Issue 033

January 2008

For a man who has only fought for the UFC twice, Jay Hieron has made more walks to the Octagon than most of the promotion’s top fighters. When this explosive 170lb fighter isn’t busy cracking heads in the International Fight League (IFL) as part of the Anacondas team, he is one of the main guys behind the scenes of the Randy Couture’s Xtreme Couture gym in Las Vegas. 

He has just earned a shot at the IFL’s welterweight strap, and when you consider the list of fighters he regularly spars and works with, it’s not hard to see why. “We have a lot of great fighters there,” Jay says. “Some gyms you have a lot of good guys but they’ve got an ego, at our gym everybody leaves their ego at the door. We try to help each other out and train hard.

“I work with the public, whoever joins the gym. I teach MMA classes, and also with the fights, if fighters need me to corner them, I do that. If I need them, they corner me. It’s like a family thing we’ve got going on.” 

And what a family it is… “Mike Pyle, Gray Maynard, Tyson Griffin, Forrest Griffin, John Alessio, Joey Varner, Wanderlei Silva (ha ha) [he laughs as he almost forgot Wanderlei], there are a bunch of guys… James Thompson from England, Mike Whitehead, Alex Schoenauer, Chris Horodecki, Benji Radach, the list goes on, too many to name!” The amazing thing is that he is referring to just a few of the fighters who call Xtreme Couture home, omitting fighters such as Joe Stevenson and Kendall Grove, who he expects to corner when they appear on UFC 80 in Newcastle, England.

The 31-year-old started working corners earlier in his MMA career when training back home in Long Island, New York, but as Jay is a permanent staff member at Xtreme Couture his services are called into action all the time. “I did a bit of it before Xtreme Couture, but now I do it so much, we got so many fighters. It’s an honour for me to be in these guys’ corners, just like [having them] in my corner. 

“When you’re in a fight you definitely want to come back to the corner and believe the guy talking to you. You don’t want to come back to your corner and look in the guys eyes, you’re in the middle of a war, and you don’t believe the words coming out of the guys mouth. All the guys respect each other, we’ve been there before, I’ve been in wars, everybody in the gym I know has been in wars, I would let any of them corner me, and I would believe what they had to say. That’s what its about.” 

Jay’s MMA career began as the result of a chance meeting with old acquaintance Phil Baroni. A state champion wrestler, Jay found himself on the wrong path and got into some trouble with the law (“I thought I was Tony Montana,” he half-jokes). It was by discovering he could let his frustrations out on a punch bag that made him realise there was more than just wrestling, and Baroni, who he knew from the local wrestling circuit, introduced him to MMA, a move that changed his life. 

“It gave me a way out, man. Not a lot of people have that. Some people get in trouble and get messed up and go back to doing the same thing. I was fortunate enough to change my life. I’m just looking forward and staying positive. It’s a shame, I look at other people’s lives and it’s a shame, it just makes me want to train that much harder. All the negatives are small things in my life now, I just push them to the side and do what I’ve got to do.” 

It is a lot easier to stay positive when you’re in a positive environment though, something Jay agrees with wholeheartedly. “You’ve got to like what you do. If you’re not in a place where you like what you do its time to switch up and do something else. It’s a great thing that everybody is tight, it makes it that much easier, because this stuff is hard man… It’s a hard business, man. It could definitely get miserable for you if you let it get to you, but having good positive people around you makes it fun. You appreciate what you do that much more.” 

Appreciating what you do must be a lot easier when you’ve got a title shot on the horizon, sponsorship deals with companies like Affliction, Ecko Unltd, Skin Clothing, Xtreme Couture (“I’ve got a closet full of stuff,” he chuckles) and a team that is set up more like a family – Long Island and the wayward life he left behind couldn’t feel further away, and the future is all good.