Issue 075

May 2011

Pat Barry claims he’s “not a clown” but who says kickboxers can’t have a sense of humor? 

A beginner’s kickboxing class pounds on rows of heavy bags, the thuds smacking loud and stinging at Duke Roufus’ gym in Milwaukee. While the students take a breather, the break from the slapping and grunting allows for another sound to emanate from the other side of the wall: laughter.

Around the corner, the gray sweatshirt-clad 5’11”, 235lb frame of 31-year-old UFC heavyweight Pat Barry is surrounded by other Roufusport fighters as he shakes hands all around. Barry smart-alecks his way through knowing he has a photo shoot to get to. But he always has time to talk to fans or students. Outside, a trio of nine-year-old little angels all clutching American Girl dolls stop their game and come over when they see the fighter who, to them, seems like a giant. One gulps, and asks Barry a question.

“Are you a fighter on TV?”

“Yes, I am. Do you like to watch the fights?”

“Only sometimes. They can be kind of scary to me.”

“Me, too,” he says, as he pats her on the head. His palm nearly envelopes her cranium. Pat Barry is no tough guy. He just plays one on TV. And that’s exactly what he’s always wanted. “I grew up on The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Jean Claude Van Damme and Street Fighter video games,” he says. “Those are the three things that influenced my entire career to get into kickboxing and the martial arts. Donatello was my favorite one. He was the most athletic but he also outsmarted everybody. In a lot of kickboxing matches, I felt like I outsmarted my opponents.”

Indeed, Barry is riding high these days after a recent win over Joey Beltran at Fight for the Troops 2 in January. He’s happy he won—especially since it was on the 26th anniversary of the death of his father David, a veteran himself. But there’s plenty of people, he says, who are upset he didn’t knock out Beltran. “I knew going into the fight, that Joey Beltran had a zombie for a head; that’s what I called him. Joe Rogan started laughing, but that’s what I told him: Beltran is a real-life zombie. He can get hit in the head with anything he wants to and he’ll still keep coming at you,” Barry says. “I hit Beltran with 37 low kicks. Two hours after the show, he came into my locker room like everything was fine. No bruises, no swelling. I bet you Monday the guy was in the gym running stairs and doing squats and sh*t. I’m still walking around with my shoe not tied because it’s still sore three weeks later.”

It had been months since Barry had worked his way back into the ring. He had taken a pounding in his fight against Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipovic at UFC 115. But he says the pounding was more easily attributed to Cro Cop’s granite face and elbow than any of the Pride sensation’s punches. “I knocked him down in the first, and that’s when the hand broke. Honestly, there was a little panic at first. Because I thought that was the end of my career. I thought for sure I had broken all four of my metacarpals,” Barry says. “I would have never guessed that I had only broken one. Thirty seconds later I throw a kick and break my foot against his elbow.” Barry eventually succumbed to a rear naked choke, but the fight had been over for some time. 

“Yeah, that was my awesome white-belt jiu jitsu at work,” Barry laughs. “At the end of the first round I go back into my corner and tell my coach my right hand is broken, my right foot is broken, my left leg is banged up so all I got is my left hand. So he says to me, ‘Well, get on your bike throw some jabs and score some points.’ I go, ‘Say what? Hey man, there’s no bike to get on. You’re not listening to me–there is no bike, no points, no nothing. I got one hand. That’s it.’”

Barry relished the opportunity to battle one of his boyhood idols. Kickboxing icon Cro Cop was a hero to the man who drips with stand-up credentials himself, having won the US Open Sanshou Championship, a silver medal in the Chinese Wushu Kung Fu Championship, trained with Ernesto Hoost in Holland and been lauded by the Shaolin monks, no less. But that didn’t mean he let Cro Cop win, as many fans theorized. “It took months after the fight for people to believe that I didn’t ease up on Cro Cop. All I heard was ‘You didn’t want to beat your idol so you went easy on him,’” Barry says. “But after they saw the pictures and saw that I had a broken foot, hand and swollen shin, then they eased up on me. I just joked with people that I bet money on CroCop!”

Barry might not consider himself a clown, but his choice in shorts while “serving people” – his lingo for rolling out a favorite practical prank – certainly makes him look like one. “It started out as a joke–I was just going to jump out of the bushes and catch somebody off guard in a pair of ridiculously ugly swimming trunks,” Barry says. “The idea was ‘to be a life guard where there should be no life guard’.” 

Whether in four feet of snow, lurking behind a buddhist monk or when teammates are trying to cut weight, Barry and his ugly shorts pose down and crack people up. “At the UFC fighter’s summit last year Dana [White] and the Fertitta brothers were all sitting at dinner,” Barry says. “So one of my teammates tells me that Dana’s down there and I strip down throw on the shorts and did it: ‘Dana, you’ve just been served.’ He thought it was hilarious.” With the stones to run half-naked through a restaurant in front of Dana White, it’s easy to pin Barry as the life of the party. However, it’s not so, says Barry.

“Do I feel like I’m a funny guy? Yes. But I’m not a comedian. I don’t have jokes stored up. I might say things that are humorous every once in a while, but I don’t have jokes like, ‘Yeah, uh so three dead babies are walking down the street…’ I don’t have that,” Barry claims. “I’m witty. That’s what I’ve found out over the years that some people want me to be places just because I’m the entertainment. Once I found that out, I was like, ‘Oh, so you don’t like me, you just don’t want your people to be bored.’ That’s lame. But sometimes you have to play 

that game.”

This perspective has kept Barry humble, if the sport of mixed martial arts didn’t do that already. Before his win over Anthony Hardonk netted him $155,000 in one night, Barry was subsisting on rice and ketchup before his fight. “I went into that fighting knowing I had to win. I was pretty much down to nothing,” he says. “And all I had in the cupboard was a box of Uncle Ben’s five-minute rice and a bottle of ketchup. So I just boiled that b*tch up and threw the ketchup on it.” So what did he buy with his winnings right after the fight? “I bought barbecue sauce,” Barry laughs. “Ketchup, rice and barbecue sauce. No seriously, I paid off a bunch of debt, and put some aside for taxes and savings. But that one fight… after nine years, it was like a dream. But what I got out of that fight was not only can great things happen for you, but if it happened once, it can happen again.”

So Barry continues to fight, not out of hatred, rage or anger. The self-proclaimed ‘not-tough guy’ fights because it’s fun. “I have never even been in a street fight. Any sh*t that hits the fan, you can’t count on me for the first ten minutes,” Barry says. “I’ll be running seven blocks down the street then I’ll stop and turn around. Once it registers what happened I’ll come back and save the day. I’m out there in violent competition, but that’s just artificial,” Barry adds. “I’m not out there because I hate the other guy or I want to stomp on his guts. I love people. When someone asks me for my autograph or to take a picture with them, I ask them, ‘Can I take a picture with you?’ Autographs I’m like, ‘Wow, I get to write my name on my own picture and people want it.’ Damn, that’s cool. After working so hard for ten years, things are starting to happen and a lot of my dreams are coming true right now. I’m living the dream.”

Leg Show

Pat Barry on fighting, life and love…

On pre-fight nerves: “I’m nervous before every fight. I am just not a tough guy; I don’t go around eating raw meat or drinking blood or anything like that. So for me anytime that I fight, every fight is the biggest fight of my life.”

On Wisconsin winters: “This [snow] is shit. I don’t know how anyone years ago migrated across the great plains and stopped here [Wisconsin] and said, ‘Man, this is it. We found it–the promised land.’ Hell, no. Summers are beautiful and colorful, but the winters are ridiculous.”

On his preference for “girly drinks”: “Malibu and pineapple juice. It’s delicious. The girly drinks just taste better than the manly beer. Smirnoff Ice actually has more alcohol than beer. Huh! What tastes better than rum? You can drink it with a straw… The little umbrella’s the best part… A little cherry on the plastic sword. It’s like drinking an island.”

On family: “I’ve always wanted to teach and be the world’s greatest husband, world’s greatest dad, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. So to be able to find someone and be with them every day and still be laughing I get chills thinking about it. Make 30 little ninjas running around!” 

On his physique: “I have big legs and I’m only 5’11”. So for me to wear pants is tough. It’s hard to find pants to fit. My legs are wider than my waist!”

On Brock Lesnar: “You know who’s not an asshole? Who’s not a jerk? Brock Lesnar. Yeah, he’s extremely annoyed because he can’t go to Walgreens at two in the morning to get his wife some medicine because he gets swarmed by a billion people who are following him while he drives the streets. But he’s very cool.”

On education: “At the University of New Orleans I failed physical education. Can you believe that? But not because I couldn’t hack the workouts, but because they told me in college you don’t actually have to go to class. So I didn’t go.”