The rise and fall and rise of Xtreme Couture

LAS VEGAS – People might tell you that there was a time when the Xtreme Couture gym on West Sunset in Las Vegas was home to one of the top fight teams in MMA, but that isn’t true. It’s one of those myths that pop up, propagated first by the people who genuinely hoped it would become true, and later by those who squinted at it from a distance and figured it was close enough.

The truth, according to those who were around to see it, was that Xtreme Couture was always more of a venue than a team. It was a physical location, albeit a good one with a good space. It was a roof and mats and cages collected in one cavernous warehouse of a building out there in another nondescript strip mall, the kind that reach out in all directions across the desert floor.

Fighters would show up there for practice not knowing who, if anyone, would be there, said UFC lightweight Gray Maynard, “and every day it was like dogs trying to piss on the same fire hydrant.”

With the gym’s namesake, Randy Couture, off making movies, there was no uniting force on the mats every day. All they had was a loose collection of coaches there to hold spit buckets and press start on round timers, while fighters drifted in and out on whatever breezes happened to be blowing just then.

“It was ‘Lord of the Flies’ in here,” gym manager Eric Nicksick said.

The gym had become “just a place to spar,” as Maynard put it.

“There just wasn’t any consistency,” said IFL and Bellator vet Jay Hieron. “Everybody was doing their own thing, and it wasn’t working.”

It was, in other words, no good at all. That’s why Maynard left, ditching Xtreme Couture to go on his own little MMA walkabout, which took him to Nova Uniao in Brazil and to AKA in San Jose. Guys like Tyson Griffin, Michael Chandler and Mike Pyle also sought their training elsewhere. The team, if there had ever been one, was falling apart.

Some blamed Vegas. It was just the way the MMA scene worked out there, they said. A bunch of mercenaries, all out for themselves, cobbling together their training from multiple sources of their own choosing. There would never be one true MMA powerhouse in that city, people said. It couldn’t be done.

Even all the way up in Oregon, Robert Follis heard them.

“I love those words,” Follis said. “Really? ‘Can’t do it?’ I think you’re wrong. Maybe it just hasn’t been approached the right way.”

Robert Follis

At 45, Follis is lanky and lean, a man with the booming voice of a motivational speaker and the manic energy of a subway preacher. He’s one of those people whose stare feels a little too strong to be comfortable, like he’s looking at you and seeing the things you thought you were doing a better job of hiding.

For years he was the coach behind the scenes at the Team Quest gym in Portland, where fighters like Couture, Matt Lindland, Chris Leben and a host of others first honed their crafts. Around the same time that gym began to unravel, Follis found himself divorced, a little bit sick of the fight game, and in need of a change of scenery. He thought he’d move south, maybe get a more low-key job teaching jiu-jitsu. But when longtime Xtreme Couture member and retired fighter Dennis Davis heard that Follis was available, he formed other plans.

Davis had tried to assume a leadership role at Xtreme Couture for a while. But it wasn’t easy to suddenly become the coach of the same people he’d trained alongside for years. They just didn’t think of him that way, and they didn’t seem eager to start.

“I think it was hard for people to see me as their coach,” Davis said. “Here I am, I’ve been their training partner for a long time, and all of a sudden, hey, I’m your head coach and telling you what to do, when to be here. That was hard for some guys.”

From Davis’ own experiences training at Team Quest before he moved to Las Vegas, he knew that Follis wouldn’t have that problem. Whatever ineffable quality it was that made some people leaders, Davis knew Follis had it.

“He’s just one of those guys who commands respect,” Davis said. “I don’t know what it is about him. He’s like your dad. You don’t want to disappoint him.”

Davis also knew that if anybody had what it took to make the team approach to MMA really work in Vegas, it was Follis. He knew from his own experience that while the relatively cheap housing, the nearby presence of the UFC headquarters, and the year-round warm weather made the city a magnet for young men seeking fame and fortune as pro fighters, Las Vegas could also be one giant, glittering distraction. He’d experienced it for himself when he first came here from Oregon. In Vegas, there was always a party to be found somewhere. And if he indulged himself to the point of excess and couldn’t make it into pro practice the next day?

“No one said anything,” Davis said. “No one was calling me saying, ‘Hey, where you at?’ But I knew Follis would do that, because he did it to me back in Oregon.”

The trouble was, Xtreme Couture didn’t exactly have the budget for two full-time head coaches at the time. To solve this problem, Davis offered to take a pay cut. He did it, he said, because the team needed someone like Follis if it wanted to become any sort of team at all. While Xtreme Couture might have gotten by on name value and novelty alone for the first few years, he knew those things had taken them as far as they could. His own career was proof of that. After leaving Oregon and relocating to Las Vegas, Davis said, “my fight game went in the dumps compared to where it was with Follis and Team Quest.”

“I think when Randy first started this gym, what you had was a bunch of people who were already good, and they just showed up,” Davis said. “You get a bunch of good guys all in one spot, they can be good for a while. The problem was, they weren’t getting any better. The level just stayed where it was, or even dropped off for some of the guys.”

Follis came on as head coach in September of 2013. Right away, he got to work establishing some ground rules, because he knew as well as anyone that the atmosphere needed to change if things were ever going to get better at Xtreme Couture.

“I’d been down here and seen it for myself,” Follis said. “Practice started at four? Then everybody would roll in at 4:30, like it didn’t matter. Nobody was setting the standard and holding people accountable. I sat everybody down when I first got here and told them that four o’clock means four o’clock. And I know that might sound like a silly point to some people, but if I’m going to do this, it’s to win titles. To me, showing up 15 minutes late doesn’t say championship training. It says, ‘I don’t care enough to be on time for myself and my teammates.’ And I get it, it’s easier to let people roll in late than it is to constantly hold that line. But what I told them was, ‘I don’t want to look at you after a loss and go, maybe I should have made you be on time. Sorry.’ No, I want to know I gave everything I had on my end.”

When Follis started his coaching job at Xtreme Couture, team practices consisted mostly of amateurs, a few pros who fought on small regional shows, and “one guy in Bellator.”

“That’s it,” Follis said. “Not one UFC guy was coming to the actual team practices.”

These days you look around on the mats and see UFC fighters like middleweight Brad Tavares, welterweight Josh Burkman, lightweight Evan Dunham, bantamweight Bryan Caraway, women’s bantamweight Miesha Tate, women’s strawweight Heather Jo Clark – even Maynard is back these days, which is an encouraging sign to people like Nicksick, the gym manager, who cited Maynard’s departure as a low point for the team as a whole.

“When Gray left, that hurt,” Nicksick said. “That’s when we had to take a hard look at ourselves and figure out what the problems were, what was wrong. When we got everybody together and asked them what they wanted out of this, the answer was the same for everyone. You want to win f-cking fights.”

Follis had a proven track record for helping fighters do that, and he brought those same principles to Xtreme Couture. About a year after he arrived, the situation had improved enough that Maynard had started to hear rumors of the gym’s resurgence.

“People started to tell me, ‘You should check it out. It’s organized now,’” Maynard said. “So I came back and checked it out a few times, and man, it is organized. It’s a team atmosphere now. Before, you wouldn’t know who’d be here or what they’d be doing, but you’d come in to practice and feel like you have to protect what’s yours, just a scrap every day. If you’re preparing for a championship bout, you need a home. You need a place where you feel safe and you know people are there for you.”

That’s the part that’s long been missing from the Vegas MMA scene, according to its detractors. Whether it’s the nature of the city itself, the people who’ve put down roots there, or the lingering influence of the superstar-centric boxing gyms that dot the landscape, many fighters will tell you that Las Vegas is where people go for a few weeks worth of training – not to build a career.

That approach had begun to bother fighters like Maynard, who looked at his peers in places like San Jose, Albuquerque, and South Florida, and saw fighters with the type of consistent support systems that he longed for. In those gyms, fighters could allow themselves to be vulnerable. They could grow and develop.

“Here, it got to the point where people would just come in for their camp, here or there, and it’s like, where were you for my camp?” Maynard said. “Where were you when I needed you?”

In addition to convincing old team members to give it another shot, Follis’ arrival also caught the attention of those from the Pacific Northwest scene who knew him from the Team Quest days. That’s what prompted Caraway and Tate to come here after their own period of wandering in the wilderness, during which they were sometimes criticized by other coaches and fighters for being too reticent to throw in with the rest of the group, too focused on doing their own thing in someone else’s shop.

For Caraway, the appeal was twofold. For one, he knew Follis to be one of the best coaches around when it came to the mental game, which Caraway needed (As Follis put it: “One of the things we joke about is, man, if we could just always Bryan in pretty good shape, then every once in a while surprise him and throw him in a van, drive him straight to the arena, and throw him in the cage, he’d be a world champion for sure right now.”). For another, Caraway trusted Follis enough to let him take the reins with Tate’s career, which Caraway had tried – obsessively at times, as he’ll now admit – to constantly mold and safeguard, sometimes at the expense of their relationship.

“I don’t want to be the bad guy and then come home and have to be a good guy,” Caraway said. “We realized we needed another coach to kind of funnel the constructive criticism through, and there’s nobody better than Coach Follis.”

The way Follis sees it, a lot of the difficulty for Tate and Caraway revolved around trust. Tate needed to know that Caraway trusted the coach who was running things, and Caraway needed to trust that person enough to hand over the keys for the two of them. In that way, Follis said, it wasn’t so different from working with any other fighter. It’s just a matter of figuring out how they communicate, and then speaking their language.

“I think for Bryan, a lot of it had to do with him making sure that he was heard,” Follis said. “Some fighters, they want to have more of a role in crafting their game plan, their approach, and some coaches hear that and they take it as an insult. But before you can teach someone and reach them on a different level, you have to develop a certain degree of trust. You have to reach them on their level, the way they communicate, not the way you communicate. My goal as a coach is to figure out what you need — whether it’s the tough guy, the sensitive guy, the kid gloves, whatever – and give you that. I pride myself on being able to morph to their needs, rather than them morphing to mine.”

Part of his desire to turn the team around, Follis will admit, is to prove he can do it. To come into a city where people said the team approach wouldn’t work, and to revive a gym that had become little more than a warehouse of able bodies, that would show people that his success at Team Quest wasn’t just a consequence of having the right talent at the right time.

But the thing about trying to turn an MMA team around is, there’s only one way to prove that you’ve done it, and that’s to win fights. That’s the part that’s largely out of a coach’s hands come fight night, and also the part that’s easily subject to bad luck, bad breaks, or just bad nights.

“If you’re winning,” Follis said, “you’re a genius. If you’re not then you’re an idiot.”

But then, when it comes to trying to peer into the future, wondering if the results will match up with the work they’ve been putting in on those long afternoons in the desert strip mall, it’s not so unlike what Follis tells the fighters who come to him with concerns about their next fight, their next opponent. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll get knocked out, even if they’ve never been knocked out before. Maybe they aren’t sure if their wrestling is where it needs to be, despite the fact that they’ve been holding their own in practice. To engage in this form of speculation, Follis likes to point out, is to look into the unknown.

“And, I mean, if we’re going to make up the future,” Follis said, “why don’t we go ahead and make it up in our favor?”