It's Time! Read online

  Barring the occasional fretting principal, using your fists back then had none of the stigma it might have among parents and teachers today. The manly art of pugilism was an accepted part of American culture. When we were living in Dallas, we had a gym teacher who encouraged us boys to settle our differences by pulling on some boxing gloves and taking swings at each other. Every Saturday night our mom would cook us a great meal—New York strip steaks and baked potatoes, with lemon meringue pie for dessert—and we’d sit in front of the TV and watch the fights. I’d even fallen in love with a scene in an old movie where the great movie star James Cagney, the original little tough guy, tossed a much bigger man using a number of judo moves. I loved it.

  But the day I got pummeled in the face, something went wrong. I got caught off guard and paid the price. More than anything, I’ll never forget thinking how the punches felt. I think the biggest fear most kids—and most adults—have is, if someone punches me in the face, it’ll hurt badly and I’ll be horribly wounded or disfigured.

  Well, no, you won’t.

  Chances are, the person throwing the punch doesn’t know what he’s doing and doesn’t know how to connect very well. Chances are, those punches will sting or bloody your nose, but not do much harm.

  This kid had worked me over. All I could do was lie there and mull over the experience in a strangely analytical way. Huh—that didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, I thought. The second thing I thought was, It’s never happening again. I’m going to learn how to defend myself for real. I had been taking judo class, but now I wanted to be very diligent.

  All the way home, I asked myself what I could have done to stop him. My dad had always told us, “If a bully threatens you, you hit him first. Don’t wait for him to touch you. Don’t let him get the first punch. Just punch him in the nose. Make him see his own blood, and I promise you he’ll never come after you again.”

  That was good advice, and if I ever had a kid myself someday, I’d teach him or her the same thing. The surest way to stop most people is to make them bleed. Because they are not expecting that. Anyone who picks a fight is in love with his own sense of power, and he’s probably never had anyone stand up to him. That’s how most bullies get away with the crap they pull. No one has ever pounded them good.

  That day on the playground, I had messed up. I hadn’t seen the punches coming. I hadn’t reacted very well, and I got beat. After that, I recommitted myself to judo.

  My old man was delighted to see that I was getting serious about self-defense—and no wonder. Joseph Buffer had boxed in his youth, served fifteen years in the Marines during World War II and served again during the Korean War. He’d served as a drill sergeant and drill team leader at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. He’d trained young soldiers in hand-to-hand and knife combat. This was intense stuff, where you could look right into the eyes of the man who wanted you dead, feel his breath in your face, and smell his sweat. He’d also served as the master sergeant in charge of the guards assigned to the brig at Camp Pendleton.

  He was a tough SOB, and he wanted his sons to share that toughness.

  He was a tall, handsome, dark-haired, hazel-eyed man who was John Wayne, Errol Flynn, and Steve McQueen all rolled up into one. When he walked into a room, women wanted him and men envied him.

  Side by side, my parents made an odd couple. My mom, Connie, is a sweet, beautiful Italian-American lady who stands four foot eleven. My dad, on the other hand, was a six-foot-tall monster who was absolutely brilliant and half nuts to boot.

  How nuts?

  Imagine a guy who, on his very first date with our mother, got hassled by a panhandler and tossed the guy through a plate-glass window.

  Imagine a father blindfolding you when you’re ten years old, and having you break down and reassemble one of his German Lugers while he times you with his watch.

  Imagine him teaching you to shoot rifles and pistols at six years old.

  Imagine him teaching you to play poker and blackjack when you are eight.

  Imagine him teaching you to mix stiff drinks when you’re ten. Imagine him teaching you at the earliest age possible that you should never, under any circumstances, bet on a horse. If you were going to gamble, you were going to do it with your own skills, your own brains, and your own smarts. Horse betting was for idiots. “The only way you follow a horse is with a shovel,” my father told us, and we never forgot it.

  And he always said, “Walk into a room like you own it!”

  There was something remarkably convincing about his sayings. We gleaned the message that we could pretty much accomplish anything, if only we had the balls to follow through with it and we were scrupulously honest.

  What was the point of cheating at cards? If you learned to be a good cardplayer, you’d rarely lose. And if you’re going to fight, then know how to fight. On the street, he saw the point of fighting dirty to survive because, in that situation, you must do whatever it takes to win that fight. He taught Brian and me many tricks we needed to know, because he knew them all.

  I carry these lessons in my heart today.

  Fighting was actually part of our DNA. Our grandfather, Johnny Buff, my father’s father, was a world-champion boxer in 1921. His real name was John Lesky, and he fought in New Jersey and New York, and later other parts of the country in the bantamweight and flyweight divisions through most of those early Prohibition years. Buff was his nickname, and for some reason I’ll never know, he passed that name, albeit modified, to my father.

  Growing up in a tough neighborhood in New York City, my dad got by on his smarts and his fists, and channeled what he learned into the Marine Corps. But like a lot of guys who leave the military, he struggled to find himself when he hung up his uniform. Between the wars he was a debt collector. Later he became a businessman, an entrepreneur, and a VP of sales of various companies. He did not graduate from high school or college to achieve any of this. He was self-taught. He had a knack for salesmanship, but it didn’t make him terribly happy. You could say that behind my father’s tough-guy persona dwelt the soul of an artist. In those days, when you didn’t have a billion cable channels on TV, families hung out after dinner and did activities. Dad taught me how to draw. And I remember him reading to us.

  “You ready?” he’d say, and he’d launch into reading one of the world’s most famous poems.

  “ ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,’ ” our father intoned. “ ‘If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too …’ ”

  The words are from a poem called “If,” by Rudyard Kipling, one of my father’s favorite writers. Kipling was the same Brit who wrote The Jungle Book, “The Man Who Would Be King,” “Gunga Din,” and Captains Courageous, some of the greatest adventure stories ever written.

  BUFFERISM NO. 1

  “BIG CHEERS AND NO FEARS FOREVER.”

  You can’t live in fear. Live in such a way that you’re always celebrating life. Wake up every day happy, knowing you’re the best that you can be. If you can banish fear, you’ll rest easy, knowing that you can handle anything you come up against. When an athlete succeeds, everybody cheers. So why not do that for yourself? You kiss a pretty girl? Cheers. You landed a commission at work? Cheer for yourself.

  But Kipling’s poem was something else entirely. It was a code of honor, the words of a father offering wisdom to his sons. We would hear that poem all through our childhood, until the words seeped into our brains and we could practically recite it from heart. I especially liked how the poem ended. The father tells his son, if you can do all these things, then: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

  To this day I carry a copy of that poem in my wallet. If you are the parent of young sons, I urge you to share that poem with them.

  But as much as he loved the expression of the written word, my father clammed up about his childhood and his myster
ious parents. For example, Brian and I never met our grandfather, Johnny Buff, or our grandmother. In our entire lives we never saw a single photo of our father and grandfather together. My mom’s side of the family was no mystery. She was 100 percent second-generation Italian; her dad was from the Abruzzi, in central Italy. But we were never sure about our ethnic heritage on our father’s side. What nationality was Johnny Lesky—Polish, German, Italian?

  Our father waved off discussing such matters, promising to come clean someday. That day never came. But here’s the thing: whatever mysteries my father locked away inside him, one of those family secrets would one day bubble up to the surface and lead me on a path to the UFC.

  But before all that, I had a debt to settle with Glenn the bully. When I was fourteen years old and our shop class teacher stepped out of the classroom for a bit, I gave him a solid dose of payback punches.

  Case closed.

  2

  FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

  When I was in high school, some friends of mine planned a ski trip. All I needed was seventy-five dollars to go along, and I’d have a fabulous weekend on Mammoth Mountain in Yosemite.

  I asked my mother for the money. She was and is a beautiful woman, who has a sort of Elizabeth Taylor quality to her. Dark hair, and beautiful eyes that she fixed on me now with a kind of despair.

  “Sorry, honey,” she said, “we don’t have that kind of money to spend on ski trips.”

  I was cool with that. Absolutely. A lot had been going on in our lives in the last couple of years. My father got a job offer that took us west to California, land of sunshine, movies, endless beaches, and beautiful girls. My parents rented a house in Malibu, of all places. That probably sounds glamorous, but in the 1970s Malibu was not the bastion of wealth it is today. In fact, it seemed to be full of beach bums and a lot of middle-class families like ours. The movie stars were the ones who had the houses on the beach.

  One of our neighbors was Steve McQueen. I used to hang out with his son Chad. We were hanging out in the family’s kitchen one day when Steve and Ali McGraw came home from shopping. They had just appeared together in Sam Peckinpah’s film The Getaway, about an ex-con and his girl on the lam. Ali was as beautiful as she was in that movie. Steve shook my hand and said I was always welcome in their home but had to follow one rule: call first before coming over. He seemed like the coolest dad ever. Drank beers with us on the beach when we were older, and told us some hilarious stories. When we got to know each other a little better, he’d let me use his deck and the awesome sauna downstairs in his house after I was done surfing the beach in front of his house. I regarded him with a mixture of awe and respect. McQueen probably was the coolest of all the leading men at the time. The writers of the day dubbed him Mr. Cool.

  California opens people’s eyes to bigger and better things. No sooner had my father gotten settled in L.A. than he got tired of being a suit. He itched to try something new. He announced one day that he was quitting his job to pursue one of his passions: writing. My mother supported him one hundred percent, even though this decision left our family without a guaranteed source of income. She knew my father needed to make a go at this or he’d never be able to look at himself in the mirror. When you have that kind of dream inside you, you can’t look away. Denying it only makes you feel worse. Ask any fighter in the UFC. If you want something so bad that you can taste it, you’re better off ditching your old life, getting your family to accept who you really are, and going balls-to-the-wall trying to make that dream happen. It does you no good to let your kids see you live your life as a frustrated person, with your dreams quietly dying inside you.

  BUFFERISM NO. 2

  “REACH FOR THE STARS WHEN FULFILLING YOUR DREAMS.”

  Don’t just take one step forward. Take it to the highest level possible. Don’t be half-assed in anything you do. Believe in yourself and your ability. Don’t just reach for the stars—be a star yourself.

  Eventually, my mom’s faith in my dad proved to be a good bet. In the coming years, my dad would build a successful career as a writer. He wrote nonfiction articles for magazines like Guns & Ammo. I was much older when I unearthed stories he’d written even earlier in his career, for men’s magazines such as Playboy and Argosy. They were macho guy stories about womanizing, swaggering tough men who brawled their way through a series of crazy adventures. Dad basically wrote about himself, and in the world of fiction, he always got the dames.

  And on the side, he and my mother began displaying his collection of antiques and collectibles from World War II and earlier. They reserved booths at gun collector shows held in Vegas, and over time managed to learn a lot about buying and selling collectible weapons and artifacts to the public.

  But the success of all those ventures was off in the future. Right then I was a kid who wanted to go skiing with his friends, and my family didn’t have seventy-five dollars to throw away on my trip. I was fine with not going; I really was. I’d never been skiing before, so I didn’t know what I’d be missing. I’d spend the weekend with my brother and my parents, like always. No big whoop.

  But a day later, when I came home from school, my mother took me aside and handed me a wad of cash. “You take this and you have fun,” she told me.

  Hey, great, I thought, and I went on my ski trip after all.

  A week or so later, at about two o’clock in the morning, I awoke to hear my parents talking in the kitchen. The month was almost up, and they needed money for the rent and other bills. They were coming up short, and were at their wits’ end trying to figure out how they were going to get over that first-of-the-month hump.

  I huddled in my room. I felt terrible. My mother had given me all that money and now they didn’t have what they needed to pay their bills. How selfish had I been? Who the hell was I to ask for seventy-five dollars when my parents were trying to make ends meet?

  It was a pivotal moment in my life, one that nearly brings me to tears when I think about it today.

  I resolved never to ask my parents for money ever again. I would find a way to make money and keep making it. And if I could figure out a way to help them, too, then I would.

  From that moment forward, I devoted my free time to conceiving, building, and marketing a business to my fellow high schoolers. Never in a million years would you guess, knowing me today, what I sold.

  Jewelry.

  I made it myself, in my bedroom, cranking out beautiful necklaces and earrings using turquoise stones and various metals I got at a craft store. The girls in school loved it. The boys loved buying it for them, and plenty of people even bought them to give as gifts to people in their families. Soon I was doing well, earning about $800 to $1,000 a month in 1970s dollars. I remember my jewelry once getting me out of trouble with my gym coach. In my senior year I had cut a number of gym classes and used to go to breakfast at the diner across the street instead. And now I was in danger of failing gym, of all things. So I built the world’s most beautiful necklace and presented it to the coach.

  “This is for your wife,” I said. “No charge.”

  He was flabbergasted and accepted it gratefully.

  “But there’s just one thing,” I said.

  “You’re failing,” he said. “This doesn’t change anything.”

  “I know, but couldn’t you please just give me a passing grade? I know I don’t deserve anything better.”

  “You don’t!” And then he softened and added, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I know you probably don’t want your kids doing this at school, but it shows that at a young age, I was already learning how to make deals.

  THERE was no high school in Malibu, so my brother and I went to Santa Monica High School. Weekends, all of us kids used to hang out on the beach. Finding the right spot was usually a hassle. Our school had a fierce rivalry going with nearby Venice High School. If there wasn’t a football game on the weekend, there was a street fight along that strip of coast between the kids from those two schools. B
each culture naturally seems to breed turf wars.

  One night we were all hanging out at a big party on a stretch of Northern Malibu Beach called Zero’s, in front of a number of houses that were scheduled to be demolished because the county was turning this small stretch of surfing paradise into public beach access. It was a big night for us local kids. Almost every teenager from Malibu who went to Santa Monica High was there, plus a bunch of kids from other locales, as fate would have it. We had a bonfire. A live band. Beer. Girls. Everything a teenager could want.

  No one had shown up to hassle us. Everything was going great. And then, all of a sudden, a guy who I later found out was the middle linebacker for Loyola High started arguing with people on the beach, including a female friend of mine. None of us knew what it was about. All we saw was the football player punch and drop my friend’s boyfriend in the sand. My friend started yelling at him. The football player hauled off and punched her, too. Down she dropped into the sand.

  Everyone was shocked. Oh my God, how could this happen?

  But no one, no one, stepped forward.

  This guy just loomed over these two kids and kept taunting them while they held their faces. The girl was crying. Her girlfriends were afraid to go over and get her out of there.

  Then someone walked out of the crowd and said to the big lug, “I think you should leave now.”

  The teenager who had spoken was me, and I was plenty pissed.

  I’m sorry, I don’t care what the situation is. In my book, a man does not hit a woman, much less his girlfriend or his wife. Ever. Even a wimp tends to have more power than the girl he’s dating. And this guy was no wimp. He was a 225-pound monster. Think of a guy the size of Tito Ortiz or Randy Couture, but with none of their class or brains.