Cody Garbrandt - The Pact: A UFC Champion, a Boy with Cancer, and Their Promise to Win the Ultimate Battle

CONTENTS

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

Some times you dont see the fight coming.

Sometimes you get jumped from behind.

Sometimes you get sucker punched.

Theres no way around it. It happens. To everyone.

The key, though? The key to surviving? The key to thriving? That all depends on what you do next. And what you do next? Well, thats up to you. Or, to be more accurate, thats between you and God.

What Ive learned these last few years is that even when you think youre alone, fending for yourself against this world and everybody else in it, youre not. Youre just not. When you watch for the signs, you realize Gods actually got your back. Hes put a whole army of allies around you who are ready to give you the strength you need to fight, to defend yourself, to rise up, to make it all the way to the top if thats where you want to go.

The thing is, those allies, those angels, those people who are here to lend you strength you didnt even know you hadtheyre not always who youd expect them to be. And sometimes they come out of nowhere. They show up out of the blue and take you by surprise, just like the fight you didnt see coming....

Want to know what I remember most about my childhood?

Fighting.

Pick a time or a place in my hometown, and chances are I can tell you about a fight that happened then or thereone that I watched, or one that I got into.

Fightings how I marked my time.

Like in fifth grade, I remember fighting this kid Jimmy outside his house over by the football stadium. I was kicking the spit out of him when a guy drove up in an unmarked sedan. He was a real responsible-looking dude, a grown-up authority-figure type for sure, but he didnt get out or try to stop the fight or anything. Instead, this guy pulled up and looked right at me and said, Well, I can tell youre gonna be seeing a lot of me.

I looked back at him and yelled, Get lost, man! This is none of your business!

When he left, I turned to one of the other kids who was standing around watching us fight and said, Who was that?

Oh, thats Jimmys probation officer.

Thats right. A fifth-grader had a probation officer. He wasnt the only one, either. And heres the really crazy part: Jimmys probation officer drove up right in the middle of me whaling on him and didnt do anything to stop itbecause fighting was that much a part of life where we lived.

Theres a saying around these parts: If youre looking for help, call 911. If youre looking for trouble, call 922.

The 922. Thats the nickname for the little corner of Ohio I called home. It comes from our telephone exchange. Not the area codethat would be too big and nonspecificbut the next three digits after that.

My hometown of Uhrichsville, Ohio, is a Midwestern town full of old brick buildings and empty storefronts. Back in the late 1800s, it was a booming placea town that billed itself as the clay capital of the world. A major east-west railroad line runs right through the middle of it, and all sorts of businesses grew up around those tracks. It was probably someplace really great to live before all the jobs washed out for reasons no one seems to remember. Before so many people were left struggling just to pay their bills. Long before I was born.

Uhrichsville and its neighboring twin town of Dennison make up one combined small-town community here, and over at the Dennison Railroad Depot Museum, the streetlights are decorated with red, white, and blue banners that say Dreamsville, USA. That was the nickname the town took on during World War IIwhich seems pretty funny to me, because nowadays the only thing most people in our corner of Ohio ever dream about is finding a way out.

My family, the Garbrandts, were pretty well known in the twin cities way before I came along. I guess you could say we had a reputation.

Growing up, we werent the sort of family that went skiing together or hiking together or swimming together. I didnt even know any families that did that kind of stuff. Instead, we were a family that went to fights together: wrestling matches, boxing matches, neighborhood fights, bar brawls, it didnt matter. We went to fights and witnessed fights and talked about fights and fighters almost as much as we got into fistfights and fought with each other over every little thing every chance we got.

Maybe if Id been born to a family of doctors or scientists or something Id have spent my childhood hitting the books. Instead, I spent my childhood just plain hitting and getting hit and hitting back whenever I could.

Some of my earliest memories in life are of getting into it with my older brother, Zach. Hes only ten months older than me, but he was always a whole lot bigger than me and naturally stronger than me, and it seemed like anything I did could set him off. Id grab a toy that was his or say something he didnt like or look at him the wrong way, and hed start whaling on me. Im talking really young, like when we were three, four, five years old.

In some other family, I suppose the dad wouldve been there to step in and stop all that fighting. But our dad was in prison for most of our childhood. Hes still in prison as I write this book. My mom tried to step in, but she just couldnt seem to stop us.

Occasionally Zach would beat me up pretty badso I learned to fight back pretty quick.

I think the first time I really hurt Zach (not that he would admit this) was when I was still a preschooler. We were playing Three Musketeers out in the woods somewhere, and we got into a fight. I cracked Zach in the head with a stickcut his head right open. Mom wasnt too happy about that, but after all the beatings hed given me, she told him it served him right.

I got into my first street fight in preschool too. Our mother put us in the Moravian day-care center, a local Christian-based school, while she went to work. My poor mom. She got the call that day because some kid bit my finger and I hauled off and socked him in the mouth.

It was just the beginning.

I was six years old when I got my first concussion. Zach and I were playing some sort of a no-rules hockey game on rollerblades in my grandparents basement across town. Everything we did turned into a fight, so this was no different. I tried to get away from him and ran up the stairs with my rollerblades on, but Zach threw a basketball and knocked my legs out from under me. I fell all the way down the stairs and bashed my head on the cement floor. My first knockout.

I remember being so scared when I woke up in the hospital not knowing where I was or what had happened. We left there with a big old X-ray of my head, though, and I brought it into school for show-and-tell. I thought it was cool!

Thats the thing: It was cool. I loved to fight. I didnt mind getting hurt. I liked to try new moves that might take Zach down, to push myself and learn to hit harder than he did. Those fights, as crazy as they got sometimes, were fun to me. And to Zach.

What Zach did to me on the stairs wasnt cool, though, and even at that young age I was patient enough to wait and exact my revenge when the time was rightright when he would least expect it.

Zach and I werent allowed to play in the basement at my grandparents house for about a month after I got that concussion, but finally one day after school Grandma said we could play. We were sitting on the cold cement floor putting on our rollerblades, and Zack kept looking at me like, This is gonna be fun! We get to play! He was all excited, and so was Ibut for a very different reason.

I thought, I remember when you kicked me down those steps. So I laced up my rollerblades real quick, and while he was still busy tying his second skate, I lifted my leg up as high as I could and kicked him right on the side of his headnot with the toe of the skate, but with the big block brake on the back of the skate. In an instant, Zachs temple swelled up like an egg. And then it kept growing. It ballooned out a good two or three inches from the side of his face before Grandma got some ice on it.