On the morning of June 4, while the graduating class at Chelmsford High School in Massachusetts flocked to a football stadium for commencement, Chris Fox took a Greyhound bus to the Howard Johnson hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The other seniors at Chelmsford High were about to receive their diplomas. Fox, 17, was about to get started on the next phase of his education: how to punch, kick and karate chop another man into bloody submission.
“I think I’m the only one missing my high school graduation to be here,” Fox said. “But I knew it would be worth it.”
He sat cross-legged in a ballroom, alongside about 140 other young men in workout clothes. Some had flown across the country. Others had driven all night. They were there not necessarily because they planned on being professional fighters, but because they wanted to learn under the best fighter in the world.
His name is Fedor Emelianenko, and in the sport of mixed martial arts, he is Mike Tyson, circa 1988. He draws more than 60,000 fans for his fights, makes more than US$1 million a bout and rarely needs more than a couple minutes to complete his work. He enters the ring looking out of shape and half-asleep. Then he begins stomping the head of the next challenger.
But as Emelianenko strode into the Howard Johnson, flanked by a UN interpreter and five ring girls clad in red satin, no one at the front desk recognized him. Mixed martial arts is still in the formative stages, a sport chronicled mainly on the Internet and fueled at the grass-roots level. Only when Emelianenko reached the ballroom, where he was to conduct a fighting seminar in his native Russian, did young men whisper and squeal.
“I never thought I could achieve so much this way,” Emelianenko said through an interpreter. “But it was always my dream. It was my golden dream.”
The dream, to parlay karate or wrestling or street-fighting skills into fame and riches, has spawned a generation of Americans in training. Teenagers practice mixed martial arts in local karate gyms for the same reason they play baseball for traveling teams. They hope to someday be good enough to make the major leagues.
Mixed martial arts includes two major leagues: the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which is famous in the US for its pay-per-view showdowns, its octagonal ring and its highly rated reality television show; and Pride, which is most popular in Asia, regularly fills the Tokyo Dome in Japan and has enough money to keep Emelianenko on its roster.
But there are dozens of smaller leagues, like Mixed Fighting Championship, Inter-national Fight League, Gladiator Challenge, TKO, K-1, M-1, King of the Cage and Cage Rage, that help less-acclaimed extreme fighters stay in the ring. Some make as little as US$500 a bout, pay their own expenses and share hotel rooms with whichever friends have agreed to train and manage them.
“I guess I’m a dreamer,” said Joey Brown, a 39-year-old fighter from Lodi, New Jersey, who goes by the nickname Knockdown. “It takes a dreamer to do what we’re doing.”
Brown has a full-time job, a 2-5 record and an assistant manager he repays by helping to baby-sit her mentally disabled daughter. He works days for an auto company in northern New Jersey and trains nights at a gym in New York City. From the moment Brown saw the first Ultimate Fighting Championship “Nov. 12, 1993,” he recited proudly — he found a sport that spoke to him.
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