Feb-25-2009
Hunger, discipline, identity—for Brandon Vera, these are the things
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Silver Star Urijah Faber Cali Crown T-shirt
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By Chuck Mindenhall
It’s a fickle thing, mixed martial arts. In a short space of time—a year, a month, a round, a punch—a fighter can tumble from the mountaintops to the pedestrian ranks with all the empty denial of a pickpocket victim. It’s a cruel sport that way. For those who’re able to re-ascend, square one has to be looked at as the process of redefining the most abstract element of his game—the fighter’s edge.
It’s the deepest part of his motivation, it’s his driving force, and, what distinguishes it from the entire lot of technical trades, it belongs solely to him.
For Brandon Vera, this meant picking up his jump rope.
“Dude, it’s ridiculous,” Vera says from his home in San Diego. “I [messed] up in a bad way, and I’m fixing it now. I’m just bringing back the simplest things, things as simple as jumping rope.”
This is Vera’s metaphor for fighter’s edge.
A year and a half ago, Vera was an undefeated force in the UFC’s heavyweight division, having beaten Justin Eilers, Assuerio Silva and Frank Mir in a combined 5:13 of Octagon time. Needless to say, the 31-year-old Vera was considered a free-swinging wrecking ball in the division. Not only was his Muay Thai world class, but he had submissions and long-range striking ability. He had menace.
A year and a half later he has lost three of his last four fights, with the lone win—a decision over Reese Andy in his light heavyweight debut this past July—perhaps his most lackluster of the bunch. As luck would have it, that fight was the catalyst for a change in his mindset; he called it an epiphany at the time. He went home that night and refigured his career, and the next day he upped his commitment.
Fighting has been a full-time occupation ever since, and getting back to basics for the man who calls himself “The Truth” has become a necessary step in his Sisyphean journey back up.
“I actually started fixing it before the Jardine fight, during that camp, the whole process” he says. “But now we’re back on track of where we were before, when I was dropping people in the first round and knocking people out.”
Vera narrowly lost a split decision against the unorthodox Keith Jardine at UFC 89 in Birmingham, England, and though he thought he won the fight—just as a lot of fans did in online forums and the blogosphere—he talks about it nongrudgingly and matter-of-factly. This is quite a change from the aftermath dialogue I had with Vera after his losses to Tim Sylvia and Fabricio Werdum, where his words were tinged with anger and the picture of injustice was indirectly painted.
In fact, he looks at the Jardine loss as taking positive steps in identifying where he is a fighter, and in gaining more insight into what places he was still coming up short.
“It’s hard to explain, man” he says. “I’m on my way back. If I would have had a better understanding of who I needed to be that I do now, then I think the Jardine fight would have went a lot different. It was a great fight, but I can’t complain. I mean, Jardine’s a great competitor—he’s a tough bastard. I had a good time.”
Vera says he’s now comfortable as a light heavy, and that he drops his jaw whenever he catches glances of himself when he was 235 pounds in his heavyweight prime.
“I was fat as hell,” he says, unkiddingly. “I never thought I was fat until I saw pictures of myself. I was like Oooooh! Now I walk around, on my heaviest weekend, at 213. I’m digging light heavy now, yeah. I’m getting my pace to where it needs to be and weight’s not an issue at all.”
Not only feeling light, Vera is feeling reborn. Losses hurt, but if what Oscar Wilde said is true—“we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at stars”—Vera seems to be looking at stars. He’s taking whatever he’s dealt with an optimist’s sense of spring.
And the next hand out of the deck is the wild card Mike Patt, a submission specialist who is coming off a loss of his own to Tim Boetsch at UFC 88 in Atlanta. Vera (9-3) is cautious when talking about the little known Patt, saying “maybe it’s a dangerous fight, he is 15-3,” but is more concerned about what Brandon Vera does at this point.
“I’m in a position right now where I don’t care who I fight,” he says. “You just put somebody in front of me and I’ll fight. Maybe this is a good fight for me, maybe it’s a stupid fight. They [UFC] said you’re going to fight such and such, and I said okay, I’m in.”
In regaining his fighter’s edge, Vera has again taken to nomadically bouncing from gym to gym, like he did back when he was “whoopin’ people’s asses.” It helps simulate the unfamiliar.
“I like just going to unknown environments,” he says. “Going to different gyms and training with different people, you know?”
As Patt has submitted nine opponents in his career, Vera has taken up grappling with Dean Lister and two-time world champ Leo Santos at his Alliance Gym in San Diego to prepare for his March 7 bout in Columbus, Ohio—Patt’s home state. With world-class mimics, he says “I’m not worried about his Jiu-Jitsu at all.”
It does help that Eric Del Fierro is there to push his buttons, and Master Lloyd Irvin has been consulting with him weekly via the phone. Both men will be his conscience in the corner at UFC 96. These are the very people who think they see the bastard of today looking dangerously close to the bastard that was.
“It’s cool man, hearing all my training partners and everybody who’s been watching me go through the ups and downs of this sport,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Brandon, you’ve never looked like this before. Even before when you were doing good you didn’t look like this.’ And it’s coming from my family, and my training partners, and my coaches, and the people in the gym. It’s coming from the people who know me most.”
When people band around you as they have with Brandon Vera, it’s hard to tell when you’re on the downs. Maybe it’s because he has his second wind, or that he has discovered something about himself through the oft-times necessary evil of defeat. Or maybe it’s because there’s still a lot he wants to accomplish in the UFC, besides obviously scrapping for a light heavyweight championship.
Things like, as a Filipino-American, potentially fighting in the Philippines if and when the UFC goes there—a distinct possibility as the UFC expands its market.
“It’d be awesome,” he says. “I mean, to fight in front of all the dignitaries and the Filipino fans live? That’d be amazing. Especially for my folks, who’d for sure be there for me.”
First things first though, getting off to a good start to the rest of his life.
“I see this being real bad for Mike Patt,” he says. “Real bad. No matter what he gives me, I’m going to take. If you want to go to the ground, then I’m going to cut you on the ground. I’ve got three five-minute rounds to either break something on him or break something on me, and that’s how it’s going to be. It’s going to be a long night for Mike Patt.”
Not as long as the road back will be for Vera, who has a fire in his belly.
He started jump-roping again.
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