The Laws of the Ring (21 page)

I scrambled to find the lock for the door. I was fumbling, clawing at the door like a crab in a pot. Their faces were at the window, their teeth flashed, their fists pounded.

I couldn't maneuver the lock. The door swung open.

It was like they were all trying to get into the car at the same time. I thought I was dead. This was the first time my positive attitude began to waver. There was little room for creativity left. How could I get out of this? I was trapped, like a turtle on its back. They were shoving and angling to get at me. I wasn't going to give up, but I was down to my final option.

But now the driver became a concern. Where was he? Whose side was he on? I felt a shift in the car and saw the driver get out on his side. This was not good. One of the attackers reached in and started pounding me on the head and pulling me by the hair. There were open wounds on my head, and the hair pulling made the pain very nearly unbearable.

That's it,
I thought.
The driver bailed and I'm done. I'm the Rodney King of Indonesia. I'm never getting out of this cab.

Just then, the driver yanked the hair puller away from the car and hopped in. The driver was on my side! He was helping! He leaned outside of the car and yelled at the attackers. He told the onlookers to call for help. This backed them down some. I was now part of a huge public scene, and that worked to my advantage. At this point the crowd of helpers far outnumbered the attackers.

I leaned back, my head nearly in the driver's lap, and started kicking. My experienced feet were like pistons: too quick for them to grab, too strong for them to overpower, and I was fighting them off. The only question that remained was how much longer I could keep this up. While I was repeatedly kicking—I must have been on my back for twenty or thirty seconds, but it felt like ten minutes—I noticed the other attackers were involved in some kind of commotion outside the car.

Finally, there was no one left to kick. I glanced outside the car and saw another group of people—foreigners, like me—prying my attackers away. Finally, some help. The door slammed closed. The driver started the car and floored it onto the street.

My attackers, or what remained of them, stood in the street behind me waving their weapons and shouting their chatter. I didn't think the combination of happiness and relief I was feeling was possible. I was nearly crying, and I couldn't stop thanking the driver. I was bloody, sore, and beyond exhausted, but I was alive.

I told the driver to take me to the hospital. I counted seven open gashes on the top and back of my head. Just as I began to calm down, I noticed a guy following us on a motorcycle. He took one turn with us, then two. There were very few cars on the road.

I had no idea who he was, but I wanted to find out why he was following me. I told the driver to pull over so I could get out and confront him. There was no fear in me at this point and I wanted to make sure I wasn't being followed. I had no idea if the motorcycle guy was friendly or not, but I wanted him out of my life either way.

“What's up?”

He was a local who spoke decent English. “Are you okay?” he asked. He wanted to know where I was staying and if he could help. The adrenaline was still rushing inside me, and I didn't tell him anything. I couldn't trust anyone.

“Don't worry about it, I don't want you following me,” I said, and told the driver to continue.

He took me to a hospital; my hair was thick with dried blood. The first thing they did, given my bloody and battered condition, was make me take a shower to make it easier for them to examine my head. My shorts were soaking wet and bloody, and I wasn't wearing underwear, so a hospital-issue towel became my only clothing. They thought I had a skull fracture, so they sent me to another hospital for an X-ray. My feet and legs were swollen, cut, and bruised. They sutured seven different spots on my head and put cotton balls over each. The X-ray, thank goodness, was negative.

While I was in the hospital, Virgil and Bobby, the local we had hired to be our tour guide, came to visit me. The guide was furious and said he had connections with the police. For fifty dollars, he told me he would get, as he put it, “justice.” I was forced to go to the police station to file a report, by Bobby, who insisted that we get “justice.” I was still sporting the towel from the hospital as they lined up a bunch of guys and told me to identify my attackers from the group in front of me. I looked at them and had no idea if I'd seen any of them before. They insisted that I just choose one, but really I couldn't have cared less at this point and wasn't interested in blind justice.

I sat with a police officer to tell him my story. What followed was one of the strangest scenes of my life. I was exhausted, lying on a table in the police chief's office, wearing nothing but that hospital towel, talking to a cop who was typing on an old computer. How weird is that? It was ten in the morning and I hadn't slept at all. I was so tired from the night's ordeal that I barely wanted to stand up, let alone recount the story. I started out by sitting in a chair, and then I moved to the table. I was accompanied by a local witness who was telling his version of what happened to me. He said he first assumed that I was a crazy person, running around the club bleeding and causing trouble, then realized I was being attacked.

The officer was looking at me kind of funny, but I was too freaking exhausted to even care. When the officer left the room, the witness told me he couldn't believe I had the nerve to lie on the chief's table nearly naked. He would look up occasionally and laugh. Just another example of the crazy American, I guess.

Every couple of minutes, the power would inexplicably go out. When it did, I had to start my story over from the beginning. Finally, I asked for a pen and paper to write it all down.

My guide kept telling me, “For fifty bucks my buddy will get these guys.” Nobody could believe I wasn't interested in their form of justice. “I don't care if they get these guys,” I said. “I just want to sleep.”

The funny part of the story was my concern about the hospital bill: How was I going to pay? I didn't have much money with me by this point in the trip. I had no health insurance. I had no idea what they would charge or how they would handle my situation. Would they send a bill to my house in Sacramento? Unlikely.

When the hospital released me, I was gritting my teeth wondering how I was going to pay for my stay. I knew what a night in the emergency room would cost in America. I was probably more nervous at this moment than I'd been at any time during the fight. Then they told me what I owed. It was the equivalent of thirty-five dollars U.S. I nearly laughed with relief. I gave the taxi driver a hundred-dollar bill and thanked him for saving my life. He was so grateful for the money, but not nearly as grateful as I was for the lift.

I was in Bali for two more days, in the house we had rented, recuperating for the flight home. I was supposed to corner Olaf Alfonso in Japan three days after the attack. The fighting organization, called Dream, wouldn't book me a flight from Indonesia to Japan, so I flew from Indonesia to Sacramento and spent twelve hours on the ground before flying another fifteen hours to Japan, in order to keep my word to my buddy Olaf Alfonso. I wore a hat over the six cotton swabs that were threaded to my head. I'm sure I was quite a sight.

W
ould I do it all over again given the option? No. Not a chance. My escape from the murderous thugs in Bali makes for a good story, but I wouldn't do it over again on a bet. I learned many lessons from that episode, none more important than this: Sometimes, the bigger man is the one who walks away.

There's a temptation to think you're invincible when you're a successful twenty-five-year-old fighter with a nice buzz going. I gave in to that temptation, and it was a huge mistake. I took the challenge based on principle.
You can't pick on me.
That's all it was: false machismo. I failed to take into consideration that not everybody fights by the same rules. And not everybody values life in the same way.

Context is everything. In the aftermath of this experience, I learned a lot about the people I was dealing with—their situation and their motivation. I visited Indonesia during a time when the economy was in bad shape. For the most part, the people were extremely friendly and welcoming to us, but there were times when their desperation showed. Many of them sat on the streets attempting to sell jewelry or other trinkets, and occasionally they would flash anger when they couldn't close a sale.

Young men in Bali—like my attackers—had precious few options in these tough economic times. I later learned that one of those options was to serve as “escorts” for female tourists. These guys were good-looking locals, and they would hang around bars and restaurants showering women—most from Australia or Europe—with attention. The women, in turn, would wine and dine these young guys and, if things went well, pay them for
additional attention
. I have no reason to think that the European girls with whom I was dancing knew anything about this, but it's possible the Balinese men thought I was standing in the way of their finding out.

So I unknowingly violated several local customs. For a group that is downtrodden and already working for peanuts, it's humiliating to have one of your own beat up by someone, an American, who was already viewed as a guy who was “stealing” potential customers in the bar. Their subsequent actions validated one of life's basic truths: The less you have to lose, the more willing you are to lose it.

So, no, I wouldn't do it again. I would do anything to avoid that situation. I would allow my pride to be hurt, and I would have let the instigator stare and scowl. And I would have been content to receive my satisfaction by looking at the guy and thinking to myself,
I know I can kick your ass, but I'm not going to do it.

The 30th Law of Power

The Power of Friendship

H
ere's a quick story that comes from a place about as far removed from the MMA scene as you can imagine, but illustrates how fun together with friendship can be a great ingredient for success.

Leonard B. Stern and his friend, Roger Price, were screenwriters in the early days of television. One day they were working on a script for
The Honeymooners
when Stern found himself at a loss for words. He was stuck, and so he asked his friend Price to give him an adjective.

Price gave him his choice of two: clumsy or naked.

Both of those words were hilarious to Stern, because he was searching for the right word to describe Jackie Gleason/Ralph Kramden's nose. Price, of course, had no idea what Stern was attempting to describe, and when he found out, he laughed, too.

It dawned on them immediately: They could make some money on this. Imagine if you could give someone the framework of a story and they could ask their friends or family members to fill in words based solely on parts of speech. It could be a lot of fun for those who played, and highly profitable for the two friends who invented it.

Somewhere along the line, one of them came up with the name “Mad Libs.” Stern and Price figured this was an easy sell, but they quickly found that no publisher would touch it. They went from publishing house to publishing house, and each time they heard the same things.

It's childish.

It will never sell.

Why would someone buy it when they could just make it up themselves?

It would have been very easy for Stern and Price to abandon the idea. After all, how could so many people in the publishing industry be wrong? They wanted to make money, too, and they'd publish the book if they believed it had merit, right?

Stern and Price didn't give up. They didn't say, “Oh, well, we gave it a shot,” before going back to their day jobs. Instead, they persisted. When it became clear that they weren't going to be handed an advance and a publishing contract, they didn't discard their passion and assume that other people knew more than they did.

Instead, they published it themselves. The first run of fourteen thousand copies had to be warehoused somewhere, so Stern decided the best available space was in the dining room of his Manhattan apartment. Part of the lore of the early days of
Mad Libs
is that Stern had to eat standing up for several months before they sold enough books to clear some space.

The result, of course, is a ridiculous success story. Stern and Price knew far more than the publishers. They sold more than 150 million copies of the various editions of
Mad Libs
and the word game has also become a huge seller as an app for the iPhone and iPad.

In fact,
Mad Libs
got so big so fast that Stern and Price opened their own publishing
house
to keep up with the demand. Just a couple of friends, doing their thing.

W
hen I joined the WEC, which was the UFC's organization for lighter weights, I was invited to have dinner with Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas.

“We have big plans for you,” White said. “Keep on doing what you're doing, do the PR we have set up for you, and continue to take the sport seriously. We want to make you one of our go-to guys.”

I noticed right away that Lorenzo and Dana had an easy camaraderie, and over our meals I asked them how they came together to start the UFC and bring MMA out of the dark alleys of professional sports.

And that's when I learned that one of the most successful sports corporations in the world started as a conversation between childhood friends. Dana was a guy with the foresight to see that MMA, to be successful, needed to be revamped for public consumption. He was one of the sport's first managers, repping some of the biggest names in the early days, like Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell. Lorenzo was running his family business, which included the Station Casinos, and was a member of the Nevada Boxing Commission. Their love of combat sports was a bond that kept their friendship strong through the years.

Dana was running a couple of cardio/kickboxing gyms in Las Vegas, and he reconnected with Lorenzo after inviting him to come in and work out. But Dana had something greater in mind for this reunion. One day, he approached Lorenzo with a business proposition: buy the UFC. Dana's plan was well considered, including the all-important steps to clean up the sport and its image in order to market it to a more general audience. Lorenzo and his brother Frank saw the potential in the UFC
and
in Dana, and in January 2001, they bought the UFC for two million dollars.

Most of you are probably familiar with the story of all the money that was initially lost, how it was recovered and compounded, and how the reality show
Ultimate Fighter
was integral to the rebirth of the UFC, so I'll spare you the hundredth iteration. The short version is they came, they saw, they didn't quite conquer, they got creative, they launched a successful reality show on SPIKE—introducing the sport to anyone with a cable box—and that investment has paid for itself many times over.

Anyway, listening to them tell the story, I said, “I just think it's so cool that you guys were friends who ended up putting your minds and your passions together.” Then I got to thinking about the widespread impact of that friendship. It has created jobs for writers, referees, commentators, equipment manufacturers, gym owners, arena workers, trainers, managers. It created a system that allows fighters to work hard and create their own breaks. And it all sprouted when one friend (White) had an idea and the other (Fertitta) had the means to bring that idea to fruition.