Pugilists at rest: How one generation of MMA fighters is learning to let go

Chris Lytle

For Rich Clementi, pain is a part of everyday life. After 14 years as a pro fighter, his spine is in bad shape, his lumbar vertebrae “pretty much shot.” Bending over at the waist is difficult bordering on impossible some days. He wakes up each morning knowing that the hurt will only continue.

“The pain is pretty bad, to be honest,” the 37-year-old Clementi told MMAjunkie. “I’d put it between a 6 and an 8 (out of 10) on a daily basis.”

Clementi isn’t the only castmember from the UFC’s one and so far only “comeback” season of “The Ultimate Fighter” who’s hurting these days. Travis Lutter underwent a three-level fusion in his neck. Matt Serra had a rib removed. Jorge Rivera doesn’t bother trying to list all his injuries, but rather just laughs it off and says, “I’m all messed up. I’m starting to fall apart now.”

But that’s MMA retirement for you. What did you expect, a gold watch and a 401(k)? This isn’t that kind of life, and they knew that when they signed up for it.

Still, the “TUF 4? fighters represent a class that straddled two different generations of MMA. Most have called it quits. A couple, like Patrick Cote and Pete Spratt, seem determine to fight on. But as the rest settle into life after MMA, they provide current fighters with a glimpse of the challenges, comforts, rewards and regrets that are waiting once they step out of the cage for good.

What does the retired life look like for the regular guys, the working class of MMA fighters who didn’t get multi-million dollar payouts or cushy do-nothing UFC jobs to ease their transition to civilian life? What does it tell us about the inevitable reality that most of today’s fighters will eventually confront, many of them a lot sooner than they think?

• • • • •

Knowing When

Matt Serra

Charles McCarthy: Everybody has different reasons for doing it. I’m a very competitive person and I wanted to show that I could be the very best in the world at something. I wanted to be UFC champion, and eventually I just had to accept that that was not in the cards for me. I’m a slow white guy who’s not explosive or super fast or anything like that. I’m just a hard-worker who’s good at jiu-jitsu, and that’s not enough.

Chris Lytle: I don’t feel like it was a choice. I felt like I had to do it when I did it. There didn’t seem to be any other way at the time.

Pete Sell: I got to a point where I was in my 30s thinking, ‘Man, I need to do something.’ It just wasn’t panning out. The money for me, it wasn’t anything I could live off. … I remember before my last fight, a good friend of mine told me, ‘Do you realize that this is fight week, and for your last two fights all you’ve been talking about is making money? You don’t even talk about the fight.’ I was like, ‘You know, he’s right.’ I was doing it because that’s just what I did – I fought. Your mind goes elsewhere. You don’t really think about why you’re still doing it.

Matt Serra: When I had to get my rib removed, that helped me to think, ‘OK, what’s really important here?’

Jorge Rivera: I didn’t want to keep doing it just to get a paycheck. I always want to be relevant in anything I’m doing. I don’t want to be someone else’s stepping stone. It was just time to quit. I didn’t see anything too positive coming out of continuing to fight.

Rich Clementi: My last fight, that was a guy that I should’ve beat. It was close, and I still think I should have won a decision, but when I lose because my body just isn’t holding up, that’s tough. I have sons that watch me fight. I don’t want to lose just because my body can’t perform like my brain and my heart can. I just felt at that point, I’m doing an injustice not only to myself, but also to my sons and my family name. I felt like, why am I still doing this? Knowing the condition my body is in, is it worth me pushing an extra two or three years? And for what? Is it more important for me to get on TV a few more times, or is it more important for me to be able to wrestle with my sons in a few years when they’re going out for wrestling practice?

• • • • •

The thing about this line of work is that nobody tells you when it’s over. The UFC will tell you when you have to leave that particular party. Your coaches will maybe tell you when they’re done helping you. But there are always other fight promoters, always other coaches. You could go on more or less indefinitely, or at least as long as your body will let you.

For most fighters, the end comes due to a combination of factors. Their bodies start breaking down as their career prospects grow dimmer. It’s often tough to say which comes first.

For Din Thomas, it was partly physical, but also psychological. When he saw Anderson Silva, a man who had once been something of an MMA god, not to mention a contemporary, follow a knockout loss with a bone-snapping injury, he knew it was time – even if there were other options in theory.

“I had been contemplating retirement, but when I saw (Silva) go down, that was really it,” Thomas said. “And physically, I felt like I was winding down. I saw all these guys taking (testosterone replacement therapy) and stuff to be able to compete, and I didn’t want to do that. I feel like you’ve got to pass the torch on at some point. If you need drugs to compete, then it’s too late for you. It’s over.”

Travis Lutter

For Lutter, who won the middleweight “TUF 4? tournament and was rewarded with a shot at Silva (a bout for which he would eventually miss weight, making it a non-title affair), the decision to hang it up felt like it had been taken out of his hands. After his last fight, a knockout loss to Rafael Natal in 2010, his neck “just never felt right,” Lutter said.

For Clementi, it happened in stages. For one thing, there was the persistent problem with his ribs.

“People who know me know that my ribs have kind of always popped out,” Clementi said. “Two out of my last three fights, I had four ribs pull off my sternum. One of the fights I won, but another one it happened on the first exchange. I lost a decision, and it was brutal. I had to pretty much hold my breath the entire fight.”

Then there was his ankle, which has bothered him for years, a fact which he unwittingly broadcasted to future opponent Marcin Held when they shared a dressing room before they ever met in the cage.

“I was arguing with the commission about taping my ankle, and he was sitting right there,” Clementi said. “I didn’t even think about it at the time, but later, when I fought that kid, he knew I had problems with my ankle. As soon as the fight started, it was the first thing he went for. I couldn’t believe I made a rookie mistake like that.”

The worst, though, is his spine. Due to a birth defect involving his L5 vertebrae, Clementi said, his hip “just doesn’t work right.” That, in turn, has affected his spine, which he insists is an under-examined part of the body in a sport obsessed with head injuries and pre-fight brain scans.

“All my discs are dehydrated and bulging, and now I deal with a lot of pain from mixed martial arts,” Clementi said. “But when I found out my diagnosis, it helped me be OK with that decision to retire. As a competitor, I don’t ever like to give up. It’s just not in my nature. But this helped me realize, yeah, it needs to be over.”

And then it was over. It was as simple as saying the words out loud. But then what?

• • • • •

Life Beyond the Cage

Din Thomas

Serra: Guys get bored. Even if you have enough money, where do you go? What do you do? That’s why a lot of guys fight longer than they should, because it’s all they know.

Lytle: The real transition for me was me being around my family a little more. To be honest, it wasn’t all just breezy. You think it’s going to be like, ‘OK everybody, I’m here. Put me into your lives.’ It wasn’t that easy. The people in my life were used to what they were used to, which was me being really busy, off training all the time. It took a little more time to ease back into their lives.

Thomas: That was something I always felt I was pretty good at, was putting things in the right perspective and being a well-rounded individual. I know a lot of fighters who, they fought and they never really did anything but wake up, train, and fight. Then when their time is done, they don’t really know what to do. They have no school, aren’t really that knowledgeable about the game, and can’t teach it. You can pull the wool over people’s eyes for a little while if you have enough of a name, but eventually they’ll figure out that you don’t know what you’re doing.

Rivera: I looked at the guys who came before me. What did they do when they were done? Quarterbacks become coaches. Fighters become trainers. I can teach a lot more than I can actually do, so now I’m up at 6 a.m., running this gym. I do the sales. I run a business. It’s a job, dude. It’s definitely a job. This is how I pay my bills and take care of my family. I’ve got to make this work or I’m in a lot of trouble.

McCarthy: The way I came up, our coaches always told us that would be the next step, was opening gyms. We didn’t ever think we’d make much from fighting. The problem is, how many people can open gyms before you’ve saturated the market? You’d think that if you fought in the UFC and people know your name, your gym will be successful. But really, your stiffest competition isn’t other MMA gyms run by other fighters – it’s John’s Taekwondo down the street.

• • • • •

Gym owner. It’s by far the most common occupation among this group of retired fighters. For some, like Rivera, who owns the Rivera Athletic Center in Millford, Mass., it’s become something of an unexpected passion. At a recent UFC event where his fighter John Howard won a unanimous decision over Siyar Bahadurzada, Rivera could be found in the media room afterward, demonstrating a technical detail to Howard on the carpet of the MGM Grand.

According to Rivera, he started his gym in 2006, when he realized “the career was winding down, and I’d never given any thought to what was going to come next.”

One fighter who thought far in advance was Serra, who opened his first jiu-jitsu gym with his first two UFC checks, following a knockout loss to fellow “TUF 4? castmember Shonie Carter in May 2001 and a decision win over Yves Edwards later that same year.

“It was a modest academy,” said Serra. “I needed the win bonus (against Edwards) to be able to afford it, but I ended up winning and that helped me open my first academy. So basically, what I did was set myself up for what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If I had all the money in the world, I’d still be at my gym teaching, because I enjoy it. Whether it’s kids or UFC fighters, I just love spreading the art, the art that my instructors spread to me.”

Charles McCarthy

But to hear McCarthy tell it, opening up a gym isn’t a one-size-fits-all fix for retired fighters. He should know. He owned two of them, and did well at it. He made far more money than he ever had as a fighter, he said. Some months he grossed $30,000 with his Florida-based academies.

“I could have never made that fighting,” McCarthy said. “At the time, I thought it would be the thing I’d do for the rest of my life, but it didn’t really work out for me that way. I got about eight years and two gyms in, and I found myself at a real crossroads.”

For McCarthy, the biggest obstacle was boredom. He went from training to fight in a cage in front of thousands of people, to spending all day, every day confined by the same four walls, teaching the same rudimentary lessons to beginners.

That’s because people who own martial arts gyms face a difficult choice, he said. They can put all their energy into training actual, aspiring fighters, but that population is relatively small and typically doesn’t include people who have much disposable income to spend on gym dues. Their coaches get a cut of their fight purses, but try living on a 10- or even 20-percent cut of some fighter’s $800 payday after two months of working with him every day.

On the flip side, they can gear their business toward regular people, weekend warriors, jiu-jitsu enthusiasts who show up after work and pay their membership fees on time.

“But you have a lot of turnover in those gyms and a lot of new students, so you’re essentially teaching the exact same lesson for the rest of your life,” McCarthy said. “You’re torn because you love jiu-jitsu and love teaching jiu-jitsu, but at the same time you’re really bored. What I did to alleviate that boredom was I gravitated toward the fighters.”

That eventually led McCarthy to his current job as a fighter manager and co-owner of Guardian Sports Group.

“I think I get all the best parts of the fight game now, and I don’t have to cut weight or get hit in the head every day,” McCarthy said. “I don’t miss that s–t at all.”

Rich Clementi

Clementi is another fighter who’s kept a hand in the gym business, but his primary career these days is in medical sales. It’s a field he got into when he began to seek out more information about pain management, he said, just hoping to find something that would make his day-to-day life more livable.

“I figured since I’m so busted up, I’d go right to the horse’s mouth and learn as much as I can,” Clementi said. “I’m pretty passionate about people’s bodies that are all messed up like mine, so it’s really meaningful work.”

It also helps that he makes “way more f—ing money now” than he did fighting, he said.

“That’s one thing I could go on and on about,” Clementi said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for what this sport has brought me. But financially? It’s a joke. Even if you make $50,000, by the time you pay your taxes you’re down to about $30,000. Then you’ve got 20 percent in management fees, and that’s off the original 50. You factor in your coaches and other stuff, and even if you fight three or four times a year, at best you’re making four or five grand a month. For the pain that you put your body through, you almost just have to want to do it for the glory, because financially it’s laughable.”

Almost without exception, the retired fighters in the bunch said their financial situations had improved dramatically after they quit fighting. Some of that is a result of the lower payouts that fighters from that generation had to look forward to, and some is because, even today, the big money is reserved for those at the top.

As McCarthy put it, there were fighters back then who made enough to retire on, “but the rest of us looked at them like they won the lottery.”

According to Sell, who now trains fighters part-time and also works for a chimney supply company in Long Island, N.Y., for his victorious UFC debut against Phil Baroni in 2005 he made $2,000 to show and another $2,000 to win.

When McCarthy fought Michael Bisping on the main card of UFC 83 in 2008, he estimated that he took home less than $10,000 after being taxed by both Canada and the U.S.

“When I was a single guy with no kids, I would have been thrilled with that because I would have fought for free,” McCarthy said. “But when I got home and assessed how my gym had been doing as I was going through training camp, I realized I basically broke even, only now I can’t hear out of my right ear after Bisping hit me and I’m pissing blood. Then it’s like, this doesn’t feel like a smart way to raise my family.”

Lutter, who opened his first gym in the late ’90s, well before he debuted in the UFC, attributes his improved financial situation to letting go of one form of competition and embracing another.

“I’ve put a lot of the energy that I used to put into fighting into my gyms, improving them and making them more efficient,” Lutter said. “A guy like me has got to be competitive with something. Since I can’t compete physically anymore, I kind of threw myself into learning how to be a better gym owner, making things run smoother, getting my retention up, just doing all the things that actually make the gym money.”

Thomas, who now helps trains fighters like UFC welterweight Tyron Woodley, said that even though his financial situation has improved since retiring earlier this year, it doesn’t always feel like it.

“When you’re fighting, you get those big checks, this chunk of money all at once,” Thomas said. “Now I don’t get that anymore, but the money is a lot more consistent, and it’s a lot more reliable.”

Still, the money is only part of the equation. The other part is changing their way of thinking.

Take Spratt, for example, who initially retired after losing a fight to Tim Means in September 2013, but later decided to amend that to a year’s vacation, set to end this fall.

“Right now, I’m bored,” Spratt said. “With this layoff, I’m bored. I’ve fought for the last 15 years, and I know some of those other guys just can’t physically get back in the cage, but I’m not at that point.”

Eventually though, he knows he will be. The hard part for many fighters is finding a way to be content with it, especially when the lights go down and the cheers go up for someone else inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena. That’s when it sinks in that they’ll spend the rest of their lives on the outside of the cage, and for some that feeling stings more than others.

• • • • •

Filling the Void

Jorge Rivera

Lytle: I remember not too long ago when I was at a fight, cornering Matt Mitrione, and I was talking to Joe Rogan at the weigh-ins and saying, ‘This kind of sucks. I feel like I should be weighing in right now.’ But it’s like, I know I’m not willing to do it, even though I feel like I should. But as Joe told me then, ‘Well, it’ll probably get a little easier tomorrow, then a little easier the day after that.’ And it has. There’s a lot that I know I’m not willing to go through anymore, but it takes time to get used to it and realize, this is the way things should be for me now.

Clementi: The thing that I struggled with at first is, you think that fighting is your identity. It’s really not, though. Fighting is just an expression of your identity. I think some guys don’t understand that. You can take the same person that you are and apply it to other things, and you feel that same feeling.

Rivera: It’s hard not to miss it, because I know you hear a lot of negative things, but this s–t literally saved my life. Not only that, it gave me a good life. It made me a better person, a more aware person.

Lutter: I miss fighting, but I don’t. It’s kind of a love-hate relationship for me. I miss the competitiveness of it, the training, stuff like that. I don’t miss dealing with fight promotions and the political things you have to deal with. I didn’t like being famous. The little bit of fame that I had, I didn’t like that. I’d prefer that people leave me alone. I never loved strangers coming up to me. I always tried to be nice about it, but I like the fact that it doesn’t happen much anymore. When it does happen, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot about that.’

McCarthy: What I tell fighters now is, enjoy every moment of this, because it’s fleeting. You’re getting to do what you love to do, and every day you live it is one less day you’ll get in it. It’s a fleeting thing, so enjoy it more than you worry about the negatives that come along with it. Enjoy it and know that at any time the ride could be over, so have a plan for that.

Thomas: When you’re backstage and you hear Burt Watson say, ‘We rolling!,’ you know it’s on. When you come out of that dressing room and go through that curtain, you can’t put a price tag on that energy and that experience. I don’t think I’d really still want to get in there and fight afterward, but I still appreciate that experience.

Serra: Every time I corner someone, every time I walk out there, I miss it. Dana White said it best once when I was talking to him about it. He said, ‘It’s like telling a woman she’ll never give birth again.’ That’s how special the feeling is of being in that cage and fighting in front of thousands. That feeling is something you’re not going to get anywhere else.

• • • • •

There’s a reason so many of the fighters who call it quits are back in the cage again within a year or two. It’s not just the money, though, as Lytle said when discussing the far-fetched prospect of a boxing match with former champion Roy Jones Jr., “another paycheck would always be nice.”

Really though, it’s the empty space it leaves in your life. After waking up every morning with a singular goal, it’s hard to know what to do with yourself once that goal and all the things that go with it have vanished.

Plus, for many fighters, it’s how they are known to just about everybody in their lives. It might even be how they know themselves. If they aren’t the fighter, then who are they?

This is one reason why comebacks are so popular, or at least the comforting idea of them. Even among fighters who aren’t actively trying to make it happen, most who were in any way physically capable had at least one hypothetical on their list, one specific condition that, if met, might bring them back into action.

For Lytle, it’s the chance to box Jones. For Serra, maybe a fight in Madison Square Garden, assuming MMA is ever officially sanctioned in his home state of New York. For Thomas, a fight “with another old guy,” like Renzo Gracie.

For others, like Lutter, injuries have spoiled even the fantasy of a glorious return.

“To be honest, I don’t ever really think about it,” Lutter said. “My neck is pretty messed up.”

Pete Sell

For Sell, it’s something he hasn’t ruled out. He still gets on the mats and spars with legit pros on a regular basis, he said, “and I do all right, believe me.”

“But you see those old rock and roll guys, in their 40s, playing in some bar like they’re going to get on MTV,” Sell said. “I’m a realist. I fought and did my thing. I moved on. If I was able to come back and do a little more, cool. But all my eggs aren’t in that basket anymore.”

As for McCarthy, his eggs are as far out of the basket as they can be, and with good reason.

“I’m at [American] Top Team a lot,” McCarthy said. “I see them training. These guys are f—ing killers, man. It’s not like you can roll off your couch and go fight guys like that. These guys will kill you if you do that. I’m a hobbyist now. Plus, I never liked training camps even back then. That stuff sucks, and to go through it again for the kind of money we’d make, I mean, it’s just not worth it.”

There are other options besides getting beaten down by a 25-year-old assassin inside a cage, though. Serra has considered them. Maybe he’d do a jiu-jitsu tournament some day, he said. Maybe. But one thing you can’t fake is the enthusiasm for competition, he added. If you try, “people will sniff that out.”

“You’ve got to be honest with yourself and say, ‘If I do come back, I’m not going to be the guy I was,’” Serra said. “You’re in the gym and you’re sparring or rolling, thinking, you know, I can still do damage. But at the end of the day, when is going to be the last time? You’re never going to get your fill of it.”

But if you admit to yourself that it’s over, that’s when you might have to face the issue of regrets. As popular as it is to claim not to have any, almost every fighter has some would’ves and could’ves bouncing around in the dark rooms of their minds. Depending on how you look at it, that might not be such a bad thing. It might even be healthy and normal, up to a point.

“With a ton of fights I look back and say, ‘I should’ve done this,’” Serra said. “It’s always like that, but if you let yourself get too deep in that you’ll go crazy, especially with MMA. That Shonie Carter thing, when he caught me with that spinning backfist, I mean, that’s still a highlight. Maybe that’s what kept me humble all these years, is that I broke onto the scene as a highlight.”

For Sell, his last UFC fight – a first-round TKO loss to Matt Brown – is still “a little heartbreaking,” he said.

“I got caught early, didn’t even get to hit the guy, and that was very upsetting,” said Sell. “There was also a lot of stuff going on in my life, stuff with my ex, I had to move out of that apartment. It was a tough time all around.”

Then there’s the stuff the happens outside the cage, which is what McCarthy still carries around six years after his final fight.

“My big thing is, I wish I would’ve carried myself differently for the Bisping fight,” he said. “I carried myself a little too arrogantly. I don’t think I went in there respecting him enough, and I treated him too arrogantly in the media. I know it’s the entertainment business and all that, but I think character counts for a lot, and so that’s one of my regrets. I feel like it wasn’t the best side of me. I was really trying to sell the fight, and that’s not me.”

For others, it’s nothing so specific, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still bubble to the surface every once in a while. It happened to Thomas just recently, when he cornered Woodley in a losing effort at UFC 174.

“There were times when I underperformed in certain situations or allowed some of the pressure to get to me, and I kick myself for that now,” said Thomas. “That’s one of the reasons I like working with Tyron, because in his fight against Rory MacDonald, he underperformed in terms of what he was capable of. I don’t want to see him do that again, because I’ve done it and I regret it. I don’t feel bad for him losing that fight, because Rory’s a good fighter, but it’s just the fact that he underperformed. I felt like I did that a lot in my career and I wish I could go back and do it again. But you can’t.”

That might the one thing that absolutely everyone agrees on. Whatever a fighter did or didn’t do in his career, he gets to a point where the past isn’t going to change no matter what else he manages to heap on top of it in the future.

Because the sport moves on. It creates new heroes, new villains. It forgets. You might as well learn to be OK with it. You might not have any other choice.