Elias Cepeda embeds with Lauzon camp
Elias Cepeda spent two weeks living and training with Joe Lauzon, his family, and his team, during the final week of training camp before fighting Takanori Gomi.
Mixed martial arts has a lot of fighters, and, notably with the rise of blogging, no small number of fighters. Elias Cepeda is one of the best writers in the MMA space. And he is a fighter, providing him unique insight into the sport.
Last July, Cepeda spent two weeks living and training with UFC lightweight Joe Lauzon, his family, and his team, during JLau’s final week of training camp, and week leading up to his July 15 UFC on FOX contest against his hero Takanori Gomi.
In a long-form essay, Cepeda tells the truth. Do yourself a favor – skip the brief excerpts and click the link at bottom.
Ever the well-organized techie, young Joe kept external drives handy for storing essential digital valuables.
At least one such drive, he told me, contained electronic reams of fight footage of stars of the day, which Lauzon would study in between homework, class, and the gym. This came up when, given the timing, and his fighting style, I asked Joe if he ever used to be a fan of Takanori Gomi, in his youth.
Though Gomi is only about five years older than Joe, the Japanese fighter also started young and shot up the ranks. By 2002, the year a teenaged Joe had his first pro fight, Gomi was already one of the sport’s biggest stars.
In fact, he was arguably the best lightweight in the world at the time. How likely was it that a young lightweight like Joe was watching closely, in admiration, at the time?
As it turns out, very.
“Oh man, Gomi was one my favorites,” he said, of the man he was set to fight in just over a week.
“I had an external drive that had all of his fights on it. I watched them all, over and over. I loved his style.”
When a fighter meets a hero of theirs on their field of play, it’s to hurt them.
It’s interesting how the admiration doesn’t usually go away in a fighter’s mind during times like that. It just awkwardly sloshes around, side by side, like oil and water in a dressing bottle.
So, though he would the next day do his last hard sparring in preparation to take Gomi out, Joe had no edge at all about him when speaking of him in the car. The things 31 year-old Lauzon said about Takanori in those minutes were probably not all too different from the things 19 year-old Joe would have said.
He’d been in this situation, before. “It’s just like when we fought Jens,” he remembered.
Back in 2006, Jens Pulver was returning to the UFC with much fanfare after leaving as its first-ever lightweight champion, years before. The promotion needed a game kid to step in and serve as fodder for the future hall of famer.
They called one of the East Coast’s top prospects, Joe Lauzon. The kid was tough, sure.
But not even he was initially sure that he had what it took to beat Pulver. “They called me and asked me, ‘how would you fight Jens Pulver, if you had a fight with him?’,” Joe told me, still a bit wide-eyed at the recollection.
“I said, ‘With Pulver? I’d run!'”
He laughs, but it wasn’t so much of a punch line as lasting incredulity that what once seemed to him like a crazy and dangerous hypothetical, did in fact take place. And, not only that, Joe ended up flattening Pulver inside one round.
It likely wasn’t easy, for him, and the thrill of victory had little to do with separating someone he’d admired for so long from their consciousness. But, it had to be done.
Soon, it would have to be done, again.
He clearly had a soft spot for Takanori Gomi, and it seemed completely incompatible both with Lauzon’s finishing fighting style and the fact that his team had spent the past months studying Gomi, just like Joe did as a kid, to figure out ways to hurt him.
Who knows – perhaps there is always two sides to the admiration coin, with fighters. Maybe all those years ago, as he watched in awe Gomi accomplish his feats, some part of Joe’s conscious or unconscious mind was already processing ways to destroy what he loved from afar.
What we truly desire can be complex, depending on the moment. Odd, contrary emotions can mingle at the best or worst of times.
What was clear, in the car on the drive from his home Massachusetts to Connecticut that afternoon, however, was that Joe Lauzon’s long-held respect and admiration for Takanori Gomi was still very much in place, eight days before he would fight him. Those same feelings would end up surfacing again and in an almost shocking way, on fight night, in Chicago.
Joe Lauzon fights Evan Dunham at the TUF Finale in Las Vegas on Friday.
