martial arts.
In the nineties, Helios’s son, Royce, accepted an invitation from his older brother to move to California to help him teach the art. In an old California tradition (see Alter, Hobie) they started in their garage.
But it wasn’t until the family issued the “Gracie Challenge” that the form really took off. The Gracies offered a hundred thousand dollars to anyone who could knock out the relatively slight, 175-pound Royce. Nobody could. He beat everybody, taking them to the ground and making them give up before he snapped their arms or ankles or choked them into unconsciousness.
Thus was born the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
It was a revival of the old debate—which form of the martial arts was superior? The Gracies organized a single-elimination tournament and invited boxers, kickboxers, muay thai fighters, wrestlers, even the Neanderthal cage fighters.
Royce beat them all.
On television.
Everybody saw that you could do something when a three-bill gorilla got ahold of you—Gracie jujitsu. A lot of the fighters started to learn the system and incorporate it into their repertoire.
The UFC thrived as a television, DVD, and Internet empire. It got away from the cage-fighting image, established weight classes and rules, and attracted serious martial artists.
But now there was a new question—could anything beat Gracie jujitsu? Yeah, maybe, if you could keep the fight on its feet—that is, knock out your jujitsu opponent before he could take you to the ground.
The answer came with the generic term MMA—mixed martial arts.
“It makes sense,” Dave the Love God said to Boone one night as they were watching a match on television. “Really, it’s what the old Asian masters always said: ‘You do whatever works at the moment.’”
So the dojos started teaching a little of everything. The new kids coming up wanted to get into the UFC—they wanted to study jujitsu, boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, muay thai, in a combination that made sense. More and more studios that once offered only one discipline were changing over to MMA to survive.
Team Domination, for instance.
It seemed as if all the new dojos called themselves Team this or Team that, on the theory that it took a team of instructors, each with his own specialty, to train a mixed martial artist. Also, all the students trained with each other—a team of sorts for an individual sport, a “band of brothers” out to conquer the other teams.
So Boone walks into Team Domination.
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A real dojo smells.
Badly.
Mostly of sweat. Rank, stale sweat.
Team Domination reeks.
A circular ring dominates the center of the studio. As Boone walks in, two guys are rolling around on the mat in the ring, practicing their jujitsu. Heavy bags hang from the ceiling, and three other guys are banging away at them, alternating punches with low kicks and knee strikes. Another two guys straddle heavy bags on the floor and slam elbows into their downed “opponents.” In one corner, a student hefts kettle weights while another skips rope.
There are none of the trappings that Boone would recognize from the old-school Asian-type studio—no gis, no belts, no Chinese paintings of tigers or dragons, no single white chrysanthemum in a vase. Instead, posters of UFC stars are pasted to the walls, and slogans such as “No Gain Without (Other People’s) Pain.”
The students don’t wear gis but are decked out in a variety of Gen X gear, mostly cammie trunks and T-shirts. Some sport black “Team Dom” ball caps. A few are in plastic “sweat” suits, trying to cut weight. Most of the guys have tattoos, lots of them, all over their arms, down their backs, on their legs. The guy supervising the jujitsu practice looks up, sees Boone, and walks over.
“Hey! What brings you here?”
It’s Mike Boyd.
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Which makes two points of contact.
Rockpile and the dojo.
And two points of contact always make a cop or an investigator kind of edgy. Two points of contact is another way of saying “coincidence,” which is another way of saying “Easter Bunny.” You get the chocolate and the jelly beans and stuff, but much as you’d like to, you don’t really believe that a rabbit brought them.
“Corey Blasingame,” Boone answers. “Again. Funny you didn’t mention this yesterday, Mike.”
Funny and not so funny, Boone thinks. Pretty understandable: if you ran the place where the kid maybe learned how to throw a lethal punch, you might not like to talk about it either.
“You didn’t ask,” Boyd says.
“I’m asking now.”
Boone says it with a smile and Mike smiles back, but the look in the man’s eyes says he doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like Boone