Carlos Condit's UFC 195 fight journal, No. 5: Throwing guys through drywall

Carlos Condit

In the fifth of a multi-part series for MMAjunkie, veteran MMA storyteller Duane Finley takes us inside Carlos Condit’s UFC 195 camp, including holiday time with his family and a glimpse of his wild childhood.

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“I don’t know how much you dig on Lana Del Rey, but I want you to listen to the poem at the beginning of this song,” Carlos Condit says as he hands his phone over. “There is a hopeful sadness there that just hits you in the chest.”

There in that moment the man who just may be the baddest, meanest, nastiest thing walking at 170 pounds in MMA held nothing back as he mentally invested himself in the New York-born chanteuse. As the words of Del Rey’s “Ride” begin to breathe bittersweet regret through the speakers of his car, another layer of complexity to the soon-to-be welterweight title challenger is revealed.

Music has always been a muse that’s moved him, but it’s the sadness and the darkness laced throughout that magnetically draw him in. And therein lies the greater conflict of a man who by all measures has plenty to be happy about, and used to find frustration when the connection that should have come so easily just wasn’t there.

“I’ve always been prone to going somewhere else in my mind,” Condit says with ease. “There have been plenty of times in my life where I’ve actually caught myself not being in a moment where I should be or feeling what I know I should be feeling, and that type of out-of-body self-realization begs to be understood. I’d drift mentally, and self-doubt has a lot to do with it. Then no matter how hard someone tries to pull you out of it, that’s where you want to stay because there is a sick comfort in it. I wouldn’t call it depression or anything manic, but indifference has plagued me from time to time.”

The modern version of “The Natural Born Killer” stays so active his mental ledger never has time to run off into the negative. Yes, there are still lingering, albeit natural, doubts that come from the great uncertainties in life, but those things he’s driven toward are more than opposition; they are targets set for destruction. The best way for the 31-year-old Albuquerque product to stay ahead of his demons is to fight and push harder, but what he’s doing is far from running away.

To Condit, those battlefronts are varied but consistently engaged. He’s fully aware of how he’s been his own worst enemy at times, but the husk of that animal was shed and left somewhere in the void of the New Mexico desert long ago. In order to stay ahead, he needed to become much more efficient in his actions, and these days, he’s managed to push the majority of things he’s aiming at inside the cage, where he gets paid to fight down to the blood and bone. That’s as intense as things get in the sporting world, and Condit just happens to be one of the best to do what he does.

“This isn’t (expletive) racquetball we are playing out there,” Condit says with an eerie ease. “It’s blood for blood. Can I go out there and end you before you get the chance to do that to me? I know people talk about gladiator mentalities, but fighting is something we are wired to avoid and just so happens to come naturally to me.

“I’ve never gone into a situation where I’ve taken any type of joy from knocking out an opponent, but I’ll tell you what – when the blood is flowing and that thing is happening and I’m right in the middle of the storm, I’ve never felt more alive. May sound crazy to some, but that’s how it works for me.”

Everything earned

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and the Albuquerque sun has shattered into an explosion of pink and gray as if a stick of cotton candy were doused with gasoline and set ablaze, and that casts a portrait of neon fire against the mountain backdrop. Condit and his crew are on their way to their traditional family dinner at his grandmother’s house, and the mood is jovial after coming from a prior celebration on his wife’s side of the equation.

Condit and Seager are taking turns flipping the radio stations while their only child sits in the back playing games on the phone of the man who has been shadowing his father for the better part of a month. Sitting at a stoplight, a Macklemore song comes on, and the entirety of Team Condit breaks out into a spontaneous car jam complete with dance moves and rap flows. It is truly a sight to behold and one that is punctuated with the rangy welterweight working a smooth “cabbage patch” with a shoulder shimmy that keeps it just Albuquerque enough not to be a “white man’s groove.”

“Get it babe,” Seager urges from the passenger seat as the little man in back smiles at the silliness his daddy has invested in.

A short time and a few jams later, the Lexus cruises over what is left of the Rio Grande then pulls into a subdivision on the west side of the rough and tumble city, and suddenly things don’t appear to be so rough and tumble anymore. Things have become noticeably nicer with an air of easiness about the bi-level houses and multi-car garages.

Nevertheless, Condit lets out a bit of a humored sigh as he walks toward his grandmother’s house, and while the nostalgia in his eyes is evident, his gaze is completely void of fondness of any regard. The former WEC champion and ex-UFC interim titleholder was raised roughly 15 minutes away from where he currently stands but has plenty experience running the streets in that part of town.

“I grew up just around the way from here, and it’s not the easiest place to come back to,” Condit says as the wind kicks up fierce and what has been an unseasonably warm day up to that point breaks south. “One of my best friends literally lived just a few houses down from here, and we used to get into all types of (explative) in this area. This particular neighborhood is more well-to-do than anything else you’re going to find on this side of town, but just down the street (expletive) gets rough.

“We used to throw some pretty epic parties, and I did plenty of fighting on these streets.”

The word party slips off his lips in the strange way it sounds when someone attempts to transplant a word from a different language into an otherwise common phrase.

“Wild (expletive), bro,” he continues before reaching down to grab his son’s hand. “Can we get some shoes on this kid?”

In an incident that was totally unrelated at the time but relevant in the moment of Condit’s reflection, a patron at a local bar downtown had told me a story two days prior about the local legend. Apparently his sister went to high school with Condit, and she decided to throw a party one night while her parents were out of town. All had gone well until Condit and a mountain of a man got into a bit of a scuffle that resulted in the fighter drop-kicking said behemoth through the wall.

It’s just the kind of exaggeration you would expect to hear someone spout off about a professional fighter.

“My mom came home, and she was super-pissed,” the man said with laughter in his voice. “She left, and everything was fine, and then comes home, and there’s a huge (expletive) hole where a body went blasting through the drywall. She flipped out on my sister, but I told her not to get it fixed because the person who did it is going to be famous some day. Sure enough he is, and Mom missed the bus on that one because she had it patched up.”

When Condit is sourced on the specifics of that incident, he cracks a smile, and to no great surprise confirms the man’s story. “Yeah I remember that. Dude was huge, and he went right through that wall.”

While emotions are naturally elevated on days of holiday celebration, it’s immediately evident the Condit family carries an immense amount of love and admiration for one another. Furthermore, all titles and accomplishments beyond the commonalities of father, son, daughter, wife or grandma are left by the curbside. Condit’s success as a fighter or his impending title opportunity is never brought up once over the next five hours of merriment and laughter, nor is his father’s esteemed career in politics ever mentioned in a single instance.

Instead, father and son roll up their respective shirt sleeves and set about carving the turkey to be served, and then scatter about and catch up with all of the important people in their lives that the hustle and bustle of busy careers kept them from. The stories passed around are classic by every measure but ones they keep locked tightly between the bonds of their family.

From time to time Condit’s father shakes his head and looks down at the table to hide the smile that keeps the rest of his family from knowing they successfully ribbed the master, because he knows any acknowledgment of weakness means they’ll only pour it on thicker. With every hit, Condit nods in approval, and it’s clear in that moment the rigors of everything else in his his life have vanished as he’s truly locked in the moment.

An hour later, when the table tops are cleared and the stream of sink water is flowing to clean a mountainous stack of dishes, the man who could be the next welterweight king is standing in his grandmother’s backyard looking down at the sprawling lights of his home city that stretch out in the valley below.

“This view is so incredible,” he sighs as he continues to take it in. “I’ve sat out here a thousand times, and it never gets old to me. People love to knock on Albuquerque and say there isn’t anything beautiful about it, but that’s because they don’t see it the way I do. I’ve been all around the world because of fighting, and I’ve seen a ton of incredible places, but this place stacks up against a lot of them. It just takes a certain type of person to make it here, but it’s always been that way.

“Just like everywhere else, there are good spots and bad spots. Up in this neighborhood, things are nice, but trouble can be kicked up if you set your mind to it as we did on plenty of occasions. I never cared because I was always down for that type of crazy (expletive), but those memories are like ghosts to me now.”

Even though the well-lit ranch-style house in the not-so-rough-and-tumble neighborhood would become an afterthought within the hour, the time between is spent with the most intimate conversations of the night taking place. “Turkey fatigue” has wiped out a good percentage of the Condit clan, but father and son still have plenty of gas left in the tank. Dad sits in a comfortable chair with his ear bent to his son who is leaning over from the perch of the fireplace, and while their conversation is private, Condit’s (30-8 MMA, 7-4 UFC) body language and motions suggest he’s talking about his upcoming fight with Robbie Lawler (26-10 MMA, 11-4 UFC) at UFC 195.

His eyes widen and his fists clench as he emphasizes each statement, and his father nods in approval to the information his son slides his way. This is the true family dynamic in Condit’s world in full view, and just like he said earlier in the evening standing on the backyard overlook, it’s a view he’s seen a thousand times before.

The lighter side of darkness

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and Condit is standing in his kitchen cutting up vegetables. In addition to fighting, reading the works of Chuck Palahniuk and the late great Hunter S. Thompson and music and the culinary arts are some of the welterweight knockout artist’s favorite pastimes. He’s an absolute enthusiast when it comes to using food to fuel the body, and that is a passion shared with his significant other as Seager has an extensive background in such things.

“Most people think corn is a vegetable,” Condit says as he goes to the icebox to grab a bundle of leafy greens. “It’s a grain and not a very healthy one at that. Back in primitive times, it was essential to the human diet because it could be grown in abundance and had some many applications, but it’s been genetically modified so much in recent years and the government has found so many different ways to monetize those applications. That’s why so much corn is produced annually because they put it in everything.”

While he continues to talk about GMOs and the darker gambits at play in the world, he spontaneously breaks out into some strange walk that looks like a cross between Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Thompson’s ether walk in “Fear and Loathing” and a zoo animal about to attack an unsuspecting tourist. His arms swing, and his elbows tilt up sharply with each twist, and it’s not until he throws a few random head bangs in that it becomes clear what he’s doing.

“That’s my mosh-pit walk,” he laughs as he snaps back to his upright and sane looking posture. “I know it looks like every other crazy mosher out there. but the elbows actually have a practical purpose. I’ve gotten my nose broken more times moshing at concerts than I have fighting, and that’s pretty nuts when you actually think about it.

When Condit talks about music, something inspired ignites in him, and it comes as no surprise that actually getting involved in the ruckus is a common part of his concert-going experience. From the stories he tells, his younger days were filled with all-out madness from the chaos of the pit, and he even held a security job at a local venue just so he could take in shows. But as his career took off and his profile became elevated, jumping into the insanity of a thousand thrashing bodies was something he had to dial back on a bit.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love to get in there and tear (expletive) up, but I have to be careful these days,” Condit says. “I’ll be at a show, and someone will recognize me and come up and be like, ‘Holy (expletive), it’s Carlos Condit! Come on and get in this pit with us, dude.’ I know I probably shouldn’t because plenty could go wrong, but I just can’t help myself sometimes, you know? You just have to let the music take over and get to it.”

And while getting caught up thinking of his past evokes those things he prefers to keep at bay or at the tip of his mental barrel, it is times when he lets go and allows himself to connect in the moment that keep things moving in a positive direction. For a man filled with so much drive and ambition, dreams and aspirations, yet holds himself to such an extreme standard, that disconnect can occur in a flash and without warning of any sense.

That said, it is something he’s consciously aware of, and one of the many things in his life he’s working on because above all else—above becoming an undisputed champion or the best husband, father and friend he can be—self-progression is what matters the most because it will take care of all things. When Condit is at his best, he’s an unstoppable force, and the pursuit of that man is one that will never cease.

Also see:

• Carlos Condit’s UFC 195 fight journal, No. 1: Getting weird in Albuquerque
• Carlos Condit’s UFC 195 fight journal, No. 2: Everything moves in circles
• Carlos Condit’s UFC 195 fight journal, No. 3: Along with Cerrone, a wolf at the door
• Carlos Condit’s UFC 195 fight journal, No. 4: The kid who bawled under the bleachers

For more on UFC 195, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

Follow Duane Finley on Twitter at @DuaneFinleyMMA.