Something had been missing in the two years since Pat Barry gave up his K-1 dreams and decided to become a ninja. Or a mixed martial artist. One of the two. Maybe both.
Barry was doing everything he needed to become a well-rounded fighter, which in his case was a near-daily regimen of wrestling and jiu jitsu with his stablemates at Roufusport Academy in Milwaukee.
He toiled on the mats learning about the completely different application of leverage and balance. He learned about how to get out of bad situations and how to get back to his feet. He got tapped, a lot.
Eventually, though, he started getting better. He could escape most of those bad situations. He tapped less, and he could orient himself in a previously unfamiliar world. He even won a local jiu-jitsu competition.
Then, Brock Lesnar got ahold of him.
"The very first day that I was in Brock's camp and I got grabbed by a big guy, that's when I realized it's not that I suck at wrestling, and it's not that I suck at jiu jitsu," Barry told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "It's that I've been doing it with Anthony Pettis."
Pettis, the last man to hold the WEC lightweight title, is sitting next to Barry in a cold car outside a church in Milwaukee during the interview. They're about to go into church with his mom. He doesn't want to chime in.
After sitting on the sidelines for several months with a badly broken hand courtesy of Mirko "Cro Cop" Filipovic, Barry was called to Lesnar's camp this past fall in rural Minnesota as the now-former champ prepared to take on Cain Velasquez at UFC 121. Lesnar, of course, wanted a savvy striker in the room, and Barry figured a room full of wrestlers would do him good.
Boy, was he right.
"You can get a lot of skill and a lot of knowledge rolling around with (smaller) guys, but if I'm not doing it with a big body, than it doesn't really matter how good I get at it," he said.
Barry returned from the boonies on a mission to work with big guys. He fit the bill with Matt Mitrione, who once stayed with him during a camp with Roufus to prepare for Kevin "Kimbo Slice" Ferguson, as well as Sean McCorkle and a big, mean collegiate wrestler by the name of Nick Ryan. Coaching the whole thing was renowned wrestling coach John Mesenbrink, who'd struck up an allegiance with Roufusport.
Together, they've given him another taste – well, many tastes to be exact – of what it takes to grapple with a big guy. Some of them are equal jokesters, too.
"Pat has always claimed to be a ninja, and I saw his magic powers personally once," McCorkle chimes in later via text. "One day in the gym, Pat threw down one of his ninja smoke bombs and made Mitrione's ground game disappear. It hasn't been seen since."
All this mat work could also be considered strategy for Barry's next fight, a meeting with the tank-like Joey Beltran (12-4 MMA, 2-1 UFC) at "UFC Fight Night 23: Fight for the Troops 2," which airs live Saturday on Spike TV from Fort Hood in Texas. Of course, it's another step on the way to ninja-dom. But when it comes to Beltran's ability to take punches and keep walking forward, Barry (5-2 MMA, 2-2 UFC) might be wise to have options on where to take the fight.
The fingers on his right hand bear out that idea; they're a little shorter than the ones on his left. In the first round of the fight with Filipovic, which took place this past June at UFC 115, Barry dropped the Croatian with a right and broke his metacarpal all the way down to the wrist. Later, he broke his foot on a kick. Needless to say, he was a shell of himself in the striking department and could do little to prevent Filipovic from choking him out in the third and final round. It was his second loss inside the octagon, and both losses came by submission.
So, options are good. The injured hand has recovered now, though it throbs from time to time. Truth be told, he's not intensely concerned about Beltran at the moment. He's just happy to get another fight inside the octagon.
"Because as we've seen lately you can be dismissed, like, easily," he said. "So I think Joey and I match up really well for an exciting fight for the crowd."
It's true; both guys like to throw leather and put on a show for the crowd. Both could be fighting for their jobs – Beltran, too, is coming off a loss at UFC 119 to Mitrione – and both have something to prove. On paper, it's a great matchup. In that, Barry considers himself as much a fan of the sport as he is a practitioner.
He's driven by both sides. On one is the fighter. On the other, the ninja.
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