It's So Easy - Duff Mckagan [106]
Someone suggested I try working with a weight-lifting coach named Louis, who operated out of the Gold’s Gym in North Hollywood. Once again I didn’t know what to wear. I thought Converse All-Stars were cross-training shoes. I figured all the biking had raised my cardiovascular fitness, but I soon found out that when it came to strength conditioning, I was sorely lacking. I was thirty and hadn’t done anything outside of an occasional push-up and sit-up since I was playing sports—and that ended at fourteen, more than half a lifetime ago. This was something totally new and different and taxing. I hurt every morning when I woke up, but that pain let me know that I was alive.
I went every day except Sunday—and that was just because the place wasn’t open Sundays. Louis kept on me about a clean diet. I started to eat the same thing every day: melon for breakfast, a salad with grilled fish for lunch, and barbecued chicken with corn and beans for dinner. Simple fuel. He also taught me to drink even more water. I did not drink any water whatsoever in my twenties, thinking it a total waste of time and stomach space—time and space better devoted to vodka. I now realized the source of one of my earlier health problems: my hands had cracked from dehydration. Aha.
I started to feel at home in the gym, and soon I confided in Louis about my still-constant dilemma: I don’t know what to do tomorrow, or even tonight after the gym closes; I don’t know what I’ll do when I get home.
“There’s somebody you should meet,” he said. “You know the fighters who come in here?”
On a few occasions I’d seen kickboxers come into the gym. These guys were usually getting ready for professional matches. In the mid-1990s, mixed martial arts and Ultimate Fighting had yet to appear—kickboxing attracted the baddest of the badassed. When I watched them work out, I was in awe. Not only were they capable of amazing physical feats, but they all seemed to share a sense of calm and confidence. It all seemed so mysterious.
“I want to introduce you to their trainer,” Louis said. “Their sensei. His name is Benny the Jet.”
I gasped.
Benny Urquidez was famous in the Valley. This was the era of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal; Benny had been the opponent in two of the most famous fight scenes in Jackie Chan’s illustrious career. But Benny was no action-star wannabe. He was a champion ring fighter. He had helped introduce full-contact fighting to the United States and had founded his own martial-arts discipline, called Ukidokan. Just months before, Benny had come out of retirement to defend his twenty-year undefeated run as a professional kickboxer against a young Japanese fighter who said he would not consider himself to hold a true world-champion title until he had beaten the legend. That is, Benny. It ended up being the fight of a lifetime: Las Vegas, fifteen complete rounds, the forty-year-old veteran versus a twenty-four-year-old champion in his absolute prime. I have since watched the match on video dozens of times. It seems impossible neither of the men was permanently damaged—or worse. Benny won, and at the time Louis suggested I meet him, so close on the heels of this epic battle, his star burned brighter than ever.
It turned out Benny’s House of Champions was just down the road from Gold’s Gym. It occupied a storefront on Laurel Canyon near the corner of Oxnard—part of a row of nondescript buildings probably thrown up in the 1960s as suburban sprawl pushed out across the Valley. But there was no entrance onto the street, and you wouldn’t realize it was there unless someone pointed it out. They weren’t seeking foot traffic. It wasn’t that type of place.
I will never forget the first day I entered the House of Champions. It was a hot Indian-summer day in September 1994. Louis took me into an alleyway and in a back door. I steeled my nerves. I took a deep breath. And we walked in—to a tanning spa. Aha. Running a dojo is not a