Hella Nation - Evan Wright [98]
But what a crowd pleaser the choke hold is. Men jump to their feet and chant, “Guillotine! Guillotine!” Castillo is saved at the last second by a foul and comes back so strongly in the fourth round, the audience is again on its feet, this time giving both fighters a standing ovation. The fight, ultimately given to Menne after the fifth round, exemplifies the finest and the scariest in UFC fighting.
TITO’S FINAL ACT before entering the arena is to vomit into a red bucket handed to him by an assistant. He says this always happens right before a fight. The adrenaline makes him choke. Tito says he enters a sort of dreamworld right before going into a fight. He gets tunnel vision. The butterflies in his stomach go away. He feels numb all over.
A show producer pokes his head in the door and says, “You’re on!” Someone hands Tito an American flag, mounted on a pole with a chipped gold eagle on the top. “Let’s move out, men!” one of Tito’s assistants shouts.
Tito walks into the backstage hallway carrying the flag. Team Punishment rallies behind him. As they march through the cavernous area behind the arena, their ranks grow to nearly two dozen young men, all with jaws set, muscular arms swinging, displaying their flame-decorated Team Punishment uniforms. They escort Tito to the edge of a dark tunnel leading to the stage elevator. “Tito!” they shout, waving their fists in the air. “Get some!”
Tito grips the flagpole in his black ultralight boxing gloves. His cheek muscles twitch spasmodically. He stares dead ahead and steps into the darkened elevator. Tears stream from his eyes—a cold, unemotional crying jag that he later explains always hits him before he takes the stage.
The audience goes berserk when Tito rises into the arena. Behind him the stage set erupts into flames. Twelve-foot-tall letters spelling his name ignite. Cannons go off. Tito jumps up and down, jabbing the American flag in the air. Tito marches down an eighty-foot runway traversing the arena and enters the ring.
Inside, Tito breaks into a run, taking a sort of victory lap in advance. He circles, ripping his shirt off and spinning it on one finger like a stripper. Then he throws it into the whooping audience.
The whole time Matyushenko has been standing on one side of the octagon ring, as unprepossessing as a man waiting for a bus. Matyushenko is two inches shorter than Tito. His body is more heavily layered than Tito’s in thick, knotty muscles. But his pallid complexion—he looks likes he’s seen about as much sunshine as an onion sitting in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator—makes him look almost sickly. While Tito takes yet another lap around the ring, Matyushenko dips and touches his toes.
The referee brings them together to touch gloves, then shouts the UFC war cry, “Let’s get it on!”
The two fighters trade a few punches, then lock up, each trying to throw the other to the mat. In the past, Tito has easily tossed opponents as heavy as Matyushenko, but now he’s stuck. Matyushenko pushes him into the fence. The two powerful bodies sag against the fence, seized up together in a near dead heat.
By the second round Tito begins to dominate Matyushenko, throwing him to the ground. But they stick to the mat like flypaper. Each time Tito rears up to execute his ground-and-pound strategy, Matyushenko clinches him.
A few people in the rear seats boo.
“Vlady’s eye is opening up,” shouts a big fat guy in the lower front seating area. He’s