Fighter's Mind, A (26 page)

Strange stories were cropping up about his gym in New Mexico, tales of fighters being made to run in the mountains carrying each other. It suddenly seemed like the major new crop of talent in the UFC all subscribed to Jackson with enigmatic devotion. All these rising superstars would gush about him. But Greg? He said very little.

He wrote a scholarly article for
FIGHT!
magazine that compared the quest of the modern fighter to the tactics of General Sherman—stressing the need for a “two-pronged” attack. What kind of trainer was this, who exhaustively and publicly mined military theory? It only deepened the mystery.

 

Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a big flat city in the true southwest desert, on the edge of stark hills. I’d been there, years before, on a bender as a hotshot firefighter. We’d driven the five hours from our base in the Gila National Forest to go to the only punk bar in New Mexico. The night had not ended well; Albuquerque is a rough town. A law enforcement friend once said to me, “The cops in Albuquerque fire their weapons more times in their first year than most cops do in a lifetime.”

I landed at the airport in the morning, and already the temperature was in the triple digits. Jackson’s gym is just a few miles from the airport, down a side street in a semi-industrial part of town. The sun was an incandescent weight in the sky by ten o’clock. Walking into the unfamiliar gym, it had the same old feel—the smells, the watchful glances, the sizing up.

I found Greg Jackson in his back room, and he shook my hand with some wariness. He wasn’t quite sure what I was doing, but he was interested. I spent a moment in that adjustment period when you meet someone you’ve seen many times on TV and silently catalog the differences. His beard and shiny bald head make him seem much older than he really is—he’s only thirty-four—and up close in person, you can see his youth.

We sat in his “office,” his private sanctum strewn with coaches and toys and even a bunk bed, a place where he could get out of the eye of the gym. We chatted with his assistant and family friend, Julie Kedzie (a good-looking young fighter with incredible mental toughness and an appetite for pain—it was her scrap with Gina Carano on prime-time TV that put women’s MMA on the map); the gym manager, Van Arsdale; and a few others in a constant parade. I sat down into a wash of banter, a barrage of jokes and comedy routines that people who spend a lot of time together develop. Over the next week I sat in there every day for hours and listened and learned. Greg and I talked when he had quiet moments, and sometimes we did formal interviews with the tape recorder going. But other times we just bullshitted and came to recognize we were
un poco simpatico
.

 

I had nowhere to begin, so I started with the basic questions. I wanted to draw some kind of picture . . . where was Greg from? Every hero needs an origin story.

Greg was raised in Albuquerque, “the only white kid in the poorest part of the poorest state.” His parents were hippies and practicing Quakers. “It’s Christianity, but without preachers,” he said. “In church it’s just chairs in a circle, and you sit and talk to God directly, without help. My parents converted in Albuquerque.”

The Quaker tradition had one huge problem for Greg: pacifism. “Pacifism taken to extreme is ridiculous. In the circumstances I found myself in, even in kindergarten, it just wouldn’t fly. If the British had the resolve to wipe out Gandhi, then all the pacifism in the world wouldn’t have kept them from mowing him down. A big part of my young life was coming to grips with the ideology I was taught, and the reality I had to face.

“It was a huge deal, when you’re taught one thing and it doesn’t work as a little kid. My parents kept telling me ‘this is how you deal with the world,’
but it didn’t work
. It was as if I went to school in one language and spoke another at home and no one would admit it. One set of values didn’t hold in the other environment. I’d get in a fight at school and come home and feel terrible, and then sometimes I needed to fight and I wouldn’t, and I’d feel just as bad.

“My parents would tell me to defend myself, but fighting isn’t only about hitting or getting hit. It’s about standing up to bullies, for yourself or others. Once they bully you once, they’ll do it every time. In middle school it got harder, the consequences and the fights got more extreme—and the disparity between what I was told was the right thing and what
was
right got harder to reconcile.”

Greg shook his head demurely. “That was probably the hardest thing in my life to deal with. Anything taken to extremes is insanity. Pacifism at all costs is as bad as saying violence is the answer to everything. But I was a dumb kid. The struggle with pacifism created a rebellion, an opposite swing. I hurt people I shouldn’t have, I did a lot of things.” He sighs.

“I was especially stupid. For instance, I grew up in a community that spoke Spanish, and I could and
should
have learned it so many times, but because I was endlessly picked on for being the white kid, I said to myself,
Fuck Spanish
.”

He shrugged. “I was constantly in fights, and getting challenged, and then my world would get bigger and new groups would come in and I’d have to do it all over again. I dedicated my life at an early age to combat. But I make up for my sins now. I help-help-help.” He laughed.

Greg’s family had a strong wrestling background. His father and uncles all wrestled, his little brother was a state champ. Greg grew up wrestling but in his own words he was too busy being a “dumb kid” to wrestle in school. In West Aurora High, there’s a giant picture of his father, who was a wrestling champion and valedictorian. “I’ve always been in his shadow and happily so,” he said quietly. Throughout all this the love and respect—even awe—he has for his parents is very clear.

“My parents are geniuses, but they didn’t understand my circumstances. They were from the Midwest and didn’t see what I saw. I could have switched schools, but that would have been running away, and I wasn’t gonna do that.”

He smiles.

“My folks put me in aikido, which was the worst martial art to fight with, but they liked the philosophy of it.”

Greg started teaching fighting in 1992, at the tender age of seventeen. It was at Frank Trujillo’s martial arts school, a place that taught kajukenbo—a kind of early form of MMA that drew from karate, judo, and boxing.

“I never really wanted to run a school, but I got into my share of scraps and scrapes and people wanted to know how I did what I was doing. I wasn’t a big street fighter, but I did what I had to do,” he laughed, “and I was always in wars because I couldn’t KO anybody.” Greg is reflexively self-effacing, and his humility isn’t fake. He’s smart enough to really be humble.

“My only real strength is that I’m reflective. I learned enough lessons young and thought about them, and that’s why I’m a decent trainer now. Of course, I still make mistakes.”

He was a self-taught martial artist, particularly on the ground. He’d never studied jiu-jitsu with a Brazilian. That was a surprise. He taught himself from books and competitions. He was paying attention, and when Royce Gracie did his thing at UFC 1, Greg was watching and studying. But he has no belt, and he never trained in the
gi
. Yet his guys have always done well at no-
gi
grappling competitions, winning big shows, competing with the best in the world at Abu Dhabi.

At the same time, he began training with Michael Winkeljohn, a fighter from Albuquerque who had become a serious kickboxing star. Winkeljohn had been at it since 1980, had even boxed professionally, and was winning renown as a striking coach.

Greg elaborated. “When I started with him I could kick a little, but I had no set-ups, no real understanding of the kickboxing game. He gave me all that. I call him my big brother and he taught me about business, kickboxing . . .” Greg assumes a hammy, hoary voice, filled with false tears, “
a little bit about life
.” Winkeljohn was infamous for his grueling desert runs, a tradition Greg carries on. Apparently, in his prime, Winkeljohn would get dropped off on the far side of the mountains and run ten or fifteen miles back to town, through the desert heat. Greg often has his fighters run the mountains on routes Winkeljohn discovered—but Greg sometimes has his fighters carry each other.

 

I followed Greg out into the gym and watched him lead a practice. He worked on technique for most of the hour and a half, but at the end he had his fighters doing flutter kicks for grueling five-minute rounds that seemed endless. He kept them in the dark about when it would end. Just when they thought it was all over he’d tack on another round. I was happy I’d decided to just sit and watch this one. We chatted while they suffered in near silence, and then afterward we retreated back to his sanctum. Everything he did was for a reason.

“Mental toughness is learned. It’s not a skill that everyone has, or is born with. There are people that are born tougher than others mentally, or figure things out earlier in their life. But if you have motivation you can acquire mental toughness, it’s just about what your body gets used to putting up with.

“Sure, some people are already tougher and some folks just won’t get tough, but those are the novelties, on the statistical fringe. Most people are of average toughness and can get tougher. I saw it all the time as a kid. There were these guys who were
supertough
growing up. I looked up to them because they could take a crowbar to the face and keep fighting. But as I grew up, they stayed the same level. They were scrappers to the core, don’t get me wrong, but they never got any tougher. It was from their environment and they never worked on it. I could outdo them, outwork them, and they’d tire and break. It was a real revelation to me, that you can train mental toughness and work harder, that it doesn’t have to be born into you.”

He pauses, thoughtful. “Your mind is a muscle and you have to exercise it. And I don’t mean crossword puzzles, though that helps. What we did today, those flutter kicks? I can get them in shape any way, a treadmill. But that’s not why you do those exercises. You do it to acquire mental stamina as well as physical toughness. You do brutal workouts to get used to suffering so that suffering doesn’t become a huge defining deal.”

Greg is a diehard advocate of learning to function under pain, under duress. The idea is to develop resistance to the pain affecting your mental or physical abilities.

“You do those workouts to get tougher, you have hard sparring to get tougher. So when it happens in a fight it’s not this foreign, unfamiliar thing,
Ohmigod I’m so tired now, I’ve never felt this tired and he wants to hit me in the face
. . .”

Greg continued. “Fighting is a selfish thing but at its core it should be unselfish. If you start thinking about yourself, then your mind is off your opponent. You’re worried about what he’s doing to you instead of focusing on hurting him, and you’ve lost the fight if you get there.

“We work on never accepting the takedown, even if he’s in deep, never think,
I’m going to start working from the bottom now
. Make him fight for every little thing, even if you don’t know how you’re going to get out.”

I thought of something my friend Rory Markham had once said to me. I asked Rory why he fought like hell to get out from under a guy when there was only ten seconds left in the round. It was taking a lot of energy, and if and when he got up, he wouldn’t have time to mount a real attack. He smiled and said, “Because I’ll gas him, and it eats him mentally, when he can’t hold me down.”

 

Greg continued his train of thought.

“What are you going to do to him? How do I get to him, open him up to damage, push or pull or cut that angle? As soon as you say,
Oh shit my rib hurts,
you’re not going to hit him. You’ll focus on keeping him from hitting that rib. You’ve lost the initiative. Nothing worse than getting into a protracted war because you’ve lost the initiative.” Greg shakes his head at me.

“Aggression is important. You have to refocus from yourself to your opponent. You practice staying focused through pain. I watch my fighters start out at one level, and I watch them get stronger. Things that they used to do that would just kill them don’t kill them anymore.” He barks a short laugh at me.

“Any fool can fight fresh,” he says like a motto. He paused, drummed his fingers on the table.

“We call it the
emotional roller coaster
. You see it all the time, especially in the younger guys. You start winning, your emotions start peaking, and you
almost
finish the fight. You put everything into it, hitting as hard as you can, and you are really going to win—yet your opponent somehow is still there. And now you’re exhausted. If he comes back at you you’re smoked.

“So you need to maintain a constant line. Your emotions need to keep increasing on a steady line on the graph. If you get mounted, if you escape, no matter what happens, you keep climbing—but slowly, steadily. Stay out of the peaks and valleys. Keep it as ‘just business’ and stay strong.

“You recognize it in training and work on staying calm and focused. Every fighter knows the feeling when you’re winning, or you’re getting close to finishing somebody, especially in wars. It’ll sneak up on you. Suddenly you’ve got an ankle lock and you’ve GOT that ankle—and it’s all over.”

Greg mimes the cranking on the ankle, pretending tension and excitement, his face squeezed in a rictus.

“I just got to get it a little tighter, a little longer, and I’m putting everything I got into it . . . and
whoosh,
now I’m tired. Now he survives, and he starts hitting me, and I accept dominance, and now it’s over.”

He shakes his head.

“We do drills applying the squeeze with different muscles, to keep that same squeeze going with dynamic tension—so you breath hard and deep while squeezing—but the main thing is to keep emotions out of it. At its core, if you keep emotions out you can have maximum oxygen exchange as well as full muscle squeeze—and not gas.” Techniques like this—increasing squeeze while controlling breathing—are the things that Randy Couture pioneered and the reason his lactic acid levels actually drop when he’s squeezing.