Issue 053

August 2009

One of the world’s best pound-for-pound MMA fighters, WEC bantamweight champion Miguel Torres is polite, soft-spoken and baby-faced.  He escaped from a ghetto full of gangs and drugs and paid his way through college with a string of unsanctioned, underground fights – but he doesn’t consider himself a fighter. This is his extraordinary tale. 

Miguel Torres’s story reads much like any other stereotypical martial artist-come-fighter. A quiet kid from a rough Midwestern neighborhood, he avoided the dangers of gangs and drugs by throwing himself into sports.  

One of three children, Torres’s Mexican parents worked long hours to put food on the family table. They never went without, but it wasn’t an easy time. Witnessing the effort his parents put into keeping the family fed and clothed taught Torres a valuable lesson – hard work pays dividends, and if you want to get by, you’ve got to make sacrifices.  

Torres’s father, like most working-class men of his age, was a boxing fan. He worked too-long hours to ever dabble in the sweet science, but the love for fighting was passed down to the young Miguel, who decided at the age of six that he wanted to become not just a professional fighter, but a world champion. “When I first started out fighting I wanted to be a boxer, but there was nowhere to box in my home town,” says Miguel. “I tried karate and found Brazilian jiu-jitsu.” A huge fan of kung fu films, he started training in martial arts from a young age and turned the hobby he loved into a profession. “Everything I learned, whether it was striking or grappling, was geared to MMA. I believed in my heart that one day I would be a champion.”  

This all sounds average enough, right? The world is full of stories of people who avoided the negative influences around them by directing their energy into an athletic pursuit.  

But Torres didn’t get where he is like most fighters. As a skinny, scrawny, teen he fought in underground fights that paid him a couple of hundred bucks at a time, and he used this money to put himself through college.  

“I started fighting on small regional shows, they weren’t sanctioned at that time. There were no real rules, you couldn’t pull hair, bite or scratch. I started making a living that way,” he says. Torres began fighting in 1998, two years before his official professional record starts. He estimates he would fight “eight or nine times” in a semester, and used this money to fund his tuition. “They were small unsanctioned shows. When I first started training we didn’t have a gym, we had a garage – we didn’t even have mats. What I did was use those shows to get my experience. At that time I wasn’t old enough to fight anywhere else.”  

The idea of fighting in unsanctioned shows brings Jean Claude Van Damme-style movies to mind, shady underground bouts that take place in secluded settings, but the reality is far different. One of Torres’s friends had the idea to start throwing fights in a local bar and club. “He put a ring in the bar and he had guys come down who wanted to fight,” says Miguel. “He started paying guys a couple of hundred bucks here and there. I figured the more times I could fight in a semester the more I could pay for my tuition.”  

It is worth remembering that this was way before the days of regular MMA on TV, this was before Zuffa bought the UFC, before most people even knew what MMA was. So how did people react to the very visible signs of his part-time job? “I would show up to class with a busted lip, black eye, cauliflower ear, broken hand, scratches on my neck and my face. People would always look and they’d want to ask, but they never would. They might have wondered if I was getting beat on by my girlfriend or something!” Soon enough, his classmates had been to see him fight and had come to know what he was about, and Miguel went on to graduate with a bachelor’s in marketing.  

Based in Indiana, Torres met the late Brazilian jiu-jitsu master Carlson Gracie at age 21. Gracie had established a school in Chicago, and in Torres’s words he took the young aspiring professional’s game to ‘“another level”.  

This was seven years ago, and by that time Torres was already an accomplished and active competitor. By the time the WEC came calling in 2007, Torres had 33 sanctioned fights on his record with only one loss (a decision loss to Ryan Ackerman in 2003. Torres would avenge the loss two years later with a first-round submission). “I knew if I stayed in my weight class long enough it would become more popular,” he says. “The WEC came around, they gave me the call to come and fight for them, and the rest is history. I won my fights, got the title shot and now people can finally see what I can do.”  

The casual, almost off-hand manner in which he describes his rise through the ranks to the pinnacle of the 135lb division is no sign of arrogance. Torres is as humble as they come, and he is well aware that his position as a champion is constantly under threat. “I don’t really consider myself better than anyone else,” he says. “I just know that I work really hard. It’s who shows up and who’s the better man that day that counts.”  

For too long, any fighter outside of the UFC had to suffer a life of relative obscurity, especially if you fought in a weight class that no major promotion featured. Torres could once walk around his hometown with no worry of being recognized, such was his level of fame, but things have changed with the recent growth of the WEC.  

The Zuffa-owned WEC is one of the fastest-growing MMA promotions in the world. Two years ago they were holding events in venues with a capacity of 1,500 people. Now they’re doing close to ten times that. “The last card in Sacramento, that was ridiculous, there were close to 15,000 people there. I don’t know if you could tell on TV, but the crowd was crazy. I’ve been to UFCs and I’ve never seen a crowd that crazy before,” he says. He says that he thinks the lighter-weight fighters in the WEC fight harder as a result of this energy from the crowd, and he may be right – you rarely find a WEC fight that isn’t wildly entertaining from start to finish. “They fight to win,” he says. “The guys in the UFC, a lot of them fight not to lose, they’re more conservative. Everyone in the WEC comes out to finish their fights at all cost.”  

The WEC has the potential to go global, and the execs have been talking about taking events to territories such as Mexico for some time. Torres regularly does press tours there, and the reaction of fans and the media is that they can’t wait for an event on Mexican soil. “I think the WEC could venture wherever they want. Once the WEC cross over into Mexico, it’s just a matter of time before they follow the model of the UFC and go global. It’s just a matter of time. They’ve got the right fighters and the star potential, it’s just putting money behind the marketing to make it happen.”  

Torres is without doubt one of those stars. His combination of precision striking and unreal submissions skills are formidable enough, but his iron will and mental strength mark him out as a true champion. But Torres, is philosophical about his position. He feels that he’s reached his peak maybe too early. Had he come into the game a few years later, things might be a lot better for him. “I know I’m never going to get the deal I deserve,” he says. “I’m like the football players of the ‘70s, opening doors for the guys who come after me. Sponsor-wise and fight-wise, I get paid well for my division and I get more than some of the UFC guys, but I know I’ll never make the money I deserve. But I’m creating a legacy and creating history.”  

If he keeps his current form, Torres’s legacy could be considerable. Sports writers have already marked him out as one of the best fighters in the world in any weight, and his level of popularity increases by the day. That said, Torres’s job is to stay at the top for as long as he can, which is no easy task in the WEC’s talent-rich 135lb division. “Everybody I fight is going to be tough. I have the title, and they want what I have. That belt changes your life, but I’ve wanted this my whole life. If someone wants to beat me, they’re going to have to kill me.”  

TORRES ON FAMILY

“Everything that I do is for my family and my students. I consider my students like a second family. I know that everything I do opens a door for my daughter, I know her future is going to be a lot brighter because of the sacrifices that I make – I learned that from my father. When I get up and go to the gym and I don’t want to work-out because I’m tired or I’m hurt, I just think of her and it makes me work a lot harder.”  

Miguel Torres spoke with Hywel Teague