Fight Club

Just northeast of Whiskey Wild Saloon, in an unmarked white warehouse, a dozen pairs of gloved fighters punch, pull, drag and tackle one another in a 30-foot cage. Some wear lightly padded gloves, others, fully padded boxing gloves. Two women don matching sets of pink gloves as they perfect their uppercuts and chokeholds.

With each punch, the fighters eject a slight whistling noise through their mouth guards, as they’ve been trained to do to keep breathing steadily.

“What kind of shot was that?” shouts Rob Hulett, the owner of Heart of America Training Center, coach of Hulett House MMA and Columbia’s only promoter of the Midwest Fight League.

“Don’t let those punches disrupt you,” he says to a shirtless 20-something man in red boxing shorts.

Although some critics have equated mixed martial arts to a human version of cock fighting — watching the sport is certainly enough to make a first-time bystander wince with every hit — MMA is one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States.

Locally, people such as Hulett are seeking to set up Columbia as a national destination for MMA fighters. Most recently, that’s meant moving to an improved training center — his fourth in 10 years of training — to attract new fighters, accommodate and groom more fighters and keep Columbia’s pro MMA fighters in town. And he’s getting there.

Just two decades ago, the sport, which combines various fighting styles such as jiu jitsu, boxing and tae kwon do, was relatively unknown until one Brazilian family showed how successful combined fighting styles could be, along with the simultaneous birth of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC.

The UFC is to MMA fighters what the NFL is to football players — where all the best go to compete. Currently, the UFC has roughly 65 million fans, according to MMApayout.com, an online business journal and news source for the MMA business. But it’s also growing. Its fan base expanded 14 percent between 2007 and 2009, while the NFL, MLB, NBA and NASCAR suffered losses, according to data from the Simmons Research Database.

In Missouri, Columbia hosted one of the first MMA events in the state, following its 2007 approval. Some states still haven’t accepted MMA as a sport. Even though Missouri wasn’t an early adopter and its participation in the sport is average, Hulett says that the popularity of UFC shows growth potential.

“The popularity grows every year at a steady rate, both the number of fighters and the crowds at events,” Hulett says. “It’s not exploding, but it’s growing every year.” He hopes that his newest gym will be able to accommodate that growth. Before moving into his new space, Hulett toured plenty of top-of-the-line MMA training facilities to get an idea of what he’d need in his new gym.

“I’ve even taken it one step further than the ones I’ve seen,” he says. “There’s nothing else like it in the Midwest.”

He says his new gym is likely to attract some fighters from small-town teams who’d like to take their fighting to the next level. Even though Columbia has a small handful of teams, including Hulett House and Team Ambition, Hulett often brings in other teams for Columbia fights from towns such as Mexico, Poplar Bluff, Warrensburg and Sedalia.

That’s exactly how he attracted one of his best current fighters, Raymond Gray, who came to train in Columbia from Jefferson City. “I saw one of [Hulett’s] guys beat our best guy pretty convincingly, and I thought I should be training with him,” Gray says.

Similarly, Hulett hopes his new facilities and greater training options will bring more talented fighters to Columbia, as well as help him grow new fighters.

According to Todd Sutton, who will teach karate at the new gym and previously taught with Franklin Fowlks in Moberly, in the past, people interested in MMA would just “show up and start fighting, only to be found sick and exhausted in the parking lot 30 minutes later.”

“If they were to get started on the basics rather than being thrown right into the ring, they’d probably stick around a lot longer,” he says. And that has been a continual problem for many martial arts schools: turning those one-time visitors into lifelong martial artists.

“With traditional martial arts, it’s hard to keep a school going because people come and go so quickly,” Sutton says. “And I’m not saying that people don’t come and go in MMA because they do. But it’s not quite so fast because I think there’s more variety of things to learn.”

Although Hulett plans to ramp up beginner classes this month, he’s been teaching children’s classes for about eight months and already has a handful of students.

“I expect it to be big when we get started, just based on the reactions I get from talking to people in the community,” he says. “We’ll probably get a lot of wrestling kids wanting to practice in the off-season.”

MMA for children is already a national trend with more than 3 million children between 5 and 13 taking classes, according to MSN. By starting young and keeping training structured, Hulett hopes to cultivate more skilled fighters by the time they reach 18, the age they can begin to compete.

Clayton Arnfield, another assistant coach at Hulett House, says starting young is the best way to create lifelong practitioners and more highly skilled fighters on the local MMA teams as adults.

“That was my experience,” he says. “I think this will open doors for them at a young age and introduce them to something that really becomes a way of life.”

A top-notch gym also has Hulett hoping to keep more local fighters who become professionals in the area. In total, Midwest Fight League has seen upward of 50 fighters turn pro — 15 of them making it into nationally televised fights. Going pro is the only way this hobby can turn into a career because it’s illegal to pay amateur fighters. But pros make money for every fight, from just $500 for an average fighter to thousands of dollars for a big-name fighter.

One of Hulett’s first fighters to meet success in the pros was Columbia native Kevin Croom, who then moved to New Mexico and has fought in a handful of nationally televised leagues and has a record of 12 wins and five losses.

“He left because we didn’t have enough competition in Columbia for him to train against with a high enough level of skill, and our facilities couldn’t compete with what he could get in New Mexico,” Hulett says. “Now we’ve got highly skilled competitors, and I think with the new facility, we’ll attract even more who want to move here and train.”

Raymond Gray, who supports his MMA career by working at a hotel and pulling security at local nightclubs, will be one of the first local amateurs to make the decision whether to stay in Columbia and train at the new facility or head to a pro camp when he goes pro next year.

“I always say that I don’t want to be the best guy at my gym because then I can’t get better,” Gray says. “But as we get a better facility and more hungry, dedicated fighters, I’m thinking about sticking around.”

But along with the new facilities and more fighters are benefits that Gray says other more popular pro destinations don’t have.

“The pro trainers aren’t as gruesome as the ones on the bottom fighting to get to the top, and in a pro camp, your training partner might have to miss for interviews and other pro things like that,” Gray says. “A pro camp isn’t necessarily better. It’s not the same work ethic. I want the nonstop pressure that we have here, not all that glamour.”

Gray plans to put off going pro so he can continue to build his image and increase demand for himself as a fighter when he does go pro. He says there’s a reason interviews are so important in pro camps.

“MMA in the pros is about who you are before it’s about what you can do,” Gray says. “A lot of talented guys won’t make it big because they’re not marketable. It’s all about the money because it’s a business, and [the promoters] have to market us to the crowds.”

“Ultimately, it comes down to the money in just about every sport,” Gray says. And so, he’s done what he can to make himself and his story sellable.

Although most MMA fighters are wrestlers, Gray is a striker whose training is based in Capoeira, a Brazilian martial arts style that combines music, dance and acrobatics. Because it’s “fun to watch” and “is really fancy and kind of looks like a dance,” Gray says it helps him to stand out. But he also looks different. He’s got a beaded beard, a yin yang tattoo and dreadlocks down to his chest that he swears help him during his fights. “It’s harder to choke me out with all my hair,” he says. “The dreads are kind of like a cushion.”

He also works on his fan base, locally. He stays around after fights to sign autographs, take photos and talk to his fans. He sells T-shirts to promote his “brand.” Ultimately, these efforts will help Gray earn more money when he goes pro.

“Even if a good pro is fighting a better pro, if the good one has a huge following, he’ll still make more money than the better fighter,” Hulett says.

Just to continue his branding, Gray is staying in the amateur league long enough for the first national amateur championship in Las Vegas next summer, which Hulett, as a board member for USA MMA, helped put together to gain some exposure for his fighters, including Gray — even though he’s got pro promoters looking to book him and pro fighters waiting to fight him.

As a board member of USA MMA, Hulett is also working with the national body to try to get MMA into the next summer Olympics as an exhibition sport, and he thinks the chances are good. The national tournament next summer, he says, will serve as the first step in selecting a team to represent the United States in international competitions and, ultimately — hopefully — the Olympics. Perhaps by that time, Columbia will have earned the right to have a fighter on the bill.