Chapter 6

George was beginning to realize how quickly time passes when someone stays busy. He continued training Jiu-jitsu daily, sweating and rolling with other students of every belt color. Soon he had three white stripes on the tip of his own white belt, and he was starting to seriously challenge the blue belts. He was learning to position himself in the guard, mount, side mount, and rear mount automatically instead of having to think about it. He was getting better at the most basic submissions, such as the armbar, the collar choke, and the Americana, and he executed them regularly on his fellow white belts.

            He’d also been brushing up on his wrestling which, as he came to realize during his frequent late-night training sessions with Hector, was not bad at all. In fact, George was surprised when during their first session together he quickly and easily took Hector down over, and over, and over again. Despite Hector’s superior Jiu-jitsu experience, George inflicted doubles, singles, ankle picks, and suplexes with impunity. By their second training session, George had compiled a list of drills to help Hector master the most basic, reliable takedowns and how to defend them. It wasn’t long before George found himself having to defend against takedowns as much as he was attempting them. Hector also seemed pleased with his own progress, and the two of them talked excitedly and often about the upcoming match where Hector would defend his title for the first time and establish himself as the undisputed champion of Fight Night.

            But George was not only busy with fighting. His boredom and lack of freedom eventually drove him to inquire around the Jiu-jitsu class for job openings. As it happened, a purple belt student by the name of Basch happened to be principal of a high school that was in need of another janitor. Though George didn’t relish the thought of cleaning bathrooms or mopping cafeteria floors, he took the job and worked hard for his money every week day until it was time to catch the bus back to Brotherhood Jiu-jitsu Academy for the evening class. With every monotonous push of his dust mop, George reminded himself of the things he could buy once he got paid. And it didn’t take him long to find a worthy focus of his time and money.

            “C’mon, tell me your name!” he tried again. “Just your first name.”

            The girl smiled and shushed him, not wanting her store manager to see that she had been talking to the same customer for fifteen minutes. “You’re going to get me in trouble! And besides, what if I don’t even go by my first name?”

            George liked her. He’d spotted her weeks ago arranging a window display at the Pampered Chef store next to the academy. She was blonde and tall. Almost as tall as him. And she shamelessly flirted back at him.

            “Then I’ll have to give you a name, just so I can call you something.” He grinned. “I gotta warn you though, I’m terrible at coming up with girl names.”

            “What,” she interrupted, “you’ve done this with other girls?” He ignored her.

            “Bertha,” he began. She made a sour face, but immediately laughed afterword. “Prudence. Susie-Q. Or how about Shaniqua?”

            “No, wait, seriously,” she interrupted again. She glanced back at her manager and winced, and then she began to whisper. “I went to school with a girl named Shithead. No joke. S-h-i-t-h-e-a-d. I know it’s not pronounced the same, but still, I felt so bad for her. I mean, didn’t her parents notice when they wrote out her birth certificate?”

            Now George was laughing.

            “So, do you work next door? I see you here a lot.”

            George was surprised. He didn’t know she’d noticed him. “Yeah. Well, no. I actually live there. Upstairs.” He realized as he said it that he felt embarrassed.

            “That’s cool! You live above a Karate school?” she said.

            “Actually, it’s Jiu-jitsu.”

            “Oh, I’ve heard of that. It’s like MMA, right?”

            George nodded, impressed. “Yeah. How do you know about MMA?” Somehow, she looked more attractive to him than ever.

            “My cousin does that. I’ve even seen him fight. So since you do it I bet you’re a tough guy, right?” She punched him in the shoulder, though not very hard.

He stumbled backwards and clutched his shoulder where she’d hit him. “Ouch, watch it. I want to hold my children with these arms one day.”

            She laughed again. Before long she told him her name was Summer. Then they arranged a date for that Friday night.

 

            George had one of Hector’s legs trapped against his body. He tried driving his head into Hector’s thigh to throw him off balance, but Hector placed both hands on George’s head and pushed way, freeing his leg and stumbling back to a grappling stance.

            “Awesome,” George said. “You’re getting good at this.”

            Hector nodded. It was true. They’d been training late at night for seven weeks now, and Hector’s first title defense was coming soon.  Hector’s takedown defense had become superb. It was becoming nigh impossible for George to take him down unless he was giving it everything he had. Hector, on the other hand, was becoming trickier and trickier with his own versions of the takedowns George head shown him. George figured it was Hector’s Jiu-jitsu training influencing his wrestling.

            Hector shot in for a double-leg takedown of his own, wrapping his arms tight around the back of George’s thighs and lifting him into the air. George, too tired after forty minutes of hard sparring to avoid the takedown, instead felt another instinct go to work. Immediately he felt his legs wrap tight around Hector’s mid-section.

            George’s back slammed hard against the mat. Hector, constricted between George’s knees, was on top, his bodyweight pressing down on George’s chest.

            “Why’d you just go to guard?” Hector asked, breaking away from George’s defensive position and sitting back with his hands on the mat. “You should have tried to defend the takedown. This isn’t Jiu-jitsu.”

            George sat up and shrugged. “I thought the guard was a good place to be. You know, you can sweep the guy, choke him, armbar him…”

            “You can in Jiu-jitsu, but this is MMA. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I mean, yeah, sure, some people can pull that off every once in a while, but most fighters are too savvy to fall for those things. And judges see the guard as an advantage for the fighter on top. And in Jiu-jitsu, you don’t worry about guys dropping hammerfists or elbows into your face while you’re trying to armbar him. In MMA you do. I’m telling you, man, don’t go to your back so easily in MMA. You’ll just get pounded.”

            George sat quietly for a moment. Hector’s face had changed as he started talking about Jiu-jitsu. It was meaner, angrier. He didn’t know why Hector was feeling that way, nor did he know what to say.

            Hector saw George’s reaction to his outburst and realized how he might have been more emotional than he intended to be. His expression softened. “Look, I’m just trying to help you see the difference between Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts. That’s all.”

            “I thought Jiu-jitsu was made for EFC and stuff like that. I mean, didn’t the Gracia family start the EFC to prove Jiu-jitsu was the best?” George asked. He’d been listening to Ricardo’s lessons about the early history of his family’s Jiu-jitsu and how he’d won four EFC championships in a row. According to him, Jiu-jitsu had an answer for just about everything that could reasonably happen in a fight.

            “That’s ancient history,” Hector answered him. He stood and walked to the photos on the walls. There were photos there of Jiu-jitsu masters fighting cage matches and holding trophies and belts. “Jiu-jitsu did the best when mixed martial arts was all about Jiu-jitsu fighters against karate fighters against kickboxers against kung fu fighters. But it’s not like that anymore. Now, everybody knows at least a little Jiu-jitsu. At least enough Jiu-jitsu to know what fighters like us are trying to do. I mean, the Gracias aren’t even the only ones who teach Jiu-jitsu anymore. Now there are Jiu-jitsu schools all over the country and MMA fighters spend a little time at them so they can figure out how to beat it. Right now, there’s not a single EFC champion who specializes in Jiu-jitsu.”

            George didn’t know why Hector seemed to be so upset over this. He had to admit, it was a little disappointing to hear that he was spending so much time learning a fighting style that didn’t perform very well in competition anymore, but he wondered why, if Hector had so many doubts, he still trained there. In truth, he didn’t want to talk about this matter with Hector anymore. This was supposed to be fun.

            “C’mon, Hector,” he said. “Let’s stop for tonight. You’re fight’s in, what, nine days? So no more going real hard, just long, soft training for the next week. Remember, long training sessions, low impact training.” He started to walk to the door to unlock it while Hector got his things together.

            “I bet you’re wondering why I train here,” said Hector. “At first, it was because I was like you, just needing something to keep me active, something to help with my aggression. But then when I got older I wanted to compete.”

            George kept quiet while he listened. He wanted to say that he didn’t feel like he was there to release aggression or anything like that. He wasn’t really angry about much of anything. But he didn’t say anything. He wanted Hector to finish so they could move on.

            “I thought, since Ricardo was a former champion, I could convince him I could make a name for myself and his family’s Jiu-jitsu by fighting locally. I thought he’d understand.” Hector shoved his gear into his bag and shouldered it. “But it turns out he’s too bitter to let anyone else compete.”

            George was confused. He’d never heard anyone speak of his instructor and relative this way. Everyone who knew Ricardo seemed to like and respect him, but now George wondered. “Bitter about what?” he asked.

            Hector was already walking through the door into a foggy night. Cars passed by with their headlights shining in front of them like glowing cones in the mist. “Don’t you know why he doesn’t fight anymore? Because he was beaten. He went undefeated for four straight championships, and then someone finally beat him. Since then he refused to compete, and he won’t let anyone else compete either.” He started walking away again.

            “See you later, George.”

            “See you, Hector.”

            It was a while before George could fall asleep that night. He didn’t really know why.

           

            Kelly Bairde, owner of Elite Fighting Championship, was in a meeting. “We’ve got a problem,” he said to his staff gathered around a long, dark wood table in the shape of a horseshoe. “When we started this thing nineteen years ago, I had a vision that we would eventually be seen a legitimate sport, and that the Elite Fighting Championship would become as widely recognized and watched as professional boxing. Well, we’ve made it. We met that goal about six years ago. Since then we’ve focused on getting onto more networks, our reality shows, our clothing lines, and any number of smaller projects to keep us moving forward. For the past six years, we haven’t grown by any significant percentage. We’re not moving forward. We’re standing still. In business, that’s moving backwards.”

            He paused to look at his assembled employees from marketing, scheduling, fighter management, and other divisions of his company. They were of all sorts of backgrounds and nationalities, and even their style of dress was different. Most of his marketing executives were dressed in suits or at least shirts with ties. Most of his fighter management staff were in jeans and EFC logoed t-shirts. Some of the staff came to the EFC from high-paid positions in companies like Cinemax and Pay-per-view, while some of them, particularly those who worked directly with the fighters, Kelly had rounded up out of MMA gyms and dojos from across the country. None but such a diverse, creative group could have made the EFC as successful as it was. Them and one extraordinary family with a dream and the fighting expertise to back it up.

            “What we need is a new company goal, one like what drove us to success for our first thirteen years. One that will direct every department of EFC in the same direction.”

            Kelly pushed a button on a remote, and a projector shone an eight-foot-tall image onto the wall behind him, washing him from the neck up in light and casting his shadow onto the screen below one massive word: LOYALTY. The staff members nodded, more out of interest than understanding, and waited for Kelly to explain.

            “This morning, as I was driving to my office, I passed at least eight cars with bumper stickers featuring teams from the NFL. The guy pumping gas next to me yesterday was wearing a t-shirt with his favorite wrestler from WWE. Everywhere I look outside of this building I see loyalty. But where are the EFC bumper stickers? Where are the t-shirts of our fighters?” They had them, of course, but those products sold poorly and everyone in that room knew it. “Folks, we have no loyalty.”

            The marketing team was furiously taking notes. Others whispered and nodded or shrugged. There was a consensus in the room that Kelly had just identified something big.

            “It doesn’t work that way for MMA,” said someone the department that managed fighters. He wore an EFC baseball cap and a truly massive beard. “It’s hard to develop loyalty for MMA champions because there’s no telling how long they’ll hold on to it. And there’s so much time between fights, you never know when they’re going to fight next. Diehard fans might be loyal, but the average viewer? I don’t think so.” Someone from marketing agreed.

            “Then something needs to change,” Kelly answered. “What keeps baseball going is the undying loyalty of fans for specific teams. My brother follows the Yankees like a religion, regardless of how many times they trade players. Even the Cubs have loyal fans, and they don’t even win! That’s what we need. We need people to somehow feel loyal to fighters in that same way. We need to prevent the kind of thing that happened earlier this year when a fighter spontaneously retired and we realized we’d wasted money and time putting his face on posters, hoodies, and video games.”

            “How do we do that?” someone asked.

            “Figure it out,” said Kelly. “You’ve got thirty days. Don’t worry about sharing ideas with other departments. If we figure this out, I’ll reward everyone in this room.”

            Heads were nodding and people were smiling. This team did particularly well with being challenged, and they also knew Kelly would make it worth their while if he got results. He’d already changed MMA once when he turned it from a spectacle into a sport recognized in 49 states. He was about to change it again.