This wasn’t how Kevin Burns pictured the lead up to his UFC debut, sitting in a customs room in a London airport, subject to a barrage of questions, fingerprinted, photographed and not allowed to make any phone calls, even to his wife.
“I felt like a terrorist,” said Burns, who after a ten hour flight from Des Moines, Iowa, was cooped up on the Tuesday before his UFC 85 bout with Roan Carneiro on June 7th, wondering if he would ever get through the airport and onto the business of pursuing his dream of fighting in the Octagon.
For three hours he waited. He was offered the opportunity to take a nap, but as he puts it, “there were these pillows that looked like they had been there for years. You couldn’t pay me to put my head on that.”
Enter UFC Public Relations Director Jennifer Wenk, who had flown in on the same flight as another fighter who was now being retained at customs, Jason Lambert. Ms. Wenk, armed with a letter from the Zuffa legal department stating that the fighters and company employees didn’t need work permits for the event, voluntarily detained herself with Burns, Lambert, and another volunteer detainee, Burns’ trainer Chris David, until a fax came in with an identical letter for the fighters. Just like that, Kevin Burns had a fight again.
“I really thought I was getting deported,” he said. “Had I not seen Jason Lambert and Jennifer, I would have 100 percent, without a shadow of a doubt probably been deported.”
Now let’s add everything together – Burns, a full-time employee at Wells Fargo, gets a call on short notice to take on jiu-jitsu black belt Roan Carneiro in his debut in the sport’s biggest organization, doesn’t leave work until the day of his flight, arrives in London and is held up for three hours at customs, and now has to get acclimated, deal with the UFC jitters, and then fight. If you wanted to place some money on Burns winning after all this, you probably couldn’t get anyone to take the bet.
So what did Burns do? He not only wins, he submits Carneiro, taking a submission of the night bonus in the process. Hearing the whole story and seeing the outcome, I can’t help but think of the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’.
I’ll paraphrase - “You like apples? I won the fight, how do you like them apples?”
Not that you would ever hear that out of Burns’ mouth. One, he’s a humble, respectful pro. Two, with his schedule, he probably doesn’t have time for movies.
“I have a very understanding wife,” he says, when asked about his daily routine. “And up until this point, it’s been manageable. I train before work, during my lunch break, and right after work. Then I have a chance to go home and then start all over the next day. But it has been a little more challenging since my fight in London because there’s a lot more that goes along with fighting in the UFC than some of the other local shows I had fought in before.”
But before we go forward, let’s go back. A lifelong athlete who played college football for the University of South Dakota, Burns had moved on to ‘normal’ life after his days on the gridiron were over, but he still kept busy in martial arts from 1999 on, first in Tae Kwon Do, where he is a black belt, and then in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where he is currently a blue belt. Fighting - as it turns out - was the next logical step, and after a few amateur bouts, he turned pro in 2006 with a TKO win over Demi Deeds.
By 2007, he was starting to get some positive notices on the local scene, and he looked to be closing in on a possible invite to the UFC when he broke his left hand two weeks before a bout last December with Steve Schneider. Burns still took the fight.
“I told my wife, ‘it’s already broken – what’s the big deal,” he recalled. “I fought and won by triangle with a broken hand. It was an interesting way to fight, no doubt, and probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it showed me a lot personally – what I can endure in the cage as well as go through mentally and still come out victorious.”
Burns took time off after the Schneider fight, but he was back in action in May of this year, knocking out Bobby Voelker. By the end of that month, he got the call to replace injured Ryo Chonan against Carneiro. He took it, confident that he could compete against and beat his more experienced foe.
“The film that I saw in the short time I had to prepare, I thought I could protect myself and stay out of harm’s way on the ground,” he said. “I didn’t see myself subbing him – I honestly had the full intention of keeping the fight standing because I thought I had the definite advantage on the feet.”
This confidence extended to fight week and fight night, where he was obviously undaunted by the magnitude of the event he was about to fight in.
“I wasn’t any more nervous going into that fight than any other fight,” said Burns. “But I feel a certain amount of nervousness is good going into a fight anyway. I don’t like to be overconfident, and you’re fighting against the world’s best in the UFC and I had to take it in stride and realize that at the end of the day, a fight’s a fight, whether it’s in front of 20,000 people or 5,000 people at a local venue. I’ve been fortunate that the venues I had been fighting in had cages that were the same size with the same flooring, which made it a lot easier to transition going from a promotion like that to the UFC.”
And when the bell rang, Burns fought like he had been there for years, calmly surviving some dicey moments to come back and score the upset victory via triangle choke in round two.
“As the fight went on, I felt that he was getting extremely frustrated, and I could see that,” said Burns. “That did nothing but feed me as far as confidence goes. I saw myself winning the whole time, but I did shock myself a little bit that I won in the way in which I did.”
Now he’s the toast of the MMA world, with feature stories on the websites of NBC Sports and Sports Illustrated, among others. But he may be most popular around the water cooler back at Wells Fargo (and for the record, he was back to work at 7am on the Monday after his win over Carneiro).
“They’ve been very receptive and have always been supportive, both from the management side of things as well as from the peers I work with,” said Burns of the reaction at work to his success. “I think it’s almost as much fun for them as it is for me because a lot of them are fans of the UFC anyway, and to actually know somebody who’s doing it that’s not doing it full-time and who’s going through the same day-to-day grind that they’re going through, they relate to it and they’ve been very cool about it. It’s been fun.”
Well, at least for a week or two, before Burns got the call again to fight this Saturday (Spike TV 9pm ET / 6pm PT) against fellow up and comer Anthony ‘Rumble’ Johnson. But staying active is no issue for the 28-year old.
“At this point, I’ll fight as often as I possibly can to keep chucking away at that ladder,” he said. “I’ve just begun in my mind. This is the shot I’ve been looking for, but at the end of the day, my goal remains the world title. And in order to get there, I’ve got a lot of extremely hard work ahead of me. But I’m more than ready to put my time in.”
It all starts with the intriguing matchup against Johnson, whose two UFC wins over Chad Reiner and Tommy Speer lasted a combined 64 seconds. Burns admits that Johnson is an explosive force, but his eyes tend to stray towards Johnson’s lone MMA loss, a UFC 76 submission defeat at the hands of Rich Clementi.
“He’s obviously a very explosive striker – he’s got KO power in both hands,” said Burns of his opponent. “I’d be foolish not to respect that. But in the Clementi fight, Clementi didn’t get lured into a reckless exchange – he stayed out, he was technical, and he was able to get him down in the second round. Yeah, he (Johnson) gassed from taking the fight on late notice, but even to see technically where he was at on the ground, on the ground I think I win that fight.”
After what happened last time, would you doubt him?
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