Issue 168

June 2018

Having trouble outside of the octagon is never a good thing, but for some professional fighters like Brandon Vera, trouble finds them.

I have a lot of street fight stories. The craziest one happened when I was much younger – before I found professional MMA and what it means to be a martial artist. All of us Filipinos were going to this club where our girlfriend was singing. It was in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

One night, I don’t know how or why, the club was already full, but the whole Laos population decided they were coming back that night. Tensions were high – super high. I remember my sister was there and she was young at the time, probably 16. We told her and all the girls to go out, go to the car, just get ready to leave.

We ended up going outside and we ended up fighting. The fight was on.

I remember seeing my older brother fighting somebody. My brother was throwing flying kicks and jumping kicks – swinging. One guy ended up on the hood of a car and I was punching him on the hood of the car. As he slid off, I spotted a sidewalk and the storefront for a Domino’s pizza with a giant window.

Another guy came up to my brother and “If there was a camera outsIde, It would have looked lIke a fIght scene In a fIlm.

I grabbed him. My brother grabbed him too. We picked him up, turned him sideways, ran and threw him into the Domino’s window. He went at against the window and slid down. Me and my brother looked at each other, just like in the movies, and picked him up again to throw him into the window. Wham! Splat! He slid down and we started fighting other people.

We looked at him again, looked at each other again, and picked him up one more time. He’s got to go through the window this time... We picked him up and threw him into the window. Boom! Nope. Splat! He slid down to the ground. I remember looking in the window of the Domino’s and one person was holding a pizza with their mouth open. Other people were just watching us fight and must have been like, ‘What the hell is going on outside?’

Then I got punched in the back of the head and we started fighting all over the place again. We won for sure. All the Laos people took off before we left. We hung out until the cops came and told them what happened. The owner even told them what happened. We really didn’t start. They came in and were like, ‘Get the f**k out of our club!’ We’d been there for like 10 weeks. What were those guys talking about? That was our girl singing up there.

It really wasn’t our fault, but we did wreck shop that day. It must have been 30 vs. 30. There were so many Asian people. If there was a camera outside, or we had drones back then, it would have looked like a fight scene in a film.

My last street fight back at Virginia Beach on the strip, some guy was talking s**t to me and he got really close to my face and started hitting me. I clipped him with a hard left hook. His head hit a glass window and then he fell down. When he fell, I saw he had a gun. I looked at him, looked at the gun and thought, damn, if I didn’t put him to sleep, this dude would have shot me.

That was my last fight ever on the streets. After that, I realized it’s really not worth fighting in the streets at all. A lot more people started getting shot and a lot of fighting stopped in the States for a while because of it. I’m glad I stopped street fighting and found mixed martial arts.