Hella Nation - Evan Wright [94]
The main impediment to Tito’s ambitions is a 205-pound Byelorussian named Vladimir “Vlady” Matyushenko sitting in a much smaller dressing room a few doors down from Tito. Matyushenko is a taciturn, thirty-year-old former world champion wrestler, fair-haired with Slavic features—a solid build and an almost squarish head, which, his trainer Rico Chiapparelli boasts, “is so hard you can hit him in the head with a sledgehammer and he’ll keep coming.”
Matyushenko’s toughness—Tito calls him the “most powerful wrestler” he’s ever confronted—was trained into him from a young age. He grew up inside the old Soviet sports system. He was raised in a state-run wrestling academy from the age of fifteen and went on to become a Russian national wrestling champion and a European Cup winner, ranked sixth in the world. He earned a spot on the Russian team for the 1994 Olympics, which he gave up in order to move to America, where he worked variously as a college wrestling coach and as a ditchdigger, before taking up Ultimate Fighting in 1999.
Matyushenko doesn’t have much of an entourage—just Rico and Louie Chiapparelli, brothers and former wrestling champions who run the Los Angeles gym where Matyushenko trains, and two American friends who flew in from Nebraska. Matyushenko displays none of Tito’s flights of mood. He is calm to the point of seeming boredom as he sits in his rumpled sweat suit, watching undercard bouts on the closed-circuit TV.
“Aren’t you nervous, Vlady?” asks Steve Chapman, one of his friends from Nebraska, a guy who works as an air-conditioning repairman back home.
“No,” Matyushenko says. “Why should I? Do you get nervous before you go into work in the morning?”
A relative unknown to Las Vegas bookmakers, Matyushenko was given odds starting at more than four to one that he would lose. The more gamblers and bookmakers learned about him, the more the odds evened out, until by the time the fight draws near, the sports book at the Mandalay pegs Matyushenko as the underdog by a margin of less than two to one.
“Tito’s never faced a real athlete like Vlady,” says Rico. “The Fertittas are in love with Tito because he dyes his hair and looks like a pro wrestler. They’ve thrown him easy fighters, built him up, loaded him with belts, and for the first time ever, he’s going to face someone who’s more powerful and more experienced. This is a fight of style versus substance, a guy with a hairdo against a world champion.”
TITO DID HIS MOST INTENSE TRAINING at a camp in Big Bear Lake, California, where he stayed for four weeks before the Victory in Vegas fight. A ruggedly isolated mountain village at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet, Big Bear Lake has long been a popular training spot for boxers. But unlike boxers, whose training often revolves around an intense, almost secretive bond with an individual coach, Ultimate Fighters train in a loose, collegial atmosphere.
Tito’s “camp” at Big Bear consisted of a couple of rented vacation cottages, with his Team Punishment crew sleeping on floors, couches and bunk beds. Team Punishment included individual coaches for jujitsu, boxing and kickboxing and an assortment of fighters who served as Tito’s sparring partners. Some of these were narrow specialists like the 310-pound kickboxing champ from Tonga and the contingent of wiry jujitsu black belts from Brazil. There were established Ultimate Fighters like Quentin “Rampage” Jackson. There were up-and-comers like the twenty-year-old featherweight from Mississippi named Bobby “Wolverine” Terrel.
Typical of the sort of dedication fueling amateurs in this still obscure sport, Terrel had hopped a Greyhound bus out of his hometown in Mississippi and showed up at Tito’s front door several weeks earlier, asking if he could train with him. Tito put him up on his couch. “There’s a thousand people in Bobby’s town,” Tito boasts. “And Bobby’s whipped nine hundred of them.”
Tito and Team Punishment spent eight or ten hours a day together lifting weights,