A year in the life of an MMA fight team
This was before. This was back when the old team was still together. Back before the night Trevor Wittman stayed…
This was before. This was back when the old team was still together. Back before the night Trevor Wittman stayed up till dawn in a Canadian hospital with a friend who’d been beaten beyond all recognition, his face swelling up like a beach ball as they documented its changing colors with their cell phones. This was before he had any reason to know or care what the testosterone/epitestosterone ratio of a healthy adult male was. Before the time he had to round up spare change just to pay his energy bill. Before he bounced a rent check to his parents. Before his gym became, in the words of one of his top fighters, “a ghost town.”
This was January of 2011, and none of that had happened yet. The future was still a never-ending promise. The best of life was still to come. His friends would always be his friends and his fighters would always be his fighters. So he thought.
Maybe because he had no idea what was coming, or maybe because it was his natural state, Wittman had every reason to smile as he wheeled his desk chair around the cramped little office inside the Grudge Training Center in Wheat Ridge, Colo., using the pictures that covered all four walls as starting points for one story after another about his strange life in the fight game.