Thursday, January 22, 2009
The first time Donald Cerrone broke his back, he was a teenager climbing rocks with his buddies at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. He fell 40 feet before his friend caught the rope holding him, but the resulting jerk on the line caused an injury that hindered him for years.
The second time Cerrone broke his back, it wasn't even the worst part of his day. While riding four-wheelers in another remote expanse of his native Colorado, he made a split-second decision to follow a friend on a 60-foot jump.
The man who will fight for the WEC lightweight title this weekend made it about 55 feet. The four-wheeler impaled Cerrone, breaking several ribs, turning his lungs into Swiss cheese and exposing his internal organs to the sun.
"I remember dying at the hospital on that one," Cerrone said. "I was knocking over the gurney, throwing up blood on the floor, and then I had the most peaceful feeling I've ever had in my life. I woke up from the coma 2 1/2 weeks later, though."
That 2 1/2-week break aside, Cerrone has packed more life into his 25 years than most people will ever manage.
He has been an avid bull rider and dirt-bike racer, and he's still a talented snowboarder and water skier. He also says he led police on the occasional high-speed pursuit near his grandparents' home in tiny Yoder, Colo., which is why his driver's license is suspended until 2012.
Cerrone tells stories of his Technicolor life with the same palpable passion that dominates his kickboxing, and which eventually drew him to the playground of misfit athletes known as mixed martial arts. His spectacularly violent victory over Razor Rob McCullough last November kept Cerrone (9-0, 1 no-contest) undefeated and put him in line for his first title shot against Jamie Varner in San Diego on Sunday night.
For instance, Cerrone says he's basically been banned from Westminster, Colo., where he fought for months to reclaim his beloved dog, Harley, after it attacked a policeman called by his neighbors, who thought Cerrone and his friends were suspicious characters. Cerrone then tattooed Harley's portrait on his back after the dog, rescued from a junkyard and put through attack training by Cerrone, accidentally hanged himself with his own chain in a hot tub mishap.
"That was my man," Cerrone said. "Spent thousands of dollars to get him back, got him home to my new house, and I put him on a chain. I came home, and he was stretched out over the hot tub. I miss him."
Greg Jackson, a respected Albuquerque, N.M.-based MMA trainer, recognized the exuberance in this mercurial son of a well-to-do Colorado family and channeled it into something more constructive than brawling with people who didn't like his cowboy hats. Jackson has seen every type of character in his gym, but Cerrone is unique for more than his talent.
"Nobody else in the dojo has been disemboweled, as far as I know," Jackson said. "Cowboy is one of those guys that the sun always smiles on. Half of that stuff would have killed or disabled anyone else. He is a phenomenal athlete, and as he grows more, you'll see what he's really capable of becoming."
Though he grew up largely in the upper-middle-class suburbs and attended the Air Force Academy's high school, Cerrone is known to most everybody as "Cowboy" because of his affinity for small-town attitudes and accouterments, right down to the cowboy hats he wears nearly every day. He's also got a special hat for fight night, calling it "a bad omen" for his opponent.
Cerrone also has a daredevil's nonchalant appreciation for how many disasters he skirted before finding a focus in MMA. As a teenager, he rode bulls three times a week, even after breaking his right leg in a training accident. He also was a skilled rock climber, aside from that broken back.
"Whenever I get involved with something, I just get involved 100 percent," Cerrone said. "I want to get the most out of it and try everything I can in it."
After failing to stick in college, Cerrone found combat sports when he realized he was courting trouble in downtown Denver with people who didn't like his hat. He first tried a college "fight night" in Fort Collins, a loosely organized tournament in which the "worst people you can imagine" put on boxing gloves and slug each other during 30-second rounds, he said.
"Turns out God blessed me with a good right hand," he said.
A friend, Mike Baldwin, had taken up kickboxing, and Cerrone began to follow him to the gym. He took his first fight two weeks after starting training, knocking out his opponent. Cerrone immediately took to muay thai, and his career took off when he hooked up with Jackson in late 2006.
"I instantly liked him," Jackson said. "He's a character, and characters entertain me. He spoke from his heart, and that's what I liked at first. Then I saw him work and move, and I saw talent like you wouldn't believe."
After learning about Cerrone's mind-boggling litany of extreme-sports mishaps, Jackson has learned not to worry much about Cerrone's health. A nagging bruise or a sprain is no excuse to skip training for a man who survived that horrific four-wheeler crash, or who still ran on his broken fibula to escape the bull ring.
With a title and bigger paydays looming if he can knock off Varner, Cerrone's life is calmer now. After living above Jackson's gym for several months because he can't legally drive, Cerrone and his new dog _ a fat English bulldog named Little Momma _ moved into a place within walking distance of the gym with teammate Leonard Garcia.
He's becoming a disciplined fighter, improving his self-proclaimed "horrible" wrestling skills and conditioning his mind to ignore his brawling instincts. Jackson approves of his fighter's progress, but still hopes Cerrone never loses the unpredictable edge that first brought him to MMA.
"He's legit. You can see the scars where he got disemboweled," Jackson said. "He's on the level. He lives his life kind of fearless. He lives his life and does it, whatever it is. Sometimes it's not the smartest thing to do, but he does it."
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