Issue 081

November 2011

Welterweight contender Nick Diaz aint in the game for the fame, the titles, the adulation or the fans – he just wants to get paid!

Full name: Nicholas Robert Diaz

Born: August 2nd 1983, Stockton, CA.

MMA: Became a professional mixed martial arts fighter in 2001 just after his 18th birthday. 

Record: 33 fights

25 wins (13 KOs, 8 sub, 4 dec), 

7 defeats, 1 no contest.

Nick Diaz isn’t for the faint-hearted. He has the look of a prizefighter, the presence of a street hustler and his vocabulary would make the most ardent gangster rapper blush. Yet he’s simply a product of his environment. As well as the mean streets of Stockton, California, for over a decade that environment has been Cesar Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy.

After 10 long years inside the ring, Nick Diaz has become the archetypical bad guy. His somewhat alluring “I don’t give a f**k” attitude has, rather uncomfortably for him, made him a genuine fan favorite. And on October 29th in Las Vegas, the former Strikeforce champion faces welterweight kingpin Georges St-Pierre for bragging rights over the entire 170lb division. The UFC’s own white knight, if you will, against the uncompromising black knight.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, Diaz has no desire to ponder the impending GSP showdown. Win, lose or draw, the outcome of the biggest fight of his career washes over him like so many beads of sweat. It’s clear that Nick Diaz feels like he has put his heart and soul into mixed martial arts, and now he wants some payback.

Those around him – his training partners Jake Shields, Gilbert Melendez, his brother Nate and spiritual leader and coach Cesar Gracie – insist to a man that this is the ‘real’ Nick Diaz. Honest to the bone, frank to the point of pain.

All the media attention, worldwide exposure, sell-out arena events with giant screens and football-sized crowds – even the fan expos, Diaz’s life would be all the better without it. “There’s a reason I’m good at what I do, because I’m not focused on that s**t,” says the 28-year-old, equally savvy with his hands as his chokes. “I’m focused on what I’m doing and I’m not changing that.

“I’m not changing what works, fighters don’t do that. I’m into science and the science of fighting. That’s why people try to come talk to me thinking I’m violent. People are confused. I’m not violent. I don’t want to hurt people. I don’t love doing this… I love jiu-jitsu because it works, because it makes you stronger and smarter. I think everybody should do jiu-jitsu. You’d be more healthy and you’d have more insight, kids should do it too and be more healthy.”

It has taken Diaz some time to sit down for our pre-arranged pow-wow. It leaves plenty of time to observe him. Earlier, at the back of the gym, away from the mats, Diaz has taped his hands, and is pulling on his head-guard as he prepares for nine three-minute rounds of sparring in a ring.

The sweltering heat of the California suburb of Pleasant Hill makes it a sweat session, yet Diaz is in the zone, choosing his moments to attack with perspicacity against three partners. He fights in a picaresque manner: part rogue, part abandon, part masochist. But when he decides to go to work, he’s both clinical and brutal. Fearsome, yet fearless. Flared nostrils, that sneer etched across on his face. It looks like disdain. It is, in fact, focus. 

Timing is everything. He claps those gloves together when he goes to work, responds like a champion when he is hit, and never, ever, takes his eyes off his opponent. There is no bluff with Nicholas Robert Diaz. 

There are moments during the four hours I spend there, having been invited by Cesar Gracie, that an interview with Diaz looks off limits on this day.

There is a reluctance from him at first. Reluctance to engage. He is deep in concentration, doing what he does best, and nothing will distract him, not least a pesky media man from the UK. Perhaps FO magazine had come on a bad day; or maybe it’s a normal day. Mr Diaz is not sure he wants to divulge too much. 

“Talking about how I’m doing, you know, and this and that, that’s not what I do. You know, I rely on stuff that I train and cover everything and I’m technically better. I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I know I’m gonna win or you know, I’m gonna do it,’ you know, I don’t do that bulls**t. I’m all prepared. I’m all pumped up to be honest. I’m not gonna say, ‘I love this s**t or I hate this s**t. This is just what it is, you know. I love jiu-jitsu, of course, but I hate fighting for a prize when someone says, ‘Go.’ But I’m not gonna not take the money of course.”

MMA fans find Diaz, his views, and his skills, of serious interest. “That’s what’s going on, though. That’s it. That’s all there is to tell. I try to explain to people that there’s nothing to say, you know. I have a conversation with somebody and they say, ‘Well what do you like to do?’ ‘Well this is what I do. I get paid [to fight] and that’s that.’”

Arguably, there is a sense of self-loathing in his fighter’s mask, and when we do converse, 90 minutes later, there is a filter-less torrent of words, a stream of honest consciousness, from a thoughtful man. Maybe a man who thinks too much. Diaz spars nine rounds, intense, taking punishment, opening up, switching between southpaw and orthodox.

Outside in the shopping mall where Cesar Gracie’s gym has been set up for over a decade, the car park in the quad is half full. A quiet solitude resides. Gracie himself, marked by the sign of the triangle, and bearing the weight of a name thick with MMA history from Brazil, begins taking a class of around 20 jiu-jitsu practitioners. Outside, the nail salon and the Honda sushi bar on one side of the gym, and The Tug Boat fish and chip shop on the other, do a little passing trade.

Diaz pulls off his headguard, a rebel with a cause, almost Faustian, trapped in a life he can neither fully fulfill or even escape from. Many aficionados will wish that Diaz can upset the apple cart (and at least half of Canada) by defeating St-Pierre in the fall in the world’s fight capital.

The UFC’s corporate uber-champion versus the scruffy cousin from Stockton. It is one of those tantalizing title fights, where the head says St-Pierre, but the heart beats strongly for underdog Diaz.

Back near the ring, Diaz has slipped between the ropes and, session over, takes to the mat with training partner Shields. They grapple intricately from bottom to top, vice-versa, in guard, a strength-sapping struggle for 30 minutes.

Soaked in perspiration, their garments are wringing wet. Then we talk again… When we sit down, it is on two plastic chairs in the middle of the gym, along a wall, just next to the mat where the jiu-jitsu players have been working out. The chairs are wet. Shields’ perspiration runs like a river from the floor at our feet and snakes down a drain a few feet away. 

So, Diaz, the trash-talker during fights, fearless in the fighting arena, is he a cocky man? “You know, people like to call me cocky and that I have a cocky attitude and that’s wrong, so wrong. I think that’s just the way it is because I think the word ‘cocky’ involves a smile. You think it involves a smile like when you say someone’s cocky, or has a cocky attitude. Do you think it’s because of the smile?”

He eyes me. Not in an intimidating way. Isn’t he quite a serious person? “I think there’s a smiley, sort of happy, cocky player, who is confident. I have nothing like that. I never had any confidence. You know, you’re gonna make this assumption that I have all this confidence and call me ‘cocky’ but I’m fighting for my life. That’s why I have a serious look on my face.”

So is he misperceived, then, by both the media and the fans? “Ha, this is just how it is and I have to deal with it. It’s made things the way they are, for 10 years. Some people might have just seen me but I’ve been fighting for so long. I been fighting since it [MMA] started.

“The way I look at it, I’m gonna be 30. You know – I started fighting in the UFC when I was 18, 19. You have people looking at Jon Jones, acting like he’s a teenager but he’s actually 21, and I started before him. I was younger and people don’t give enough credit for that. They’re just like, ‘Oh, you’re just that guy who loses to wrestlers’… and I’m trying to preach this thing about how Pride FC was a great sport and it was way more geared towards mixed martial artists.

“That’s just the way it is. So you can talk all the s**t you want about how you beat me or whatever, but I’m playing a game. I’m playing your stupid wrestling game and I’m talking s**t, of course I’m talking s**t, but you should be talking s**t too bro.

“You know I got people right now trying to talk s**t about me because I said that the UFC sucks and all this is wrong ‘cos of all the wrestlers… I’m like, ‘Hey dude, I know mixed martial arts…’ I’m the only one that’s around that’s able to say all that ‘cos I can see that and I’m going to open my mouth…”

Speaking his mind is integral to Diaz. It gets him into trouble; it gets him out of it.

“Yeah, I’m not afraid to open my mouth. I’m not afraid to fight because how are they going to contradict me? ‘What, you have something to say just because you think I’m bitter ‘cos I got taken down? Well you’re wrong bro’… this isn’t the way it should be, dude. This isn’t tactical mixed martial artists for, like, street fighting. You know, you go out onto the streets to fight with a guy the first thing you’re gonna do is try and push his face into the ground and then get up and step on his head and push away ‘cos you don’t want the dude kicking you in the face.

“You want to get up and cover up and move around and you’re not trying to hold somebody down. You wanna make some space for your own self ‘cos you don’t wanna scratch yourself up. So you know, none of these guys that are trying to hold me could ever fight me out on the street. I’d beat the s**t out of ‘em all over the ground. Not to mention, it’s just not as practical as the Pride FC used to be.

“So I have a lot to say about that. I think fighters are talking s**t and I’m not trying to make a fight out of that. You know those guys don’t have anything real to say about me, they’re wrong and make themselves, look bad as mixed martial artists. 

I don’t know if it’s ‘cos the UFC say you gotta promote this fight or whatever.

“I don’t know if that’s why people are talking s**t about me. [With me] it’s much more logical, I can’t base my confidence on being pumped up, I’m confident in my technique.”

The team – the Skrap Pack – are as important as family to him. “I’m like – kamikaze. If someone f**ks with my team, I’m kamikaze for sure, 100%. I couldn’t care less. I already wasted my life doing this s**t and I’m p***ed off about that much. And the reason why I go out and fight and the reason why I lose – I don’t have a clue.”

Diaz says he was moved around schools too much when he was young. “I was good at the things I was good at, but moving so much, I didn’t have a chance. Any kid that has to move schools that many times is going to be f**ked up.

“I’m not saying I was f**ked up and I’m not saying I was on drugs. I’m not on drugs, I’m not stealing s**t, ain’t hurting nobody. I don’t even need much, I don’t drive Cadillacs or fancy cars. This thing has taken a lot from me. I’m just trying to get paid so I can eat. I don’t have kids or stuff to take care of. I don’t want nothing. I work really hard, train really hard, I push myself another hour after the first one because the first one’s the hardest.

“If you look at my life over a long-term period I couldn’t give a s**t. I honestly don’t know, if I got locked up right now, I don’t know if I’d want to come back. I’m coming in here every day, going, ‘Why the f**k am I doing this right now?’ I could be, like, f**k this whole thing.” And he dismisses any notion of being tested driving him to succeed. “No. I’ve been tested, I’ve been done, I’m sick of this wacky bulls**t. I’m not about that.”

It all began with jiu-jitsu. “I was watching the UFC [as a kid] and watching Royce Gracie tapping people out and I was like, ‘Man, if I could do that...’” 

He then switches to talk about growing up, and being healthy. Diaz lives on a mainly vegetarian, gluten-free diet, espoused by Cesar Gracie. “I’m angry that I couldn’t have got started on good food from the beginning, because I live in a place where demand for good, organic food in general wasn’t there. We had cheap food. So I took over my household halfway through my childhood and I took over [the diet].”

Diaz was taken to swimming club as a kid by his mother. And to aikido. “I was, like, five years old, I was an aikido student for a long time. I learned aikido and judo when I was a kid. At the same time I had martial arts movies, my dad and my sister used to have them and I used to plug them in and watch them.

“I never had anything. I didn’t have any money to ride motorcycles like the other a**holes so I never had that s**t; you know no one ever taught me how to drive...”

But he knew how to drive. “Yeah,” Diaz chuckles. “You know, I didn’t get my license till I was 20. So I was fighting and training, I had a girl that was taking me to practice and this whole MMA fighting thing screwed that up, but that was a good thing and then the next time I ended up in another relationship that went on for a really long time and that all went to s**t ‘cos of this [the fighting] too. 

“You know this might not seem important stuff to someone else but that was really important to me, that kinda s**t was really important to me and this whole thing f**ked all that up and I never made a lot of money. This was never anything impressive to anybody in real life. 

“In the fight world, it’s really a big great, cool thing but in the real world that I live in, I walk down the street like a f**king ghost, nobody knows who the f**k I am...”

He is talking of Stockton, where he grew up. “And if they do know me, they don’t f**king say nothing because they’re stuck up a little bit, well not stuck up, but you know…”

For the record, Stockton has a poor rating in the United States. In the February 2nd 2011 issue of Forbes, the magazine gave Stockton the dubious distinction of being ‘most miserable’ US city, largely as a result of the steep drop in home values. Central Connecticut State University surveys from 2005 and 2006 ranked the city as the least literate of all American cities with a population of more than 250,000. According to a Gallup poll, Stockton was tied with Montgomery, Alabama, for the most obese metro area in the United States of America, with an obesity rate of 34.6%.

“The more I travel thinking I’m gonna find somewhere I like, I realize I like it at home,” admits Diaz who still resides in the suburb. “People don’t be getting road rage and s**t. They don’t wanna f**k with you. You don’t get f**king followed to the front door of your house you know, some f**ker following you home and s**t. You don’t do that s**t [in Stockton]. 

“You can go home and forget it, you don’t f**k with people so when s**t goes down it goes down so that’s why when someone starts talking s**t to me I reach out and slap the f**k out of them ‘cos I’m ready and people understand that. I’m like, 

‘Hey, what the f**k, that’s how it works bro.’”

How does he feel about younger brother Nate being involved in MMA? After all, Nick brought his livewire younger brother in under his wing. “I wasn’t a wrestler like a lot of those other guys and my brother’s in it ‘cos of me – and that’s it. 

“I’m not saying that he’s made it as far as he has ‘cos of me but maybe he wouldn’t be an MMA fighter if I wasn’t doing the training and putting it right in front of him to do. 

“Not that I pushed him into it, I’d hate to be that, but at the same time... it’s just f**ked-up weird having a brother in this too. I could do without all this s**t. That’s what I’m saying.”

He adds: “I don’t need nice cars. I don’t spend big money. All I do is buy food and train and try to live healthy. Training’s taught me how to live and I don’t need much now. Like I said, anything’s better than what I’ve been going through. Maybe it’d be better to be locked up in prison. This is like prison. I’ve been trapped in this prison, and after every fight there’s another... See, you don’t understand. When you get outta jail, that’s what it is… if I fight the fight, I win, I get out, I get off a little while and then get locked back up...

“Look, a lot of time it’s been nice, and even though I’ve been overworked and over-fought and they haven’t told me who I’m fighting next.”

But there has been plenty of warning for the title match with GSP, for which Diaz has been obliged to surrender the Strikeforce welterweight title he has defended three times. Surely he is looking forward to the GSP challenge? “No. If I fight, I lose, no matter what, win or lose. If I fight. Period. I don’t look forward to anything like that (the GSP fight). I look past that, like, ‘Holy s**t… if I win that s**t I’m f**king stuck in this game.’” 

Lost once in his last 16 contests, stretching back to May 2006. Prior to that had lost three times consecutively, to Sean Sherk, Joe Riggs and Diego Sanchez. 

Former Strikeforce, WEC and IFC welterweight champion. Diaz was the first fighter ever to defend the Strikeforce belt three times: against KJ Noons, Evangelista Santos and 

Paul Daley. Has also competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Pride Fighting Championships and EliteXC. 

Notable wins: Frank Shamrock, Robbie Lawler, Scott Smith, KJ Noons, Hayato Sakurai, Takanori Gomi, Chris Lytle and that epic one- round shoot-out with Paul Daley.

BJJ: Promoted to black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu by Cesar Gracie on May 8th 2007. His favorite submission is the kimura, and he currently teaches jiu-jitsu at his and brother Nathan’s school in Lodi, CA.

Training: Regularly competes in triathlons as part of his cardio training. 

Drugs: Tested positive for marijuana in April 2007 in a pre-fight test before defeating Takanori Gomi. The victory was later declared a no contest and he was suspended for six months.

Boxing: Diaz once fought in the pro ring as a super middleweight. In April 2005 he defeated Alfonso Rocha in Sacramento, California, by unanimous decision. Has been linked with a fight with former world champion Jeff ‘Left Hook’ Lacey. Has trained with former WBA and WBC world champion Luisito Espinosa and Olympic gold medalist Andre Ward. 

Next: Challenges Georges St-Pierre for the UFC welterweight title on October 29th in Las Vegas.