An English striking coach’s merry impressions of American MMA
An English striking coach’s merry impressions of American MMA
English Muay Thai fighter Alex Reynolds fought professionally in Thailand for nine years, before retiring at 42, and becoming a coach for an MMA team in Georgia, USA. Reynolds is left of center. Donald J. Trump is up by around 14 points in Georgia.
Culturally, Georgia MMA is a long way from Thailand, or England, but it offers Reynolds a unique vantage. Four years into Georgia, the coach wrote about his experiences for the left-of-center British political and cultural magazine The New Statesman.
The world of American MMA is a hyper-masculine landscape of death stares, predatory grunts and pounding rock music. Not to mention Gracie challenges (picking fights), crashing fist bumps, homoerotic bro huddles, cauliflower ears, smelly spandex shorts; and, lest I forget, trash-talking on social media and redneck crowds at venues like Wild Bills and The Tilted Kilt, brazenly shouting out racist epithets at the fighters duking it out in the cage. The Bangkok Muay Thai scene, even at its roughest, is a long way from all that.
Here’s what I learned. Being an MMA coach in America is much like being the manager of a Premier League football team, except all of your players are bloodthirsty killers with hair-trigger tempers and yakuza tattoos who only half understand your quaint English accent (Coach, are you from Australia? I was watching Crocodile Dundee last night and you speak just like him.)
American fighters tend to blow their own trumpets more in the style of Donald Trump than Miles Davis. I want to be legend, said one of the men under my wing. Because heroes get forgotten and legends are remembered. I advised him to be realistic but practical, to learn skills and use his mouth for breathing.
Others have a history of violence. One chap kept making finger gun hand signals at his opponents in the cage. This always messes with his opponent’s head, said Pat, our trusty corner and cuts man (whose job is to assist or advise a fighter in the ring). They all know that he once shot a guy dead who tried to carjack him.
I tried inspiring them with the basics. Train hard, fight easy. Know your craft and you can become an artist. Win, lose or draw, always remember to put on a showbiz face and be a good sportsman. Never lose your temper. Just as in an argument, you can’t win a fight when you are angry. But don’t forget to hate. Hate from your ankles to your eyeballs and you will be a winner, my son.
Sometimes training lads to fight like human roosters pays dividends. One of the stable, Jared Gooden, is now fighting for a pro championship welterweight title, and he credits me for being the first person to tell him the basics. I’m chuffed. It’s great to see someone you trained up doing what you showed him in the live theatre of the cage, and, moreover, getting away with it. Aged 46, though, I can’t let it go to my head. I just hope that, when he wins his big fat gaudy belt, it doesn’t go to his.
Reynolds now coaches at Straight Blast Gym Buford, and has lent his writing talents to a number of publications including Vice, The Telegraph. Subscribe to his YouTube channel here.