fightaustralia.com.au FIGHT TRAINING GUIDE | 89
A
fter studying athletes of all types
as an associate professor of sport
psychology at San Jose State
University, Dr Ted Butryn thought
he knew what stress and anxiety were all
about. Then he began researching mixed
martial artists.
“If you’re a football lineman, the coach
knows if you missed a block, but the world
doesn’t know unless you really mess up,”
says Dr Butryn. “But when you’re out there
by yourself in the cage, you’re naked.
Everyone knows you got beat up. It’s obvious
even to people who don’t know anything
about the sport.”
This is the peculiar condition of the pro
fighter. It’s a condition that’s wholly unique
in the sporting world.
Even in other individual sports — say, for
instance, tennis — you might be all alone
when you lose, but you still didn’t take a
physical beating on live TV or in front of a
packed stadium. Your family and friends
may have watched you get your serve
broken, but that’s a far cry from watching
you get your jaw broken.
Money: The Brutal Truth
There’s nothing else quite like the simplicity
and brutal honesty of a fight. There’s also
nothing quite like losing a fight, especially
when your paycheck and the future of your
career depends on you winning.
That’s where the stress comes in, and
that’s where Dr Butryn’s interest lies.
For the better part of half a decade, Dr
Butryn and his San Jose State colleague, Dr
Matthew Masucci, studied the way mixed
martial artists confront and cope with the
various stressors that come with life as a
pro fighter. The initial phase of the study
involved interviews with 28 different pro
fighters in several different organisations.
Part two of the study closely followed two
UFC fighters over the course of 13 months.
What Butryn found is that in MMA, the
stress over wins and losses is just as much
about finances as it is about career glory.
“I don’t think you can separate the sport
psychology of MMA from the economics
of MMA,” he says. “One of the major
stresses of all the guys I talked to, even
the ones who were more successful, was
the financial aspect.”
It makes perfect sense when you think
about it. Say you’re a mid-level MMA
fighter. If you stay reasonably healthy, you
can expect to fight an average of three to
four times a year. How much money you
make from those fights, both in terms of
actual fight purses and sponsorship deals,
depends more or less entirely on whether
you win or lose. Particularly in the UFC, wins
and losses also determine whether you get
to keep your job at all.
So what do you do? How do you continue
stepping in the cage with that immediate
financial pressure hanging over your head?
Ironically, what Dr Butryn found is that the
best thing to do may be to forget about it
entirely — if you can.
“A lot of guys said, ‘I know this sounds
crazy, but I have to not worry about the
financial stuff.’ It’s the worst thing and the
biggest stressor in a lot of ways, but they
felt like they just couldn’t allow themselves
to start worrying about it, and the financial
stuff can take a lot of different forms,” says
Dr Butryn. “Sometimes it means taking a
difficult fight for more money, and of course
the difference in what they make winning
or losing. The UFC guys were particularly
conscious of whether they were on thepay-per-view portion of a card or the dark
matches, because of their sponsors.”
Butryn said he spoke to more than
one fighter who described an uneasy
relationship with sponsors who were
displeased at not getting their logo seen
on a pay-per-view broadcast, just as the
fighters with children to provide for spoke
extensively about the added pressure of
needing to win just to keep things copacetic
at home.
“Those guys with families, they didn’t
just need the show money. They needed
the extra $10,000 or whatever they were
making to win, which adds even more
stress,” he says. “But the worst thing they
can do is start down that road to worrying
about it. If you start thinking, I’ve got to
win because I need the money, and if I
don’t, then my kid won’t have this or my
wife will get mad, then you’re done. It
spirals out of control, you get way more
stressed, and then your body doesn’t
respond the same way.”“The worst part of a loss is facing training
partners, friends and family. I hate to let
people down, and I hate sympathy.”
— Miguel Angel Torres