From UFC.com
By Mike Russell
Mark Bocek spent his summer vacations in high school a little differently than most teenagers. Rather than hanging out with his friends on a beach or pool deck in his hometown in Woodbridge, Ontario, the Canadian-born jiu-jitsu wunderkind traveled the world to train with some of the best mixed martial artists on the planet.
Logging an exorbitant amount of air miles flying to Brazil to log time on the mats with Wagnney Fabiano and Marcelo Garcia, Portland, Oregon to grapple with Dan Henderson, Hilo, Hawaii to roll with BJ Penn, and back home to Toronto to work out with Carlos Newton, paid off for the teenager who was the first Canadian to be awarded his black belt in BJJ in 2005.
Not only did the experiences make for bar-raising “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” reports; they also lit a fire under Bocek to work hard to round out his already superlative ground game to prepare himself for his boyhood dream of competing alongside his elite training partners in MMA and one day making it to the UFC.
Making quick work of his first four opponents (none of them made it out of the first round without tapping out or throwing in the towel), Bocek was offered and agreed to a UFC contract in 2006. Some felt he needed more time in the cage to add seasoning before he made the leap to the bigger stage of the UFC, especially since in his four fights that spanned his three-year MMA career, he had only actually competed for just over thirteen minutes. Add to that the fact that he didn’t actually belong to a fight team or camp outside of his jiu-jitsu affiliation with Nova Uniao, and those who were singing Bocek’s praises in the Great White North began to wonder if it was too soon. Regardless what people on the outside thought, Bocek felt he was ready and he jumped at the opportunity.
Unfortunately, he landed in quicksand.
In his first fight, he faced off opposite tough New Jersey-based wrestler Frankie Edgar at UFC 73 in Sacramento, CA. Walking to the cage, Bocek, who spent the three weeks prior to fight at Greg Jackson’s gym in Albuquerque, began to doubt himself – something he had never done before. As the bell rang, he quickly realized that he wasn’t in Kansas any more. When the whirlwind subsided, he was the one who wouldn’t make it out of the first round this time around. Although Edgar’s blows made him feel like a house had been dropped on him, the loss made him feel as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
“It was only my fifth fight and it was strange, but I just didn’t feel the confidence that I felt fighting in Canada. Not to take anything away from Frankie [Edgar], but I just didn’t feel confident. I don’t think I did what I was capable of,” Bocek recalls. “Looking back, losing that fight made me reexamine and change a few things, so it was a good experience. I think I put a lot of pressure on myself to win because of the expectations people had of me.”
Deducing that his self-doubt before and during the Edgar bout stemmed from a lack of confidence in his preparedness for the fight from the training he put in at Jackson’s, Bocek got in touch with Henderson to inquire about joining his recently opened branch of Team Quest in Temecula, CA. He was given the green light by the former PRIDE middleweight and welterweight champ who had also recently inked a deal with the UFC and he became a member of the storied team that was established by Henderson, Matt Lindland and Randy Couture.
Despite winning his next fight over Doug Evans at UFC 79, Bocek says he still felt like something was missing in his training and that he just didn’t have the confidence he had in himself that he used to. He would give Team Quest one more try before he decided whether or not to move on.
Considering it was to be in Quebec – the Canadian province where he had rattled off his first four wins as the perennial crowd favorite, he figured his confidence would be his greatest asset against Mac Danzig at UFC 79.
After eating a flush knee to the face, the blood that flowed from the ensuing gash over his right eye, combined with a swelling contusion that an earlier Danzig knee created under his left eye, impaired Bocek’s vision to the point that he could barely see, let alone try to defend Danzig’s relentless onslaught of lead jabs which seemingly landed at will. After the ringside doctor inspected the bloody wound and okayed Bocek to continue, with less than a minute left in the bout, Danzig shocked the Canadian crowd and his opponent by taking the exhausted and battered submission artist down, flattening him out and submitting him.
The loss reignited the fire in Bocek that burned inside him as he traveled the globe as a teenager to train with and learn from the best in the sport. He knew something – or things - had to change and he set the wheels in motion to ensure that he would be ready for his next and subsequent fights.
The first thing he did was visit a sports psychologist to get to the bottom of why, after realizing his dream of fighting in the UFC, his confidence seemed to be at an all-time low. He quickly realized that the reason for his nervousness before his fights had less to do with his confidence in his ability than it did the pressure he put on himself to win.
“Before the Evans, Edgar and Danzig fights – I would tell myself ‘This is life or death,’ or ‘What am I going to do if I lose this fight,’ and I found that putting that kind of pressure on myself held me back from doing what I was capable of. I kind of choked. I froze up when I started to think about what would happen if I lost. Those fights weren’t fun for me,” he says. “Even the Evans fight I wasn’t happy with. Sure it was a win, but I don’t think I showed my full jiu-jitsu skills and my striking was off. I fought to not lose instead of to win. I kind of held on and blanketed him. I didn’t even try to pass the guard, which is something I don’t even do in training. I’ve loosened up a lot. Now I just try to go out and have a good time out there every time; the rest will take care of itself.”
Next, with the help of longtime friend Marcelo Garcia, he set up a trip to Coconut Creek, FL to meet, and train with, the coaches and members of American Top Team to see if he and the team meshed well together. They did, and after two or three days at the gym, Bocek earned the respect of coach Ricardo Liborio, et al, and was invited to join the renowned team.
“Everyone was really nice and treated me really well during that week and I just felt like I was accepted here. I spent three weeks at Jackson’s and I was at Team Quest for a couple of fights, but I felt something was missing at both camps. I just didn’t feel like I was part of their teams. Neither of them was too deep in the lightweight division and I felt that something was lacking with both of their strength and conditioning programs,” Bocek explains. “I didn’t have any experts to help me cut weight or to give me advice on how to recover from it. Now at ATT, I have experts in every area and really deep training partners within my weight class. They’re really good at making jiu-jitsu guys into fighters. Most of the guys on the team came from a jiu-jitsu background except for maybe Thiago Alves. They train really, really hard, but the main emphasis at the gym is to help each other. I feel really comfortable here. There are no easy days in the gym. I feel comfortable going into fights training here.”
As his comfort level increased with the more time he spent at ATT, his confidence soared and the pressure he put on himself leveled out, which made training and competing fun again, like it had been when he was tapping out opponents left and right back when he first began fighting in Canada. Appropriately dubbed “Fire” or its Portuguese equivalent, “Fogo” by his Brazilian teammates in Florida because of his flaming red head of hair and his burning desire to compete and win, Bocek not only had a new team and attitude; he also had a new identity.
“Ever since the Robinson fight, when I first started with ATT, I started changing my attitude towards fighting. I was just getting too nervous before my fights. I talked to a lot of fighters and after talking to my sports psychologist about it, the consensus was that putting a lot less pressure on myself and treating the fight like a training session was the best approach and it’s been working perfectly for me. The butterflies never really go away, but that’s more excitement than nervousness. I just keep it in my mind that I’m doing this because I enjoy it. When I’m having fun, I perform my best, so that’s how I approach every fight now.”
Finishing his next three opponents in identical fashion, Bocek choked out fellow BJJ black belts Alvin Robinson and David Bielkheden at UFCs 91 and 97, respectively, and gave Joe “The Southside Strangler” Brammer a taste of his own medicine at December’s Ultimate Fighter Season 10 Finale. With the wins he proved to his critics and himself that the changes he made were working. Although he nearly fell into one of his old habits prior to his last fight, he was able to regain his composure and take control of the situation, and ultimately the fight.
“Walking out to the cage for my last fight I was extremely nervous. I kept telling myself ‘It’s just a training session. It’s just a training session,’ and things kind of worked out well. That’s generally what I do now when my nerves start to get the best of me. I tell myself ‘This is fun; I’m enjoying myself,’ and ‘This is just another training session at ATT where I’m going to go one hundred percent.’”
Bocek’s next pseudo-training session comes Saturday night when he takes on dangerous, yet durable wrestler and BJJ brown belt Jim Miller at UFC 111 in his opponent’s home state of New Jersey. Bocek is looking at Miller as the door to the stairwell that leads to the upper floor of the UFC’s lightweight division and says he just needs to find the key to get past him.“I know beating an ‘A’ level guy like Miller puts me right up there with the best in the division. My goal is to get in the ‘A’ class and then it’s going to be really tough fights from there – the Tyson Griffins, the Gray Maynards, the Kenny Florians – top tier opponents. I’m expecting a very motivated Jim Miller on March 27,” Bocek says. “In Miller, I see a guy with good cardio and he’s a grinder. He decisions a lot of people, except for in his last fight. I don’t know what he’s going to do against me. He’s a brown belt in jiu-jitsu and he’s been really confident with his jiu-jitsu lately. He may try to sprawl and brawl, but you never know for sure. I’m ready for anything. I’m going to go in there and throw a few punches and see what happens.”
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