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| 'The Assassin' |
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| Written by Frank McGovern -Argonaut | ||||||
| Friday, 15 September 2006 | ||||||
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UI student Ivan Suquet contemplates former life as a professional fighter Initially, Ivan Suquet blanched at the prospect of having his picture snapped for an article. “You have to understand,” he said, “I’m a shell of my former self.” Suquet is a big guy. His mass is liberally spread on a slightly taller than average frame and he carries it comfortably. It made more sense once he opened a shoebox and pulled a picture from his prime five or six years ago as a professional, full-contact, no-holds barred “ultimate” fighter. Sure enough, he was bigger then. It’s not like Ivan is shy — quite the opposite. He’s a theater and communications double major, going for a masters in the latter, a pairing appropriately reflective of his boisterous, outgoing personality. Before being drawn from the box, the photo had sat among an assortment of mementos from his fighting days. Included were medals, tapes of his fights, laminates on lanyards from fighting competitions, or “cards,” he’d attended and—additional—action shots of him laying into opponents in varying stages of defeat. Suquet, a junior, discussed the souvenirs, accumulated during his time as “The Assassin,” with a mixture of nostalgia and pride-laced regret. He isn’t ashamed of his past; he just doesn’t like being defined by it.He grew up a “skinny, scrappy kid” with a predisposition toward physical competition. Originally, he channeled that inclination through football. He did well, attending several collegiate football camps including stints at UC Santa Barbara and Eastern Washington University, and most recently with the semi-pro Palouse Thunder. It was wrestling, however, that succeeded in whetting his enthusiasm for close contact sports. By the late ’90s, wrestling had led to submission wrestling and later, participation in the budding and then almost entirely unknown “Ultimate Fighting,” or Mixed Martial Arts subculture. Suquet competed within the WPKO, a now-defunct amateur MMA collective, and in July 2000 won the belt in the Absolute (all weight classes) division. He was the undefeated and uncontested amateur world champion. In training “I had the choice to retain the title or go pro, so I went pro,” said Suquet. The decision demanded a tightly reigned and punishing training regiment. To survive (sometimes literally) in the ring, commitment to a severe routine was a necessity. “Once you get to the pros, the athleticism is so much higher it’s a chess game,” Suquet said. He obsessively watched caloric intake, avoided counterproductive vices and often committed up to eight grueling hours of daily weight and cardio work. “Your body is so important you get it running like a machine, streamlined and clockwork,” he said. If he didn’t, he could be sure his opponent would. “You have to — these guys hit harder, they move faster and this is their career. It’s how they put food on the table,” Suquet said. For Suquet, the pain was worth the payoff collected in the ring: the rush generated by a professional fight. After offering up a concise statistical synopsis of his career as a fighter and a relatively dry recounting of the training necessary to get there, his description of a fight itself began. When the narrative shifted to the fight itself, Ivan’s emotional tempo was noticeably bumped up. In the ring When Suquet talks, he paces. It’s a telling habit, revealing an almost manic passion and hyper-focus to the business at hand and an agile employment of seemingly endless energy, both of which must have served him well in the ring.“The easiest part about being a fighter is fighting,” he said. “The hardest part is the training and anticipation. When you get in the building, that’s when it hits you.” As the intensity of the narration increased so did the speed of Suquet’s pacing. “You can feel it in the air, the tension,” Suquet said. “Guys are pacing, psyching themselves. Guys sitting there with that 10-mile stare.” Ivan talked with his hands, and the more he talked, the more his hands punctuated. In preparation for a fight, psychological attunement and discipline became as or more important than physical prowess. Ivan recalled reminding himself he was a modern gladiator, capable of physical expertise and punishment few others were. Detachment and separation from himself and his opponent was a necessity. “You have to find a place where you can prepare yourself to punish another human being, someone you’ve never met who’s never done a thing to you,” Suquet said. “For me, it’s a dark place and a demon dwells there. It’s a dark room with a switch, and you hit that switch when you get in the ring.”The fighter left the locker room, waited in edgy anticipation for the ref to call his name, stats and team and walked to the ring in a spotlight.“Thousands of fans looking at you, yelling, but you don’t notice them at all on the way to the ring. The lights are hot in the ring, or the cage, I’ve fought in both. The ref checks you, checks the other guy and calls it. When I went to hit a guy in the face, I didn’t aim for his nose, I aimed for the back of his head, that’s how you have to think.” After hitting the metaphoric switch that transformed Ivan to the “Assassin” and getting into it, the fight would soon become its own reward. “When you start hitting someone, the crowd goes nuts, they love it. This is what they want and they’re feeding you. Then, when the ref lifts your arm, you feel like a god. People look at you like you’re a warrior. It’s like a drug.” The comedown Exhilarating as his string of victories and inclusion in an elite collection of athletes was, the buzz was not without a hangover for Suquet. After a string of injuries indefinitely curbed his career, Suquet was prompted, and with the time, to reexamine his situation. Expectedly enough for a drama major, the frenzied pace of Ivan’s commentary slows when he discusses the less romantic features of a fighter’s routine. “Fighting is a hard life. I started looking around the locker room and these guys look like fighters. My face is scarred up some, I’ve got a little bit of the cauliflower-ear,” Suquet said. “I said (to myself), ‘Do I want to end up like that in a couple of years?’” The physical consequences of fighting the toughest people in the world for a living certainly loomed large as a factor in retirement. However, his primary motivation for leaving the life was the psychological toll it had taken, and more importantly, the underpinnings that moved him to fight in the first place. Although Ivan is always animated during conversation, when covering something important, or an image or event that has stuck with him, he stops pacing. He faces you to ensure the importance is not missed. “It gets to you. You never know if you’re going to hit a guy hard enough that he dies, that happens. Hurting people isn’t fun,” Suquet said. “When you’re hitting someone and you see their wife in the stands crying, covering their kid’s eyes, it’s tough.” Suquet quit fighting on the cusp of Ultimate Fighting’s current incarnation as a legitimate sport and a lucrative career opportunity. Ironically, one of his chief motivations for retirement was the pervasive political and sporting world’s consideration of MMA fights as a barbarous and flash-in-the-pan anomaly. Many of Suquet’s friends and roommates during his tenure as a fighter now compose a who’s who of Ultimate Fighting’s leading names including Frank and Ken Shamrock, Josh Thompson the current Ultimate Fighting Championship Lightweight champion and scores of other. Virtually all of whom are now wealthy and well known. Being on the ground floor with the pioneers of the sport, sharing their impressive records and celebrated coaching staff, Ivan has little doubt that had he stayed at it, his name would today be included as one of the luminaries.Ultimately, though, the benefits of consigning his life over to occupational violence proved contrary to Suquet’s nature. “I started asking myself, ‘Why do I do this? Do I have to be a tough guy all the time?’ I couldn’t go back to it,” Suquet said. “My heart just wouldn’t be in it. It didn’t fulfill me. It filled my ego, but not my soul. In fact, it made it more empty.” This is an unsurprising sentiment. Suquet has so thoroughly filed ‘the Assassin’ well behind him with the violence that characterized much of his past, even missing out on the wealth and recognition doesn’t bother him. That lifestyle is gone, but it’s not forgotten. Suquet now considers it valuable and unique experience.“There are a lot of people who say, ‘I could have done this and I could have done that.’ I don’t,” Suquet explained. “I say, ‘I did do that.’”  Add as favorites (39) | Views: 1205
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