The Iceman cleans up

AT HOME WITH CHUCK LIDDELL, THE UFC'S BIGGEST ASSET J

Uess than two minutes into his fight against Quinton Jackson this past May, Chuck "the Iceman" Liddell made a mistake. He slid to Jackson's side and threw a hook to his body, a maneuver that left him open for Jackson's counter: a right hand that put Liddell on his back. In a sport like mixed mar­tial arts, or MMA, in which the combatants punch each other with four- to six-ounce gloves, there is only a small margin for error. Seconds later, after Liddell had taken four unanswered strikes to his head, referee Big John McCarthy intervened, and Liddell lost his aura of invincibility and his Ultimate Fighting Championship light-heavyweight title.

"It's something I've gotten away with before," says Liddell, referring to the mistake. He adds that his longtime friend and trainer John Hackleman had told him that "if I kept doing it, I'd get caught sooner or later. This time I got caught."

Usually such stoppages are met with an exultant roar, but there were mostly boos after this one, and the majority of the crowd, including Adam Sandier, Andre Agassi, David Spade and a small army of other celebrities, sat stunned. They had come to watch Liddell celebrate another victory in the Octagon. His win­ning streak dated back to 2004, and though Jackson had been the last man to defeat him, it was generally felt that Jackson was in decline and Liddell was at the top of his game. The fight's outcome was thought by many to be a fait accompli, a step toward bigger and better things for Liddell.

In losing to Jackson, the 37-year-old Liddell seems to have forfeited none of his immense appeal. About a week after the fight, he appeared on Late Show, bantering with David Letterman, amiably handling questions about the loss and stating his eagerness for a rematch. Rendered menacing by the Mohawk he then sported, a scalp tattoo-Chinese characters that mean "place of peace and prosperity"-and a carefully sculpted goatee, he was still the face of the UFC, glowering from a number of T-shirts and posters. He remains the most visible fighter in the sport, the first true crossover figure to emerge from MMA.

Dana White, the UFC president, attributes Liddell's mainstream popularity to "his laid-back personality and a Tysonesque presence" inside the Octagon.

"When we're in New York, Chuck gets mobbed," White says. "I have to pull him away or he'd be signing autographs all day."

Brad Marks, Liddell's friend and manager, says, "Chuck's personality is different from the way it is perceived. He's good-natured and incredibly funny. If he decides to do movies after his career, he has all the tools to be the next big action star. I think in 20 years we'll look back and appreciate the way he brought the UFC into the mainstream."

Once characterized as an outlaw sport and famously labeled "human cockfighting" by Senator John McCain, MMA is often called the fastest-growing sport on the planet. UFC programming is shown in more than 30 countries, and last year its pay-per-view revenue was reportedly more than $200 million, putting it on a par with World Wrestling Entertainment and boxing. This has been achieved through savvy marketing that targets the young male demographic and spices up the product with sexy women and celebrities. (Movie

stars and rap artists who once gravitated to major boxing cards now flock to UFC events.) But the most important marketing tool,

the one that put it over the top, is the reality show The Ultimate Fighter. A combination of Survivor and Big Brother, the show

places two teams of fighters in the same Las Vegas house, where they sleep, eat and otherwise interact while training and

competing in a 13-week elimination tournament. The grand prize is a six-figure, multifight contract with the UFC.

The first-season coaches were Liddell and Randy Couture, who at the beginning of 2005 was the light-heavyweight champ.

"I knew the UFC was going to explode after the reality show," Liddell says. "We had the right people on it. You could feel it was going to happen."

Spike TV, the cable channel that carries the show, wasn't that confident: It report­edly demanded that UFC bear the produc­tion costs for the initial season.

Liddell and Couture (whom Liddell describes as "a class act," though he won't say they are friends) rarely spoke during the show and saw each other only at the chal­lenges. Liddell believes their competitiveness fed into the fighters' psyches, amped up their ferocity and thus helped boost the ratings.

Couture, a member of the sport's Hall of Fame, is proof that losing in the Octagon does not carry the stigma it does, say, in the boxing ring. He has

lost eight times in vari­ous MMA bouts, twice by knockout to Liddell. Jack­son has lost six times, including two brutal knockouts at the hands of Wanderlei Silva. Silva has since been TKO'd by Dan Henderson, who has been named the next challenger for Jackson's title; Henderson has lost five times but now holds both the middleweight and welterweight belts in Pride, another MMA organization, which was recently purchased by UFC. Very little separates the elite fighters.

"It only takes one mis­take," says Liddell.

In person, at his house in San Luis Obispo

(SLO-as in slow-to the locals), Lid del I is not so intimidating. In contrast to his posters-which empha­size the thickness of his neck, the jut of his jaw and the muscles of his chest and arms-in casual dress he looks almost slight, and when he walks downhill or downstairs, he steps delicately, as if he has pebbles in his sandals. His toenails are painted black, a fashion statement he picked up from Hackleman. He grins frequently, and at times his sandpa-pery voice becomes nearly inaudible. He recently returned from a promotional tour he made on behalf of the movie 300, in which he plays a small role, and I ask how he and the voice held up under the stress of nonstop interviews.

"It was all right," he says. "No matter how many people you meet in any one day, you just have to remember it's the first time they're meeting you."

I bring up Liddell's Good Morning Texas appearance on the tour, during which he

slurred his words, rambled and seemed at one point to fall asleep. The video has been replayed countless times on YouTube, and the Internet was full of drug-abuse rumors.

Liddell grimaces, saying, "Hell, I thought it was pretty funny myself when I saw it. I was sick, and I hadn't been get­ting much sleep. My doctor said he could tell I had pneumonia just from touch­ing my skin. I took Lunesta and a dose of NyQuil before going to bed. and then they woke me up after three hours."

The UFC thereupon pulled him off the road to be tested for drugs. "They know I don't use drugs," he says, "but I didn't say anything until after the test came back. Then I told them what I thought."

We're preparing to drive to Hackleman's place for a training session. By way of a segue, I mention that White has been quoted as saying the first meeting between Liddell and Hackleman, in 1991, was like

something out of a chop-socky movie.

Liddell gives the notion a turn or two. "Yeah, I guess," he says. "I went out to John's place to see if he'd train me. You had to prove you were tough enough to train with John. We boxed for 19 straight minutes. He basically whipped my ass. It was raining, and I'd driven out on a motorcycle; afterward he asked, 'You com­ing back tomorrow?' I said, 'Yeah,' and he tossed me his car keys and said, 'Take my truck.' I said I could handle the rain, and he said, 'No, go on. Take my truck.'"

It's not exactly Kung Fu. but I figure if you were to wipe off the Hollywood glaze, the relationship between Crass-hopper and Master Kan would prove to be considerably less Zen koan than it was depicted. "Take my truck" is likely more reflective of the general tone.

Hackleman's home is in the country near the town of Arroyo Grande, up a dirt drive­way on a piney, isolated hillside. A friendly

dog with a game leg sniffs our tires as we climb out of Liddell's Hummer H2. Cool breezes lift the pine boughs. Firewood is stacked against a shed. It seems like the kind of place where you might expect an old hippie with a gray beard bibbing his overalls to stroll from behind an out­building, toting a sack full of freshly harvested bud. This bucolic illusion is shattered, however, when Hackleman emerges from the house, brandishing a sledgehammer over his head.

"Got the new 20-pound hammers," he shouts and offers to let Jason Von Flue, another UFC fighter who has just arrived, hold it.

Von Flue declines, saying, "I don't want to touch it. It looks nasty."

In his late 40s, with a shaved head and a salt-and-pepper goatee. Hackleman is aggressively genial and gleefully profane. After some more business with the ham-

mer, he tells a story about interrupting his morn­ing sex to call a friend, a philosophy professor, to settle a matter concern­ing Logos and pathos, two modes of persuasion in rhetoric. He then gen­tly ridicules my function as a writer, comparing it to being the pitcher on a Wiffle-ball team.

"I don't know, John," says Liddell with a grin. "The pitcher's the most impor­tant player in Wiffle ball."

Hackleman runs his pro­gram more like a martial-arts school than most fight teams do. "I love my team, but I won't tolerate any talking back," he says. "No attitude. I don't care if you're a big star making millions. You give me atti-

tude, I'll drop you flat. I demand respect, and I expect everyone to respect everyone else. But we have some fun out here."

He talks about how, years ago, he and Liddell would ride their motorcycles from gym to gym in the area, looking for com­petition. "It was in vain," he says. "They were good at what they did, but...." He breaks off his thought, the implication being that fighters from other gyms couldn't hang with him and Liddell.

When asked if Liddell, who once worked as a bouncer in 5L0, used to get into a lot of street fights, he says, "He got into the usual trouble that those of us who are fighters do, but he was always a tough, levelheaded kid."

At first this strikes me as evasive, but I decide it's actually on point. Most of the fighters I've met in 5LO have a leonine self-assurance and ease of bearing that I assume are marks of the profession. Even Hackleman and Liddell, (continued on page 131)

ICEMAN

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who appear to be polar opposites in per­sonality, often seem similar because of these qualities. I grasp that what the fight­ers have become through training and fighting is more significant than why they once fought. Whether they were overly belligerent or tough, levelheaded kids, now they fight because they love competi­tion. They're not ridding themselves of aggression or ironing out some childhood complex; they're having fun. I learn that Liddell, while growing up in Santa Bar­bara, was bullied in grammar school, which led him to study martial arts at the age of 12. But this no longer seems ger­mane to the man he is today. "I've got the greatest fighter in the world," Hackleman says of Liddell. "And he's the same now as when he used to sleep on my sofa and get $30 for fights in Bakersfield."

Thirty dollars? Who fights for $30? "They were amateur fights," Hackleman says. "Sometimes the promoter would float you gas money. Chuck always insisted on giving the money to me."

The ring in which Liddell first fought Hackleman is above the house, on a hill, but today the workout is held in a cage, a scaled-down Octagon that has been roofed against the weather and set below the house, partway down a steep, thicketed defile. Affixed to one of the support posts are metaf letters spelling out tiik pit.

Suddenly I'm surrounded by fighters. They seem to come out of the woods, out of nowhere. It's as if Hackleman

were running a camp for extremely fit Lost Boys. They sit outside the cage, talk­ing, wrapping their hands, putting on shin guards and headgear. That accom­plished, they begin to jog, making tight little circuits around the cage. Up above, by the side of the driveway, Von Flue and another fighter, Luke Riddering, swing those 20-pound hammers against huge tires from semis, a strengthening exer­cise during which they grow red-faced. Someone switches on a boom box and "Bad to the Bone" and "Who Do You Love?" pour over the hillside.

With about a dozen fighters inside, the cage is nearly full. They pair off accord­ing to Hackleman's dictates and begin to spar, both boxing and grappling. He stands outside the cage, snapping instructions: "Fast hands! Leg checks!" But he keeps things light arid jokes with the fighters. When one makes a misstep, Hackleman shouts happily that anyone who makes the same mistake should be "beaten, shot and sodomized." Later, when Scott Lighty, an up-and-coming fighter and Liddell's sparring partner for the past nine years, goofs up, Hackleman says he deserves to be "keistered."

Is this Logos, I wonder, or pathos?

The gimpiness Liddell displayed earlier disappears. He seems back in his element, sliding across the mat, winging punches, doing what his body was designed to do. Von Flue and Riddering stop their ham­mering and come down to the cage to work the heavy bags. It's violent activity, but because it's so controlled a peaceful air settles over the defile. The cool blue

California afternoon surrounds the cage; noises of exertion blend with the sounds of the wind and a dog barking in the dis­tance. The fighters' attitudes acquire a ritual formality. You can feel the organic principle of the place, the thing it has become as a result of hard work and train­ing. If 1 were to let my concentration slip a little, it would be easy to imagine the cage is full of Shaolin novices and all this is happening a long time ago.

San Luis Obispo, with a population of 45,000 and its laid-back California open­ness and style, may be the geographic incarnation of Liddell. He came here nearly 20 years ago to attend nearby Cal Poly, where he earned a degree in accounting and was a four-year starter on the wrestling team. Though he now drives a Hummer and a Ferrari F430 Spider, both gifts from the UFC, he says one thing he liked about the town was he could walk everywhere he had to go. As I stroll through the compact business district, I see Liddell's picture in a store window. He's holding a can of Xyience, a nutritional supplement for which he has a lucrative endorsement contract. The window of a hair salon contains a pho­tograph not of Liddell but of someone else wearing his signature Mohawk. In Mother's Tavern, a mahogany-paneled bar with ceiling fans, the patrons are happy to talk about Liddell and say good things. I don't meet anyone who holds a negative opinion of him.

Over steak and pasta that evening at the Mission Grill, an upscale bar and restaurant in downtown SLO, Liddell and a few friends, including Antonio Banuelos, his personal assistant, plan a cruise to Baja. Banuelos, his arms cov­ered in tattoos, an ace of spades con­spicuous on one wrist, is also a Fighter, a bantamweight in World Extreme Cagefighting, another organization, like Pride, that the UFC has absorbed.

Not long ago Floyd Mayweather Jr., the welterweight boxing champion, made disparaging remarks about the UFC. Liddell responded that he had a 135-pounder living in his house who would kick Mayweather's ass. Banuelos is that 135-pounder. He talks about his approach to an upcoming fight, but Liddell's next fight, with Keith Jardine, is not discussed except as a date after which Liddell will be available for the cruise. Though he enjoys being around fighters, Liddell tries to keep his personal life separate from train­ing and UFC business.

"Fighting's my job," he says. "I train hard, and I fight hard. People come up to me all the time and want to talk about fighting. 1 just tell them, 'I'm off now, you know.' They usually get it."

He gives me a mild yet meaningful look. I gel it. The talk turns to a wed­ding they all attended. Liddell usually seems relaxed, even when he fights, but

here, laughing with friends, a boyishness that is suppressed in other places comes out. He leans forward, eager to get in his licks as the group good-naturedly busts an absent friend's balls.

I sneak in a question about his budding acting career. Recently he played himself on an episode of Entourage, one of his favor­ite TV shows. Brad Marks told me Liddell was being considered for a role in the sequel to The Punishet; among other movies.

"I've had lots of meetings with studio people," Liddell says. "They've offered stuff, like a part in Wanted, but we're hav­ing trouble coordinating our schedules."

There is a downside to all this celeb­rity. He tells me about an encounter with Paris Hilton at a Vegas club.

"It was back when I was dating Willa Ford," he says, 'just after I started dating her, we were at a roped-off table, and Paris started dancing close to us, hanging her ass over the rope. She was dating one of Willa's old boyfriends, and she was getting in Willa's face about it. So I went and talked to her security guy, and he said, 'What can I do? She's got a mind of her own.'

""Coulda fooled me,' 1 said."

Liddell chuckles and says, "Anyway, she kept on doing it. Willa was getting mad. She was ready to beat the hell out of Paris. So I talked to the guy again. I told him if Willa goes at Paris, I know he's going to have to put his hands on her. Once that happens, it's on! We had other fighters at our table, like Matt Hughes and Tim Sylvia. I pointed to them and said, 'If I get involved, my friends are going to get involved.' He called in the club's security. They know me; they knew I wasn't the one causing problems."

What happened?

"We left," says Liddell. "It wasn't worth the trouble. A month or two later I was at the Playboy Mansion and Paris

came up to me, trying to__ I don't

know what she was after, but I told her to go fuck herself. Eventually Willa and Paris made up. It worked itself out." He makes an amused noise and says, "Shit like that usually does."

Being in a room with a group of men who can kick your ass as easily as they might swat a mosquito is inspiring and

daunting. You promise yourself you'll get in shape, maybe start running again, dig that old weight set out of the garage, check into personal trainers—and then you realize the day when you could get into the kind of shape these men are in has long since passed. The only six-pack you've been building is the pyramid of empties on the coffee table. You try to think of ways in which you might compete with them: vocabulary tests, the home Jeopardy! game, thumb wrestling. No, wait—thumb wrestling has too much risk of injury. You'd be much more comfortable with rock-paper-scissors. Then you realize there's no need for such agita, because no one here is competing with you.

The room is the gym area of SLC) Kickboxing, a martial-arts school owned by Liddell and his partner. Scott Adams. It's a wide, clean space domi­nated by a boxing ring and an open area covered with a blue wrestling mat, one wall lined with heavy bags. In the corridor leading to the gym is a bulletin board hung with some old newspaper clippings of Liddell's ac­complishments, but they're lost among fliers for local events and an upcom­ing fight in San Jose. There are no Ice­man T-shirts, posters or coffee cups. This difTers from boxing gyms that are homes to well-known Fighters, where a fighter's prominence is trumpeted and used as a publicity tool to benefit the other boxers. One thing I've learned about Liddell is that he wants to keep fame in perspective.

"It's all about the 30 or 40 people clos­est to you," he says. "The rest of it...." He makes a dismissive gesture.

A youth class has just ended when we arrive for Liddell's evening training session. (He trains twice a day, six days a week, and runs in the mornings.) As students empty into the corridor, Lid­dell warms up alone on the mat, and a solitary blond kid, maybe 14 or 15, works off to the side, slamming leg kicks into a heavy bag as if it's stand­ing in for his worst enemy, concentrat­ing on his technique and never once looking at Liddell. It's a perfect rep­resentation of the sport's continuity: I can envision the young Liddell training with such intensity.

That afternoon Liddell climbed into the boxing ring, where five spar­ring partners were lined up along the ropes, waiting. They came at him one after another, each fighting for a minute or so before switching off, not allowing him a break. Tonight the focus is on grappling, but the pattern is the same. Initially Liddell defends against takedowns, rebuffing his spar­ring partners as they shoot in on a leg, tossing them aside or forcing them to release his legs by bringing them up into a clinch. They start out at half speed, bantering, cuffing one another

like young bears at play, but soon you hear the impact of bodies and feet slid­ing over the mat. After this Liddell lies down, lets one of them secure a hold and tries to stand up. The fighters do their best to keep him down, but he manages to stand each time.

In sunbaked San Luis Obispo the house closest to the sun belongs to Liddell. It's high on a hill, a California ranch-style affair with glass doors in the back that open onto a large multilevel patio featuring a hot tub, a bar, a pool and—twisting down over huge boulders piled to form a wall—a waterslide, which Liddell says is great for his kids. Cade (who lives with his mom in Colorado) and Trista. eight and nine and a half years old, respectively. There's a nice informality to the atmosphere. Banuelos pads about in shorts and flip-flops, seeing to various household chores. Liddell's girl­friend, Erin Wilson, an attractive blonde, shows up while Liddell is in the kitchen, grousing about the strawberries in his takeout sushi and wondering why they mixed fruit in with the seafood. Trista can be heard talking upstairs. A black Chihua­hua named Bean bounces from a sofa to the floor and back.

Trista and Liddell go down the water-slide together a few times, making big

splashes. As they play in the pool, I see that, perhaps unconsciously, he's prac­ticing his footwork: stepping, sliding off, turning. Afterward he and Trista walk up to the hot tub, set on an elevated level of the patio amid an outcropping of boulders. Liddell soaks in the warm water, and while Trista darts back and forth between house and patio, he brags about her, saying she kicks his ass when they play fighting games on her Nin­tendo Wii. Trista returns with a pool toy, an enormous inflatable lobster she wants blown up. Liddell complies, and between stints of pufring he talks about the future of his sport.

"Most of the fighters in the UFC have a background in one discipline— wrestling, Muay Thai or jujitsu. Now we have six- and seven-year-old kids training in MMA. They're going to be monsters. They'll do amazing things. I'm glad I'll be retired. "

How much longer does he plan to fight?

"As long as my body holds up," he says. "I've got tendinitis in both shoulders and bursitis in both knees. I have to ice down my knees and shoulders-----"

"Four times a day," says Trista, not wanting to be left out of the conversa­tion. Then she dashes off again into the house.

Holding a thumb over the valve. Liddell takes a break from inflating the lobster and describes a visit to a veterans hospital. He's in awe of the soldiers and doesn't understand how they keep doing what they do. I sug­gest it relates to the bond forged between brothers in arms.

"Yeah," he says. "They all talked about how they couldn't wait to get back to their buddies."

Trista's back. She's growing impatient. The lobster is still about 95 percent deflated, bacon-red and Hat. stretched out across the surface of the hot tub like a waterlogged piece of roadkill. After another few minutes of blowing into the valve. Liddell says. "Daddy's getting a little light-headed." He tells Trista to ask Banuelos to help.

He settles into the tub, easing his bones and squinting against the strong sun. The image I have is of a lion at rest, kicked back in a patch of tall grass, scars on his flanks, a cub chewing on his ear, content to let others take care of the day-to-day business of survival. But when needed he'll be ready to deal with the situation.

I ask if he has to work up hatred for the fighters he's matched against.

"Emotion clouds your judgment." he says. "I've disliked only two fighters— Vernon White and Tito Ortiz—but I didn't let that get in the way."

His enmity with Ortiz dates from 2002, when Ortiz was the UFC light-heavyweight champ and Liddell was the number one contender. Ortiz gave excuse after excuse for not fighting him, and the rift has widened since then. Liddell's not eager to talk about Ortiz, whom he subsequently knocked out twice, but he does mention that he tore a medial collateral ligament before fighting Ortiz the second time.

"The doctors told me it was stable and I couldn't hurt it any worse." Liddell says. "As long as I could handle the pain, they told me to go ahead with the fight"

"Didn't it hamper your movement?" I ask.

"Yeah, but I'm a confident fighter," he says. "I know I've got the power to fin­ish a fight, even in the last minute of the last round."

We discuss the importance of confi­dence, and he says, "Quinton Jackson came to me after he'd had a couple of losses. He'd lost confidence and asked me what to do. I told him to watch some videotape and see what he was doing dif­ferently." He chops the water lightly with the edge of his hand.

"1 like Quinton," he says. "He's a nice guy, a very funny guy." He looks at me flatly, coolly, the look I've seen on his face when he fights, the Iceman surfacing from beneath his friendly manner.

"That doesn't mean I'm not going to try and tear his head off,' he adds.

"Now we have six- and seven-year-old kids training in

MM A," says Liddell.

'They're going to be monsters.

They'll do amazing things.

I'm glad I'll be retired."