LONG BEACH, Calif. — The father, a frank storyteller, won't stop talking.
It's as if Antonio McKee knows his words, shaped by a life of hard truths, will cling to anyone who listens. And in a way this is what he wants. Hearing McKee recount his upbringing is stunning. True, too, the ease with which he shares memories of traumatic events.
I'm supposed to be reporting on McKee's 21-year-old son, A.J., a fighting prodigy who shows all the signs of becoming a great mixed martial artist. It's quite clear, however, that you can't get to know A.J. without first attempting to understand his father.
"My dad is a realist," A.J. told Bleacher Report. "Regardless of whether people like what he's saying or not, it's the truth. And the truth hurts."
Antonio loves taking history, including his own, and confronting people with it. Perhaps that explains his ability to convey unimaginable acts as cold fact. There's something appealing to him about treating the truth (as he knows it) as a blunt-force instrument. He deciphers people's mannerisms and facial expressions while they squirm under the weight of his words, and it's the underlying discomfort that amuses him.
"When I was growing up, that's how I had to survive because I was dealing with criminals," Antonio said. "I was dealing with drug addicts. I was dealing with gangsters, and I was also dealing with police officers. All of this was slammed on me at once, so I just developed that as a technique. I read body movement, language, and I love looking people in their eyes to see what kind of personality they are."
Tales and tangents and world views pour from him as he sits at a desk in the apartment he shares with A.J., his teenage daughter and pregnant girlfriend.
Dayton, Ohio. Nashville, Tennessee. Long Beach, California.
These are the locations of his life, torment and tenacity.
Antonio McKee copes with the thought that at the age of 12 his mother was raped by his 19-year-old father. She didn't tell him that. Neither did his dad. But someone did, and that's what he believes.
He detailed the death of his grandfather by the hand of his father. And then, a few weeks later in 1971, the death of his father's wife (not his mother) following an accidental shooting at a bar during a domestic incident. She held his father's gun, angry because she thought he was cheating on her. He grabbed it. It went off, and she was shot in the head.
Then there's the sexual molestation he suffered as a young child by his mother's best friend, whom he claimed smothered him with a pillow to invoke arousal. Antonio McKee expresses this freely; he uses it as a bridge to discuss the brutality of white slave owners in the American South.
This experience, he said, helped him to empathize with the pain of others. Life. How he coped. What he learned. In time, the intensity of the recollections normalized because of the way he chose to treat them.
Pain expressed like it drips off the page of a Quentin Tarantino script. Shocking, violent, yet somehow detached from the awful reality of the thing.
As he discussed the moments that determined what kind of man he became, my thoughts kept turning to the future.
After an hour, I felt shell-shocked walking into their kitchen for a glass of water; Antonio, meanwhile, was ready to return to the gym for an evening conditioning session with A.J., who had a fight lined up in five weeks, Dec. 2, against an opponent who was supposed to test him.
Earlier in the day, following a sparring session, A.J. showed me around Long Beach. Memories lingered on corners and in alleys. Like his dad/best friend/trainer/adviser/mentor, he shared stories of hardships and triumphs.
"I want people to see me as that guy who's been through some things that you don't let affect you," said A.J., who signed with Bellator MMA early last year after the promotion was offered his services prior to his first professional bout. "You have a choice at the end of the day. Everyone has a choice to do right and do wrong. I grew up with a lot of friends that were doing wrong, and I always tried to steer the other way and get them to go the other way. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't."
The hope of every decent parent is to provide a better life for their children than they had for themselves, and there's no question that Antonio has done this for his son.
"There's nobody looking out for kids that's like this," Antonio said. "He has ADHD. ... Oh, give him some Ritalin, and he's going to be OK. I said I won't medicate him. What I did was I had him taught. I pulled him out of school and had him taught five subjects within the hour. He jumped up two grade levels in one semester."
Antonio paid a teacher $26,000 to work with is son four months out of the year.
Hopping between subjects every 10 minutes to keep things fresh—this is how Antonio also learned to instruct his son in the gym. It wasn't enough to wrestle, or strike, or focus on one particular move at a time. He had to approach it from all sides. Making training multilayered made it easier to digest.
"What I realized is guys like me and my kids have to stay busy and entertained," Antonio said. "That's when I really looked to train him right, left, right, left. I never let anyone know because no one would believe me. They're not going to believe me until he's undefeated and not getting touched."
Antonio and I first chatted about doing a profile on his son in August, the night A.J. won his fifth fight as a pro 32 seconds into Round 2. It marked the first time in his career that an opponent had made it past the five-minute mark.
Thus far, A.J.'s trajectory as a fighter appears to be nothing less than special. Groomed by his dad and built for a purpose he is eager to fulfill. Home-schooled in the ways of ass-kicking, raised around fighters. A.J. will tell anyone who listens that he is in a rush to prove he's the best mixed martial artist in the world. The best ever. A young GOAT. Smart, handsome and charismatic, he possesses everything, including a veteran's bag of tricks.
A.J.'s promoter, Bellator President Scott Coker, said the kid is "very unorthodox. He punches and kicks from all different angles. He does the craziest stuff in the cage. That's what makes him difficult to train for.
"I think that he really enjoys the combat aspect of it. Here's a kid, a young kid who grew up in a fighting household. His father being a wrestler and a very successful mixed martial artist. And to be honest I think he has a lot more tools than his dad. He's had great success. He is chomping at the bit. He is ready to go."
Coker matched A.J. with Emmanuel Sanchez, a rugged featherweight, for a bout that was supposed to take place Dec. 2 in Oklahoma. Yet for the second consecutive fight, A.J.'s opponent backed out. Bellator officials said Sanchez strained multiple muscles in his back, but Antonio claimed that was bogus. Sanchez was scared, Antonio said, and wormed his way out because knew what was in store for him.
Opponents don't mean much yet to A.J.'s dad. Until the money is right, Antonio is content to let A.J. mature and battle foes with similar records. So in place of Sanchez stood the strapping Ray Wood. The contest turned out to be tougher than the McKee clan expected, lasting three full rounds. During an impressive opening period Wood connected with several hard shots that tested A.J.'s chin, rocking him at least once. It was the kind of bout that any young fighter needs as they progress up the ladder.
"He's a tough kid that will fight till the end, and I know that runs in his family blood," Antonio said of his son. "Now he realized some issues that he has to fix before he's a legit champ, but we are on the right path."
This is a track the boy has followed since the age of three, which is one of the reasons A.J. calls the cage his "playpen."
What a year it's been for young featherweight prospect AJ McKee (3-0)! Follow him right here: @AJMcKeeJrhttps://t.co/SSAvK7FhnZ
— Bellator MMA (@BellatorMMA) December 15, 2015
"I wanted to be a fighter since I can remember," A.J. said. "I was like, Dad, you let me fight or I'm fighting in the streets. It was a choice."
A.J.'s fighting style is fluid. The lanky, athletic featherweight wrestles and strikes and mixes technique in smooth and dangerous ways. Antonio, trainer to several top-echelon fighters including Quinton Jackson and Emanuel Newton, knows what he has in his son. Unlike A.J., Antonio was a grinder. He grounded opponents to boos from the crowd and wasn't regarded as a hot commodity among promoters or fans. Now 46 years old, Antonio hasn't fought since 2014. If he never steps foot in a cage again, he'll retire with a 29-6-2 record.
"There's a lot of I've seen in his career that was holding him back and holding him down," A.J. said of his father. "He's already walked this path. Of course, he's not going to tell me to do anything he wouldn't do himself or redo the right way himself. When it comes to the fight game, I don't think anyone knows it better than him."
Antonio got a relatively late start in MMA and never could bring himself to play the political game that is sometimes required for success. He fought once in the UFC, which released him following a split-decision loss to Jacob Volkmann in 2011. His brief time around the UFC was uncomfortable, and he likely didn't help himself by telling executives what he thought of them.
Hint: not much, and the truth (as he knows it) hurts.
"That's why his style is the way it is," Antonio said of his son. "I can take credit for some of it, but you know I just don't want him to suffer like I've seen other fighters suffer. There's a lot of damage done to these fighters that you guys don't see. There's a lot of guys on steroids shooting up stuff. We're doing everything right. If this is truly what he wants, I want him to be the best that he can be."
Antonio designed A.J.'s exciting fighting style to be what his wasn't. So far that has panned out, yet despite his son's ability, talent and entertainment factor there's the lingering concern that it can all fall apart in an instant.
Currently, Antonio's biggest worry regarding A.J. revolves around his kid enjoying pot too much. Antonio repeatedly tells A.J. that marijuana can ruin a fighter's reflexes and mess with timing, especially early in a career when rhythm and movement need to be the bedrock of success. Antonio said he's never smoked it and never will.
The father remains leery of what lurks in dark corners. He keeps a house full of knives and guns just in case.
"I used to always feel something was going to happen, and I gotta be ready," Antonio said. "I grew up and watched people die left and right. Death was outside."
If A.J. can steer clear of distractions—drugs, women and topics surrounding race, which Antonio believes would only prevent mainstream audiences from buying into his son, a mixed child with a mother of Lebanese and Russian descent—the father is convinced that the son will rank among the best fighters in the sport.
Highly marketable. Highly compensated. Highly regarded.
A.J. has promised his dad he will stay on track. He's so young, though—only three years removed from graduating Long Beach Polytechnic High School—that expecting him to live up to that hardly seems realistic, especially since money and notoriety are already a part of his life.
"When he's done, I want him to walk away and have income coming in that gives him financial freedom," Antonio said. "That's it. I don't care about anything else other than being a good person and a responsible man. Other than that, I just want him to be successful where I wasn't successful."
The McKees hoped the storyline of a father-son combo fighting on the same card would entice Bellator to promote both of them on Jan. 21 at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif. Coker said he was open to the possibility, but A.J. injured his left hand during the victory over Wood and won’t be able to make the date. They’ll have to wait.
A third-generation fighter—some parts his granddad (Golden Gloves boxer), some parts his dad (street fighter and wrestler) and some parts, well, the natural—A.J. is more measured than his father. More sympathetic. Smoother.
Antonio chimed in to make a point. He has conjured greatness for his son. But he has also dreamed about his demise, a mangled corpse in the charred remains of a car wreck. If A.J. had his way, he would take part in a second career as a rally car driver. It's a vision that haunts Antonio, who knows the fast lane is where A.J. strives to be—like many young men, reckless is where he ends up when he outpaces the comfort zone.
A.J. has totaled four cars, including his dad's dream machine, though the young fighter is quick to note that two weren't his fault. Nonetheless, insurance rates skyrocketed, and he hasn't driven much lately.
This, again, is the McKee Law of Attraction. Karma. Physics. However Antonio feels like framing it, this is life rebounding, energy repurposed.
"When I was little, I used to break into cars and steal radios," Antonio said. "I tagged a couple of cars. So when those cars got destroyed and my son was OK, I was like, you know what, this is what you did when you were little, and this is the payback.
"I realize when I lose control, it's dangerous. That's why I do what I do to him. He has to be able to control that. The only time he loses control is when he's in that ring. But he has to be able to hear keywords to come back. That's when I tell him we have our own code of talking, and I realize he's just like me. He can do whatever he wants. It's in his blood."
A.J. (and his sister and the baby on the way) could also be seen as energy and karma and physics. For Antonio, they are purpose. The purpose. He is the father he always hoped would be there for him.
"We've always been friends, and I've also been dad," Antonio said. "I don't know any other way. I've seen other fathers. They push their kid too far. The parent that does stuff like that never did it. They never accomplished anything like that in life, so they're trying to live a lot through their children. He's going to do things I wished I could've done if I had a dad. I told him I'm kind of jealous.
"I got something out of life that I didn't think I'd ever get, and that's my offspring doing the right thing. I'm good with that."
