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MMA Fighter Mike Easton: “All D.C.’d Up”

(Read the Washington Post Story here :http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog/2009/02/mma_fighter_mike_easton_all_dc.html#more)

I don’t usually write about MMA fighters in this space. But I’ll make an exception for a guy who lives about two miles from my house; who trains to go-go music (Rare Essence and Junkyard Band!), roots for the Caps and D.C. United and met his trainer at a Cluck-U Chicken in P.G. County; whose father went to Howard and teaches visual art at Duke Ellington; and who plans to enter his fight this weekend to the strains of “Bustin’ Loose.”

“It’s Chuck Brown, baby,” Mike Easton explained to me over the phone. “It’s the Godfather of Go-Go. Since we’re fighting in D.C., I had to give the fans some Chuck Brown. Had to.”

The fight isn’t technically in D.C., but it’s close enough. Easton’s biggest opportunity to date will happen Saturday night at the Patriot Center, a meeting with former World Extreme Cagefighting bantamweight champion Chase Beebe. Easton, 5-1 as a pro, will be introduced out of Temple Hills, but he’s “all D.C.’ed up,” as he put it, from growing up in Anacostia to moving near H.D. Woodson to childhood boxing lessons with his father at Orr Elementary.

“Every time I dropped my hands, he would slap me in the face; not a hard slap, but a little slap,” said Easton, whose fight headlines the 10-fight Ultimate Warrior Challenge card. “I remember crying and boo-hooing. He was like, ‘Regardless of what’s going on around you, if you stay calm you can see your way out of any situation.’…I liked that feeling.”

Easton spent years learning Tae Kwon Do, but that, he said, “was like playing tag. It wasn’t no real contact. And I like contact.”

Then he met Master Lloyd Irvin in that P.G. chicken shop, noticed Irvin’s cauliflower ears, and began talking about mixed martial arts. Easton visited Irvin’s gym and was hooked, went 5-0-1 as an amateur and didn’t lose as a pro until a 2007 fight against Reynaldo Duarte. The Brazilian threw a kick, which Easton thought was heading toward his ribs; he misjudged the angle and Duarte’s shin crashed into his elbow. As both men went to the ground, Easton realized something was wrong.

“My arm just flopped backward,” Easton remembered. “I’m having a full-blown conversation with my coach while this guy’s trying to punch me in the face. I’m like, ‘Man, my arm’s not working. What’s going on with my arm?’ This guy’s just hitting me in the face….I wasn’t worried about him. I don’t fear no man.”

Irvin threw in the towel, and the fighter headed to the hospital to get a titanium plate and five screws in his broken arm. So sure, he has to get a special pass to get through metal detectors now, but he said the pain of the break didn’t particularly bother him; “I have a pretty high pain tolerance, except for like a little paper cut,” he told me. “That always hurts me for some strange reason.”

What else do you need to know? Easton compares the feeling of landing a perfect punch to the vibration in a batter’s arms upon hitting a baseball with a bat; “you can feel the vibration through your whole body, and it’s perfect, and the person just drops, just goes nighty-night,” he explained.

He wears Speedos in the ring, because he wants to “keep it old school,” and because it prevents opponents from finding any fabric to grab when he’s using his knees. “And the ladies love it,” he added.

He was raised on Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, loves classical ballet and the District, considers MMA “beautiful,” has previously used Mambo Sauce’s “Welcome to D.C.” as his entrance music, is a “Washington Redskins fan to the fullest,” and fights under the name “The Hulk,” because, he said, his body somehow swells up before fights.

“Everybody says it,” he told me. “I don’t know what it is, my legs and muscles get all big. My dad explains it really well, he says, ‘Man I look at you before the fight, yeah you’re looking all slim cut and ready, but then fight night you walk in there and you’re huge. Just swollen, like an over-sized pit bull or something.’ It’s wild.”

In the previous blog entry we spoke about how many schools are not legit and how confusing it can be for a new person interested in learning MMA or Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to find the right place. In the United States if you want to become the next UFC star there are simply not that many places to do so. Just watch the UFC and look at the teams producing competitors, then look at those producing winning records, then look at those producing title contenders, and then look at those producing title holders. You will see a lot of the team names repeat. When Brandon Vera from Team Lloyd Irvin fought Tim Silva and lost that was a win for Team Lloyd Irvin. It put the team in a very select group of true MMA academies in the USA and in the World that have produced a title contender.

Brandon Vera from Team Lloyd Irvin goes on to become Title Contender

 There are so many places these days which advertise them selves as MMA schools, or make similar claims. Most of it is marketing and business, Karate schools changing their signs to MMA training centers. The truth is, most places out there claiming to be a MMA school are either lying to you, or lying to themselves.
The one thing that separates Team Lloyd Irvin from a lot of other programs is that we home grow our talent. We have one of the most loyal systems in the industry. The few teams in the USA that produce good MMA fighters will allow regular people from the street to train as a hobby, for fun, or so that you can say that you do MMA, but won’t take you in to their pro-practices unless you have above average experience and/or area of expertise they can use. A lot of the big name MMA schools are notoriously known at times for recruiting talent/students from smaller schools that can’t pay them a salary to train full time. Money wins over loyalty in those cases, and also works as an amnesia pill for the student to quickly forget who brought them up. At Lloyd we show you a way in which you can make it to the top. We give you the chance to make the sacrifices and start from scratch without previous experience. It will be very hard, but if you have the motivation and determination, even if you do not have the natural talent, we will open our doors. This is the story of Mike Easton, a home-grown talent.
Third Law is “Third Law Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” not “Third Law MMA,” because we pride ourselves in teaching people World Class Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We have a track record of success developing local, national, and international champions at levels that are sufficient for professional MMA training. We are not in the business of deceiving people. When someone tells me they want to be the next MMA star. I ask how many times you want to train a week. They usually say 3 times. I then proceed to mention how 3 times a week will get him to a respectable blue belt level in 2 years at best.
Being good at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu requires commitment and lots of training and the right program. There are also things to consider when thinking MMA. If you have zero athletic experience at the high school or college level, it will take longer. If you are not in good shape, it will take longer. Team Lloyd Irvin is not interested in developing the so-called “MMA Fighters” at the small-town events level who holds a whitebelt in jiu-jitsu. The long-term MMA goal of Team Lloyd Irvin is to have students in the UFC, DREAM or some high-caliber event like the UWC where Mike Easton will be fighting February 21st, 2009. At that level you better make sure your Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is on point( by the way Mike Easton is a brown belt multiple times international level medalist in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu).There is no better place to do this in Collier and Lee County than at our school. As a matter of fact we form part of a handful of schools in Florida that teach BJJ at a high level. This is not marketing cliché, but facts. Look at our tournaments results and compare it to other teams in Florida. While we do not send millions of competitors to events and play a low-efficiency big numbers game, we send our most motivated group of competitors which producing high-efficiency results (i.e. more medals achieved than competitors sent at ranked or rated events).
Finally here is the clip of my friend and teammate Mike Easton as he prepares to fight Chase Beebe (ranked in the top 10 in the World).There is small Coach Roberto Torralbas training with Lloyd Irvin at the 0:29 minute mark and the 3:09 in the video.

UWC 5: Man O’ War Mike Easton vs. Chase Beebe

UWC 5: Man O’ War - John Dodson vs. Jose Villarisco

As always leave your comments to interact with us. They are greatly appreciated!