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Love Test #1: India Yoga Ashram

The origins of modern MMA trace back to 1910, when a 14-year-old Brazilian named Carlson Gracie began studying with a Japanese judo expert. After the master's return to Japan, Gracie and his brothers continued training, now unrestrained by judo's rigid strictures, and developed their own ruthlessly practical fighting system, known as Gracie or Brazilian jujitsu, which emphasizes choke and joint holds. The sport slowly spread to Japan, Russia, Europe, and, in 1993, to the United States, where multidiscipline MMA emerged. Today the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), MMA's major outlet in the U.S., operates under a clever set of rules that manages to keep the fights sanctioned in 34 states—outlawing eye gouges, groin strikes, and other maneuvers—while preserving the violent spectacle that helped the sport gross $223 million in pay-per-view revenue in 2006 (the last year financial information was made available). That was more than big-time boxing ($177 million) or World Wrestling Entertainment ($200 million). To paraphrase Joe Rogan, UFC's premier TV commentator, the sport's remarkable growth has forced MMA combatants to evolve more as fighters over the past 20 years than their gladiatorial predecessors had in the previous 2,000. Or put another way, Mara and I weren't hanging with just the toughest people on the planet, but most likely the toughest who'd ever lived.

"Just so you know, I loathe everything about this," Mara said as I slapped a headlock on her. It turned out we'd waltzed into Chute Boxe just in time for a wrestling class. The gym's fighters train every day in three distinct segments: a two-hour morning class devoted to technique, a mid-afternoon weight workout, and an hour or more of Brazilian jujitsu in the evening. I was relieved to learn that they rarely engage in serious combat while training to avoid injury. The wrestling lesson was simple enough: The instructor demonstrated a move, then we broke into pairs and practiced. Strangely, no one took the slightest notice of Mara and me. Javier never introduced us, no one spoke to us (everything was in Portuguese anyway) or even looked our way. We were just there, rolling around on a mat next to guys like Shogun Rua. It was like wandering into Muhammad Ali's training camp in his prime and slapping the speed bag with your girlfriend.

As a partner, Mara proved disappointing; she went limp at the slightest provocation and was hyperaware of curly hairs on the mat, alarmingly calling out "What's that?" each time she spotted one. Meanwhile the fighters around us diligently worked on technique, although late in the day two heavyweights went at it, the no-quarter intensity reminiscent of a fight I had once witnessed outside Kabul between two half-breed mastiffs. The behemoths pulled and kicked and kneed each other from one end of the gym to the other and back again. Both wore standard six-ounce (170-gram) fingerless gloves, which cause more facial lacerations than eight-ounce (227-gram) boxing mitts—hence the sport's bloody reputation—but also protect better against concussive head injuries. (In 20 years of major promotions, only one MMA fighter has suffered critical head trauma.) Like a street fight from the sport's early days, all rules went out the window as the heavyweights crashed to the floor in a mutual bear hug, where the larger of the two finally forced a tap-out concession. Unfortunately, my day came to an abrupt end when, while taking in the spectacle, I accidentally head-butted Mara and made her cry. So that night back at the hotel, I wasn't altogether put out when she suspiciously fell ill. It gave me an opportunity to become one of the lads.

The next morning I showed up alone at the gym an hour early. Slowly the fighters trickled in, including Dida, Cyborg, Ninja, and Shogun. They sat together on the mat in their sweats, taping their hands with gauze and chatting in Portuguese. The day began with a kinetic tsunami of push-ups, squat thrusts, shadowboxing, and Muay Thai, a form of kickboxing indigenous to Thailand. For an hour we whaled on a heavy bag downstairs before being summoned back up for another round of calisthenics. By then I was perspiring so obscenely that an ever widening puddle formed around me, which proved disastrous when I lost my footing during a simulated takedown. Like a curling stone I slowly slid across the room and landed underneath Ninja, who nearly stepped on my head. The evening Brazilian jujitsu session brought more embarrassment. Instead of a formal class with an instructor, in Brazilian jujitsu you teach yourself by "rolling" with a revolving series of opponents. The problem was no one wanted to roll with me. In fact, none of the 40-odd people there, including a posse of teenage fighters, even made eye contact with me. I spent the entire evening sitting on the sidelines with someone's girlfriend.

"That's how I felt at the ashram," Mara explained back at the hotel, after I wondered aloud why, as a former war correspondent, I'd had an easier time feeling comfortable among Russian arms dealers. "I was intimidated," she continued. "I held back, I think, because I thought people at the ashram were more spiritually evolved. And now, for whatever reason, I think these meatballs intimidate you."
 
Mara rejoined me on the fourth day and the ice began to thaw. The first breakthrough came courtesy of an exceptionally stocky fighter everyone called Para who lived at the gym in a tiny space off the weight room. In his late 30s and shaped like a washing machine with a softball glued on top, he took Mara under his wing during the morning sessions and taught her Muay Thai. I tagged along. Para showed us countless knee and kick combinations, including spinning back kicks and the lethal Muay Thai clinch. As my technique developed I found myself growing less self-conscious, letting my punches and kicks go with more authority. Even Mara loved Muay Thai—principally, I think, because Para would yell "Olé!" every time she kicked a bag.

Toward the end of our first week I also met a gangly young American with a soul patch named Chris. It seems no matter how far off the beaten path one stumbles in this world, be it a $2 go-go bar in Mindanao or a Coptic shrine outside Addis Ababa, there is always some Yank there who has settled in to reinvent himself. Like me, Chris was from Long Island. Before he came to Chute Boxe to become a fighter, his major claims to fame were a semipro paintball career and that he once had a deli sandwich named after him. "I used to have a weight issue," was how he put it. When I confided in him that I was having trouble finding my place at the gym, he empathized. "Same way with me, dude. When I moved down here, no one talked to me either," he said. "It's a Brazilian thing, a fighter thing. But if they come to trust you, man, it's awesome. These guys are like my family now."

During our stay I learned that most of the Chute Boxe fighters came not from the favelas but from the precarious Brazilian middle class. Outside the Rua brothers, Dida, Werdun, and a few others, most would never make a living fighting. Yet they continued, day after day, year after year, chasing the dream at enormous sacrifice, living on the cheap and sleeping on futons in cramped apartments they shared. They didn't drink, smoke, or party. They ate for fuel, not pleasure, and nearly all of them, I discovered, were deeply religious. Their piety helped them ward off the many destructive temptations—booze and drugs and late nights—that could quickly destroy a career; in that sense they were truly fighting monks.

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Love Test #1: India Yoga Ashram