The Way of the Fight Read online

  As he grew up, he became more and more active, and he was always on his tiptoes. He could disappear if you didn’t keep your eye on him, and all it took was a few seconds. One day, he was in the yard, tomato planting with his dad. Georges was two and a half. Dad turned around for barely a moment, and poof! Georges was gone, vanished. We looked for him and somehow found him halfway down the street, near the corner, watching traffic. It was scary . . .

  Georges was never able to sit still for even thirty seconds. He was always hyperactive. That’s how it was for his first years.

  The best thing I did for him when he was young is buy him a kids’ encyclopedia about dinosaurs. He studied that book and learned it by heart. He fell in love with dinosaurs and their history and asked for more, and more, and more!

  Many people wonder why I’m so interested in dinosaurs and their history. The reason is actually really simple: dinosaurs were the biggest, most physically powerful creatures that ever walked the face of the earth, yet now they’re gone. They ruled the planet for more than 150 million years, but then they became extinct, they just disappeared, and it fascinates me. Ever since my mom bought me that encyclopedia about dinosaurs, I’ve been obsessed. How could these unbelievably powerful, fearsome creatures completely disappear?

  But I’m also fascinated by cockroaches. Unlike the dinosaur, the cockroach is built for and exists for one single purpose: survival. It’s the total opposite of a dinosaur. Cockroaches are survival machines. Scientists believe they can survive very high levels of radiation from a nuclear blast, and that’s just the beginning of the story.

  The cockroach is one giant nerve, fine-tuned to everything around it: the environment and all immediate sources of potential danger. It’s adaptable to almost any situation it encounters, and that’s what makes the cockroach so interesting. It’s a mobile radar system designed to identify and avoid threats.

  The cockroach doesn’t waste a single thing; every part plays a role. It can run up to three miles per hour. It has faster reflexes than humans beings. It can live by eating paper or glue. It has two brains, including one in its behind. It has a set of teeth in its stomach to help it digest food. It can squeeze itself as thin as a dime. It can go about forty minutes under water on a single breath. It has been practicing survival for over 280 million years. A female can stay pregnant her whole life. Its heart doesn’t need to move or beat. It rests for 75 percent of its existence. It lives in cracks and nooks—so, anywhere. It survives at minus-32 degrees Celsius, no problem. It has one giant nerve from head to tail, and the hairs on its back legs measure disturbances in the air. And finally, it can live for a full week without its head, until it dies—just because it can’t drink water anymore. For humans, the cockroach is rather scary and intimidating, very suspicious and totally repulsive. It doesn’t even have a pretty name: the cockroach. But it persists.

  Dinosaurs were huge and powerful; they could not adapt and they died out. And so the big difference between dinosaurs and cockroaches is adaptability: one is able to adjust, while the other, apparently, couldn’t. Dinosaurs didn’t make adjustments, either because they didn’t feel they needed to, or couldn’t understand that they needed to. They were slowly but surely dying out as food became scarce and their environment changed around them—be it temperature or the arrival of mammals.

  The same analogy applies to fighting, and probably any other sport. It’s not always the strong that survive. It takes brains, guts, tolerance and forward thinking. We’ve seen this since the beginning of mixed martial arts.

  Maybe the greatest MMA inspiration for me is Royce Gracie, who defeated Gerard Gordeau in UFC 1. Royce is not a big man. He’s about six feet tall and weighs 185 pounds. Gordeau is taller (six foot five), bigger and physically stronger. In fact, for the final of the very first UFC, few people thought Royce could win. Everyone believed his brother Rorion was the better all-around fighter and better suited to MMA. But Rorion chose Royce to represent the Gracie family style of fighting. And in the final, it didn’t take Royce long to get Gordeau to the mat, trap him in a chokehold and tap him out.

  This match, for me, showed a new way of fighting. It showed how a smaller, lighter man could beat anybody. It showed how MMA is more than a fight, it’s a strategy sport. (Some people don’t see it that way yet, but eventually, they should.)

  Royce went on to defeat many opponents who were much larger than him, including the legendary sumo champion Akebono. Akebono is six foot eight and almost five hundred pounds, and the fight lasted barely more than two minutes. Akebono got on top of Royce, but in a poor mount. Royce squirmed into a better position, slowly, methodically, until he finally got hold of one of Akebono’s gigantic arms. He locked the wrist and Akebono submitted.

  “I did everything my trainers told me not to do,” Akebono said after the fight.

  “What you saw tonight is exactly what I trained to do,” said Royce. “I knew I had to bring Akebono to the ground, and I knew that the best way to do that was to let him come to me. It worked perfectly.”

  When he fought Royce Gracie in 2004, Akebono was the dinosaur that couldn’t adapt despite his superior metrics across the board. He was three times the size of Gracie, after all, and likewise had become expert at a style of fighting. Gracie was the more fluid fighter, and he stuck with the plan and tweaked it as he went, seeking new opportunities as the fight evolved. I’m not saying Royce was a cockroach in a derogatory sense, of course—he’s one of my heroes—but his approach and style were certainly based on constantly adapting to the threat in front of him. What got the great, big Akebono was a simple wrist lock.

  In many ways, my approach also tries to mimic the cockroach’s survival-based existence: I constantly have to invent new ways of defeating different and more lethal opponents. And I’ve had to become more efficient as I progress through my career. This is a critical point because, like the cockroach, I want to confuse my opponent before the battle even takes place. I want to psych him out before we fight so I can have the mental edge.

  One of the jobs I had when I was starting out as a mixed martial artist was as a bouncer in a nightclub near Montreal. Every single time I went to work, I had meatheads challenging me to a fight. It still happens nowadays, and it’s always in clubs: guys come up to me, take one look at me and tell me they can kick my ass. I don’t mind at all; it’s all part of the game for me. What I used to do when guys got excited at the nightclub is say, “Hey, I can’t hear what you’re saying, let’s go talk about this outside.” They’d immediately think we’d be about to fight, so they’d eagerly follow me out. Once we’d get outside the club, I’d tell them they weren’t allowed back in because they were acting like jerks, and they’d be welcome another day, when they were calmer (and sober). It pissed a lot of them off, but that’s all right. It happens. These were just harmless drunks trying to show off their physical strength, and the best technique was to outsmart them; psych them out—avoid it altogether.

  There are still many, many fighters who focus on their brute strength before perfecting their technique. But they often run into a wall as they fight better, smarter opponents. In sports, we see the David-versus-Goliath example all the time.

  I’ve never been the biggest guy in the octagon, and I don’t ever want to be either. My goal is to be the most efficient, quickest-thinking fighter. I aim to be flexible, open-minded and ready for any situation. And so, I may love the dinosaurs and their stories, but I’m inspired by the cockroach: the ultimate adapter and the greatest survivor.

  MOTHER: What I remember best is that whenever Georges started something, he never stopped. He’d see something on TV, and then he’d go alone somewhere and practice it until he got it. Only then would he come back and show you what he could do. When he was ten, he saw people on TV walking on their hands, and so he decided he was going to do the same. He spent two whole years walking on his hands at home. I’d call the family in for dinner and you’d see these two little legs bobbing in behind the kitchen t
able. That was my Georges.

  My father first introduced me to Kyokushin karate when I was seven years old. He had practiced karate for years and was a black belt himself, and so he taught me the basic principles and movements in the basement of our home, which hasn’t changed much since my childhood. When you walk down there you can see the punching bags and gloves and all the other equipment I’ve gathered over the years.

  When my dad was content that I had learned the basics, he registered me at a local karate school. I remember my very first class, a brand new white belt holding my brand new gi taut against my body. There had to be a hundred other kids in that class—and, in the ensuing weeks and months, I lost fights to most of them.

  After a while, my peers and I had the opportunity to graduate to green belt, but during the examination, I looked around and noticed we weren’t a hundred anymore. Now we were about fifty. As the years passed by, the number continued to dwindle, and I noticed that the fewer the number of regular students, the more fights I won. I was still losing a lot, mind you, but I kept going forward. And I believed my instructors, who constantly reminded me that I would keep getting better, that I had superior athletic skills, that I was making progress.

  I also listened to my dad, who told me I should never quit, no matter how slowly it seemed I was developing or how long it took me to improve. One of my friends even remarked that I was “stubborn,” “independent”—“hyperactive,” even! Years later I can confirm that he was on the mark: once, to prove a point, I walked on my hands for almost two years.

  By the time I got to the brown belt level, we were fewer than ten students, and when I was almost thirteen years old and going for my first black belt, there were only two of us standing there. This is when I first reflected on the recent past and realized that, though I had lost a lot more fights than I had won during the previous five years, I had changed: now, I was finding new, innovative ways of losing fights. I was learning from my losses, and this led to me win some close fights that I used to lose before.

  With the help of my father and my teachers, I learned about resiliency, but at thirteen, I wasn’t yet approaching losing from a philosophical perspective. At one point I had even tried to quit karate altogether. I was twelve years old and tired of losing and tired of my teacher, who, in retrospect, was a great mentor but a hard man. We used to get slapped around and barked at a lot. In fact, in today’s world, he probably wouldn’t be allowed to be as tough on kids as he had been, but this was another time, another era. One day I told my dad I was quitting karate for good. He wouldn’t hear of it. He just looked up at me and stared into my eyes: “You can quit when you’re a black belt,” he stated plainly. “Don’t ever quit anything until you’ve reached the end.” He went back to whatever he was reading, which was the indicator that that was the end of the conversation. I had no choice but to go back. Thank goodness I did.

  Funnily, one of my sisters was in the same class and she too decided to quit. But instead of talking about it with my dad, she hid in the cornfields behind our house so that nobody would force her to go back. We still laugh about that one. I’m thankful to my dad, though, because this was one potentially lost opportunity that would have altered my life for the worse. He turned this seemingly small episode into an eternal truth: always finish what you’ve started.

  Of course, I never actually liked losing, and I still had no idea how losing would help make me a better person. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, I was living according to a new emotion: anger. I didn’t understand why I’d been bullied, and it really bothered me. I wondered what I’d done wrong, and what was wrong with me. I decided I wasn’t going to relive my past as a bullied kid, and at first, as I kept getting better at karate, I just wanted to learn more ways of breaking arms and hurting people. I had a lot of hatred, a lot of anger. And I really wanted revenge on the bullies.

  That’s what happens after you’ve been bullied. Some bullied kids become class clowns because they want to be liked so badly that they think making people laugh will bring them back to respectability. I know people like that. Other bullied kids go into hiding and aim for invisibility, hoping the world never again takes notice of them. Some bullied kids become bullies themselves—not because they enjoy being bullies, but more because they figure that if they do, nobody else will bully them anymore.

  And some choose to fight the world of bullies on their own.

  MOTHER: Georges never opened his school books a lot, but he always made sure to do the necessary work and pass all his courses. He also always respected his teachers and elders.

  Although I wasn’t the type who was going to step out and start fights, I decided I wasn’t going to walk away from one ever again. This kind if thinking translated to how I behaved in class with other students.

  One of the important lessons I learned from my parents is always to respect authority figures like teachers. While some of our teachers were pretty annoying and rude, one of them was really warm and kind. She always encouraged me and treated me like I had something special. Of course, she taught religion and spirituality. I decided I was going to police her course and keep the kids under control so she could teach uninterrupted. This isn’t a bad thing, but it certainly didn’t make me any more popular at school.

  One day, this guy kept on teasing me, and I decided I’d had enough. We got into a fight, and not only did I win, but I broke his arm.

  And then my world changed.

  After thinking about what I’d done, I was a little ashamed of having hurt him so bad, and I thought people wouldn’t want to be near me. I actually thought I’d be cast out even further from the norm. But it was just the opposite. Now I was popular. I had been a reject for a long time, and then one day I got in a fight and broke a guy’s arm and all of a sudden I was popular.

  I knew it was bullshit. It pissed me off that I’d become popular because I’d kicked a guy’s ass. I thought it was stupid, even though people “liked” me now. I thought people were stupid, and I didn’t give a crap what they thought of me anymore, not at all, and I didn’t hesitate to tell them exactly what I thought of them.

  MOTHER: By the time he got to high school, I think he was very lonely. He was home a lot. He didn’t have many friends, but I remember our dogs wanted to sleep next to his bed or in front of his door. He had a special relationship with those dogs, a shepherd and a collie. They followed him everywhere.

  I think the reason he was so lonely is that he didn’t know what to do with his genius—“son génie,” as we say in Quebec. I felt he was purposely isolating himself from others. He did have two very nice girlfriends for a while, but I think they became possessive, and you never tell Georges what to do. His training always comes first. Always.

  I rejected the world I’d come from. I lost my bearings, my foundation. I could feel the world shifting beneath my feet, and my struggle was to keep balance. It was ridiculous that people would start respecting me now because of this event. So I realized it wasn’t real respect, it was fear, and that pissed me off even more! So I focused on training because it was the only thing I was sure I wanted to be doing. I withdrew, slowly, surely, into my own shell. I went back to my dad’s basement and the gym. It was the only thing that made me feel good. Back when I was a kid going through this for the first time, I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I had no idea what I would become. It just felt good to be training. Working. Moving forward.

  So I slowly drew away into my own world, my own invented existence.

  MOTHER: I have to admit that at first we didn’t understand the Georges we saw fighting in the octagon. We didn’t know where the anger or the vengeance came from. This inner rage was foreign to us. For his first-ever fight in Laval, he had to convince me to go, and he kept talking about the technical side of martial arts. He said to me, “Tell me what you think after you see me fight, not before.”

  We haven’t missed any of his fights since.

&n
bsp; He’s changed a lot too, like he’s transformed himself. How he speaks, the way he moves, the style he dresses. He’s always still the same Georges, but when I see him on TV, I see that he’s created another personality.

  It makes me wonder sometimes where he comes from.

  A lot of people who have known me for many years say there are two Georges. They see and hear two of me, they say. There is one Georges they’ve always known. And then there is this other Georges who, if not entirely different, seems unknown and surprisingly distinct.

  My mother often says she doesn’t recognize me when she hears me giving media interviews. My own entourage, who spend more time with me than anyone ever has—sometimes they just look at me after I’ve spoken, and they stare. Like they weren’t expecting those words to come out of me. Like it’s not really me.

  I think I know when I first noticed the change—the other Georges, as they call it. I was nineteen years old and had just started my MMA career. The years before turning nineteen had been long and tough and filled with doubt. Darkness. The dreams I had were still stuck inside me, and I didn’t know how to voice them yet. I started behaving differently, making decisions that surprised some people. Like going to New York City to seek out new coaches, new knowledge.

  I understand what people mean by their idea of two Georges. There’s me in a hostile environment, when I need to be hard and without pity, and then there’s me when I’m in relaxed surroundings. There’s quite a difference . . .