The Way of the Fight Read online

  How I Structured This Book

  The essence of the story is broken down into five major parts: Mother, Mentor, Master, Maven and Conscience. Each section is connected to the voice of someone who changed my life, who played a key role and helped me become who I am today.

  Mother takes you into the world of my childhood and some of those early, shaping lessons. You’ll hear from . . . my mother. Mentor, which should also be known as the Ground Book, is where everything begins, and the voice is Kristof Midoux’s. Master—or what you might also call the Transition Book—represents growth and transition, and the voice belongs to the great thinker and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu teacher John Danaher. Maven, the Standing Book, draws on the wise words of Firas Zahabi, my friend and head coach, and expresses how people use their knowledge and continue their progress through life, becoming better versions of themselves. Conscience, the only part of the book written after the Carlos Condit battle, delivers a completely different point of view on the person I’ve become, through the voice of my longtime friend and manager Rodolphe Beaulieu.

  Ground. Transition. Standing. The flow represents how a mixed martial artist fights, learns, progresses and evolves. While we will delve into fighting techniques, there’s more to winning battles than fists and feet.

  BOOK 1

  MOTHER

  Maman

  One thing about Georges: he’ll always tell you

  exactly what he thinks. He was cut from the same

  cloth as his dad and granddad. Both were hardworking

  and very, very direct. His granddad was nicknamed

  ‘The Bionic One’—Le Bionic. Anyway, he’s very opinionated

  and not afraid to face the truth, even though

  he’s able to let other people’s insults slide off him

  like water off a duck’s back. In fact, you want to

  know the real Georges? He stays friends with his foes.

  Le v’la ton Georges! There’s your real Georges.

  —MY MOTHER

  I’m scared.

  I’m scared because I’m thinking of a moment that changed my life and altered who I am, and I can’t get away from it. I realize that being scared is part of who I am. Fear is the genesis of most of the good things that have occurred in my life. Fear is the beginning of every success I’ve lived.

  But it affects my perspective, both physical and logical. That’s the way it works. It doesn’t just change what happens inside of you, it also immediately impacts how you relate to the world all around you. How—or if—you remember. Because of fear, other information that seems totally basic and elementary—like what you were doing and why you were there—are gone. The present loses its power when pitted against fear.

  Fear is magical and possesses all kinds of superpowers. All it takes is a few words or a flash of images to trigger its strength. And the moment you see or hear whatever it is that scared you, your life changes.

  And yet, because I’m scared, details I don’t usually notice are right there in my mind—I can see them and their shapes, I can sense them, and I feel like I could reach out and touch them. But not the whole picture; some things dissolve.

  And that’s what happened to me on the day my good friend Dr. Sébastien Simard called my mobile.

  In fact, I’m sitting here trying to think of where I was when the phone rang, but I can’t remember. I’d like to know what I was doing when I took the call, but that’s not possible either. The memories attached to that moment are lost somewhere inside me, and I know it’s because of the fear.

  What I can recall—and the clarity of that recollection is odd, like a slow-motion dream—is that I was standing in a long hallway, alone. I see white walls and a hall and I’m walking down the middle of it toward who knows where. The phone rings and I know I have to answer because it’s my surgeon. I stop, which is odd because usually I walk and talk. But here I stop, I look at the screen and see his name, I push the button and I put the phone to my ear. And this is when he tells me: “Georges, you have a torn ACL. Your knee ligament is fully torn. You need major surgery. You’re not fighting for a long time.”

  Ever since I was nine years old I’ve known the unique feeling generated by fear. It makes me laugh now, but that’s because I know better. It’s because, without the bullies and the assholes and the jerks, I would never have become who I am today. I would never have been lucky enough to prove them wrong. I would be somebody different, and nobody can know who that person would or might have been. I just don’t care about the possibilities because I can’t change any of the things that have come before me. All I know for certain is the present.

  I’ve also known for a long time that fear comes in two packages: good and bad.

  Here’s an example of good fear. When I was twelve years old, my buddies and I would gear up on winter days and plan these big street fights in our neighborhood. All the kids from my street or my neighborhood. We wore these big, thick winter coats, toques and gloves to protect ourselves from the minus-30 Celsius Canadian winters. We’d have these epic battles and beat each other in the snow until someone gave up. I was pretty good at that, but sometimes I ate my share of whoopings, especially from the older kids. We were trying to prove who was tough and I was really proud, so, many times, I got whooped. There were no head shots, just body blows. It was fun. I was scared, but I went anyway because I didn’t want to be teased for being scared. It taught me to be humble. You learn to understand that others can be stronger than you.

  I wasn’t always the strong one. Fear made me. It’s why I am in love with my own fear. Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t like fear, but I do love it, and there’s a major difference there. Because of what my fear makes me do. Because of how my fear has made me who I am. Some of my fears are terrifying, paralyzing, and I won’t talk to you about those. They take my sleep and my comfort away from me. So not here, not now. Because I’m not ready for that yet. I can’t. I won’t. I’m not a machine.

  MOTHER: My Georges came out two weeks late. He had lesions on his face, and soon after that he had scabs all over. There were five or six doctors checking on him all the time. We were really scared for him.

  The truth is that I didn’t start as a winner. When I was a kid, I was just another reject. I started at the bottom. I think all winners do.

  It was a physical thing, most probably. For some reason I don’t know, I was addicted to licking my lips. I couldn’t stop. I’d chew on the collar of my shirt, or I’d lick the rim of my lips. At home, walking to school in the classroom, in the schoolyard, I’d constantly be licking my lips, round and round and round. This wasn’t good, especially for a kid who always had skin problems.

  In fact, my mother told me that even before I left the hospital where I was born, I had all kinds of skin issues. I got better, of course, and I grew up all right and everything, but then when I was eight I had to have a major kidney operation—ever notice that big scar on my lower back?—and after the operation I started having psoriasis problems. Again, I got better, but for a while I wasn’t very pretty to look at . . . and no matter what, I couldn’t stop licking my lips.

  Eventually, I developed a red rim of raw skin around my mouth. I must have looked like a diminutive clown, or something else, something ridiculous. To the other kids around me, I was different, weird, an easy target. It would be my first pass at the world of losing.

  Even though I’d been studying karate since the age of seven, I realized when I was nine years old that life isn’t like a movie. The bullies will win. When you’re alone and there are three of them, and when they’re twelve years old and you’re a skinny, funny-looking nine-year-old, you’re screwed. You can do all the karate in the world, you can fight back with everything you’ve got, but you will not beat them. I wasn’t the Karate Kid, because that’s fiction. Even though fiction is inspired by reality, fiction in commercial art often omits some very important, very traumatizing nuances.

  It was tough being bullied where I grew up beca
use everybody knows everybody. I come from St-Isidore, a village of about 2,000 people that’s about thirty minutes outside of Montreal. I didn’t have that many friends. I got close to one kid, an immigrant from Colombia who didn’t speak French or English. We got on just fine, probably because we couldn’t speak to each other at first. We used sign language, although I’m pretty sure he knew what was happening. He’s always been a really smart guy. I’m glad he stuck by me, and that we’re still friends today.

  I’m the kind of person who can deal with insults, but what actually really makes me angry is when somebody picks on someone I care for. That always ticks me off. Sometimes when I got picked on, I got really scared and I ran. But other times I was being humiliated in front of everybody and didn’t have a choice: I had to stand and fight. I confronted danger even if I knew I wasn’t going to come out on top. My thinking was, At least I’ll get my shots in and they’ll regret it and hopefully they won’t try again.

  After school, at lunchtime, during recess—it happened pretty much anytime, anywhere. Playing dodgeball, they’d throw the ball in my face on purpose. They’d throw it at me when I was on the sideline, just because. I’d be walking off, and pow! Right in the kisser. They’d laugh more and I’d hurt more because it was unexpected.

  I was always angered by my treatment, but I tried not to show it. I went through all the emotions, sometimes fear and avoidance, and other times maybe I was learning to be brave. I once fought because they spit on my friend and me. I went in alone, pretending I’d forgotten something, and I took a swing at one of them. They were surprised, especially when I connected. I got him good. I swung for another one, and that was the mistake. They teamed up and I really paid for it. But sometimes you just can’t walk away.

  The truth is that bullying has helped make me who I am. Without it, without those obstacles, I might not be where I am. The story would be different. Bullying was part of the world I grew up in, at a key period in my life, and I got through it. It was mine to face and I did.

  Every single day was the same. I’d get up, walk to school past the same houses, along the same streets, by the same trees. My world was four kilometers square and everything I knew lived inside it. One day, I started losing my lunch money. Then I started losing my pants. I had these cool Adidas tearaway pants, the ones with the buttons that run along the side and you can pull off with a stiff yank, like the professional basketball players had on television. Every day, they’d yank them off me and laugh. And so I lost my dignity. In front of all the kids I went to school with. Right there in the schoolyard. Some of the kids looked on and laughed. Some pointed and whispered. Others, who were just as scared as I was, hid in the shadows. They probably thanked their lucky stars it was me getting picked on and not them. I don’t blame them. Because I remember and understand how they must have felt. Luckily, I could take it. And yet, for some reason, I kept wearing those same pants to school.

  One night, I came home from school and told my parents how I’d lost my lunch money to bullies. My dad got up from the kitchen table, walked me straight over to the one of the bullies’ houses, told his parents about what he had done to me and demanded an apology and a promise that he never do it again. Not only did this tactic not work, but I was totally embarrassed, and so I never told my parents again about being bullied. My mother says that the next time she heard I’d been bullied as a kid was in a television interview a few years ago, when I was in my twenties.

  The bullies kept at me for almost three years—until they found a bigger reject than I was, I guess. Or maybe they just got bored with me. I don’t know why they started leaving me alone, and frankly I don’t care. Maybe I was getting bigger and they knew I was on the verge of becoming a black belt.

  Maybe the most important lesson I learned from my youth is that I don’t ever want to make someone else feel the way these bullies did to me.

  MOTHER: I used to play records with subliminal messages for Georges when he was young. It was relaxing music to calm him down, and the messages were always positive, like “You are a loved child” or “You are a great person,” things like that. It was important to me that he feel good about himself.

  When he was eight, he had a major kidney operation. That’s when he started psoriasis. He had just started karate too. I remember he’d cry after losing at first, but I kept every single one of his karate evaluations and you can see where he started and where he got to today. It’s incredible.

  Some people learn to lose. Others lose and learn. The latter is a much better approach in my opinion because it focuses the mind on the positives and keeps your thoughts away from the negatives. One of my favorite Japanese proverbs is “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” This understanding extends to all things, by the way, but you only learn it by losing a few times.

  Winning is love. I cried when I won my first title. It was the best moment of my career. It literally was a dream come true. Losing, however, is a step along a much longer life path. And the only way to ascend to new and greater heights is to lose. I have a special relationship with losing. It scares me to death, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find a way of using it to my benefit. Because losing changes me and turns me into a better man.

  The first time I learned and understood what losing actually means, I was just eight years old. I was in grade school and I remember it like it was yesterday. I can see it in my mind’s eye. I recall the details quite vividly because it’s also the first recollection of pain in my life.

  We were in the schoolyard during recess and a bunch of the bigger, tougher kids were playing on the snowbanks. Trust me, there was lots of snow in St-Isidore during the winter. It’s what we call a real winter. At my school, the plows would push the snow into these great mounds at the end of the yard. They were so high you couldn’t see what was on the other side of them. But they sure were fun to play on. The schoolyard became a fortress of snow.

  So throughout the winters, at lunchtime, we’d get out there, eight and sometimes ten kids, and play King of the Mountain. It’s a simple game: everybody starts at the bottom, you race to be the first one to reach the top of the mountain, and then you do anything and everything possible to stay there, on top, being king.

  We were all trying to be kings. The toughest primary-school kids who had something to prove, they were all there. Les p’tits toughs, I called them—the little toughs. There were no rules. You could do anything, as long as you stayed atop that mountain.

  The kids on my block didn’t play King of the Mountain—they were too little or nerdy—so I had no idea how it worked, but I was curious. At first, I just stayed in the distance, watching this game, trying to understand. One day, leaning against the wall on the other side of the yard, I decided it didn’t look that tough and I decided to give it a try.

  At the start I was pretty scared, but I was also pretty agile. So I was doing well at first, pushing a few people around and avoiding major shoves and pushes myself. I was strong enough, I thought, to maybe become king. But what I didn’t realize is that, to the others, I was just the new guy, the rookie, the fresh meat. The others kids knew each other and how each played, strengths and weaknesses, tactics and all that. So when you were the new kid coming into the game, everybody noticed. It’s like in football, when a veteran sees a new guy on the other side and tells one of his buddies, “Let him through once or twice so I can get a shot on him.” At some point, especially in sport, someone’s going to test you and see what you’re made of. That’s just the way it is.

  One of the kids I’d pushed out of my way was getting frustrated—his name was Joel Cavanagh, and I’ll never forget it. After a shove, he turned to me and asked, “Georges, do you want to fight?” I thought he just wanted to wrestle, something to have a bit of fun on the mountain. And so I barely had the word yes out of my mouth when he landed a straight right to my nose.

  THWACK!!!

  I fell and rolled down the side of the snow mountain, all the way to the ground. Somewhat daze
d, I could tell from the snow on the ground that my nose was bleeding. I grabbed a handful of flakes and pressed it to my face for two reasons: to stop the bleeding, and to hide my shame! Joel was a nice kid, and we actually talked about what happened afterward. He was frustrated by my staying power and he took me by surprise. Every kid in the yard saw me get knocked down. But I learned something from it that I’ll never forget. I may have lost that mountain, but I won a valuable lesson that day: the power of the unexpected. I’ve been using it ever since.

  The worst punches are the ones you don’t see coming. The ones that don’t give your brain an instant to prepare you for the blow. The ones looking for a place to connect. Especially when the thrust—be it a fist, knee or foot—strikes your temple or your chin. Those are the strikes you don’t immediately feel. You can’t. Your body gives priority to all of the power exiting it. The powerful and instant displacement of human matter is so great that your knees buckle, then cease to function. All of you ceases to function. And you go down.

  As for the top of the mountain, let’s just say that I learned the best way not only to become but also to stay king is to keep my eyes up and my hands ready at all times.

  MOTHER: Georges had all this energy and we had to find new ways of punishing him. We couldn’t make him sit down in the corner; it wasn’t possible. So when he was bad, I’d send him to the monkey bars in the front yard. I told him to go dump his excess energy there.

  At two months, he was sleeping through the night. He was nine months old the first time he stood, and he took his first steps at thirteen months. The truth is that he preferred to walk on all fours, backward, and he was constantly bumping into people. I took him to an audition for the Cirque du Soleil once, but it wasn’t for him. He said he’d never wear tights like the acrobats. Never. They were all sorts of professional or Olympic gymnasts at the audition too. He didn’t fit in that day.