil done by the refusal to look at the least pleasant link in a causal chain, by the willingness to note the reposeful voting citizenry but not the democratically elected tyrant, the politician declaring righteous war at his podium but not the soldier who comes back in halves. I was proud to be among men who looked not only up at the majestic flashing lights but down at the women slumped in alleys, who treated each part of the spectacle with equal fascination. Experienced travelers tend to avoid places they call “touristy,” but one of the many lessons fighters have taught me is that if you want to see a place unknown to the world, the truly untraveled anteroom of any city, go to the most touristed place in your vicinity, and look down.
“Fuck your mother!” said the white homeless man.
“He didn’t pay his bar tab!” the other man said to us, then thought better of it and walked away.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to get involved,” said Erik as we followed him down Ninth Avenue to an Italian restaurant where he bought, in his munificence, a pasta dinner for every spacetaker.
“So much poverty here, so much when we were driving through New Jersey. I’ve been all over now, been to Vegas, been to Canada, been here, and I still want to spend the rest of my life in Cedar Rapids.”
“This is what a Caesar salad is?” said Cliff. “It’s just lettuce with mayonnaise on it.”
“You know what I’m gonna buy if I win,” said Erik. “A hybrid. You save so much on gas money!”
What Erik did not tell anyone that night was how, as he first looked up at the kaleidoscopic radiance of Times Square, he felt confused about where he was; about how he could not focus for long on a single point. We didn’t notice him swerving on the sidewalk, losing, for a brief moment, his balance. As we stared at a woman vomiting on New Jersey transit on our ride back to the hotel, we did not see Erik holding onto his seat as if there were some risk of it crumbling underneath him.
Back at the hotel, Erik told Pettis, and only Pettis, that he was disoriented and dizzy, and that it had started with Duke’s jab.
“That sounds like the kind of thing,” said Pettis, “where you go to sleep and don’t wake up.”
Faced with this most ominous prognosis, Erik was really and truly terrified. He took Pettis to mean that if he were knocked out the following day, at the fight, he would very likely die. But were he to tell Duke of his disorientation, the fight would certainly be canceled, the months of training and self-starvation all for naught, the eminent men who controlled the Big Shows ill-disposed toward him for ruining a fight but hours before it was slated to transpire. Erik thus elected to take his chances and tell no one else; and so Duke and I would watch the next night unfold in utter ignorance.
•
At the thrillingly dense, meticulously organized city that was the Prudential Center, I had the best seat I’d ever had—better than my seat in the bubble, better than my seat in St. Louis, because the men who ran the Big Shows were profoundly impressed by my association with the Cedar Rapids Gazette. I looked up from that press box to see people seated on every side of me, floor to ceiling in four sections, between the sections scrolling marquees—Jon “Bones” Jones—and above all that cameras that swerved on black tracks bolted to the ceiling, and everywhere laser lights weaving about our heads, Jumbotrons hitched to the wall. There were 19,000 of us seated there in Newark, waiting for the first fighter to be announced, the first fight, and on top of the cacophony of our voices the promoters had chosen to blast a genre of music I believe is called “party rock,” such that one could not be heard without shouting. In the press box chubby white men tapped on laptops, and in the front row a legendary fighter named Chuck Liddell shouted something to his attractive wife.
The reason these 19,000 had come to gather here was not to see Erik, but to see Shogun, Erik’s hero and the man Lonnie claimed could beat Jesus. In the night’s final and most important fight, twenty-eight-year-old Shogun would fight twenty-three-year-old Jon Jones for the light heavyweight title. In the night’s first and least important fight, Erik would face Raphael Assunção; and even among those two, Erik was deemed the least important, and would walk out first. Only the final six fights would be broadcast on Pay-Per-View; his bout would not be televised. Thus it was that in the bar the previous evening the night’s least important fighter had walked up to the most celebrated and had told him, through Shogun’s ever-present translator, that watching Shogun as a kid was part of what made him want to fight in the first place. Shogun smiled and nodded politely and Erik returned to his table to not eat or drink while Duke had a Coke.
Erik had lost control of his body, existed outside of it as if he were merely playing himself on the Xbox, and now a whole machine had sprung into motion, beginning with the bridge-burning injury of his brother, driving toward this enormously choreographed spectacle, and concluding, quite likely, with a beating from a black belt. To leave would mean to return to Cedar Rapids, but the Cedar Rapids he knew was gone, had disappeared the moment his brother hit the mat.
In the locker room, Erik held out his hands, Duke laced up his gloves, and they sang in unison Eminem’s “Soldier”: “Even if my collarbones crush or crumble / I will never slip or stumble.” Erik thought that perhaps if he consciously tried to regain synchronicity between his brain and his body, some missing piece would click back into place. When he heard his song he bolted out with a defiant bounce, shaking his arms as he strode toward the cage between Duke and Pettis, bopping his head to the music.
He stopped before the cage, took off one sock, handed it to Pettis, took off the other sock, handed it to Pettis. Duke tilted water into his mouth, handed him his mouthguard. The ref checked his hands. Duke vaselined Erik’s cheeks, and for a moment Erik stood perfectly still, eyes closed, as Duke rubbed two greased thumbs over his cheekbones. Brown-orange complected, head shaved, Erik was a completely different creature than he had been in Vegas. Instead of looking ill in a recognizable way, he looked simply other, glowing brown-orange under the lights, shadows over his sunken eyes, under his pecs and neck, under each tiny ripple of stomach. He accepted a hug from Duke, a hug from Pettis, and stepped through the cage door to a bright, white, sterile cage. He had never fought first before, never seen a cage so clean.
Raphael Assunção walked out, singing along to his entrance music. He was four inches shorter than Erik, with broad muscles unlike anything on Erik’s body. He had a flat brown fighter’s nose, a wide brow, dark stubble about his mouth.
“Are you ready?” the ref shouted to Erik. Erik, looking grim, gave a thumbs up. “Are you ready?” the ref shouted to Assunção, and he nodded. “Let’s fight,” said the ref, clapped, backed himself toward the cage.
“Here we go!” said the TV color man.
Erik runs in and leans low on his legs, almost squatting—the stance of a man preparing to be pulled down, afraid to be knocked off balance by an opponent five inches shorter than himself. And yet even in this awkward fearful hunch Erik moves so fast he is hard to see, arms up and down, hands fisted then palms open, a step here and a step there—to Assunção’s every motion, three in response. Erik kicks high with the kick that had downed Cisco but Assunção just throws an arm in front of his face, blocks it. The TV color man compares Erik to Anthony Pettis—“long and lean, that reach”—as Erik carefully hops toward Assunção, and Assunção carefully hops away. Assunção stops his slow backward walk, swings, misses, and backs away more. They are falling into a partnered pattern, rarely touching, forward and back. “He’s got that right hand loaded,” the color man says of Assunção, and it’s true, Assunção is just waiting for the moment to lunge that right hand into Erik’s face, knock him to the ground. Assunção throws a high kick, and Erik pops away with a single deft jump, so smooth it seems Erik knew where Assunção was headed long before he threw. Assunção swings, misses, and Erik does not retaliate.
“Come on guys,” shouts someone from the crowd, “this is a contact sport!”
“Just throw!” shouts Duke from behind the cage.
Erik is afraid of losing focus; the fight is a minute and a half in; he feels that he must end the fight or he’ll simply fall. But he hasn’t yet found a range, and there is that loaded right hand. A normal fight for Erik is a moment of total absorption, but with the newfound cloudiness, the way it throws him off, he must somehow keep track of his own body in addition to Assunção’s. It is as if Erik is standing outside himself, reminding his body to do what it is told. It’s all so unstable, the body’s obedience so subject to chance, that Erik is desperate for a way out.
Assunção lands a light kick to the shin, as if checking to make sure Erik is solid matter. Erik hits back with a left but Assunção dodges it. Erik finally lands a loud thwap of a kick to Assunção’s chest; the sound resonates through the silent stadium.
“Set it up!” says Duke.
Assunção jabs with his left, misses, and charges, swings hard with that loaded right. Erik sees him coming. As Assunção runs toward him Erik throws a light left hook, barely visible. His fist hits the soft spot behind Assunção’s ear with all the strength of his cocked arm, but also the force of Assunção’s own charge; it appears as if Assunção has run full speed into Erik’s clenched hand. It is a moment in which Erik hardly moves; his arm only slightly extends past his own body, a movement almost impossible to see, and so there is a confused silence as Assunção hits the ground, his head with a thud, his flaccid arms hitting the canvas above his head a millisecond later. A realization passes, the silence breaks. Nineteen thousand people scream.
“It’s all over!” shouts the color man. “Just. Like. That!”
This moment lasts for days. We can only open our mouths in a united wordless moan. We are each of us simple tools of perception, free of the cloudying intellect, allowed a thinking of the body only accessible when men like Erik can, for a single solitary second, lead us outside ourselves. He has torn a small hole in consciousness. It is already closing.
“Wow,” says the color man. “Wow. Perfect.”
Erik collapses onto his knees, lifts his hands to his shaved head, looks up in tears of gratitude at the fact that he is still alive. He places his head on the mat, kowtowing, jumps up, fist bumps Bruce Buffer, who doesn’t break pace as the ref raises Erik’s hand: “Referee Kevin Mulhall has stopped this contest at two minutes thirty two seconds in the very first round, declaring the winner, by knockout, Erik ‘New Breed’ Koch.” The color man hops onto the canvas with a mic, which Erik grabs so as to pump up the crowd: “What’d you guys think, was that a good opener?” And the crowd launches into its scream once again.
But now he is shooed off the stage for bigger, more important fighters. We watch the other fights as we come down, reenter ourselves, reacquaint ourselves with the limiting walls of perception. We wait for Shogun to defend his title as the best light heavyweight in the world. In his last fight, against Lyoto Machida, he was glorious. But Shogun is twenty-eight and we realize, as we watch him pummeled, kicked, ground into the mat, and finally slumping against the cage like a tired drunk as a younger man knees him in the face, that Shogun has grown prematurely old. The ref steps mercifully in. The fight is so unexpectedly quick that the Pay-Per-View gods have time to fill; there is room to televise an extra fight. And so a million people, after they see Shogun fall, watch Erik watching himself knock a man to the ground.