Off the Mat

Part One

Wearing white shorts and a red T-shirt — and some cuts and bruises on his face, but not too many — Nik Lentz, with short messy brown hair and a beard, stands beside the referee in the Octagon. On the other side, in red shorts stands Manny Gamburyan, bald and bearded, his right eye bloody and swollen. They've just finished the featherweight fight at the May 10, 2014 Ultimate Fighting Championship Fight Night 40 in Cincinnati. Lentz dominated with a bombardment of punches and kicks and devastating knees to the body and face.

The announcer standing behind them bellows into the microphone, "And the winner by unanimous decision: Nik ‘The Carny' Lentz!" The ref raises Lentz's fist and the crowd roars.

Moments later Lentz talks with reporters who ask him, among other questions, "Your fight game has come around quite a bit — what gives?"

Lentz, 29, tells how two years ago, after fighting as a lightweight (155 pounds) for six years, he "threw his life away" and got rid of his whole team and hired a new nutritionist and joined a new camp, American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Fla., where he moved from his home in Minnesota, and he cut down to featherweight (145). "When I was fighting at 155, I was just one tough SOB, but I was a waste of talent," Lentz says. He says he didn't have true confidence in himself back then, but he does now.

"I'm standing right here. Come get some."

In his post-fight interviews, Lentz declares himself the No. 3 featherweight in the world and he says that in 2015 he's going to be ready for the title. "You can put a lot of money on it," he says. "Any of you think you can beat me, think again." His eyes are wide and his eyebrows are arched and he says to the fans and to the world and to life, like a man who's been through a thing or two, "I'm standing right here. Come get some."

Lentz has totally transformed his fighting and his life in the last two years. That transformation began even before he threw his old life away, before he won his first featherweight fight by first-round knockout, before he became the first American to win two fights in Brazil, before he took No. 2 in the world Chad Mendes the distance, even before he dropped down to the featherweight division.

It's hard to believe now, but he was once on his way out of the UFC, considered a boring fighter, someone who won but put the crowd to sleep and caused viewers to change the channel. Fans hated him, his bosses ripped him in public, pundits and announcers criticized him, and he fought like someone just trying to hang on.

Then he learned that fighting to survive wasn't enough. He had to learn to fight for something. And that changed everything.

Part Two

Let's go back to Dec. 11, 2011. Lentz is in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre for UFC 140, to fight Mark Bocek. Lentz wears loose red shorts and black gloves with blue tape around the wrists. As he steps into the Octagon, the crowd is booing him.

Lentz is on a mission tonight, with two objectives: One, he needs to change his reputation. He's undefeated in seven UFC fights, but he's won using a wrestling style that UFC fans find offensively boring.

Bocek enters the Octagon wearing tight black shorts and black gloves with red tape. He has long red hair and a red beard. Although he can't match Lentz's record, the crowd greets him with cheers.

Lentz knows he needs to fight better, and that's his plan. If he fights this fight just right, he'll have a good chance at meeting his second objective: Go home with $105,000. He's only getting $15,000 to be here, and winning would net him another 15 grand. But if the fight is good enough, if it's named the Fight Of The Night — the best of the night's 12 fights — both he and Bocek will earn a $75,000 bonus. So that's the plan, not just win, but win AND entertain, because, well, he has to.

The fight begins. The crowd is chanting "Bo-CHECK. Bo-CHECK. Bo-CHECK."

There's a lot at stake here for Lentz. For years he's fought on his own terms, almost like he held a mental middle finger in the air, determined to do things his way. Entering this fight, he's begun to realize that in order to survive, he might need to begin doing things not just for himself, but for others. Winning, at least winning the way he has been winning, down on the mat, is not enough.

Rumor has it that because the fans hate Lentz so much, UFC President Dana White is looking to cut him first chance he gets — that's bad enough. But there's something else at stake tonight that nobody in the arena knows about except for Lentz and his father, Jon, who on this night is in his corner with his team, just as he's been in his son's corner his whole life.

Jon has black hair, intense blue eyes, a square, firm jaw and a face weathered and hardened by a life that's had many troubles. He also has cancer, not for the first time, but for the third, and this time he's not getting treatment for it because he made a promise. He's a man of his word and to keep his word he has to save his money for someone else instead of spending it to save himself. He doesn't look it, but he's dying.

So Lentz has to fight this fight just right not only for his survival, but also for his dad's, because he needs every dollar to save his father, who spent everything he had a decade ago to first save him.

* * *

Nik was born in El Paso, Texas. A couple of years later, his younger sister Mandy was born. Soon after that, he and Mandy and their parents moved to Minneapolis, but when their parents split, the kids stayed with their mother, full custody. In Jon's words, their mother was "half nuts" and "drunk 24 hours a day." She soon married another man. He was abusive and he was also drunk 24 hours a day. After Nik finished first grade, Mom and stepdad moved to Austin, Texas.

They lived in shithole apartments in dangerous neighborhoods without much money. Mandy once suffered a lice infection so severe she ended up in the hospital. Nik's clothes never fit. He escaped by going to a friend of his mother's, where there was peace and quiet and a Nintendo. He spent all the time there that he could, playing and beating Zelda, the Mario games, Dragon Warrior, Metroid, and all the other games she bought for him. That's all he did: He played video games and ate junk food, and this kept him feeling happy and safe.

Jon tried to get the kids back, fighting for them in court several different times. But because Nik's mother moved across the country, there were all kinds of complications that cost a fortune and kept crippling his cases on technicalities. It took eight years, and most of his money, but he finally got custody and took the kids back to Minnesota with him.

Nik was 14 years old. Fourteen years old, 5 feet tall, and 200 pounds.

* * *

One day Nik saw a school wrestling practice and decided he wanted to wrestle, too. But everyone said the same thing: You don't just pick up wrestling at age 14 in Minnesota — most kids there start to wrestle in the crib — and besides, you're way too out of shape.

But not Nik's dad. Jon wanted Nik to get in shape, to become more disciplined, to shed weight. Jon himself wasn't much of an athlete, a musician and music engineer by trade, but even still, he worked out with his son.

Nik shared his father's relentlessness and by the start of his first wrestling season, Nik was down to 175 pounds. Jon went to every match and sat as close as he could to the mat, sometimes so close his son's sweat hit his face. Nik went after wrestling like his father went after custody of his kids. First he became competitive, and then he became great. He won two state championships, and the University of Minnesota, one of the best college wrestling programs in the country, gave him a wrestling scholarship.

Part Three

At the start of his fight with Bocek, Lentz immediately takes a right to the jaw and two knees to the body. He clinches with Bocek, and knows he could take the guy to the ground and grapple and try to choke him out, which he is good at — but, to borrow from "Gladiator," he's not only trying to win the fight, but also the crowd. He lets go and aims a powerful kick at Bocek's head. Bocek blocks it. They hit each other some more. Bocek is efficient. Lentz is wild, missing high with punches and kicks, and he suffers fists and knees to the body.

Bocek takes Lentz down and they grapple. Lentz gets Bocek in a guillotine hold — squeezing Bocek's neck between his bicep and forearm, his head at Lentz's side and looking at the floor. UFC commentator Joe Rogan yells in excitement. Bocek stands, loosening Lentz's hold, slams Lentz to the ground, and then lays on top of him. Lentz punches at Bocek while trying to get free and get the fight up off the mat. They trade choke attempts and more punches. Bocek backs off briefly and Lentz goes for a vicious upkick. He misses Bocek's head by maybe an inch.

Bocek gets back on top of Lentz and everything slows. The two men grunt and strain, but hardly move. The fight is becoming boring. The crowd isn't happy. Bocek lays on Lentz and ends the first round punching at him until the bell rings.

All three judges score the round 10-9 for Bocek.

* * *

In college, Lentz studied pre-med, made all A's and worked his ass off, training every single day, even studying mixed martial arts like judo, jiu-jitsu, and kung-fu, because he thought it would help his wrestling. For a while he even lost touch a bit with his father because he was training so much.

But no matter how hard he worked, wrestling wasn't going well. He'd later realize he was putting way too much pressure on himself and not letting himself relax and have fun, which likely would have made him much better. Instead, he was burning out. Even when he did have good days, when he won a match, "I didn't enjoy my success," he says.

What he did enjoy was MMA. On a whim, he entered a nondescript local amateur MMA fight. He knocked the guy out in the first round.

He enjoyed the hell out of that.

Something about MMA grabbed him in a way that wrestling never had, and a way he can't describe if you ask him. "I couldn't tell you exactly what it was," he says, "but I just knew I really liked it." Maybe, he says, it was how it felt like real fighting. Maybe it was because it was standing against someone trying to physically break you. Maybe it was because all his life he'd survived by the help of someone else, and with MMA, he felt he'd found something that he'd learned how to do well at pretty much on his own; he'd found his own way to survive.

Part Four

Lentz fought his first professional MMA fight in August 2005 in a tiny bar in Des Moines, Iowa. The room where Lentz dressed and warmed up wasn't much bigger than a closet and his opponent missed the 175-pound weight limit, but Lentz fought him anyway. He put the guy on the ground in seconds and rained down blows on his head, and he submitted quickly.

It was a great day. Lentz's father was there, and Nik flirted with Elissa, his younger sister's college roommate. Later that month they would get coffee together and argue over which was cooler, Harry Potter or Star Wars. "Harry Potter being the clear winner," says Elissa. They've been together ever since and are now married.

Less than two months later, in October, Lentz fought again, and again he knocked the guy out in the first round.

"I started thinking, ‘Maybe there's a little something to this MMA game,'" Lentz says.

But Lentz was pretty close to getting into med school, and he was a bright student, doing everything he was supposed to do, putting together a foundation for a stable future. He'd gotten a lot out of wrestling — a relationship with his father, an outlet for his emotions, fitness, a scholarship, discipline, lessons in how to grow. But it also taught him that it sometimes doesn't matter how much you "want it," because if you don't enjoy what you do, you're inevitably going to burn out. The more he thought about it, he couldn't see himself trying to finish school and fighting at the same time, and he couldn't see himself doing well in school when all he really wanted to do was fight. So he quit and went all in, dropping out of college to fight full-time. He figured he could finish school when he was older. Fighting was way more fun than wrestling had ever been, and right now, he wanted to see what he was really capable of.

People told him he was crazy and said he was throwing his life away and they even said that he was stupid. It's not like fighting was making him rich — he doesn't say how much he made those first few fights, but until fighters make it to television, there's not much money in the game — but he didn't really care about the dollars. The way he'd grown up, he was used to living without a lot. He'd always found a way to survive. He just wanted to live life how he wanted. On his terms and for his reasons, nobody else's.

His response to everybody telling him he was crazy and stupid was "Screw it." And he threw that mental middle finger in the air.

Part Five

Lentz takes a hook to the body to start the second round with Bocek and then he plants a right to Bocek's mouth. Bocek goes for a takedown. Lentz wards him off. Bocek slips and falls and scrambles back to his feet. They trade punches. Bocek fires a head kick and Lentz blocks it and that makes Bocek slip and fall again. Lentz takes him down. Bocek parlays this into keeping most of the rest of the round on the mat, grappling. Lentz almost chokes Bocek out with a deep guillotine with a minute to go, but Bocek gets free. "Let's work," says the ref. It's both an order and a plea; things are getting boring again.

Bocek is determined to fight his fight, which is to keep the fight on the ground, where he feels he will win. Lentz is dying inside, trying so hard to fight on his feet, but Bocek holds him down and holds him down and keeps him there for so long that the referee has to force them up with 20 seconds left in the round. Lentz tries taking advantage, unleashing a flurry of punches. He absorbs a Bocek knee to the body to end the round.

It's not enough. Bocek controlled the round, and the judges reward him with 10-9's across the board.

There's a brutal irony to that. Bocek is doing to Lentz exactly what Lentz did to other fighters — exactly what had made Lentz so hated.

Part Six

As with all reputations, Lentz's is one that he earned, but perhaps not fairly.

It all started when he fought Andre Winner in Boston in August 2010. One year earlier, with a record of 16-3-1, Lentz signed with the UFC and after going undefeated in his first three fights, two wins and a draw, and was starting to make real money. Winner was a British kickboxer and a devastating striker, fearsome as hell on his feet, capable of throwing coma punches. He was also 3 inches taller than Lentz and Lentz knew that trading blows with Winner would get him destroyed. So Lentz went to his strength, his roots, grappling.

Winner was a terrible wrestler, so bad that he didn't even know how to engage Lentz. All he could do was use his size advantage to try to prevent Lentz from keeping him on the ground.

Lentz controlled the fight, but it was little more than 15 minutes — three five-minute rounds — of Lentz pressing Winner into the side of the cage. Almost from the start, he was booed by most of the 14,000 people in the crowd. They booed even harder when he was named the winner by unanimous decision.

Lentz didn't think much of it — so what if they didn't like his fighting style? He was smaller than Winner, and he was a wrestler, and he totally neutralized the big Brit's strengths, and he'd won. What else mattered? Wasn't that the point?

No, it wasn't. The backlash stunned Lentz more than any one of Winner's punches would have. The fight had aired on Spike TV as a lead-in to the pay-per-view portion of the card, and afterwards UFC president Dana White publicly blamed Lentz — not Winner, just Lentz — for a subsequent low PPV buy rate. And in the rabid world of MMA, thanks to White's comments, public opinion turned on Lentz and became vicious. "Fans" on Facebook asked where he lived and threatened to burn down his house.

Lentz knew what they wanted to happen next. They were hoping like hell that he would get beat his next fight so that he would get cut from the UFC and they would be done with him. Many even speculated that was what White and UFC match-setter Joe Silva had planned when they announced Lentz's next opponent: Tyson Griffin, a former college wrestler like Lentz who had transformed himself into one of the UFC's most deadly and dynamic lightweights, winner of a ridiculous six Fight of the Night bonuses.

Lentz, only 24 at the time, was like most ambitious and talented young men; he thought he knew better than anyone. "Screw it," he thought. He would continue to fight his way and find a way to win against Griffin. Nothing else mattered. When two grown men in world-class shape try to kill each other, who cares what winning looks like? He wanted to be standing at the end, his arm in the air, even if that meant spending the match on the mat.

So in November 2010, Lentz fought his fight again, stifling Griffin's explosive style by forcing him to wrestle. He took some hard shots to the face along the way, and he got slammed a few times, but overall, he controlled the fight. By the end, Griffin looked winded but was otherwise unmarred, and Lentz's face looked like he'd been in a car accident, but he had controlled the action and the judges rewarded Lentz with a win by split decision.

Griffin was so frustrated he nearly broke down crying, and for the second fight in a row, Lentz's arm raised in victory inspired not admiration, but 10,000 boos and insults from his boss in the media: White flat-out said that the judges had robbed Griffin and that Lentz should not have won.

Lentz finally started to realize the sordid truth of the sport, the difference between MMA and collegiate wrestling, and why one takes place in arenas before thousands of people and millions more on TV and the other in gyms before hundreds and occasionally on channels nobody watches in the middle of the night: People who like to watch men fight don't watch just to see who survives. They watch men fight to be entertained. They don't watch for victory, but for the violence.

And Lentz realized that he could probably keep doing things on his own terms, and he would probably keep winning and he might even survive, but — that was not the game, and his survival would depend on someone else. Fighting was his job, and his boss was clearly displeased with his performance. "It's my job to fix that opinion," Lentz told a reporter at the time. "And it will be fixed soon."

He decided he would no longer fight only to win. He would no longer fight intelligently — he would fight violently, for the crowd. He would shed his old identity to take on a new one, and his survival, utterly and completely, would be up to him, and depend on his ability not to control a fight, but to lose control of it, figuratively and literally.

Part Seven

In his next fight, in Seattle in March 2011, he faced Waylon Lowe, a three-time Division II wrestling national champion. Lentz tried head kicks, flying knees, wild punches. He missed often. He took shot after shot to the face, and he was taken down and slammed many times. He lost round one and round two and he would have lost the fight were it not for the miracle he pulled out in the third. He took the center of the cage to start the round, missed with another leg kick and suffered a shot to the face. He answered with an uppercut, got hit again with another left, and got put against the cage. Lowe went for the kill, shooting for a takedown. It was a lethal mistake. Lentz countered by locking Lowe in his signature guillotine, and he locked him in deep, too deep for Lowe to survive, and Lowe tapped out and Lentz was saved. He had survived, but barely.

His next fight was his most violent yet. In Pittsburgh in June 2011, he fought Charles Oliveira, a young Brazilian jiu-jitsu artist with more enthusiasm than brains. He was eager to be the one to lay Lentz and his boring ways to rest. "I am going to have a lot of crazy moves," Oliveira said before the fight. "He will have to deal with it in exciting fashion. He will not slow me down. I am always looking to finish."

To finish. In the UFC, this means one thing: End the fight before the clock does. There are two primary ways to do this, by knockout and by submission. By submission, a fighter gets his opponent to force the other guy to "tap out," in which he taps to indicate he can't go on. This usually happens when he's in some sort of hold, whether being choked out or having an arm or leg bent so badly he doesn't want it to break.

The fight began and Lentz got hit hard and often, and midway through the first round he found himself trapped in a deep anaconda choke — Oliveira had his arm wrapped tight around Lentz's neck and had his legs wrapped around his waist, had himself wrapped all around him, strangling him. It would've been enough to undo a lot of fighters, but Lentz waited Oliveira out until he found a way free. He then latched onto Oliveira with a guillotine hold of his own. Oliveira took his turn showing his strength, also refusing to tap. He escaped, then dropped Lentz with a knee, hit him hard with a left hand, hit him with another knee and tossed Lentz to the floor, looking almost frantic.

The round ended and Oliveira had won it, but Lentz was doing his part to win the crowd — they were going nuts, Lentz was still learning, but for the first time, he was beginning to get the hang of this new style. "What a great back and forth battle," said UFC commentator Joe Rogan.

The second round began with Oliveira trying a flying knee. Lentz caught him mid-air and put him on the ground. They grappled for nearly a minute, then Oliveira rolled over Lentz and finally sprang free and got to his feet first. Lentz gathered himself, a fist and a knee still on the mat, about to stand. Then Oliveira, in his adrenalin-crazed state, drove his knee into Lentz's face.

"That was an illegal knee!" Rogan yelled, and he was right: A fighter cannot knee a downed opponent.

But the referee, Chip Snider, somehow missed it.

"What a big mistake by this referee," Rogan said. "That really hurt Nik Lentz."

The fight went on, but not for long. Lentz was shaken and he turtled, curling into a ball, as Oliveira pounded the back of his head with panic punches, going for the knockout. The audience booed relentlessly. They want violence, but they want it within the rules. Lentz's blood spilled all over the floor and as he tried, pitifully, brokenly, to evade Oliveira, who was getting covered by his blood, too.

It was futile. Oliveira got the half-conscious Lentz in what's called a rear-naked choke, which is essentially a headlock, and Lentz was hurt too badly to break free, and he tapped out.

The ref called them to the center of the Octagon to present Oliveira as the winner. Lentz couldn't walk straight. The skin under his right eye was swollen huge and split wide open. He wandered the Octagon as though lost. Snider had to pull him to his side. When Snider lifted Oliveira's fist, the crowd chanted, "Bull-shit, bull-shit, bull-shit!"

Lentz spent the night in the hospital, where he learned that his right orbital bone was broken. The loss would later be nullified and officially labeled "No Contest" by the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission.

Lentz wished he could've finished the fight — winning would have meant earning another $30,000 on top of the 30 he was paid to be there. However, there was one positive that came out of everything: All that blood earned Lentz the Fight of the Night bonus, which that night was $50,000.

This was a good sign. He'd fought well. He had entertained. His bosses had rewarded him for it. And he had survived. Barely.

But then came another kind of blow, a knee to the heart: He learned his father had cancer again.

* * *

Jon Lentz had cancer twice before when Nik was younger. First, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and then lung cancer. He managed to survive both, but now he had cancer of the bladder. He'd lost health coverage after insurance companies learned that he'd undergone experimental treatments to fight earlier cancers, and now had to pay for treatment on his own. Doctors in America couldn't do much for him, anyway. The only solution seemed to be in China, where a surgeon had developed an experimental procedure wherein he would replace the bladder with one formed out of the large intestine. But it cost $100,000.

Jon had managed to save a fair amount of cash, and between Jon's savings and Nik's winnings, he could afford it — but Jon refused to tap into his savings — he didn't consider it his money to spend. Years earlier, he'd promised his daughters that if they worked hard in school then he would give the money to them later. Mandy was about to become a lawyer, and his daughter from another woman, Alyson, was a med student. They had bills. Jon decided he would rather die than break his promise.

Nik wouldn't accept this. He couldn't. His eye would heal, and he'd won the crowd at least for a night, and he believed he knew how to do it again. He had to do it again.

Nik entered the Bocek fight knowing he could save his dad. Lentz would be vicious and violent, not just enough to win a fight, but to earn the Fight of the Night bonus and take home that $105,000, enough for the surgeon. He would not just survive, but this time, he would fight for something. And if he did that, he could save his dad, the man who had saved him.

Part Eight

The problem is, Bocek is fighting Lentz exactly how Lentz had fought before.

The third round against Bocek begins. "Lentz needs to do something different," says commentator Mike Goldberg.

Lentz knows this more than anyone, and he really wants to, but he's still learning and trying to adapt and within 20 seconds, Bocek has put him on his back again, pressed against a cage post. Lentz locks in yet another guillotine hold, but once again Bocek patiently wiggles himself free. Lentz gets off his back, but he's still in a seated position, held there by Bocek. He punches Bocek, trying to break free, fighting for more than points now.

"In Nik Lentz's defense," says Rogan, "he's the one who's been attempting submissions. He has come the closest to finishing the fight. He has gotten a couple of near submissions."

Two minutes of this goes by, which is forever in the Octagon. Lentz finally gets Bocek on his back, locking in another guillotine, but instead of trying to clinch it to tap Bocek out, knowing that Bocek is so good at getting out of them, Lentz uses the guillotine to get back to his feet. He cracks Bocek's chin with a lead uppercut and Bocek's head snaps back. There is hope, but only fleeting.

Bocek is no dummy. He shoots in again and tackles Lentz to the floor and holds him there, neutralizing any threat of losing. He lays on Lentz in much the same way Lentz was so vilified for laying on Winner. Bocek has had a rough stretch of his own lately — he's only 5-3 in the UFC, so he's playing this one safe. "Maybe it wasn't the most fan-friendly bout," Bocek tells a reporter later, "but I just really needed to get the W."

"Bocek has landed some solid shots," Rogan says, "but quite honestly, the person that's been the most dangerous has been [Lentz]. That said, he's losing the fight. Crazy game, isn't it?"

There's a scramble and Lentz and Bocek trade punches. Lentz gets on his feet and flings punches at Bocek, but there are only seconds left now, and then the horn sounds, and Bocek has won the round and the fight, and Lentz leaves with only $15,000 and no way to save his father.

He hopes his next fight will come soon, very soon, because he has to win it and the Fight of the Night. He has to. Dad doesn't have much time left.

* * *

Two weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Lentz is driving down a snowy road in the Minneapolis cold on his way to a party when his cell phone rings. It's his manager. He is blunt: The UFC is cutting him. It doesn't matter how he fought in his last fight, that he was the aggressor, that Bocek wouldn't let him fight. The fight was a bore and he lost and now he has to take the blame.

One loss. That's all it took. Boom. Done.

Lentz tells nobody that night or the next day, not even his fiancée, Elissa. He is depressed for weeks. He barely leaves the house, and he eats and he drinks and plays StarCraft II, feeling like a waste of space, a waste of a man, not a man at all, but a 14-year-old boy.

Part Nine

Two weeks after Christmas Eve, Lentz's manager calls again: Paul Sass was supposed to fight Evan Dunham in the lightweight slot at UFC on Fox 2 in two weeks in Chicago, but he just got hurt in training. Silva only knows one fighter probably crazy enough to take the fight on such short notice, especially right after a fight of his own. The fight is Lentz's if he wants it.

"Hell yeah, I'll fight," Lentz says. Want it? He'd die for it. Literally even. He would've done anything for the fight, because he'd do anything for his father.

* * *

Lentz walks into the Octagon wearing black shorts, already tired, drained from cutting weight and out of shape. But it's do or die, as literally do or die as any fight has ever been.

When the fight starts, Lentz attacks. Violently. He'll pay for this, but there's no sense in playing things conservative now. He's already been dropped, and if he loses, he'll probably get dropped again. But that doesn't matter anymore, really. Nothing matters, really, except for that operation. He might as well go a little crazy. He takes that mental middle finger and pulls it down and clenches it into a fist.

He is unrecognizable. The fighter that put fans to sleep has been shed like some old dead skin and now every pore is pure fighter, pure frenzy, pure focus. Even his face seems changed, his eyes — they are suddenly wide and bright, not insolent and almost sleepy, like before. He throws punches over the top. He bruises Dunham's legs with kicks. He blocks a high kick, takes a few hard rights to the chin. He keeps going. He takes Dunham down and gets him into a guillotine hold. Dunham stands up through it and defends himself well. Dunham's a hell of a fighter. Lentz abandons the hold and grappling period and viciously knees Dunham.

"This is a very aggressive Nik Lentz!" Joe Rogan says, sounding surprised and excited.

Dunham grabs Lentz in a standing guillotine, but Lentz ducks out of it. Lentz takes a pair of hard elbows and gets taken down by his legs. Dunham slams him to the mat. So what? Lentz goes with it, isolates Dunham's right arm and hits Dunham hard in the face with several left hands.

"He's fighting like an animal!" Rogan yells.

Dunham thought he was supposed to fight a guy who had been dropped and was out of shape and was boring. But instead, he got this. Some animal. Some guy who seems to hit more the more he gets hit, who just walks through punches and kicks and knees, some kind of comic book superhero. Dunham just can't do anything with Lentz and he lands just a single right hand before the first-round bell.

Lentz hasn't just taken the first round, he's claimed it — a son claiming his birthright, a son fighting to save his father.

At the start of the second round, Dunham charges out at Lentz, throwing a knee that misses and then a punch that doesn't, driving Lentz back against the cage. Lentz fires a right hook that pushes Dunham back and follows with a left that lands, too. He fires another right, but Dunham ducks under and takes Lentz to the mat. No way, because Lentz knows that on this night, the mat is his enemy, and to get up off the mat he has to GET. UP. OFF. THE. MAT. Lentz stuffs the attack and grazes Dunham with an upkick, trying to get off the ground, and he does briefly, but Dunham chases and grabs him and Lentz is back on his back. He puts his knees into Dunham's chest and shoves him back and then gets his feet on Dunham's shoulder blades and drives him back hard, putting Dunham on his knees. Now he's back on his feet and gets a hold on Dunham — but lets go, and pulls Dunham up, and throws three uppercuts into Dunham's chin. Dunham clinches with him again. This time Lentz refuses to go down. Once was enough.

They separate. Lentz kicks Dunham's leg and Dunham sticks Lentz with a straight right to the head. Lentz moves through it, moving forward, pushing his head ahead somehow, even as Dunham's punches pop at his jaw, and he's throwing as many punches back as he can.

The crowd is in an uproar. This they like. This fighter, they love.

Dunham gets Lentz in a headlock up against the cage and then hits him with a half dozen punches, most to the face. Lentz doesn't clinch up, like he could, nor go for the legs, nor even consider trying a takedown of any kind, even though that would save him. He stands tall and takes the punches, a human heavy bag, like if Rocky were a UFC fighter. And then he punches back, again and again and again.

Dunham rushes backwards, surprised, and Lentz absolutely unloads, connecting, connecting, connecting.

And then finally, a pause. Exhaustion, sweat, and adrenaline on both sides of the Octagon as each fighter catches his breath.

Lentz grins. Dunham grins back. They nod at each other. The crowd screams.

Blood pours like sweat down Lentz's cheeks, onto his chest, onto the mat's face. There's a bad cut under his left eye, already so swollen that he can barely see. In the hospital later, he'll learn that the orbital bone, this time on the left side of his face, is already fractured.

"Lentz's face is a mess," Rogan says.

Lentz steps toward Dunham, still with no plans of clinching or grappling, even now, half-blind. He keeps swinging.

The round ends soon with Lentz and Dunham tussling in a corner. Lentz lands the last punch, an uppercut to the chin, and the horn sounds. Dunham walks away from Lentz breathing heavily. His head and his body drip with Lentz's blood.

Referee John McCarthy corners Lentz. "Let me see your eye real quick," he says. "Look at me." He calls the doctors over.

Lentz doesn't look at McCarthy, he looks at Dunham, his good right eye wide. Three doctors converge and gingerly clean the cut and examine the wound. A cameraman sticks a camera right in Lentz's face. A close-up of his face appears on the arena screen. Half his face is covered by his own blood, and that cut looks devastating, gushing and already purple, huge and terrible, like something alien and grotesque is growing out of his face. The crowd gasps in horror.

The sound is an echo of Lentz's heart.

"Tell me," a doctor says, asking a question whose answer he already knows, "are you able to see?"

See? See? He can barely stand. He can't see. Lentz sighs and shakes his head and mutters, "No."

The doctors tell McCarthy to stop the fight. Moments later McCarthy's in the middle of the Octagon raising Dunham's fist.

Joe Silva finds Lentz and tells him, "We're not going to cut you."

Then it's on to the hospital, where Lentz will have to get stitches. While he's there his manager calls again: Lentz and Dunham won the Fight of the Night bonus. His cut is $65,000.

The stitches pull him back together. Lentz calls his father and tells him that he's going to have that surgery, that he's going to live.

Jon protests, trying to convince Nik to keep the money because he's just starting his life and — Nik cuts him off.

"I've been poor lots of times," Nik says. "I can live without money. I don't know if I can live without you." End of discussion. And the start of something else, of a new Nik Lentz, who doesn't fight — who doesn't live — only to survive, clinging desperately until the final bell, but rather stays up off the mat and stands tall, takes the hits and hits right back.

Two years later, that is the Nik Lentz standing in the Octagon declaring himself one of the best fighters in the world and telling everyone and everything else to "come get some." In his corner, Jon is watching, alive and well.