Still to this day I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I’ve been in a lot of fight gyms while covering this sport for the last 13 years.
I’ve watched Dustin Poirier and Will Brooks beat each senseless at American Top Team in South Florida. I’ve seen Jon Jones go hunting for fresh sparring partners on the mats at the Jackson Wink MMA Academy in Albuquerque, N.M. I’ve been politely asked to leave the wrestling room at American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose in order to allow them to finish an increasingly acrimonious team argument in private. I’ve seen Shane Carwin twist someone’s headgear all out of whack at the old Grudge Training Center outside Denver.
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And still I’ve never seen any professional fighters approach training quite the way the Diaz brothers do it. That could explain, at least in part, how we got to this point, with the younger brother Nate Diaz (20-11) set to fight Jorge Masvidal (34-13) for the half-winking, half serious title of the UFC’s top BMF (Bad Mother … you know the rest) at UFC 244 in New York City on Saturday night.
First, a little scene-setting. It was 2010 and I had been sent to Stockton, Calif., by the short-lived “UFC Magazine” to write a feature on Nate. I was a little leery of the whole project, in part because I still wasn’t sure of the ethics of writing for the UFC’s magazine (shortly after this assignment, I stopped accepting new ones for that very reason) but also because I’d already been to Stockton on assignment once, and it didn’t go so well.
The previous year “Fight Magazine” (hey, remember when magazines were still a thing?) had sent me to do a cover story on Nick Diaz, who spent three days avoiding me with a stubbornness and determination that, by the end, I almost had to admire, even if I didn’t get my story. The prospect of going back for Round 2, this time with Nate, seemed like an invitation to go home frustrated again.
To my surprise, Nate turned out to be far more accommodating than his older brother. He met me where and when he said he would. He answered all my questions thoughtfully and honestly. He drove me around town in his souped up Chevy truck as we listened to Tupac and talked about the fight business.
Then came the day I was supposed to meet them at the gym to watch a day of training and nobody showed up. I kept checking and rechecking my phone as 10 minutes went by, then 15 and 20. There weren’t more than one or two other people in the gym, milling around and looking entirely unsurprised by the delay. Finally, over a half-hour after the supposed start time, a caravan of vehicles pulled up out back. Doors opened. People and smoke come pouring out. They tossed their bags in the locker room, turned up the volume on the music (Tupac again), and hit the mats running.
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There was no warmup, no talking, no formalized process. Within two minutes of entering the building, Nick had jumped on his brother’s back and started digging for the rear-naked choke. Practice was on.
This went on for well over four hours. Most pro fight teams are in and out within two. Also most pro fight teams split up the different aspects of MMA training across multiple days. The Diaz brothers did it all, from grappling with jiu-jitsu specialists to gloved sparring with pro boxers to conditioning and calisthenics and mitt work and some stuff I’d never seen before involving the creative use of resistance bands, and they did it for what seemed like forever.
This went on all day, a marathon training session, and no one seemed to think it was weird. I wondered recently whether I might have just caught them at a strange time, doing stuff they don’t normally do.
“No, I’d say that’s pretty typical for them,” said longtime friend and training partner Jake Shields. “They come in the gym for really long periods of time. They come in late and stay all night. It’s not at all uncommon to be in the gym with them until midnight or 1 in the morning. Other people will train maybe two hours a couple times a day, but they might come in and go for four or five hours. That’s their mentality in training, these long sessions, and one thing you notice about them is they never get tired.”
This is true. You think of fights you’ve seen both Nick and Nate in, even the fights you’ve seen them lose, and it’s not easy to find examples of either of them looking more fatigued than their opponents. You might beat these guys, but you probably won’t wear them out.
That’s not just because they train hard when they have a fight coming up, either. According to those who know them, it’s mostly because of their lifestyle. For all the talk about the Diaz brothers as the weed-smoking bad boys of MMA, in many ways they’re living cleaner, healthier, and more consistently active lives than the majority of pro fighters.
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This came as a surprise to Leslie Smith, who trained with the Diaz crew after moving to California in 2010. Like most people, she’d heard the stories about them. Media accounts made them out to be anti-establishment, perma-stoned street thugs who never met a rule they wouldn’t break, so she wasn’t sure what to expect when she showed up in the gym.
When she got there and saw what seemed like a suspicious gathering of people in front of one specific locker after practice, she only got more suspicious.
“I remember seeing them take turns in front of this locker, and I was like, what is it? Are they doing cocaine in there or something?” Smith said. “That was my first thought, just because of what I’d heard about them through the media. And then when one of them finally moved enough for me to see what was going on, I realized they had some kind of super greens drink that they made from a powder, and they were taking turns using the inside of the locker to mix it up so they could drink it.”
The other thing Smith noticed right away was how self-motivated the Diaz brothers were when it came to training. Most fight gyms rely on a series of coaches to tell fighters when to train, how, and with whom. When she got a chance to watch Nick and Nate work, Smith said, she saw a different way of doing things. They never waited for anyone else to tell them what to do. Instead, they were the ones doing extra rounds after practice, staying late to do their own abs workouts, then getting sucked into more and more training.
“There was one fight I was getting ready for where I went out there to train with them, and practice would start at like (7 p.m.),” Smith said. “But we wouldn’t even leave the gym until 1 in the morning. We’d all train, and then we’d start asking Nick questions. He’d give us all sorts of answers, and then we had to drill that stuff. Then we’d have to do it live, and that would lead to more questions. Somewhere in there maybe some joints got passed around too, and we’d just be there all night. I was just amazed at that work ethic and determination, but also how willing they were to share their knowledge and information and stay until everyone had got what they needed.”
During my own time in the gym with them, it didn’t take long to see how the Diazes managed to weaponize their own conditioning. This particular day, they had invited several pro boxers to spar with them inside the small cage in their Lodi, Calif., gym.
Those early rounds didn’t go so well for either Nick or Nate. They’d come forward, get their heads snapped back by the crisp jabs of seasoned pro boxers, have their bodies used as bass drums by one thumping hook after another, and then keep on walking into more and more punishment.
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But that was the thing, the way they both just kept coming, throwing punches in volume, chipping away at their sparring partners in exactly the same relentless fashion. Before long, the momentum in these rounds started to shift. The boxers threw less. The Diaz brothers landed more. A half-hour later, the boxers were splayed out in metal folding chairs near the open doors of the gym’s front entrance, trying desperately to get some air as they shook their heads and quietly declined polite invitations to go one more round.
It was not unlike the experience boxing champ Andre Ward described when asked about his own training with Nate.
“He’s hard to fight,” Ward told reporters at a 2016 press conference. “I mean, he’s real hard to spar, really. They call it the Stockton Slap, because he’ll slap you to death. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. … (Nate) helped me get ready for Chad (Dawson). He always comes in shape, and he throws a million punches from a million different angles.”
In many ways, this is a style and an approach that Nate learned from his older brother. Early on in his career, Nick became the jiu-jitsu master who could also stand there and box with you, confident that you’d get sick and tired of it before he would.
So when his younger brother became a pro fighter, it only made sense that he’d follow a similar approach. It’s a style that demands a ton of physical and mental toughness, as well as a nearly bottomless gas tank. And if you’re going to fight that way, you’d probably better train that way.
“I’ve seen them do it more times than I can count,” Shields said. “They’ll get in there with good boxers and just wear them out because they throw so many punches and just keep going. You don’t see that often, where an MMA fighter can be the one wearing out boxers in just pure boxing rounds, but they’re some of the few guys who can do it. They just never give you a chance to breathe.”
And when it’s all over? Then it’s time for veggie smoothies and CBD recovery aids and probably some Tupac in the car ride home. There may be other recipes for creating a BMF contender, but it’s hard to argue with the results from the Diaz brother way of doing things.
(Top photo: Kevork Djansezian / Zuffa)
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