Issue 031

November 2007

When the International Fight League brought its team concept to the sport of mixed martial arts the athletes and coaches were thrilled. To them, fighting has always been about a team. While the league's coaches competed individually in the past, they always trained as members of a team. Ken Shamrock had the Lions Den, Renzo Gracie had a whole family full of fighters, and who could ignore the team from a small town called Bettendorf, Iowa, that produced champion after champion. 

Pat Miletich has been raising the bar in MMA for years, coaching more than 10 UFC champions and nearly sweeping the Portland Wolfpack, 4-1, at last year’s first-ever IFL Championship. And while many of the coaches involved in the sport would like to claim all their fighters are ready to go the distance in every match, Miletich’s fighters have been proving it for years, known for both their hard work ethic and excellent conditioning.

"It doesn't matter how good you are athletically, there's a lot of guys with ability, but there not going to be anything in this sport unless they've got a good work ethic," Miletich said.

From heavyweights like Tim Sylvia and Ben Rothwell down to lightweights such as Spencer Fisher and Bart Palaszewski, Miletich has put out fighters in every division who hit hard and never quit. Sylvia, for instance, defended his UFC title three times for five rounds (going 25 minutes) with men like Randy Couture, Jeff Monson and Andrei Arlovski. And who could forget about Fisher’s recent war with Sam Stout at UFC Fight Night 10? It was the second time those two fighters met for a three-round decision.

The Miletich Fighting Systems didn't just make cardio important in MMA, they made it a requirement.

"[I push them] as hard as I feel they need to be pushed to give them a better than good chance to win – no harder than I push myself." Miletich said. "You just have to gauge each person’s athletic ability and the way they [learn]. Do they need visual explanation? Audio? There are so many different ways to read an athlete and to get them to respond. For some it takes yelling, some being their friend, and some need a kick in the ass. It’s a fine balancing act to be honest." 

Miletich held two titles of his own in the UFC and was the organisation’s first lightweight and welterweight champion. He fought some of the best around, but left an even bigger mark on the sport as a coach. “Becoming a champion and coaching one are both very satisfying. Winning yourself is like realizing your own dream, but when you coach you’re realising that your helping someone else realise that same dream. It’s very satisfying.”

The man’s success rate in the sport is undeniable. When it came time for him to put together a roster for the IFL’s Iowa Silverbacks, he couldn’t ask Matt Hughes or Tim Sylvia to leave behind their welterweight and heavyweight titles in the UFC, so instead he made stars of newer fighters like Rory Markham and ‘Big Ben’ Rothwell, who’ve produced some of the most thrilling knockouts in IFL to date.

“Pat’s great because he doesn’t try to change you or make you like him. He’s not out to make a bunch of mini-Miletichs. He finds your strengths and he adds things to them,” Markham said.

The school started out on a racquetball court with mats when Miletich himself was training to become a champion in the 1990s, fighting in shows like the Battle of the Masters, an eight-man tournament with no rules and no weight limits. “I just wanted to win a world title and we needed a place to do it,” he said.

The sport has evolved a lot since the days of no weight classes and no rules. Today fighters cannot target the back of the head or the spine, in the IFL no elbows are thrown. But one thing Miletich wouldn’t mind changing is the name. “I wouldn’t describe it as MMA. I think it’s a bad name. I’m not sure who thought that one out, I think they had the right idea, but martial arts [to your average American sports fan] can have a negative connotation. Most people don’t understand wrestling is a martial art, boxing is a martial art, I think they get confused when they hear that martial arts part,” he said. “I’d call it sport fighting — I think that goes better with the American mentality.”

Whatever you want to call it Miletich is at the heart of the game, training countless UFC veterans and the IFL’s elite, the first ring bearers of the 2006 IFL Championship. The Silverbacks went 4-1 against Matt Lindland’s Wolfpack that night, and despite Lindland winning the coin toss, Miletich said later he would have let Lindland pick the order of every match that night, that’s how much confidence he had in his fighters.

“[When one of my guys enters a fight] I’m looking for him to just go out and give 100 percent. Win, lose or draw, to know he did his best, and if he loses and I look at the guy in the locker-room all bummed out, I’ll ask him, ‘Did you do your best?’ And if he tells me, ‘Yes,’ I’ll tell him, ’Then don’t worry about it.’ We expect to win because it’s what we’re used to, we’re not good losers, but we expect to win because we put the work in.”

Before Pat Miletich Bettendorf, Iowa was just another city on the map, but today it’s a destination for some of the world’s best fighters. Schools have franchised throughout the United States, but only in Iowa will you find Rothwell sparring with Sylvia or happen to catch Don Frye grappling with Nick Ackerman. 

“There’s no traffic, not a lot of crime, a good education system for my kids and people from this area, the Midwest, are all hard workers. That’s really all I need,” Miletich said.