Escovedo Travels Hard Road to UFC Debut at BetLM

Escovedo Travels Hard Road to UFC Debut

For most of his life, Cole Escovedo has been a get-things-done type of per­son. He’s the first to admit that not all of the things he has got­ten done in his life have been good, but he’s clearly a doer.

When his cat was stuck in the branches near the top of a 40-foot pine tree, Escovedo kicked off his shoes, shim­mied to the top, popped the cat into his shirt and made his way safely back to the ground.

But as 2007 dawned, Escovedo’s life spi­raled out of con­trol. A one-time World Extreme Cage­fight­ing feath­er­weight cham­pion, fight­ing seemed out of the ques­tion. Walk­ing nor­mally was going to be a chal­lenge. Sur­vival, just liv­ing, was the short-term goal.

A tiny sore on his left fore­arm, which he thought may have been a spi­der bite, an ingrown hair or pos­si­bly a pim­ple, was rob­bing him of every­thing that he held pre­cious. This is a guy who fought pro­fes­sion­ally for a liv­ing, who once drove a race car and jumped out of a plane at 30,000 feet.

As 2006 turned into 2007, how­ever, get­ting from the liv­ing room to the bath­room with­out the aid of a walker was nearly impos­si­ble. Escovedo had con­tracted a staph infec­tion that seemed cer­tain to end his fight­ing career, fin­ish life as he knew it and per­haps end his life, period.

He was 25 at the time and 11–4 in a mixed mar­tial arts career that had seen him win the WEC feath­er­weight title and com­pete against lumi­nar­ies of the sport such as Uri­jah Faber and Jens Pulver.

Life was never easy for Escovedo, whose father, Larry, was con­victed of rape, kid­nap­ping and other charges in 1995 and was sen­tenced to 68 years in a Cal­i­for­nia prison.

Larry Escovedo was a schiz­o­phrenic who was diag­nosed with mul­ti­ple per­son­al­ity dis­or­der, and the knowl­edge of his father’s con­di­tion eased some of the pain that Cole felt about his father’s crimes.

Still, it didn’t have an imme­di­ate pos­i­tive impact upon him.

“I ended up becom­ing a pretty jacked up teen-ager and a pretty big [exple­tive],” Escovedo, now 29, said. “But the one thing that helped me was mar­tial arts. I had been doing mar­tial arts since I was six, and that kind of helped keep me cen­tered. It kept me some­what out of trou­ble. A kid in that state could prob­a­bly have ended up going a lot of dif­fer­ent ways. I man­aged to avoid most of the really bad stuff with my Mom’s help. I’m not in prison and I’m not a drug addict, and I went to the Police Acad­emy for a while when I was 19, so I think she did a pretty good job.”

If it wasn’t for his mother, Laura Robitschek, Escovedo may have become an alco­holic and almost cer­tainly would never have got­ten rid of the walker he needed just to move slowly around his home.

He surely wouldn’t be days away from mak­ing his debut for the Ulti­mate Fight­ing Cham­pi­onship by fight­ing Renan Barao on May 28 at UFC 130 at the MGM Grand Gar­den Arena in Las Vegas.

After Escovedo was diag­nosed in late 2006 with MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphy­lo­coc­cus aureus), the most dan­ger­ous type of staph infec­tion, he began to feel sorry for himself.

He would drink when he awak­ened and drink to put him­self to sleep. He wasn’t doing much of any­thing to help him­self beat an infec­tion that was slowly, but surely, drain­ing the life out of him.

“I had a lot of depres­sion and I went through a big spell where there was a lot of drink­ing, unfor­tu­nately,” he said. “I spent a good month or two pretty much just hav­ing a pity party and I just drank every day. I didn’t do any­thing else but drink a lot of the time.

“But one day, my Mom smacked me around a lit­tle bit and told me I needed to pull my head out of my (exple­tive). She said, ‘We’re done with the pity party. You’re going to go get a job like every­one else, or you’re going to go and do some­thing about this and fix the prob­lem and con­tinue doing what you have always wanted to do.’ She told me I was going to waste away if I con­tin­ued the way I was and I’ll admit, it was a really depressing time.”

What Escovedo wanted to do more than any­thing was to fight. He wanted to prove the doc­tors wrong, to show that he could once again climb into the cage and test him­self against another man.

At the time Robitschek con­fronted him, he was hooked up to an intra­venous line and given the antibi­otic Van­comycin. He went through the reg­i­men twice a day for two hours at a time for six weeks.

Escovedo’s staph infec­tion had ini­tially been mis­di­ag­nosed and he wasn’t given the proper treat­ment. By the time it was prop­erly diag­nosed, the infec­tion had cre­ated an egg shell-like sub­stance around his spinal cord and lit­er­ally had begun eat­ing through the spinal cord. It did enough dam­age before it was cor­rected with surgery that he still suf­fers from what he calls “leg shakes.”

Occa­sion­ally, his legs will begin to tremor and won’t be able to sup­port his body weight. He’ll have to take a break from what­ever he is doing until it resolves itself. It usu­ally occurs when he’s doing intense work­outs that involve his legs.

“It’s some­thing a lot of peo­ple don’t notice and it just seems like fatigue, but what it is is that my legs aren’t get­ting the mes­sage any more from my brain to stand up straight and hold my weight,” Escovedo said.

After Robitschek laid into him, Escovedo real­ized his mother was right. He had never been one to drown in his sor­rows and had always gone hard after what­ever he wanted.

He laid in bed at night and thought about what it was that he wanted: To walk nor­mally, to fight again, to live a full and com­plete life. And he real­ized that he wasn’t going to do that rely­ing on a walker and a bot­tle of alco­hol, so he com­mit­ted on the spot to mak­ing the best of it and get­ting him­self back to normal.

It wouldn’t be easy, but noth­ing about his life was easy and he had come to the con­clu­sion that the life he was liv­ing wasn’t much fun. He vowed to him­self that he would push hard to recover and to be all that he had dreamed of becoming.

“I always had the belief that if I wanted to do some­thing badly enough, I could achieve it,” he said. “That’s just the way I was brought up by my par­ents. They’d always preached to me that just because some­thing is hard didn’t mean I couldn’t do it or that I should give up trying.

“So, there was always that small, under­ly­ing feel­ing that regard­less of what my doc­tors were telling me, it was going to be me who would be the decid­ing fac­tor in whether I would con­tinue to walk or not again. At that point, once I decided I could walk, it was just a mat­ter of how long until I could fight.”

It was about 18 months from the time that he was orig­i­nally diag­nosed until his first trip back to the gym for a light train­ing ses­sion. And while he was walk­ing OK by that point, it was an entirely dif­fer­ent thing being able to go through the gru­el­ing train­ing ses­sions required of a pro­fes­sional fighter.

And Escovedo faced plenty of road­blocks and encoun­tered a lot of doubt.

“For the first cou­ple of months after I got back into it, there was a feel­ing that I had bit­ten off more than I could chew and that I was just wast­ing my time,” he said. “I was think­ing maybe it was futile to believe that I could fight and that the best I could hope for would be to get back into shape and teach [martial arts].”

But Escovedo knew how badly he wanted to fight and just didn’t have it in his DNA to give up with­out try­ing harder. He kept push­ing and began to make progress. Each day, he’d be a bit bet­ter and the future began to seem more promising.

Sud­denly, he was on the verge of accom­plish­ing what he wanted more than anything else.

“I can remem­ber when my doc­tors were say­ing that not only wouldn’t I ever fight again, but that I prob­a­bly wouldn’t walk again and me think­ing, ‘Oh yeah? You just watch me,’ ” he said. “And now, here I was. I was walk­ing, obvi­ously, and every day I’m in the gym and I’m get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter and (a return to com­pe­ti­tion) was get­ting more realistic.”

He returned to com­pe­ti­tion on May 8, 2009, when he faced Michael “May­day” McDon­ald after two years, eight months and 22 days away from com­pe­ti­tion. He still wasn’t 100 per­cent. He wasn’t nearly what he had been prior to the infec­tion, and there were still doubts, in his mind and in the minds of those clos­est to him, whether it was the right thing to do.

But he’d come so far he wasn’t about to quit.

In small type on the side of his Face­book page, Cole Escovedo has posted one of the more famous quotes from the book, “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu: “Vic­tory is reserved for those will­ing to pay its price.”

Regard­less of what hap­pened in that fight against McDon­ald at the Tachi Palace in Lemore, Calif., Escovedo was a win­ner. He had paid the price. He’d bat­tled back from the brink of death to return to pro­fes­sional sports com­pe­ti­tion. Not even a loss in the first minute of the first round could obscure that.

Escovedo has not only made it back — win­ning that night on a second-round TKO — but he’s gone 6–2 since his return and has made it to the pin­na­cle of the sport. He insists he’s a bet­ter fighter now than he was prior to the staph infec­tion and has devel­oped a more well-rounded game.

The UFC did him no favors in his debut, how­ever. Barao has won 25 con­sec­u­tive fights and is a team­mate of UFC feath­er­weight cham­pion Jose Aldo Jr., so he promises to be a for­mi­da­ble opponent.

As good as Barao is, how­ever, there’s no way he’s tougher than MRSA and a life-threatening ill­ness that nearly took away every­thing that is dear to Escovedo.

Regard­less of the out­come, Escovedo is already a win­ner and now only has to go out to try to win a fight.

“I’m pretty stoked,” he said. “I’ve been doing this 10 years and I finally made it. I know when I walk into the cage and they close the door, it’s time to get seri­ous and get ready to fight. But I’ll be hon­est. It’s going to be hard for me to quit smil­ing. I’m going to look around that place and soak it in and I know every­thing I’ve been through will be run­ning through my mind.

“It’s going to be a huge moment for me, not only as a fighter but as a man. Get­ting to the UFC after where I’ve been, I’m not sure I know how to describe that other than to say that it means every­thing to me. Unbelievable.”

Related Posts:

• Escovedo Trav­els Hard Road to UFC Debut
• The “Pit­bull” Leaves Hard Times Behind
• Ban­tamweights Renan Barao Vs. Cole Escovedo Now Offi­cial for UFC 130
• Solid Road Trip Has Islanders Back in Hunt
• Bears QB Cut­ler to Visit Doc­tor When Team Trav­els to Denver

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