IF YOU MEET Jeff Bourgeois, he's likely to point out his ears.
For more than a decade, they've been mashed, grabbed and hit by men who are trying to hurt Bourgeois while he tries to hurt them back. He does this as a hobby.
All that mashing leads to clots, which block blood flow to the cartilage, which folds over and basically dies. You know, cauliflower ear.
Next Bourgeois tilts his head back. Look at my nostrils, he says. One is stretched out, oblong. The septum is askew.
Then there is his right arm, which no longer straightens. This is because he refused to give in when another man, also a hobbiest, bent it backward.
To Bourgeois, these are all signs of membership in an exclusive club. The uninitiated call it cage fighting, but he uses the term mixed martial arts, or MMA.
The sport is thriving in Washington. Any weekend, hundreds pay to see rank amateurs pummel each other. Thousands flock to larger venues for pro bouts, which can run $45 a ticket and up.
Bourgeois has fought for years as an amateur. When we met, he was headed for his first professional fight on Dec. 10. To train, he would endure an eight-week regimen that would put most of us in the hospital. The fight would consist of up to 25 minutes of beating, kicking and grappling. Asphyxiation is always possible, as are broken limbs, shattered eye sockets and concussions. At age 40, Bourgeois is nearly 20 years older than his opponent. He stood to make about $1,000 if he won.
You might wonder: Is this guy a complete idiot?
He doesn't seem to be. He's polite, pithy and a good listener. He has a house in Sumner, a wife of two decades and three kids. He coached soccer. Runs his own business installing phone systems.
"A lot of people don't see it as a civilized sport," Bourgeois acknowledges. "But it is."
We'll see about that.
LET'S ESTABLISH two things up front. First, the world of MMA is foreign to me. Second, we're talking about a sport Sen. John McCain called "human cockfighting," one that, for a time, was banned in many states.
In 1993, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu impresario staged the first fight in what would become the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The idea was to answer some age-old questions. Things like, who's better, a boxer or a wrestler? Could a kick-boxer outmatch a karate master? You know, pressing questions.
Nowadays, a good cage fighter has to be skilled in all the disciplines. A typical fight is an unpredictable mashup of striking (punching and kicking) and ground work (wrestling-style moves).
Although the sport struggled at times, even teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the idea turned out to be pure marketing genius. A recent UFC bout attracted a pay-per-view audience of up to 8.8 million. It wasn't even a title fight.
A lot of seemingly normal people are paying to do mixed martial arts, too. You can find dozens of gyms, some of which charge $100 a month or more to teach you to fight in a cage.
Call me a wimp, but I find this somewhat disconcerting.
COMBAT SPORT & Fitness is an Enumclaw gym run by Jeff "Hellbound" Hougland, who is "under contract," as they say, with the UFC. The guy's got cred. At the moment, he's also got a cast on one arm, but that hasn't stopped him from throwing down with his students. Bourgeois trains here.
"Jeff brings you down a level of evolution," he says admiringly.
To get a sense of the intensity you'll see here, imagine sprinting. Hard sprinting. Sprinting until your legs feel like they're going to buckle and you're sucking wind. Now think about maintaining this level of punishment while another man is trying to beat you senseless. This, apparently, is what it means to go backward in evolution.
Of course, it doesn't exactly prove Bourgeois' point about the sport being civilized and all. So far, it's mostly testosterone: a posse of young men, one young woman, and Bourgeois, the elder statesman.
At one point, he notices something on the sweat-drenched mat. "I'm tough," he says to another fighter, "but I ain't tough enough to put my mouthpiece on the mat. That's young tough, which those of us with more experience call stupid."
MMA can be hard to follow. The fists and kicks are self-explanatory, but when the match goes to the ground, I can't tell a winner from a loser. Besides, things can change in an instant.
"You got two half-naked dudes in there and they're sometimes rolling around on top of each other," Bourgeois later concedes. "It's a weird deal."
Watch and listen long enough, and what looks like a free-for-all develops a rhythm, a logic. It's about leverage, technique. Physics, almost. Bourgeois, at 125 pounds, can control guys 40 pounds heavier. He's thinking three or four moves ahead.
Fighters like to call it "physical chess."
The grappling part of MMA is perhaps the most technical aspect, and it's what gets people like Bourgeois really jazzed. It's also the part your typical beer-swilling UFC fan least understands — the part where they're known to shout helpful hints like, "Why don't you kiss him?" or "Stand him up and punch him in the face!"
"Sometimes," Bourgeois sighs, "I hate the fans."
MMA fighters can feel very misunderstood.
OK, FINE. There's a lot of skill involved. Still, why would anybody with half a brain do this?
To find out, I check out Ivan Salaverry's MMA gym, in Seattle's South Lake Union, a bustling high-tech neighborhood. Here, I meet a fighter who works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a trainer who's a financial planner. I learn Amazon employees and firefighters and dentists train here, too.
So far, not a lot of meatheads.
Andy Paves is one of Salaverry's best fighters. He wears glasses, drinks chai tea latte and has a slight lisp. His girlfriend, a social worker, attests he's a really nice person. He is getting his doctorate degree in clinical psychology.
"You ask me why did I choose fighting?" he says. "I wonder why I chose grad school. It's just as punishing."
School is his main priority. But fighting, he says, "is my expression. It's my guitar, my painting. And it's what I share with the world."
The first time he fought, he was "scared witless." Only he didn't say "witless." He's fought four more times as an amateur and twice as a pro.
This is where brainy Paves turns into a real ham. He dances down the ramp to the cage, pantomimes like he's a character in an old-school video game and pulls off a mean Hulk Hogan imitation. He fights with a Filipino flag on his shorts, a nod to his heritage. His friends cheer like mad.
He started dating his girlfriend, Michel Daliva, around the time of his second fight. In 52 seconds, he had his opponent on the ground and was beating the daylights out of him. TKO.
"I was horrified!" Daliva said. "I had never seen him in this light. I remember thinking, this is so primal. I was like, who is this guy?"
Afterward, Paves leapt in the air then fell to his knees. He hugged his opponent, bowed, and thanked him.
You'll see that a lot in MMA fights — the hugging. And not just perfunctory hugs, either. There's a lot more respect than you might think.
"It's funny," another practitioner told me. "After you fight, you like the guy."
Shawn Plaster is another of Salaverry's students, and he, too, is addicted. At 41, he's older than most. The owner of a business consulting firm and a father of young kids, he understands responsibility.
"I know it sounds crazy," he said, "but it's a thinking person's sport."
In the past, he mostly ran for exercise, and hated every minute of it. Three years ago, he started at Salaverry's, 35 pounds overweight, and having "successfully avoided confrontation since elementary school."
He had no idea what he was in for.
"I was thinking, holy smokes! Someone just punched me in the face!" he recalls. "It took about two months to be OK with another grown human being punching me in the face.
"After that, you don't even think about it. All that fear, it's like anything else. The more you do it, the more you get used to it."
To him, getting pummeled — and getting a few good licks in himself — is an adrenaline rush. It's followed by a Zen-like calm.
On an intellectual level, I can relate to these guys a little bit. Still, they seem to be telling me why getting punched in the face isn't as bad as you might think. They're not answering the real question: Why put yourself in that position in the first place? Why not basketball?
Pondering this one afternoon, I posed the question to a male colleague, one who's widely admired as friendly and easygoing. To him, it's obvious.
"Guys just really like how it feels to beat the stuffing out of somebody," he said. Only he didn't use the word stuffing.
I thought for a moment. This explains everything.
It also explains nothing.
Especially in light of what I saw at the Tacoma Elks club.
"OUT OF respect for the lodge, please remove all headgear," a sign at the entrance reads.
A few steps away, shirtless men prepared to beat the crap out one another. Meanwhile, a bevy of ring girls pranced around in short-shorts. A flyweight-sized emcee breezed in wearing a linebacker-sized white tuxedo.
Rap music was blaring, there were lousy burgers and vendors selling custom mouth guards. It was Rumble on the Ridge, my first fight. A few hundred spectators shelled out $25 for six amateur fights. Most appear to be friends and family of fighters.
I'm invited to sit up front with the judges, including Matt Hopkins, a pro fighter.
"Hopefully we don't get blood on the scoring table," he says.
There will be no blood. Not much excitement, either. Even I could tell most of these guys didn't have a clue. Fighters whose guts hung over their shorts. Who swung wildly, cartoonishly missing their targets.
One entered the cage from the wrong direction then strutted around like a pint-size Ali. Hopkins groaned. Amateurs.
"People will sometimes train out of their garage with each other and go fight in an event," Paves later explained. "Some guys are like that — they'll take a fight, regardless. It's a very macho mentality."
So . . . some fighters are brainy and quite civilized. They train hard and think carefully before getting into the ring. Others, not so much.
That's when I begin to realize something. Name another sport where amateurs can perform, man-to-man, in front of hundreds of paying fans. In some ways, it's the stuff any red-blooded American boy dreams of.
And, it turns out, some girls, too.
Fight No. 3 of the evening, 16-year-old Julia Kerkes enters the cage with nails painted red and a ribbon in her hair. She looks calm. It is her first fight.
Just so you know, Julia's no meathead. A few days after the fight, she and I had a long conversation. She's a junior at North Mason High School and showed me one of her term papers. The girl can write. As we talked, I saw her confidence. Her willingness to work hard. Her determination to follow her passions, even if some classmates think she's nuts.
When the bell rang, her opponent came out swinging. And swinging. And pounding and kicking, landing blow after blow.
Julia used her gloves to protect her face. At the end of the round, she looked dazed. When her cornerman opened the cage door, she fell out. A minute later, when the referee checked on her, she snapped to attention. Ready for Round 2.
Again, she took a beating. The crowd was getting wrapped up and seemed to be on her side as she took one punch after another. Her gut, her head . . .
It left me shaken.
Later, I saw her in the hall with her family. Her nose was swollen. Her face was red. Black eyes no doubt were forming.
And she was exhilarated; almost as if she were high. Two days after the fight, and two weeks after, she still thought it was a great experience.Later, I talked about it with Bourgeois.
"She went to a place most people will never go," he explained. "And she walked away."
IF YOU talk to MMA fighters long enough, you start to realize they like to wax philosophical.
"The thing about fighting," Hougland says, "the high is awesome." But, "if you want to hit someone, you've got to be willing to get hit back."
It takes a certain kind of person to do that. They all tell me it's humbling.
"It weeds out jerks," says Cindy Hales, another accomplished fighter, who has fought internationally. Now, she teaches Brazilian jiu jitsu to kids in Bellevue. Parents love her.
"There's nothing more real than someone beating you up," she goes on. When she started out, she was managing a customer-service center. At night, she would do sit-ups until she thought she would die. She would shadow box, spar, diet. She trained under tough guys, became a fight-video nerd, learned the physics of fighting.
"I want to be aggressive," she realized, "but I'm not mad at anyone."
And then, "I can do this aggressive thing, this physical thing, and have it be beautiful."
LAST NOVEMBER, I saw what was later dubbed one of the greatest UFC bouts of all time, Dan "Hendo" Henderson vs. Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. The fight was in San Jose, Calif. I dragged three friends to a Ballard bar where they showed it on pay-per-view.
Couples on dates had come. Young men in trucker hats doing shots. A hipster in duct-taped glasses drinking coffee.
The fight went the full five rounds. Initially, 41-year-old Henderson was battering Rua, 29. The older man nearly finished the match with a choke hold early on, but Rua escaped. One blow opened a cut over Rua's eye, another bloodied his nose. He bled throughout the fight. It looked like he was done-for. Yet he kept moving.
But the momentum would shift. At one point, Rua had Henderson against the cage, landing several hard strikes. For a moment, as Henderson leaned against the cage and Rua leaned against him, it seemed neither could stand without the cage, without each other.
"It's captivating, isn't it?" a friend said. "Because you never know." A fight, we learned, can change at any minute.
All that mashing leads to clots, which block blood flow to the cartilage, which folds over and basically dies. You know, cauliflower ear.
Next Bourgeois tilts his head back. Look at my nostrils, he says. One is stretched out, oblong. The septum is askew.
Then there is his right arm, which no longer straightens. This is because he refused to give in when another man, also a hobbiest, bent it backward.
To Bourgeois, these are all signs of membership in an exclusive club. The uninitiated call it cage fighting, but he uses the term mixed martial arts, or MMA.
The sport is thriving in Washington. Any weekend, hundreds pay to see rank amateurs pummel each other. Thousands flock to larger venues for pro bouts, which can run $45 a ticket and up.
Bourgeois has fought for years as an amateur. When we met, he was headed for his first professional fight on Dec. 10. To train, he would endure an eight-week regimen that would put most of us in the hospital. The fight would consist of up to 25 minutes of beating, kicking and grappling. Asphyxiation is always possible, as are broken limbs, shattered eye sockets and concussions. At age 40, Bourgeois is nearly 20 years older than his opponent. He stood to make about $1,000 if he won.
You might wonder: Is this guy a complete idiot?
He doesn't seem to be. He's polite, pithy and a good listener. He has a house in Sumner, a wife of two decades and three kids. He coached soccer. Runs his own business installing phone systems.
"A lot of people don't see it as a civilized sport," Bourgeois acknowledges. "But it is."
We'll see about that.
LET'S ESTABLISH two things up front. First, the world of MMA is foreign to me. Second, we're talking about a sport Sen. John McCain called "human cockfighting," one that, for a time, was banned in many states.
In 1993, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu impresario staged the first fight in what would become the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The idea was to answer some age-old questions. Things like, who's better, a boxer or a wrestler? Could a kick-boxer outmatch a karate master? You know, pressing questions.
Nowadays, a good cage fighter has to be skilled in all the disciplines. A typical fight is an unpredictable mashup of striking (punching and kicking) and ground work (wrestling-style moves).
Although the sport struggled at times, even teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the idea turned out to be pure marketing genius. A recent UFC bout attracted a pay-per-view audience of up to 8.8 million. It wasn't even a title fight.
A lot of seemingly normal people are paying to do mixed martial arts, too. You can find dozens of gyms, some of which charge $100 a month or more to teach you to fight in a cage.
Call me a wimp, but I find this somewhat disconcerting.
COMBAT SPORT & Fitness is an Enumclaw gym run by Jeff "Hellbound" Hougland, who is "under contract," as they say, with the UFC. The guy's got cred. At the moment, he's also got a cast on one arm, but that hasn't stopped him from throwing down with his students. Bourgeois trains here.
"Jeff brings you down a level of evolution," he says admiringly.
To get a sense of the intensity you'll see here, imagine sprinting. Hard sprinting. Sprinting until your legs feel like they're going to buckle and you're sucking wind. Now think about maintaining this level of punishment while another man is trying to beat you senseless. This, apparently, is what it means to go backward in evolution.
Of course, it doesn't exactly prove Bourgeois' point about the sport being civilized and all. So far, it's mostly testosterone: a posse of young men, one young woman, and Bourgeois, the elder statesman.
At one point, he notices something on the sweat-drenched mat. "I'm tough," he says to another fighter, "but I ain't tough enough to put my mouthpiece on the mat. That's young tough, which those of us with more experience call stupid."
MMA can be hard to follow. The fists and kicks are self-explanatory, but when the match goes to the ground, I can't tell a winner from a loser. Besides, things can change in an instant.
"You got two half-naked dudes in there and they're sometimes rolling around on top of each other," Bourgeois later concedes. "It's a weird deal."
Watch and listen long enough, and what looks like a free-for-all develops a rhythm, a logic. It's about leverage, technique. Physics, almost. Bourgeois, at 125 pounds, can control guys 40 pounds heavier. He's thinking three or four moves ahead.
Fighters like to call it "physical chess."
The grappling part of MMA is perhaps the most technical aspect, and it's what gets people like Bourgeois really jazzed. It's also the part your typical beer-swilling UFC fan least understands — the part where they're known to shout helpful hints like, "Why don't you kiss him?" or "Stand him up and punch him in the face!"
"Sometimes," Bourgeois sighs, "I hate the fans."
MMA fighters can feel very misunderstood.
OK, FINE. There's a lot of skill involved. Still, why would anybody with half a brain do this?
To find out, I check out Ivan Salaverry's MMA gym, in Seattle's South Lake Union, a bustling high-tech neighborhood. Here, I meet a fighter who works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a trainer who's a financial planner. I learn Amazon employees and firefighters and dentists train here, too.
So far, not a lot of meatheads.
Andy Paves is one of Salaverry's best fighters. He wears glasses, drinks chai tea latte and has a slight lisp. His girlfriend, a social worker, attests he's a really nice person. He is getting his doctorate degree in clinical psychology.
"You ask me why did I choose fighting?" he says. "I wonder why I chose grad school. It's just as punishing."
School is his main priority. But fighting, he says, "is my expression. It's my guitar, my painting. And it's what I share with the world."
The first time he fought, he was "scared witless." Only he didn't say "witless." He's fought four more times as an amateur and twice as a pro.
This is where brainy Paves turns into a real ham. He dances down the ramp to the cage, pantomimes like he's a character in an old-school video game and pulls off a mean Hulk Hogan imitation. He fights with a Filipino flag on his shorts, a nod to his heritage. His friends cheer like mad.
He started dating his girlfriend, Michel Daliva, around the time of his second fight. In 52 seconds, he had his opponent on the ground and was beating the daylights out of him. TKO.
"I was horrified!" Daliva said. "I had never seen him in this light. I remember thinking, this is so primal. I was like, who is this guy?"
Afterward, Paves leapt in the air then fell to his knees. He hugged his opponent, bowed, and thanked him.
You'll see that a lot in MMA fights — the hugging. And not just perfunctory hugs, either. There's a lot more respect than you might think.
"It's funny," another practitioner told me. "After you fight, you like the guy."
Shawn Plaster is another of Salaverry's students, and he, too, is addicted. At 41, he's older than most. The owner of a business consulting firm and a father of young kids, he understands responsibility.
"I know it sounds crazy," he said, "but it's a thinking person's sport."
In the past, he mostly ran for exercise, and hated every minute of it. Three years ago, he started at Salaverry's, 35 pounds overweight, and having "successfully avoided confrontation since elementary school."
He had no idea what he was in for.
"I was thinking, holy smokes! Someone just punched me in the face!" he recalls. "It took about two months to be OK with another grown human being punching me in the face.
"After that, you don't even think about it. All that fear, it's like anything else. The more you do it, the more you get used to it."
To him, getting pummeled — and getting a few good licks in himself — is an adrenaline rush. It's followed by a Zen-like calm.
On an intellectual level, I can relate to these guys a little bit. Still, they seem to be telling me why getting punched in the face isn't as bad as you might think. They're not answering the real question: Why put yourself in that position in the first place? Why not basketball?
Pondering this one afternoon, I posed the question to a male colleague, one who's widely admired as friendly and easygoing. To him, it's obvious.
"Guys just really like how it feels to beat the stuffing out of somebody," he said. Only he didn't use the word stuffing.
I thought for a moment. This explains everything.
It also explains nothing.
Especially in light of what I saw at the Tacoma Elks club.
"OUT OF respect for the lodge, please remove all headgear," a sign at the entrance reads.
A few steps away, shirtless men prepared to beat the crap out one another. Meanwhile, a bevy of ring girls pranced around in short-shorts. A flyweight-sized emcee breezed in wearing a linebacker-sized white tuxedo.
Rap music was blaring, there were lousy burgers and vendors selling custom mouth guards. It was Rumble on the Ridge, my first fight. A few hundred spectators shelled out $25 for six amateur fights. Most appear to be friends and family of fighters.
I'm invited to sit up front with the judges, including Matt Hopkins, a pro fighter.
"Hopefully we don't get blood on the scoring table," he says.
There will be no blood. Not much excitement, either. Even I could tell most of these guys didn't have a clue. Fighters whose guts hung over their shorts. Who swung wildly, cartoonishly missing their targets.
One entered the cage from the wrong direction then strutted around like a pint-size Ali. Hopkins groaned. Amateurs.
"People will sometimes train out of their garage with each other and go fight in an event," Paves later explained. "Some guys are like that — they'll take a fight, regardless. It's a very macho mentality."
So . . . some fighters are brainy and quite civilized. They train hard and think carefully before getting into the ring. Others, not so much.
That's when I begin to realize something. Name another sport where amateurs can perform, man-to-man, in front of hundreds of paying fans. In some ways, it's the stuff any red-blooded American boy dreams of.
And, it turns out, some girls, too.
Fight No. 3 of the evening, 16-year-old Julia Kerkes enters the cage with nails painted red and a ribbon in her hair. She looks calm. It is her first fight.
Just so you know, Julia's no meathead. A few days after the fight, she and I had a long conversation. She's a junior at North Mason High School and showed me one of her term papers. The girl can write. As we talked, I saw her confidence. Her willingness to work hard. Her determination to follow her passions, even if some classmates think she's nuts.
When the bell rang, her opponent came out swinging. And swinging. And pounding and kicking, landing blow after blow.
Julia used her gloves to protect her face. At the end of the round, she looked dazed. When her cornerman opened the cage door, she fell out. A minute later, when the referee checked on her, she snapped to attention. Ready for Round 2.
Again, she took a beating. The crowd was getting wrapped up and seemed to be on her side as she took one punch after another. Her gut, her head . . .
It left me shaken.
Later, I saw her in the hall with her family. Her nose was swollen. Her face was red. Black eyes no doubt were forming.
And she was exhilarated; almost as if she were high. Two days after the fight, and two weeks after, she still thought it was a great experience.Later, I talked about it with Bourgeois.
"She went to a place most people will never go," he explained. "And she walked away."
IF YOU talk to MMA fighters long enough, you start to realize they like to wax philosophical.
"The thing about fighting," Hougland says, "the high is awesome." But, "if you want to hit someone, you've got to be willing to get hit back."
It takes a certain kind of person to do that. They all tell me it's humbling.
"It weeds out jerks," says Cindy Hales, another accomplished fighter, who has fought internationally. Now, she teaches Brazilian jiu jitsu to kids in Bellevue. Parents love her.
"There's nothing more real than someone beating you up," she goes on. When she started out, she was managing a customer-service center. At night, she would do sit-ups until she thought she would die. She would shadow box, spar, diet. She trained under tough guys, became a fight-video nerd, learned the physics of fighting.
"I want to be aggressive," she realized, "but I'm not mad at anyone."
And then, "I can do this aggressive thing, this physical thing, and have it be beautiful."
LAST NOVEMBER, I saw what was later dubbed one of the greatest UFC bouts of all time, Dan "Hendo" Henderson vs. Mauricio "Shogun" Rua. The fight was in San Jose, Calif. I dragged three friends to a Ballard bar where they showed it on pay-per-view.
Couples on dates had come. Young men in trucker hats doing shots. A hipster in duct-taped glasses drinking coffee.
The fight went the full five rounds. Initially, 41-year-old Henderson was battering Rua, 29. The older man nearly finished the match with a choke hold early on, but Rua escaped. One blow opened a cut over Rua's eye, another bloodied his nose. He bled throughout the fight. It looked like he was done-for. Yet he kept moving.
But the momentum would shift. At one point, Rua had Henderson against the cage, landing several hard strikes. For a moment, as Henderson leaned against the cage and Rua leaned against him, it seemed neither could stand without the cage, without each other.
"It's captivating, isn't it?" a friend said. "Because you never know." A fight, we learned, can change at any minute.
Finally, Rua took Henderson to the mat, kneeling over him and beating him again and again. It was ugly to watch. Henderson wasn't really able to fight back. He just held on.
Henderson was declared the winner, but he didn't make it to the post-fight news conference. Both men went to the hospital.
And that, to me, is what's so frightening about this sport, and yet so compelling. Here were two people in amazing physical condition so beat up they could barely stand.
Yet they kept going.
Maureen O'Hagan is a Seattle Times staff writer. Mark Harrison is a Times staff photographer.
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