November 2010

I. MOTORCYCLE HILL “You must make friends with suffering!” Greg Jackson shouts to a group of about 15 professional fighters and one aging, but aspiring, participatory journalist as we all struggle up a diabolically…

The Trident Bookstore and Café is just how it sounds - a sleepy, pseudo hippie hangout on the west side of Boston set in an old Brownstone with several floors of reading material and acoustic tunes to enhance your reading experience.…

ZAYED’S DREAM Highway E 11 cuts 79 miles through the great Rub’ al Khali desert between the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. FIGHT! Staff Photographer Paul Thatcher is piloting a tiny blue rental car as we speed down…

Major League Baseball has Cooperstown. The National Football League has Canton. MMA has FIGHT! Magazine. Ok, ok, so we’re not quite as prestigious as Cooperstown, but great mixed martial artists needed a place where they could be…

I am cornering my team in an MMA event, and I look at the judges and think: These people cannot possibly be qualified. Two of the judges are men who are older than dirt and the other is a woman with a bouffant hairdo. Give me a freaking…

Seedy bars, seedier strip clubs, hospital rooms, and crazy after-parties—I have spent the night after fights at all of these locations. Fights are the culmination of years of blood and sweat. From the moment the fight ends until…

At 11-0, Ryan “Darth” Bader has quickly become a force in the UFC light heavyweight division. Now, he’s taking the biggest gamble of his career—leaving Arizona Combat Sports and creating his own gym with friends CB…

Utter the name Leonard Garcia to die hard MMA fans, and they will likely smile before launching into a verbal tornado of praise and admiration that parallels the very fighting style of Garcia himself. Whether it’s a…

Friend or foe, when the cage door slams, the only thought that should go through a fighter’s mind is how to secure victory. RICH FRANKLIN Former UFC Middleweight Champion Rich “Ace” Franklin has had to…

The showdown between Frank Shamrock and Tito Ortiz at UFC 22 was regarded at the time as the greatest fight in MMA history, and it is still seen as such by many people who saw it in person or watched it live on television. The…