Streaking to Win (eBook)

Foreword by Mark Munoz

One Friday night at a church summer camp in Sebastopol California, which I looked forward to attending for the whole year, changed the course of my entire life. 

The church camp staff was getting ready for what we thought was a message. Instead, the lights were turned off, a strobe light started flashing and the staff was yelling like it was a military invasion. As music was blaring with bells and whistles, we were blindfolded and subdued in a very playful way, each understanding that a game was soon to begin.

We were playing a seek and evade type of game called “Underground Church” and in order to win this game you would have to make it back to the sanctuary unscathed by “flour bombs” that were indiscriminately launched at you from all angles. A flour bomb was about 4-5 tablespoons of flour wrapped inside a Kleenex and secured by a rubber band. If you were hit by a flour bomb and the flour was on your clothes, you lost and had to go to the cafeteria because that’s where all the losers went to enjoy refreshments. Well, I of course was going to win and was not interested in enjoying refreshments in the cafeteria. 

We were in full camouflage gear as we knew that “Underground Church” was going to happen. We were blindfolded, guided to vehicles and then driven to certain spots of the campground. I was part of a group called “Mission Impossible.” We were told that it was impossible for us to win because of the spot that we would be put in when we start the game. I, along with a group of five others, were loaded together in one vehicle. We drove up what seemed to be a steep incline with switchbacks for about ten minutes. The staff had placed us at the highest point of the campground where we had to scale down the side of a mountain to win the game. 

After we were dropped off a whistle blew to signify the game had begun. As we took off our blindfolds, we instantly started hearing people screaming because they were getting pursued by the camp staff with flour bombs. The staff had flashlights that were flashing through the night sky as they surveyed the scene, while we had no flashlights and were literally being kept in the dark. It was completely chaotic and fun, and no one really knew where they were going, including me. 

They often say that life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans, and life definitely did happen to me during that evening at camp. Looking back, I’m not sure exactly what happened, because it all occurred so fast. As I was scaling down the mountain side, my vision became compromised because of all the shrubbery that began to envelop me as I pressed on ahead. As I was almost to the foot of the mountain, flashlights shone in the brush that I was in and the camp staff was awaiting my presence. Flour bombs began to be thrown in my direction. So, I decided to do what anyone who was going to win the game would do and scaled back up the mountain to get to a safer place. Flashlights were shining in the brush and I was running frantically through the woods and up this mountain. With almost no vision of the path before me, the last thing I remember, while still conscious, is falling into a ravine before everything went blank. Once I regained consciousness, there was one of the camp staff who had fallen on top of me and something was clearly wrong with my ankle. After shining a light on my ankle, I was horrified to see that it had been snapped in half, right near the ankle bone. 

It was a while before help arrived. The camp staff was yelling for help. I must have gone into shock because my teeth were chattering, my bones felt cold and I could feel a throbbing in my ankle and foot. After pulling me up by a rope, there were about five camp staff around me. As they glanced at my foot and ankle, which was turned inwardly so much it looked deformed, I remember them saying, “we need to get him to the hospital!”

They called for help and about ten minutes later, which seemed to be about two hours, a car pulled up. I was placed in the back of the car. I remember going over bumps and thinking that my foot was going to detach and completely fall off my lower leg. The camp staff had driven me to a hospital and when I arrived, they had trouble accepting my insurance because my parents had military covered insurance. Long story short, I returned back to the campground after receiving no medical help, spent the night and left in the morning for home. 

As I was in the back of the car, I was still dressed in full camouflage with little prickly sticky things poking me through my clothes and my ankle swollen so big that it had the same circumference as my knee. 

When I finally got home, my mother immediately brought me to the Travis Air Force Base Hospital and, upon arrival, we were told that the hospital beds were all taken because of the Desert Storm War. So, my mother decided to drive fifty miles from where we were to the Oakland Naval Base Hospital. When we arrived, there was more bad news. They informed us that active duty gets full priority and that I would have to wait a week before I could be seen. As my mother was pleading with the nurse, there was a cancellation and I was admitted into surgery. It turns out that I had broken my talus, which is the weight bearing bone of your foot. It had actually been broken in half. Additionally, my calcaneus was dislodged from my foot and the tips of my tibia and fibula were fully fractured. Dr. Marlene DeMaio performed surgery, addressed my issues and drilled five screws into my ankle during the five-hour process.

My life wasn’t at risk, but it might as well have been because I woke up to heartbreak. Although the doctors had diligently performed their task of fixing my ankle, there was only so much they could do. I was informed that I would never be able to play football again because of the severity and location of the break. I was devastated. Football was what I most loved to do, and a football player was all I wanted to be. Growing up in Vallejo, California, I was told that I had a promising football career ahead of me. In fact, many people were already telling me that I was destined for the pros, even though I was still only a freshman in high school. After all the years of work I had put into my football career, I had suddenly been sidelined.

Luckily, my dad had always taught me that we can’t control everything in life so we should only focus on the things that we can control. Although football had meant so much to me, my consolation was that I might still be able to wrestle, which was a sport I had taken up in the football off-season. I never really had thought that wrestling was going to be my primary focus in athletics, but now it was all that I had. So, as with everything else I did in life, I gave it all my effort and wanted to be the best. It’s pretty amazing how life works out for you, even during the darkest times. If it wasn’t for that freak accident, who knows where my life would have led me. But, I’m grateful that it led me where it did.

After only a few years of wrestling I discovered that, for some unknown reason, it came very easily to me. Don’t get me wrong, I worked extremely hard to get better and to catch up with those who had wrestled for years ahead of me. For people who have never wrestled, know that it is one of the most grueling sports on the planet. The college wrestling legend, Dan Gable, said the sport was so difficult that once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy.

After only a couple of years of wrestling I won the California State Championship, then I won another. I also won two national high school wrestling championships and then went on to win the NCAA Division One national wrestling championship as a Senior at Oklahoma State University. When people ask me how I brought myself to overcome all the early adversity I had faced in my life, along with what should have been a career ending injury, to get to the level that I did, the answer was quite simple. I had faith that God had a plan for my life and that I was destined for greatness in whatever He chose for me. Simply put, I just knew that I was going to succeed.

After serving as an assistant coach at Oklahoma State for a couple of years, I moved my growing family to Davis, California to coach wrestling. So began another chapter in my life because I met Urijah Faber, who was one of the earlier faces of MMA. After coaching with him, he convinced me that I should come train with him in MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and I fell in love with the sport. After only a few months of training, I won my first professional fight by knockout and was hooked. However, with four children and my budding MMA career, we needed help. After four professional fights, I moved down to Southern California because that is where my wife’s family lived. I still remember the first day I walked into this little gym called Joker’s Wild in a city called Lake Forest. It was recommended to me by a good friend of mine Michael Bruno who worked with Fairtex (a major brand in Muay Thai Kickboxing), as a place to check out and it was near my new house. Little did I know what an impact this little gym would have on my life.

I had trained at Joker’s Wild a few times and it was already starting to feel comfortable to me. I showed up for a normal noon class and I wasn’t paying too much attention to who was there because it always seemed like a good mix of guys. Then, I trained with a man who was a bit older than most of...