Issue 073
March 2011
Contrary to common belief, Stephan Bonnar doesn’t have an Ivy League education. But with his commentary, art business and memorable battles he’s distinguished himself nonetheless.
Barely 90 minutes have passed after Bonnar’s contest against Igor Pokrajac at The Ultimate Fighter 12 Finale at The Pearl – a club-like venue at The Palms Hotel, Las Vegas as akin to rap acts as to chin music. I find myself in Bonnar’s room, on the 21st floor, watching a re-run of his fight on television. A posse of Bonnar’s, with his training team and Muay Thai coach Master ‘One Kick’ Nick Blomgren, sit transfixed by the action. The protagonist himself, with a cut lip, bruised toe and a couple of facial contusions, watches intently while his father John, his middle brother Brent, and a few friends nod and concur that on replay it’s a near-perfect performance.
Bonnar has shown his cannier side by ‘fighting clever’. He mostly took the contest to the ground, but in the stand-up he counter-punched the Croatian, who has a name that disappears like a marshmallow as it is uttered. Bonnar said he would brawl. But he bewitched Pokrajac by throwing a curveball and truly mixing his martial arts. He grins, a glint in his eye. He’s got a kick out of foxing his opponent.
Andrea, Bonnar’s long-term partner – who he married last year in Tuscany, Italy, and is a former Emmy award-winning journalist with Fox News – watches quietly. The rest of the Bonnar clan prepare for the after-party at Blush, a bespoke nightclub at The Wynn hotel. By preparation, I mean fill glasses. It’s a pendulum swing in mood change – quite chichi compared to the thrash-up at The Pearl. You can’t pull out a white-tipped cheroot at Blush without a barman appearing with a lighter from the darkness for your first inhalation. Bonnar has moved his road show to Las Vegas over the last couple of years, and he has his finger on the pulse.
Bonnar is one of life’s risk-takers. He dares, and he wins. Well, more than he fails. And when he loses, he does so with honor. I’ve spent a decent amount of time with Bonnar and it’s like he is lit up from the back. There’s an energy about him, both compelling and, at times, slightly worrying. Perhaps I’ve heard too many of his stories, like racing on flat tires to airports to catch planes, or ending up on a drip in hospital close to death from septicemia after a bar brawl left him with an assailant’s tooth in his flesh that he knew nothing about. It also took several meetings and a ton of phone calls to get this interview finished. He has to be one of the busiest fighters in the UFC.
Since the fight with Pokrajac, Bonnar switched into hectic mode. He insists there’s a reason for that. “Being in training camp is like living in jail. It’s training hell, night and day, so when a fight is over, I need to get on with business,” the 33-year-old, a paragon for the mixed martial arts movement, explains in this exclusive interview. Here’s a flavor of Bonnar’s mad schedule: after the fight at The Palms (and an after-party long into the wee hours), he had a meeting with Dana White, UFC president, to discuss some merchandising ideas; he then flew six hours to Bristol, Connecticut, on the East Coast on Wednesday to start 7am filming on Thursday for ESPN’s MMA Live; then back to Vegas to enjoy a ‘staycation’ (that’s a vacation without going out of town) with his wife at Rumor, a new hotel. On the Saturday, he boards a one-hour flight to Los Angeles for two photographic shoots (one for TapouT, another for Fitness Biotics). In LA, he hosts a UFC party at Sharkeez, a Mesquite-Mex broiler on Manhattan Beach, with his business partner Tom Scully – with who he is designing bespoke T-shirts and artwork. One of the giant lithographs created this year was donated to the Bruce Lee Foundation, while White and Lorenzo Fertitta own two other pieces of artwork, iconic depictions of the sport Bonnar feels born to take part in. At Sharkeez, on the night Georges St Pierre shuts out Josh Koscheck in Montreal, Bonnar is the host, and the endorsement icon on a night of fun. Job done, he comes back to Vegas, then heads to Phoenix, AZ, to work on blow-by-blow commentary for WEC 53. He does a pretty fine job, too.
Bonnar is living life large. Yet did he always know he was going to have a career in mixed martial arts? “No way, man. I knew I was starting a career in this when Dana White came in the cage after I had fought Forrest Griffin [at the TUF 1 Finale] and he said, ‘There’s no loser in this fight, we’re going to give contracts to both these guys.’ That’s when my career as a mixed martial artist really started. At the time, I was looking to do something physical – I had my bachelors’ degree from Purdue University School of Physical Therapy [where he studied sports science]. It was always a life-balance thing with me, a yin-yang thing. I spent half my day hitting people and breaking them down, and then the other half helping them, healing them and nursing them back to life.”
So let’s begin at the beginning. How did the kid from Munster, growing up in Chicago, wind up in the fight business? “Probably because it was a hard knock life for me from the start. I had a ton of broken bones; I was always banged up and injured. I’m really not exaggerating, either. If you spoke to my family doctor he would tell you they never saw a kid as much as they saw me. I always had broken bones. I remember the doc telling me once that he saw me more than he saw his wife.
“Let me just tell you about the first couple…” he starts, ominously. “When I was two years old, I was in church and one of my brothers set up some building blocks, and said I couldn’t jump over them. I said I could. But they were in front of a flight of stairs. I jumped the building blocks and went tumbling down the stairs. I cried for a few minutes. Then I stopped. It was grandma’s birthday that day, and after church we drove about an hour from Chicago to her house. We went to the party, and the next day I was crawling on my hands with limp legs, looking like something out of The Terminator. I’d broken a leg. Man, it just went on like that. A couple of years later, in kindergarten, we’re playing football on my oldest brother’s birthday and I get tackled and flattened by my middle brother, who snaps my arm down. I cried for a few minutes, then I stopped. I was fine for the rest of the day, we played mini golf, I went to kindergarten the next day, then I went out on my bicycle with my arm limp in my lap, swaying with one arm. My arm was broken. That kind of crazy shit has continued for the rest of my life. Look, I broke my foot twice this year.”
As the youngest of three ebullient brothers, he learned resilience early. “When I was eight, for Christmas my dad got us three pairs of boxing gloves. It was probably the shittiest Christmas I ever had because I had my ass whupped every day by my two older brothers, Brent and John. My brothers used to say you could hit me as hard as you like but I couldn’t be hurt. I just used to laugh.” At 10, he started wrestling. Taekwondo began at 12, and like many of us, he found a natural hero in Bruce Lee. “I guess it was all preparation looking back on it. I guess I was just born tough.” A black belt in taekwondo was completed, aged 16.
It was intriguing spending some time in the company of Bonnar’s father, John. He was in the US marines, a likable dude with a grey and white walrus mustache, but when he started to talk of “we” being in the Octagon with Pokrajac, he meant it. “He went to Vietnam, and he’s seen some shit,” Stephan explains to your correspondent. Bonnar captures the moment in MMA, a second-generation fighter, business savvy, fighting savvy and making the most of a burgeoning career. “I dreamed about doing this [in high school] but I never imagined that I really would be. Maybe in my subconscious, I knew it my whole life.” The formative years for young Bonnar were frustrating, by his description. In fighting terms, at least. “I was beanpole tall and skinny, but always worked out. I was physically weak to begin with. I wrestled at 160lb, and I couldn’t beat the guy who was at 152lb. I was on weight gainers, I lifted, did more weight gainers through my senior years at high school, kept working out, hitting the pads, running and then in my junior years in college, got pretty good at taekwondo. But the whole time I kept working out and never missed a day or a session. I never really knew why.”
The early UFC events had also fired his imagination. “I graduated from high school in 1995, and had a couple of VHS tapes of the UFC. It was a guilty pleasure of mine. ‘You’re watching that filth again. It’s disgusting,’ my mom would say.” During his college years, he finally got bigger, stronger, graduating from Purdue University in 2000. He moved to Chicago city, but had started training jiu-jitsu. “I had two fights, I was training twice a week. I wanted to take it more seriously. But at that time, I was having fun, going out, renting my own apartment for the first time…” In the summer of 2001 a fight promoter visited the school looking for fighters to compete in the Ironheart Crown that November. Bonnar gave it a try. He defeated both his opponents by stoppage, and romped home with the title. “If you want to get started in MMA, sign up for fights in your hometown, because you don’t want to get your ass kicked in front of your family and friends.”
Six months after the Ironheart Crown, the legendary Carlson Gracie Sr came to Chicago, and Stephan became his protégé. “I learned so much from him in such a short time,” explains Bonnar, who also took up boxing, competing in 2002 and 2004 in the Chicago Golden Gloves superheavyweight championships, winning the novice division in the first year and the open division two years later. With the open title triumph, he competed in the national Golden Gloves tournament in Kansas City, Missouri. “Thirty-two guys. Two white guys, two Mexicans, 28 black guys. I had to learn to stand and brawl and bang, because I was a novice with a dozen fights, and some of them had had a hundred amateur fights. It was very good for me.” He also competed in various jiu-jitsu tournaments, winning a gold medal in the Pan Am’s 2002 adult blue-belt division. “That whole period [2000–2005] was interesting. I was finding my way. Put it this way: it was a low time, moneywise. For example, I went on vacation to Jamaica for two weeks at a resort there, and you got to stay free, meals free, for giving one exercise class a day. I had little spending money, so I took a couple of MMA fights on short notice, ended up in good brawls, got the win bonus and was as happy as a pig in sh*t to head to Jamaica with 500 bucks.”
Against Pokrajac, Bonnar showed he has a fine ground game. “Carlson brought me up in BJJ. Then I got my black belt from Sergio Penha [with who he has worked in Las Vegas for the last two years]. Carlson was awesome, the kind of guy who would always cheer you up. He could relate to everyone at the same time, push you hard, but barely spoke the language. He barely had a dollar in his wallet, too. He wasn’t just a trainer, he was a father figure. Sergio is the same way. So consistent. He’s there every day, sees the little holes in your game and fixes them. He got his black belt at 17, and has spent his whole life doing it. As Sergio says of himself, ‘I know how to do two things: how to fly a plane,’ he is a retired pilot, ‘and how to do jiu-jitsu.’”
It was in 2005, with season one of the televised series of The Ultimate Fighter, that Bonnar got his break. Timing in life can be as important as timing in sport, and Bonnar had his chance. He went for trials, he got on the show. ‘The American Psycho’ was born. “Yeah, it was Chris Sanford who came up with the name. I remember Chris Leben was drinking heavily, and they tried calling me ‘Ivy League’ because I looked like some guy who had been to Yale or Harvard, but then after sparring with me and hearing my crash-and-burn stories, Sandford had said, ‘I know who you are, you’re ‘The American Psycho’.’
“I didn’t really like it, but it kind of stuck. I thought it was over after the TUF series, but just before the fight with Forrest Griffin, Charles Lewis, aka [TapouT’s] Mask, God bless his soul, told Bruce Buffer to announce me as ‘The American Psycho’, and so he did in front of 10 million people.”
It was suggested recently that Bonnar, on the grounds of ‘that fight’ with Griffin – the highlights from which have been immortalized by its repetition and elevation to iconic status at the televised start of UFC events – his burgeoning role in fight analysis and his status as a spiritual leader of the modernism of MMA, he might one day be inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. Perhaps it’s a little early for that, but he’s surfing the new wave of professionalism and entrepreneurialism within mixed martial arts. “That was awfully cool, Kevin Iole [the journalist in question] didn’t have to write that, but I was pretty happy about it.”
His media work is an antidote to physical duress, says Bonnar. “Doing ESPN is a blast. It’s the time of my life getting to analyze those fights, watching fights, asking questions.” The ‘white collar’ tag also tickles him. “It’s kind of deceptive. I put that on in a sense – I come from a blue-collar family; I’ve been shoehorned into being white-collar, but I’m definitely rough around the edges.” So to future plans. There has been talk of ‘Rampage’ Jackson next year. It was Bonnar doing the talking, laying the seeds. He has two wins from his last two contests. “What I said is that I’d like to get another ‘W’ first – I don’t know who I will be fighting next. I’ve stopped playing the game of guessing who’s next. I suppose I’ll be fighting around March 2011. But Rampage would be my dream fight in 2011, for all the reasons I mentioned. I’m envious of his athletic ability and success, his fame in acting, and if I can make it into a dog fight – I’d be a huge underdog – and win, I’d get to feel some of that success. It’s that whole Highlander thing – if you get to beat the guy you get some of his prestige, power and skills. Yeah… that would feel good.” That’s Bonnar for you, at his brilliant best. Here’s a bet he gets that wish for Rampage in 2011.
