“The first thing is perspective. I frame things in a positive way and stay reflective. It’s almost a cliché, but in the grand scheme of my life, if the worst thing that happens to me is I lose a wrestling match, even if it’s the Olympic finals, then I’m doing pretty damn good.” A fight, even a title fight, barely registers.
“Right away that takes some of the pressure off. I know I’ll survive it, it’s not the end of the world. I won’t like it; I don’t like to lose, but the people who really care about me don’t care about me because I win. They care about me and want me to be happy. I think this helps me overcome the classic fear of failure that most athletes set themselves up for. They’re so worried about looking stupid, or making a mistake, they don’t do what they’ve trained to do. They get in their own way.”
Randy understands what I’m looking for.
“You have to put a positive frame on things. In wrestling, in a heated match, sometimes the difference in the match is that you got called for ‘passivity,’ or your opponent did. You know you’re working your ass off, and then the referee decides for whatever reason that you are more passive than your opponent, so the ref gives him the choice, and your opponent sticks you in the disadvantaged position. And it would get to me, because no one was as active as I was in matches. It would really mess with me when I got called for passivity.” He shakes his head in remembered frustration.
“Then I figured out, with my coaches, that it was okay, it was a coin toss. The ref was going to call it on somebody. So why am I getting upset? It was taking me out of my game, and I was losing matches because everyone would put you in the disadvantaged position, and I’d get turned and scored on because I was pissed off.
“So I started framing it as ‘out of my control,’ what the referee does. It’s no big deal, this is just another thing to beat. Now my opponent will put me at a disadvantage, but he’s still not going to score on me. So, psychologically, that will have a big effect on him,
it’s one more place where I can break this guy
. Who gives a shit what the ref thinks? It’s all about my opponent.
“Once I wrapped my head around that, I started savoring those situations, not that I ever stalled, but when the passivity call came I looked at it as a positive. Here’s a place where he can’t turn me, another place for me to attack him, wear him down. By creating a different perspective on the same situation, then
technically
things went a lot better. I thought better, my defense was better, and I had more success.”
When Yagyu Munenori (the legendary swordsman and contemporary of Musashi’s) wrote that “another man’s sword is your sword,” he meant just that. If your understanding is deeper, his weapons are your weapons, and you can turn his weapons against him. His own sword is more dangerous to him than to you.
The importance of coaching and cornering is not lost on Randy. “The corner has to have a real understanding of his fighter, seeing things that he can do. You use a word or a phrase, when he gets distracted, when he gets flustered or hit, you use the word or phrase to get you centered, bring you back to your training. Maybe ‘move your feet’ and that goes to your game plan, footwork.
“A guy gets caught, his bell gets rung, he needs a place to go mentally, to get him back to safety. For Chuck it was,
Chin down, hands up
. For Tito it was,
Scramble, don’t concede,
because I didn’t want to give up the takedown. The Tito fight became about who was going to give up the takedown. If I got it he was going to have a bad night, and if he got it, I would probably have a bad night.
“But you have to be careful with saying
don’t get taken down
because that’s a negative statement. I was coaching this kid who was winning by one point with thirty seconds left in the match. All he has to do is not get taken down so I’m screaming
don’t get taken down!
And whaddya think happens? What did I put in his head?”
Randy frowns and shakes his head ruefully.
“Instead of giving him positive things to do—
get an underhook, tie him up, stay in his face,
the things that got him to this point of winning—I give him something negative and he gets tentative.
“It’s the same in fights.
Don’t get hit by the right hand,
well shit I just got nailed by it.”
He pauses, musing, and then picks up his earlier thread.
“So that positive phrase will refocus him, keep him on track. You want to be calm and focused, not emotional and excitable. But if he needs a slap in the face to wake him up, you gotta do it. All fighters are different. Forrest Griffin needs to be slapped around the locker room or he’ll have a slow start. Karo Parisiyan is the same way. You gotta jack him up. With Mike Pyle I try to settle him down. If he’s smiling and joking he’ll do well, and if he’s intense and inside himself something’s wrong.”
When you hear Randy describe what he’s going to do in a fight, or talk about another fighter, his language is interesting. It’s technical and dry and devoid of emotion. Randy sees a problem, a technical problem, not an emotional fight filled with fear and rage. He talks about solving Tim Sylvia’s reach advantage like a plumber talks about coming at a leak.
There’s a reason for this dispassionate observation, and it goes back to wrestling. Even from the beginning, in high school, Randy found what worked was an “in-your-face” type of wrestling, which required he outwork his opponent. In his book
Wrestling for Fighting,
Randy said, “My style certainly wasn’t the prettiest, but it proved quite effective. During my senior year in high school, I plotted and pounded my way . . . to the State Championships.” You could say that he’s been plotting and pounding ever since.
Randy can’t deny his own genetic gifts—he’s a natural athlete whose longevity has defied all conventional wisdom on aging. He single-handedly keeps about a dozen aging fighters from retiring. They see him win and think,
Why not me?
But they’re not Randy. He was featured on a TV show, National Geographic’s
Fight Science,
where they measured his lactic acid levels (the acid that builds up in muscles as they fatigue and burn oxygen; that tired feeling is lactic acid buildup). Randy was straining and choking a training partner—and his lactic acid levels actually
dropped,
as did the jaws of the monitoring scientists.
Randy may not have been the fastest or most purely athletic wrestler, but he loved to train and he could train harder than just about anyone. He’s smart—at Oklahoma State, after the army, he had a 4.0 GPA and was an academic all-American as well as a wrestling all-American. Although they called him the Natural, Randy never felt that way about himself. He titled his autobiography
Becoming the Natural,
and it shows how his career, his success, was a process, that it was worked for—it wasn’t a free ride on talent.
His brain has been his biggest asset in his fighting career. Most other fighters will express admiration for how scientific he is, how technical. Randy was always developing his “plotting” skills as well as his “pounding” ones.
These skills—watching opponents closely, studying tape, and crafting game plans—were honed to a fine point during that long Olympic chase. In the years that Randy didn’t make the team, especially in ’92 and ’96, he was stuck in the unofficial Scrub Club.
“That’s what we called the number two and number three guys, the Scrub Club. We’d travel with the team but wouldn’t get tickets to many events. We were alternates but it was only until the first weigh-in, after that you couldn’t enter. We scouted, we filmed matches all day long so that the guy we had advancing in the tournament knew who he had next. We filled out scouting reports and watched tons and tons of tape.”
Even now, Randy sighs at the memories of monotony tinged with gnawing disappointment.
“That mind-set carried over into fighting. I watched because I liked to watch fights. I would watch how guys were technically doing things, making adjustments.”
Randy had a whole professional life of scouting opponents and breaking down tape, and he applies those lessons to all his fights. He would see what he needed to learn and then hit the gym religiously, intelligently, to learn it.
“I had several of Vitor Belfort’s fights on tape and I watched them carefully. I saw okay, he’s left-handed and leads every combination with his left, and he’s very straight-ahead, and he’ll blow through you if you stand in front of him—so I’ve got to work on footwork. I had to learn to box because wrestling won’t work, so I got a boxing coach and started circling left all day. I was confident that if I could get my hands on him I could wear him out, make him work harder than he wanted to work. No one gave me a snowball’s chance in hell.”
It was all the new knowledge, hiring new coaches and learning entirely new disciplines, that really excited Randy. “I love to train and learn. For me a that’s like a kid in a candy store. The things I was learning in wrestling at the end of my career were so minuscule, tiny technical variations, little changes to grips, things like that. But fighting had so many dimensions, new techniques, it was as exciting as hell. When I’m done learning I’m done winning.”
Randy learned from his own teaching of wrestling. “The more I taught, the more I dissected my game. And the more I dissected my game, the more technical I became. A lot of wrestlers never truly take the time to analyze how they do what they do, which makes it difficult for them to go down on all fours with a fine-tooth comb and refine their game,” he said in
Wrestling for Fighting
.
He could have learned from Dan Gable, especially Gable’s “back-off-to-win” experience, how Gable had been winning his last match in college but kept going for the pin and lost. Gable learned that lesson, internalized it, and won with it.
In the ’96 finals for a berth on the Olympic team Randy was wrestling against his “nemesis” Mike Foy. He was winning by 9 points with forty-five seconds left and could have “run all over the mat and he never would have beat me.” But Randy “wanted to tech fall his ass. I wanted to
beat
him, so I stayed on him, aggressive, went for that last fall and I ended up on my back and pinned.” Like Dan, that loss is ever fresh. Watching the match today, it’s hard to believe that was a pin. Randy was pushing Foy all over the place. In the final seconds his shoulders brush the mat as they roll over for the briefest moment.
But just as Gable probably never would have had the fire to have the Olympic career he did without losing that final NCAA match, Randy might never have had the fire to succeed in the way he did as a fighter if he’d won a medal in the Olympics. And it’s something Randy is tangentially aware of.
Even to this day, Randy’s wrestling matches are more important to him than his fighting career. When I ask him about losing in general, he talks solely about wrestling. Maybe he thought I meant wrestling—but the mind-set is revealing. “I lost the NCAA finals twice, and the Olympic trials four times when I could have made the team. But I learned to put it in perspective.”
Randy went into one of his favorite topics.
“I started thinking about the differences between being nervous and being excited—they’re very similar. The physical attributes you assign to each are real similar, and one has negative connotations. Nervousness means something bad is happening and you’re not enjoying it, and being excited makes you smile, you love what you’re doing and good things are happening.”
I had gone through a similar experience years ago, when I first thought about being a writer. I was anxious about the future, about not knowing where I was going to be living in three or four months, never having a salary. I realized that I couldn’t do that—not if I wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t live in a state of anxiety, it had to be excitement. I tell that to friends or people I meet who want to be writers or artists, anybody who wants to do something different, a job without security. Don’t let it be anxiety; let that uncertainty generate excitement. If you can’t make that switch you shouldn’t be a writer, or an artist, or a fighter. You won’t enjoy it.
There have been plenty of scientific studies that show how laughter and being relaxed reduces stress hormones and performance inhibitors. Smiling changes our brain. It’s common sense, sports psych 101. Randy’s own relationship with fear is distinct, studied. He turns his opponents into athletic puzzles. It’s not about them, personally, and he has no emotion about them.
“In the Tim Sylvia fight, I knew it was going to be a little problem for Tim—because he fights on emotion. He has to generate a little dislike, a little anger. And Tim and I are friends, he stayed at my house. I knew that would make things a little harder for him, because he respects me.”
Randy has no problem fighting his friends because of where he comes from, the wrestling; it’s not personal.
“It’s problem solving. With Chuck Liddell, I knew there was a distinct risk that if I did what I had to do to beat him I could get knocked out. So at some point you have to make friends with the worst-case possibility. But hey, if the worst thing that happens is you lose a fucking fight, you’re doing good. So risk it.”
Randy is a competitor, it’s something that gets said a lot. He loves the process, the training and learning, but the “pinnacle of competition” for him is when you see your opponent break. “Once you do it . . . you realize that’s what it’s all about. I never even really saw it until I went to Oklahoma State. But you open a guy’s eyes to that mind-set and it changes him.
“The first time that I felt it was with Vitor.” Randy smiles avidly. Here’s something he enjoys remembering, trying to quantify. “It’s almost a noise. I liken it to a stick snapping. You can hear it, feel the stick break.”
He mimes snapping a stick in half.
“Tito was close, he struggled with it. From the third round on I would take him right to the edge, I would feel the will start to go, and he screamed. He’d find a way. He knew he was close to giving up but he’d come storming back, he’d try and fight and find a way to fight on. He never really did break, he was right there teetering and I couldn’t push him over.