Nick Diaz Thanks Traditional Training for MMA Success
Nick Diaz Thanks Traditional Martial Arts Training for MMA SuccessBy Edward Pollard | Photos by Rick Hustead |
“There was always a fight at the end,” Diaz says. “One of my friends or my brother would get dragged into it, and I’d be trying to stop it.” That’s when the aforementioned blade entered the picture—and Diaz’s abdomen. “It was just an after-party fight,” he recalls. “I was trying to help neutralize it, but we were fighting with some northerners, and they didn’t really care. I was trying to pull my brother out of the mix, and somebody hit me. Pretty soon, everybody was fighting. The guy I was fighting turned out to have a knife. I didn’t know I was stabbed until everybody was looking at me funny. I lifted my shirt, and my white undershirt was covered with blood, so I had to get sewn up. I was only 17.” While a blade in the gut would be enough to turn a lesser person into a shut-in, for a warrior like Diaz, it was merely motivation. On a mission to fill in the newly revealed gap in his martial arts training, he signed up for lessons in Cabales serrada escrima, a Philippine fighting art renowned for its knife work. From instructor Steve Novinger, Diaz picked up a plethora of defenses and disarms. Assimilating the new skills proved relatively easy for Diaz because of his extensive background in the traditional martial arts.
“I’ve been aware of the martial arts since I was 3,” Diaz says. “There were these blue mats always stacked up in the backyard at my aunt’s house, and I couldn’t figure out what they were for. Then I noticed that my uncle and others were doing karate and aikido on them. They were always training early in the morning—they would put the mats out and practice throws. “They put me in aikido when I was 4 or 5. I did it for awhile, but I always wanted to do some karate where I’d be kicking and punching. As soon as I got into school, there were fliers for karate classes at the parks and recreation [department]. I would do whatever karate classes were in the area.” That growing skill base was bolstered by the all-around athleticism Diaz built while participating in wrestling, swimming and boxing during high school. He was fortunate to have those solo pursuits to fall back on because more popular team sports didn’t appeal to him. The reason: He found the typical jock attitude repulsive. Diaz equates it more with vanity and brute strength than with honor and technique. “The jocks didn’t like the way they looked in a gi doing martial arts,” Diaz snorts. “They thought karate was dorky. They liked to be cool and lift weights. They’d rather try to impress their girlfriends than walk around with skills and a karate gi.” In an effort to round out his repertoire, which was composed mostly of kicking and punching, Diaz began shopping for a grappling instructor. He wound up at the Animal House Gym in Lodi, California, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. His first instructor there was Steve Heath, a Cesar Gracie blue belt who’d competed in the International Fighting Championships Warriors Challenge. The school’s sambo coach, Valeri Ignatov, had fought twice in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. “Once I got into the academy, everybody had the same mind-set as me,” Diaz says. He knew he’d found his calling. Ground fighting came naturally to him, and the skills he was gaining on the mat later eased his transition into escrima after he was stabbed. “I would learn knife techniques, locks, breaks and traps, then find my way into a series of jiu-jitsu holds from that. I liked being able to add my own stuff.” Combining his new knowledge of knives with his previously acquired skills made Diaz a more complete martial artist, one with a healthy respect for cold steel and the damage it can inflict. Knife defense is a crucial component of self-defense, and the road to mastery is long, he insists. “People who are really good can’t be stopped. If you have a knife, they’ll take it from you and kill you with it, so it’d be a bad idea to take on someone who has real skills. It’s going to take me a long time to learn.”
Soon after he’d embarked on his martial journey, Diaz was told that his intensity was way above average. To burn off some of his excess energy, he made swimming his primary physical outlet, immersing himself in triathlons, including the Ironman competition. The swim-bike-run format of the sport suited his personality, but it wasn’t enough. At age 18, Diaz set his sights on professional MMA. During the ensuing years, he faced opponents in every major organization in the United States. At 26, he’s now one of the sport’s youngest and most seasoned veterans. He’s carved a reputation as a scrapper, but what most casual fans don’t realize is that more than two decades of traditional martial arts, including a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, stand behind him. Anyone who’s studied the way Diaz dismantled Frank Shamrock earlier this year, however, will admit that he’s much more than an angry young man with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a driven, sometimes haunted, modern samurai. Once he has you in the cross hairs, you’re pretty much through. “I’m conscious of what makes people tick, and I use that to figure out how to beat my opponents,” Diaz says. “It makes me a more efficient killer, if you will. I want to know where he comes from and who his friends are. If he’s from another country, he might not have our bad habits, but he may be missing a lot of things in general. My opponent will have to be rock solid because I’m going to figure out what isn’t and attack that.” Diaz has proved he’s an expert at exploiting the mental aspects of the fight game. He searches for ways to break his opponent psychologically, not only during a match but often long before his foe enters the arena. “As far as I’m concerned, this is warfare and I’m a ninja warrior,” Diaz says. “That’s the mentality I go in with. I don’t want to sit next to my opponent and have a conversation and lunch and do an interview together and shake hands. Acting like you have a normal life is not [the same as] having a normal life. Putting on that front 24 hours a day is just crazy. In a weird way, living with that gives me a whole lot of confidence. I know I’m going to smash him because he hasn’t suffered and he hasn’t given up the things that I’ve given up.” (To learn three sneaky submissions from Nick Diaz, check out the September 2010 issue of Black Belt.) |
