Why I Fight

Mixed martial arts has hit the mainstream. Steve Volk gets his ass kicked investigating the sport’s burgeoning popularity.

by Steve Volk

My first class at the Body Arts Gym, I don’t walk in the door as much as shamble.

I’m 5 foot 9 and 214 pounds. When I make faltering attempts to exercise, my girlfriend, a physical therapist, sees me sprawled on the floor and comments on my lack of flexibility with customary dry wit.

“Oh my God,” she says.

I’m 37 and suffer from chronic lower back pain that radiates into my right thigh. Three toes and the sole of my right foot are numb. In the morning I waddle down the steps, my hips tight from inactivity.

The instructor Angel Cartagena starts us off with jumping jacks, which produce painful cramps in both my feet. Then he calls for “six-count squat thrusts.”

I try to follow along through what seems a complex series of squats, push-ups and jumps. The push-ups aren’t a problem, but after one jump a muscle in my back angrily squeezes the lower vertebrae of my spine, pumping fire into my right leg.

When I keep going, the pain soon morphs into a more general feeling of shock and fatigue.

For an hour and 15 minutes I’m asked to do things I can’t do—like kick my foot above my head or throw a punch while jumping.

My assigned partner, introduced to me as “Gunner,” looks to be more than 6 feet tall and close to 300 pounds. I punch and kick at pads Gunner holds, and he punches and kicks at pads I hold. Did I mention Gunner weighs close to 300 pounds? I suck at air like a fish in a beer cooler, oxygen too solid for me to draw into my lungs.

By the end of class I’m exhausted, and all I’ve done is dip a numb toe into the leading edge of a wave the Body Arts Gym has ridden for years. Thai boxing, in which practitioners are trained to strike not just with their hands and feet but with their elbows, shins and knees, is among the dominant forms in the mixed martial arts leagues rapidly gaining popularity among young men. And Cartagena has been committed to Thai for roughly a decade.

“Angel is one of the very, very few people in this business who I genuinely enjoy working with,” says Justin Blair, a New York fight promoter. “He’s trustworthy, and he comes to fight. His fighters are very well prepared. And more than that, the people who come to our events tend to be young and hip, and so are Angel’s fighters. I think for our crowd it’s a little bit like seeing themselves in the ring.”

But seeing themselves in the ring and actually climbing into one are very different things. At Body Arts Gym, making that switch requires a long, arduous trip from this world—where pain is something to be avoided—to another in which sweat equals salvation, and kicking someone in the head is an expression of love.

For Angel’s 40th birthday, his wife Khara invites everyone from the gym to Siam Lotus, a Thai restaurant on Spring Garden Street.

By 11 p.m. the restaurant is filled with friends, family and students. Angel mingles, but he’s interested mainly in the Ultimate Fighting Championships airing on a big flat-screen above the bar. The lines in his boyish face deepen in the shadows. His wife bops around a little, dancing in the limited available space.

A tiny woman of Philippine descent, Khara is a fighter herself, with a 1-1 record in amateur Thai bouts. Angel refers to her affectionately as a “mean little pirate.”

At Body Arts their relationship offers comic relief, suggesting what Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz might’ve been like if they threw knee bombs at each other. Angel often playfully kicks her a little too hard during demonstrations, and when they execute a clinch, he stands his 6-foot-high, 190-pound frame tall, and forces her to rise all the way up on the tips of her toes, ballerina-style, to maintain contact.

The couple—each with a child from a previous relationship—married last October, and have varied business interests, including construction and real estate. They operate Body Arts for reasons other than money, starting the gym on North Second Street six years ago largely to give themselves and their friends a place to train. But martial arts in general and mixed martial arts (MMA) in particular have grown in popularity in the years since, and the couple has grown along with the sport.

Angel has been lobbying for almost two years to legalize MMA fighting in Pennsylvania. He also started a series of amateur Thai bouts under the name Evolved Fighting in the summer of 2005.

The next Evolved bout is July 21 at the New Alhambra on Ritner Street in South Philadelphia. If recent history is any indication, the event should draw more than 1,000 fans. Angel and his wife are also planning to expand their gym in its current location or at a second location in Northern Liberties or West Philadelphia.

“Ideally,” he says, “we’re looking for a single spot where we can have a gym that holds classes and an arena for Friday night fights.”

Gregory Sirb, the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission’s executive director, says MMA bouts were approved in February. The first MMA event in the state could be held before the year is out.

The concept of mixed martial arts grew out of an old question: Who’d win a fight between a boxer and a wrestler?

During the mid-’90s the sport earned a reputation for outsized brutality. Fights didn’t (and still don’t) stop when a competitor hits the floor. But the number of rules has increased roughly tenfold, making the sport safer and more sane by outlawing such fighting techniques as “inserting a finger into an opponent’s orifice.”

Angel’s 40th birthday party in a sense marks not only a gym owner’s ascent into a wizened middle age but the MMA’s movement into the mainstream. The TV over the bar continually shows celebrities in the audience, from David Spade to Mandy Moore.

Pay-per-view events cost $39.95 to buy at home, and among males 18 to 34, regularly outdraw the NBA and even some Major League Baseball playoff games.

Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazines recently published long feature stories on MMA’s growing popularity, praising the sport for being safer than boxing or football—largely because of the increased range of fighting options. Grappling an opponent into submission, for example, means fewer blows to the head. The sport’s stars are also praised for being among the best-conditioned athletes in the world.

Getting a leg up: The core of Thai training involves striking pads as above, but sometimes students gently strike each other.

Angel hopes to incorporate MMA bouts into his Evolved Fighting series. And if the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission’s opinion counts, he’ll likely be approved. “He puts on a good show,” says Sirb. “It’s a well-run event, and he makes sure the kids who fight in his events all have some skills.”

In my second class I realize why Thai fighting is so important to mixed martial arts leagues. “It’s the training,” says Joe Diamond, whose schools have been ubiquitous in Philadelphia and New Jersey martial arts for roughly two decades. “It’s very practical for the purposes of fighting.”

Diamond started in kickboxing and karate, earning a black belt, then advanced to the highest levels of Thai and Brazilian jujitsu, crucial to MMA leagues for the grappling that takes place on the floor.

“In karate, as in most martial arts, there’s a lot of punching and kicking of air,” says Diamond, “a lot of emphasis on forms and patterns, which look beautiful but aren’t as practical as Thai, which has people working with a partner and striking at pads.”

At Body Arts students engage in all the exercises particular to Thai. They jump rope, perform floor exercises that strengthen and shadow box with a 3-pound weight in each hand.

But pad work is the heart of Thai training.

In the second class my partner and I take turns throwing combinations. When it’s my turn to hold pads I ease up, but after my classmate keeps sweeping a big right leg into the pads covering my arms, I feel my joints ache with each blow. When it’s time to switch up, I’m grateful to be the striker, but then I cut my right foot kicking the pads and start to feel my lungs and muscles burn.

I’d always scoffed when I heard boxers talk about how hard they train just to keep their hands in the air. Not anymore.

When Angel declares class over, I feel worse than I did after my first session. So I come home and draw a diagram. The numbers beside each body part represent the severity of pain I feel on a scale of one to 10—10 being the greatest.

Right ankle: three.

Top of right foot: three.

Top of left foot: two.

Right big toe: one.

Calves: one.

Thighs: two.

Shins: two.

Triceps: three.

Lats: four.

Forearms: two.

Wrists and hands: one.

Individually, none of these pains seems a big deal. My lats hurt the most, and that pain doesn’t even rise above a four. But since I’m assuming 10 to represent the maximum amount of pain a human can endure and because all my pains together add up to a total of 41, I’ve exceeded the pain threshold by a factor of 4.1.

After two classes at Body Arts, it’s a miracle I’m alive.

Angel Cartagena sometimes wishes out loud to be like Keyser Soze, the criminal mastermind from The Usual Suspects whose greatest trick was getting people to doubt his existence.

“There are people who walk by the gym every day for years,” says Al Slafman, a student and trainer, “and they’re like, ‘Body Arts? Where’s that?’ Angel liked that. You had to be into Thai to even know it was there.”

From outside the gym looks like just another row home without even a sign to announce its presence. But Body Arts is going through a slow evolution—like the MMA itself—from the margins to the mainstream.

A few weeks after I joined his gym Angel told me that three years ago he wouldn’t have wanted me for a student. “You wouldn’t have fit the model of what I was looking for,” he said.

Today Angel is contemplating putting a sign out front. And his wish to be like Keyser Soze seems like a joke. He often ends his classes standing over a pile of sweating, gasping students with a gentle benediction: “Thank you for being a part of my gym. Thank you for coming in here and doing all the things you do.”

Those who know Angel well say he’s undergone remarkable changes in recent years. He graduated from Landmark Forum (a controversial motivational program), got married and renewed his relationship with a 19-year-old son he’d “never really been a father to.” He’s also changed the way he views his students. “I learn a lot from them now in ways I can’t really always describe,” he says. “They inspire me.”

Angel grew up “a Puerto Rican kid in a tough Bronx neighborhood,” without a father figure to help raise him. He left at 18, with street fights behind him but no martial arts experience. He served in the Marines for four years, worked for Sony as a materials manager and landed in Philadelphia, where he first started training in Thai.

He studied under a cast of characters best left unnamed. One of them gave him a security job at a local club. “It didn’t take me long to realize there was a lot of drug dealing going on,” he says.

One day he was asked to deliver a box to someone off an interstate exit. “I asked what was in it, even though I already knew,” he says.

He refused to make the delivery, quit his job as a bouncer and started his own gym with his then-girlfriend Khara. “We called it Body Arts because we wanted to do a softer version of Thai,” he says.

Body Arts initially offered classes in Thai boxing and yoga, but now judo and jujitsu, a complicated form of submission grappling, are on the menu instead. There’s no graduation ceremony at Body Arts—just a test in which the instructors pad up and beat the hell out of the student for three or four grueling rounds. At the end, if the student doesn’t give up, “nothing falls out of the sky,” Angel says, “but you’ve had a new experience, and the pain you’re feeling is an expression of love from me to you.”

It’s 3 a.m., and a trio of drunken Thai fighters is wandering through the streets of New York, looking for another bar. Along the way Judah Ciervo, his younger brother Jeff and Chris Price perform various stunts.

“Cardboard is for jumping,” says Price as he somersaults over a pile of trash left on the street.

This might seem like typical shenanigans for boozed-up twentysomethings. But even now the trio’s physical training is apparent. Judah Ciervo slurs his words and turns perfect cartwheels. Jeff Ciervo and Price stare out from underneath increasingly heavy eyelids but take turns soaring over an in-ground fountain 6 feet across. Neither of them even stumbles.

It’s easy to forgive them their youthful excess. They’re nearing the end of a victorious night. In addition to his own series of Evolved Fighting events in Philadelphia, Angel takes the competition team from his school to Friday Night Fights in New York at the Hall at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which provides a good introduction to what Thai fighting is all about.

Before the action takes place, some of the traditionally trained fighters perform the Wai Kru, or “respects to the teacher,” a slow dancelike spectacle that delays the bout by a few minutes and steeps the crowd in ritual. Angel doesn’t teach the ceremonial aspects of Thai fighting because he isn’t Buddhist and believes it would be disrespectful to honor a tradition he doesn’t follow.

He’s not alone. One of the other trainers who brings fighters to the bouts at St. Paul’s is a man who calls himself “Extreme” Lacosta. He’s a former competitive Thai fighter who dresses in a sport coat and thick gold chain. “The only thing I ever meditated on,” says Lacosta, “is breaking the other guy’s legs.”

Dubbed the “art of eight limbs,” Thai was developed some time in the first millennium AD, and intended for use on the battlefield. Even in amateur competition, where elbows to the head are outlawed, there’s no disguising its brutality.

While boxing is given to torturously slow periods of bobbing and weaving, Thai is typified by a fast pace. Competitors intersperse jabs and crosses with sudden kicks to an opponent’s thighs—jumping punches, knees to the solar plexus and big booming head kicks.

At the April fights Body Arts student and instructor John Kelly got into the ring with a New York firefighter. He was booed and his opponent was an immediate fan favorite. But after three rounds large sections of the crowd started hollering “Go Irish!” and cheering every time Kelly landed a blow.

“There isn’t a lot of room for analysis in amateur Thai boxing,” says Angel, “because guys are learning so much and evolving that the style you see on tape may not be what you see in the ring. So I just tell my guys, whatever you do well in the gym, whatever you bring, bring it. And do it right away.”

Kelly wound up winning an easy decision.

Jeff Ciervo, the other fighter from Body Arts who competed that night, lost in the evening’s closest match, landing a series of right kicks to the head that rocked his opponent but failed to bring him down.

After all the preparation, not to mention the match itself, the post-fight drinking session seems as much a part of the ritual as anything else—and just as necessary. Even amateur fighters live lives of sacrifice and experience states of consciousness most people will never know.

Fighters speak of “grayouts,” milliseconds in which they go unconscious on their feet, come to, then keep fighting. They often endure the same disciplined diets as Olympic wrestlers to make weight. And to stay in the best shape of their lives they suffer the chronic pains that come with constant training.

In preparing for a bout at Body Arts the fighters are driven to their limits, running a series of wind sprints interrupted only by push-ups and sit-ups. Three rounds, four minutes each—longer than they’ll be asked to fight.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m going to throw up,” says Khara. “But we don’t get tired in the ring.”

When I pitched this story in a staff meeting at PW, I proposed the title “Steve Volk Gets His Ass Kicked.”

I said I’d train for a couple of months and then spar with one of the fighters. But after putting in time at Body Arts I realized the gulf between myself and the fighters was so vast that I’d be asking them to waste their time. Still, I ask Angel anyway.

My desire to get in the ring is more than a journalistic stunt. I’m closing in on 40, and the last time I got into a fight was the seventh grade. (I won, by the way. Take that, Tony Yanuzzi.)

Taking a punch seems crucial to understanding the fighter’s experience. As John Kelly puts it, “A lot of what we train for here is getting hit. For most people getting hit isn’t something that happens ordinarily. A lot of what you’re dealing with isn’t pain—it’s shock. As fighters, we have to get used to that.”

Not surprisingly, Angel politely declines my request. But later that same afternoon, at the conclusion of a marathon two-hour class, he invites individual students to engage in a single round of training in which he announces each combination he wants thrown.

Using the pads, he absorbs the student’s blows. Then he tells the student to “cover up” and launches his own light attack.

When it’s my turn he starts me off with a simple jab and a cross combination, followed by a right kick. Khara says “not bad,” and I feel momentarily elated.

The truth is, two months into my time at Body Arts, I’ve demonstrated no meaningful aptitude for Thai boxing. On three occasions I’ve fallen down while kicking a stationary heavy bag. I’m mobile and presumably sentient. The bag is an inanimate object. But three times the bag won. The first couple of times I stood up like a kid embarrassed in the schoolyard, expecting to see a room full of people laughing at my expense. But it never happened.

As Judah Ciervo puts it, “Everyone gets a certain amount of respect just for walking in the door.”

One of the instructors, Ron Zimmerman, sometimes does a quick imitation of me, waving his arms over his head and prancing in a circle like a child performing a spastic little dance.

“You’re all over the place,” he says. “You have to get more precise.”

But not all the news is bad. By the time I stand up with Angel I’ve also seen some incredible results. Though I’m not a doctor and can’t recommend Thai boxing for back problems, mine are gone. I’m in no pain. The feeling in my right foot is back. I’ve lost 11 pounds, and the size 36 jeans I couldn’t cram myself into now require a belt.

I’m not alone. Michael Gill has lost 56 pounds since joining a year ago. My first partner at the gym, Gunner, has dropped 7 pounds. So after Angel calls the first couple of combinations, I feel less like a bloated and inflexible middle-aged man who lost a round with a heavy bag and more like a guy whose fat is melting away. Then the lack of oxygen catches up with me.

Angel tells me to cover, and whaps my gloves with his pads. He throws a foot jab to my stomach, and I double over, not in pain—he’s merely toying with me—but in shock. As he calls for further combinations, I find myself staggering forward at one point and throwing an upper cut that leaves me completely gassed without producing any impact on the pad. And that’s when I understand: I am, right now, kicking my own ass.

Like anyone else, I have my reasons. Years of yo-yoing weight, the nagging sense that I should find a way to make changes.

“Come to me,” says Angel, urging me forward as I gasp for air several feet from him. “Come toward me!”

When I do, he positions the pads for a series of right kicks.

So far I’ve never shouted when striking the pads like the fighters do. I’m still too self-conscious and focused on basic things, like not falling down. But today I have no choice. Today the only way I can kick and continue to breathe is to take all the toxic air that has accumulated through the last few minutes of short, hyperventilating breaths and force it out of my lungs. And the only way I can do that is to shout.

As I let out a bark with every kick, I see Angel Cartagena smile over the pads he’s holding, like Keyser Soze looming over a complicated plot.