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Justin Clough: Tony Giarrusso: Do you think about it out of the cage?
Tony: Seth Boursier: Yeah.
Seth: You’re a coach?
Seth: Do you still fight?
Seth: How come?
Seth: Cynthia Canepa Buchen wants to know, “Are you anxious or calm before a fight? Do you have any rituals?”
Justin: You look reeeally mellow. Have you been smoking?
Justin: laughs Tony—out of the cage, in the cage—a different guy! In your other life, you’re a debt collector. Are you this calm when you’re doing that?
Justin: Seth: Tony: Do you think you’re going to get hurt?
Tony: Somebody else is going to get hurt?
Tony: Everyone in this room is going to be punching and choking each other in another hour or two, but everyone is really calm.
Seth: Erik Swanson wants to know, “Does it bother you that the matches are fake?”
Tony: Justin: Seth: Do you want Erik Swanson to come here and ask you that himself?
Tony: Cynthia wants to know, “MMA overtook boxing as the number one combative sport in the world. How do you prevent the corruption and fixed matches that infiltrated boxing when money got big?”
Tony: Justin, do you make a lot of money at this?
Justin: So you actually pay to get hit.
Justin: If you got to the pros and someone offered you a lot of money to throw a fight, would you?
Justin: You wouldn’t throw a fight for $10,000?
Justin: $100,000?
Justin: You wouldn’t throw a fight for a million?
Justin: Seth. If you think MMA is fake, take a look at this guy’s face. Stitches scar over his eye, recovering black eye, broken nose, cauliflower ear, split lip… How old are you?
Justin: Tony: Seth: Eric Swensen—not Erik Swanson—wants to know what your diet regimen is.
Tony: Justin: Eric also wants to know if you have any advice for children.
Tony: How old do you have to be to get into an MMA school?
Seth: Like ten?
Seth: But isn’t MMA supposed to be street fighting?
Seth: So there aren’t less rules?
Seth: He also wants to know, are you religious?
Tony: Justin: Seth: And he wants to know what’s your IQ.
Tony: Seth: Justin: Tony teaching me some moves. Are you worried about brain damage?
Tony: You don’t care about “maybe in 15 years” when you’re 22.
Tony: That’s like how I used to sunbathe. I wasn’t worried about cancer. Melissa Saunders says: “Show me some moves! Can you teach me how to squeeze someone between my thighs?”
Tony: Will you show me a move?
Tony: OK, I have no idea what you want from me. I’m just going for it. OK, Tony, I got you, now beg for my mercy. What’s this move called?
Tony: Seth: And why am I doing it like this? What is this particular move to accomplish?
Seth: Justin, let’s say I’m walking down an alley and I see a suspicious-looking guy. What do I do? Any favorite moves?
Justin: This guy got knocked out or tapped out or strangled unconscious, and the medic came into the cage and was doing things to him for a long time until he finally stood up, and this is what he looked like. Here’s another horrible one from the troublemaker Erik Swanson: “Why did you have to make the air so putrid with creatine protein triple-stacked excrement that made me wretch eight goddamn times?” I think he’s talking about that protein supplement, and in the bathroom at his gym it may have caused some problems…
Tony: Justin: Jesse Shust wants to know, “What do you do when you know your opponent is better than you?”
Justin: Well, did you ever go into the cage and look at him and think, “Crap!”?
Justin: But what if you see a look in his eye?
Justin: Tony: Can you apply these tips to any other area of life?
Tony: Justin: “I’m nice.”
David Goolkasian wants to know, “Why are you so mean?”
Tony: I’m not mean. I’m a nice kid. Until that door closes.
Justin, when I asked for a mean one earlier, they all pointed to you.
Justin: I don’t know why. I’m pretty much the nicest. Outside the cage. Inside is where I let everything out. I train real hard for everything so I come in wanting to win every time.
We’re backstage on the red side. On the other side of that curtain are all the blue guys. How do you feel about them?
Justin: They’re all pretty nice.
But you’re about to hurt them.
Justin: Yup. That’s the way it’s gonna be.
And so it was! Justin and Tony both won after long struggles with their blue opponents. It was my first fight ever and I was surprised how little action there was. No theatrics at all. The majority of the time, these guys were locked into a pretzel, trying to squeeze the life out of the other guy while conserving their own oxygen as much as possible. We had front-row seats, and I could see every drop of sweat. They all had faraway eyes. You could tell time had stopped for them. Long after I would have given up, they were still going. Their skin was rubbed raw from scraping against the floor. They’d been punched and kicked in the face, back, all over. Blood ran down, they were panting. There was one guy whose head was pinned to the floor with another guy’s whole body weight for what seemed like forever, and he just kept hitting up at him, not even able to see, moving slow as if underwater. Then this surge of life hit him, this can’t-lose burst, and the flailing arms built up speed and power. Even with a trapped head, blind, he was landing hard blows on his oppressor! One punch really connected and knocked Blue Shorts right off his head onto the floor. He got up slow like a golem and started waling on Blue, slow and then faster, harder, punching and punching. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone was screaming. And the ref called it! He’d knocked the other guy out! The medic rushed in and moved his finger back and forth in front of the eyes of the fellow who’d been out, who was now slumped against the cage, looking confused.
A few days after the fight, I finally caught up with Brent Bergeron, the one with all the injuries who had sparked my interest in MMA. We met at a Chinese restaurant. He’d just come from getting a physical.
So you’re 28 years old, five-foot-nine, used to be 245 pounds and now you’re 155. And how many beats per minute?
Brent: On average, 57. After 20 pushups it went up to 63 beats. Blood pressure, all that, is perfect. I thought at least one thing would be wrong—glucose, cholesterol. No. All those years of beating myself up, and it’s perfect.
How did you beat yourself up?
Huh? Just lived the good life, you know what I mean?
Are you going to get married and all that?
Ahhhhhhhhrg. That’s a… great question. Um…
“Ahhhhhhhhrg.”
Fifty percent end in divorce. Are you and [the photographer] engaged?
I guess. I don’t know. We already have three divorces between us, so we’ve got 150 percent of the failure out of the way already. What was your blood pressure?
Something around 125 over 70. I was amazed. It’s good news to hear that you’re not dying, you know what I mean? Always good news. Like when you get your HIV results back, you’re all, “Wooo!”
I’m always hearing about your injuries. Do you get in fights outside of MMA?
Not really. Not since I started in MMA. Now I have a different sense of mind. I used to all the time. That’s why I thought I could fight in MMA with no training. I got beat pretty badly. I had to lose 13 pounds in five days, and I had never been near a cage or a training facility. All I’d done was fighting in alleys, stupid stuff. The kid I fought, he was a black belt in karate, and here I was walking in off the street, rapid weight loss. He came out with a flying heel to my forehead, knocked me out in the first five seconds. I did take two Percocets and a couple of shots before the fight. Jägermeister.
Wouldn’t Percocets slow you down?
Uh… they got me up off the floor after that kick to the face.
What would you get in fights about before?
Oh, you know, boys will be boys. And when you live in downtown Haverhill [Massachusetts]… stuff happens.
A lot of rowdy pedestrians here.
Peeing on your front steps. You got to get them away from your front steps. They live under the bridge right down the street. My dog knows them, they know my dog.
You get in fights with homeless people?
Only the ones that pee on my steps, yeah.
What happened the time you walked into work with glass coming out of your eye?
I tripped over my dog. I fell back first through my glass coffee table. I was cleaning it all up and a shard of glass got stuck on my finger and somehow it ended up in my eyeball. Seven cornea scratches. They pried my eye open, put some sticky stuff on a cotton swab, and pulled it out. They had to push the shard deeper in first, to get it stuck on the cotton swab. They asked me if I wanted anesthesia. I said no, just get it out. I’d just gotten over a huge spider bite. I still have the fang holes—wanna see? Right after that, I got my elbow dislocated. The spider bite, though, was painful and bad and pretty gross. Right on the kneecap—that was the problem. He’s bitten me before. He lives with me. I can’t find him, obviously, or he’d be gone, you know what I mean? In the summer, there are bugs here and there and the spider finds stuff to eat. In the winter, though, there are no bugs, but he still has to feed. He gets me when I’m sleeping.
He sounds like the worst roommate in the world.
I understand, he has to feed. Plus all summer he keeps the bugs away. So we kind of have an understanding. Usually he’ll get me here or there, on the side, the arm. No big deal—put some Bacitracin on it, it goes away. But then he got me on the kneecap. You bend it all day long, every time you move. So the swelling and infection kept getting worse.
Can you give me a history of your injuries, starting with your feet and moving your way up? Say, in the last two years?
Two years? That time frame is too much. I got a lot of blows to the head. You’re asking me for two years of injuries? They go on and on. I could let you feel my shin. My shin goes like this [makes in-and-out wave motions with hand]. From all the kicks, you know?
Why are you getting hurt so much?
I guess I’m just injury-prone. But you work through it. It’s what fighters do. You never quit, don’t quit, no matter what happens. [To the waitress:] Can we have a couple of fortune cookies? I love fortune cookies. My favorite is: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
