My Fight / Your Fight (21 page)

I take all the information in, but I only process the pieces that matter. The distance between my back and the cage. Every move my opponent makes. The effort in her breathing. The impact of my fist as it hits her face. Anything occurring around me irrelevant to whether I succeed or fail is completely disregarded.

Everything in the world is information. The information you choose to acknowledge and the information you choose to ignore is up to you. You can let outside factors beyond your control throw off your focus. You can let aching muscles hold you back. You can let silence make you feel uncomfortable. By choosing to focus only on the information that is necessary, you can tune out every distraction, and achieve far more.

I was trying to figure out my life. I wanted to be content with being a bartender, but pouring cocktails for the next several decades was definitely not it.

Judo hadn't made me happy. But not doing judo wasn't making me happy either. I worried nothing would ever make me happy, that I had missed my chance at happiness. I just tried to get through each day. Now that I was no longer doing judo, I learned quickly who my real friends were. One of those true friends was Manny Gamburyan. We had done judo together since I was eleven, and Manny was the one who opened the gym and spent hours working with me after my knee surgery. He was good at judo, but hadn't pursued it. Instead, he went into MMA. After the Olympics, Manny would call me occasionally to check in.

“You should come out and grapple with us,” Manny said.

“OK, I'll come,” I said. I needed the exercise. I looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump and inflated me to a larger version of myself.

“I'll meet you at Hayastan,” Manny said. It was the same club where we had developed my matwork after my ACL repair years before, but it had moved to a new location. Still, walking back into the club felt familiar. It smelled the same: sweat and an ocean of cologne. The place had gotten a facelift, but many of the faces were the same. Several guys I knew from youth judo were there doing MMA. They were bantering back and forth in Armenian. I dropped my bag by the side of the mat, surveying the room. A dozen guys were already grappling. There wasn't a girl in the place.

“Ron, you came!” Manny said. He gave me a hug. “You ready?”

“I was born ready,” I said. We wrestled for over an hour. Manny came at me full strength. I met him with the same energy. By the time practice ended, I was covered with sweat and had a few burgeoning bruises.

“Not too bad, Ron,” Manny said. “Lucky for you, I took it easy.”

“You wish,” I said, laughing. Being back on the mat felt good.

After the first workout, I decided to get back to grappling with Manny regularly. I loved it just as much as I had before.

I grappled on Tuesdays, but between work and heading out to Hayastan in Hollywood, I would swing by doggie daycare, pick Mochi up and take her to the dog park.

Mochi was now four months old, and I had just started taking her to the park. I saw Dog Park Cute Guy there most days, but I never spoke to him. He was a tall, dark, handsome, tattooed surfer guy who made a little voice in my head say with a French accent,
Ooh la la.
When I caught myself staring, I would quickly avert my gaze and pretend I had nothing but a laser focus on Mochi.

One day, his dog came over and started punking Mochi. Mochi ran behind my feet to hide and Dog Park Cute Guy had no choice but to come over. Privately I was screaming,
Oh my God, Dog Park Cute Guy is coming over here.

We got to talking about our dogs, then we made the kind of small talk that you don't remember later. Eventually, he invited me to come surfing. Yes, he was cute, but I wanted to learn how to surf, honestly. It was one of those things on my bucket list. After so many months of drinking and smoking, I was craving a physical challenge, and the ocean seemed strong enough for me to take on.

“Cool,” he said. “We leave at five a.m.”

I couldn't even speak; I was too afraid, “Five a.m.?! Are you fucking kidding me?” would slip out.

“Cool,” I echoed, while I did a happy dance in my mind.

The next morning, I arrived at his house before the sun. I was nervous, but excited. We drove up north along the Pacific Coast Highway in his old Pathfinder. The windows were cracked and the air was humid and cool. We drove in complete quiet.

He knew I had no idea how to surf, but when we got to the beach he handed me a surfboard and wetsuit and said, “OK, then.” And that was it; he headed out into the water. I watched him paddle out into the ocean and then dragged my board over the sand into the freezing-ass water.

Bam.
A wave knocked me off. I tried to get on again. As soon as I laid myself on top of the board—
bam.
Freezing salt water surged through my sinuses, and I came up coughing and gasping for air. Another wave.
Bam.

I felt like I was in a washing machine with a surfboard tethered to my ankle.

I got my ass handed to me by the ocean for over an hour. Then Dog Park Cute Guy caught one last wave and paddled in. I waited a minute or two so I didn't look overly eager to get out of the water, then I ungracefully hauled myself and the board to shore.

We loaded the boards back into the car, then drove home in comfortable silence. I had no idea whether he was interested in me or not. But I was interested in him and I really did want to learn to surf. We planned to surf again in two days.

I still didn't have any idea of what I wanted to do with my life, but the drinking and smoking was getting old.
I'm supposed to start training again in August
, I reminded myself. But instead of being motivated by a potential return to the sport I had dedicated my life to, the idea of staging a comeback made me miserable. Regardless, I decided I should get back in shape.

After a half dozen of our silent surf dates, I asked DPCG to run hill sprints with me. He said yes, but the night we were supposed to meet, he didn't show. I waited for almost an hour, checking my phone, convincing myself he got stuck in traffic. For a moment I almost let the self-pity creep in, but instead I called another guy who had recently given me his number and set up a date for the next weekend, and then I ran the sprints. With each hill, I cycled through a new emotion.

Hill 1: Denial.
He'll be here. He's just running late. Maybe his car broke down.

Hill 2: Sadness.
I really liked him. I can't believe he didn't show.

Hill 3: Confusion.
Could I have gotten the wrong signal? Did he see me in the friend zone? Was it something I said?

Hill 4: Rejection.
He doesn't like me. It was ridiculous for me to ever think he would.

Hill 5: Anger.
You know what? Fuck that guy.

Hill 6: Apathy.
Whatever. I'm over it.

Just as I was finishing up, DPCG pulled up at the top of the hill. His car was crammed full of white garbage bags that looked like they had been hastily stuffed with various belongings. His dog, Roxie, was wedged between bags. He couldn't even see out the back window. I was midway up the hill when he got out of the car and stood next to it, waiting for me. I reached the top of the hill and stood with my hands on my hips as I caught my breath.

“I got kicked out of my place,” he said. It wasn't an apology, just an explanation.

Then DPCG went AWOL. Two weeks later I saw him at the dog park. When he looked my way, I pretended he didn't exist. He came over anyway. “I wanted to apologize. I'm going through some shit right now.”

“Uh huh,” I said coolly.

“Do you still want to hang out?”

I did. I couldn't help it. I was drawn to him. So we made a date, and then it was on. We started spending all our time together. I never even called back my replacement date. I never gave him an explanation.

DPCG and I resumed our surf dates, but this time there was no longer silence. I would drive to the house where he was staying with a friend, smiling the entire way there because I was so happy to be seeing him. Driving up the coast and back, we talked and listened to music. He took me to hang out at his friends' houses, where sometimes we watched MMA fights. He was always interested in my observations. He asked me questions and respected my analysis. I mentioned I was interested in doing MMA. “Yeah, girl, go for it. You should do it,” he said.

We went to Trader Joe's and brought home food that he would cook. We took Mochi and Roxie to dog parks around the city, then home where the two of them would lie on the floor, exhausted. But mostly we would shut ourselves away in his little room, which we referred to as “the cave,” and lie in bed and talk. We discussed bands and movies. We had a similar sense of humor and we would laugh for hours. We talked about our lives. He told me about his son. I told him about losing my dad. He told me about his recovery from heroin addiction, five years clean. I confided in him about the devastation I had felt after losing the Olympics. With him, I felt understood.

One day, I woke up next to DPCG, looked into the brown eyes that I had grown to love and realized I simply could not bear to leave his side. I called the bar and told them I was sick. Gladstones' policy was that if you called in sick on the weekend, you needed a doctor's note to return. When I returned without a note, I was told I could not work again until I had one. I never went back.

I had spent the last year searching for something that would make me happy, and maybe I had finally found it. With DPCG, days would go by, weeks would go by, and we would be so happy we wouldn't even notice. We tuned out everything else.

I expect that if someone is overseeing such an invaluable and important part of my life as my career, they should give a damn about me.

You need a coach who actually cares about you and not just about their own statistics. Many people find a coach who's great at their job but doesn't care about them as a person. When people who don't care about you make decisions that impact your life, those decisions generally end up being bad ones.

The longer you're in a relationship, with a coach or anyone, really, the harder it becomes to walk away. A lot of people stay places too long because they don't want to have those difficult conversations or risk ruining relationships. But if the people around you aren't willing to accept what is best for you, your relationship with them wasn't as meaningful as you thought. A relationship worth anything will endure the process.

I decided I would make a comeback in judo, but on my terms. I had told everyone I was only taking a year off, and that year was up. I hadn't worried about losing my job at Gladstones, because I would be returning to judo. Funding as a judo athlete could even allow me to train MMA.

For four months, I traveled extensively as part of my judo comeback. During a trip to Japan, I was sitting in the athlete dorms at a training facility when it hit me: I was miserable, and I was going to be miserable doing this every day of my life for the next three years until the Olympics. I thought back to winning the bronze medal and how fleeting the happiness that had accompanied it was. I didn't believe that a gold medal was going to make me much happier. I didn't want to be miserable anymore. I cut my trip to Japan short and returned home.

When I got home, I wrote up this crazy training schedule totally unique to MMA or judo that would allow me to change around what I was doing every day. It was on two-week cycles, so I would make sure to hit all the disciplines, but I would be able to have options to change things up. For example, in any given fourteen-day span, I would have to do eight judo practices, four boxing practices, four grappling practices, two strength and conditioning sessions, and a couple wildcard workouts, which could be anything from running sand dunes to surfing. If I didn't feel like going to judo one day, I could go do something else. If I felt like surfing, I could go surfing. It didn't matter if I went to judo eight days in a row or every other day as long as I got in the required number of workouts in the cycle. For the first time in my life, how I trained was up to me.

After taking a year away, I had changed. I had spent all this time just living for me, trying to figure things out on my own. I was the one making the choices, not always great choices, but my own choices. And now, I was choosing for things not to go back to the way they always had been.

In May 2010, I flew to Myrtle Beach for the senior nationals for judo. It was the first time I'd competed in a major tournament since the Olympics, but there was no question I was going to win. Everyone was excited for my comeback, believing it marked my return for the 2012 Olympics.

Little Jimmy and I were standing on the warm-up mat next to each other. He had helped train me since I was a sixteen-year-old kid. I had looked up to him most of my life: as a sports idol, as an Olympic teammate, and as a coach. Now, at twenty-three, I wanted Jimmy to train me for MMA.