The good fight

One morning in the early 1990s,Todd Cochran’s mother Jan packed a pistol at the Scotlandville bus stop just to scare the older kids mercilessly picking on her scrawny son. Tonight, roving like a tank through the bowels of Harrah’s Casino in New Orleans, Cochran, now 28 and a newcomer to Mixed Martial Arts, is fighting his own battle.

A line of trainers, friends and well-wishers follows Cochran as he moves quickly past kitchen staff cleaning dishes and wrapping silverware in napkins—jabbing his fists like pistons and nodding his head to the music in his earbuds. Cochran bounces past a broken-down gladiator, bloodied and bewildered. One match in, and this fight card is already messy.

One trainer rubs Cochran’s shoulders. The other hugs him. Cochran takes out his earbuds and removes his shirt. He looks absolutely ripped under the halogen glow of the concrete hallway. A 5´7?, 155-pound brick house.

Jimi Hendrix’s guitar spits an unholy anthem out of the loudspeakers as Team Cochran approaches the doorway to the theater. His name echoes through the crowd, and he bounds up toward the octagonal ring. Hundreds of fight-hungry fans scream with a ravenous appetite. Cochran is just another victor or victim served up to them.

The opponent, Casey Hudson, stands waiting on the far side of the ring. Taller than Cochran, with blond hair and tattoos across his chest, he looks the part of a killer.

Cochran stares his combatant down, pitching his head side to side, stretching his thick neck and angular traps.

Behind him the cage closes with a cold, foreboding rattle.

“Getting in the cage that first time, and seeing that cage close—just me, the ref and the other guy—it woke me up; it really did,”

Cochran says, recalling his first MMA match six months before the Hudson fight. “Fighting taught me not to be afraid. That’s a principle I also get from the word of God. I should fear no man.”

Cochran’s fights have not always been productive ones. A few years ago, he was discharged from the U.S. Navy for injuring a fellow serviceman who drunkenly provoked him into a brawl. Cochran responded to his threats by breaking his hand. A gas turbine engineer needs his hands.

With his promising Navy days behind him, Cochran returned to Baton Rouge and slipped into an apathetic routine of drugs and alcohol. “I drank Everclear and grenadine every morning,” Cochran says. “I smoked weed. I was angry every day. I let people dictate my feelings and how I treat them. I changed that. I had to.”

One day, Cochran says, he had a spiritual awakening, found faith in Jesus and left the destructive parts of his past in the dust. He started running—everywhere—and looking for a gym that could help him get back into the shape he was in as a standout wrestler at Lee High School. Navy shape. He got a job at Jack in the Box and jogged there and back daily. He moved in with his mother and began cleaning office buildings with her.

Cochran never thought he would say “Yes, sir,” in uniform again, much less get paid $750 dollars for it. But that’s what happened in 2009 when he auditioned to be an extra in Battle: Los Angeles and earned a promotion and a spoken line on the day of shooting. After his audition at Celtic Media Centre, he was waiting by the guard shack for his mother to pick him up. There he noticed signs for MMA and for Precision Athletics, a new gym and training facility across the street from the movie studio. “It was an answer to prayer,” Cochran says. After meeting Precision owner Jason Galjour, Cochran took a few months to save up money for gym membership. Now he trains there almost every day. He doesn’t have to wait for his mother, though, because he runs to Precision from his apartment nearly three miles away.

Cochran arrives quietly and never starts working out until he’s shaken hands with everyone there. Fitness trainer Robbie Gautreaux says Cochran is the kind of guy who would give anyone the shirt off his back and the last dollar in his pocket.

“Meeting Todd, you’d never know he was a fighter,” Galjour says. “He has this passiveness about him, but then in a match he’s extremely aggressive. He helps all the little kids who come here, too.”

Precision is like a second home to Cochran, though he knows he can’t get too comfortable and expect to succeed in such an unforgiving sport.

“I like to work out in different environments so it doesn’t get dull, and I don’t get comfortable,” he says. “I want to feel pushed.”

Rafael Ellwanger, the regional authority on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, describes Mixed Martial Arts matches like games of chess that challenge opponents physically and mentally.

“If you stop to think, you’re already behind,” Ellwanger says. “But Todd, he’s stubborn. He refuses to give up.”

Roman Pizzolato is a professional MMA fighter and instructor who employs Cochran as a bouncer at Walk-On’s during LSU football season. This former college football player is amazed daily by Cochran’s humility.

“It takes a big heart and a cool mind,” Pizzolato says. “Todd has that. As far as conditioning, Todd’s the hardest-working guy in this place.”

Round 2 see-saws back and forth, and Cochran, still light on his feet, has had the majority of the crowd on his side since a commanding Round 1 finish. But after a few big Balboa swings, Hudson takes this fight to the mat, and the two fighters’ bodies crash in unison with a sharp smack. Ground-and-pound. Cochran looks well positioned above Hudson, then gets suddenly jerked up and over, flipped by Hudson’s arms that clinch like white

pythons around his neck. A rumble of “ooohs” moves through the massive crowd.

Cochran strains once, and again, then exhales.

He taps out in the dead center of the ring in a submission by a maneuver the officials call a Rear Naked Choke. A mighty roar erupts.

Backstage, the war room is abuzz. “That guy tapped out!” one eager onlooker cries aloud like a newsboy with an exclusive. “You had him beat, Todd! That guy tapped out in the first round!”

“Yeah, the ref completely missed it!” complains another.

Everyone else seems more exasperated at this apparent injustice than the one man who should feel slighted the most. With beads of sweat still dripping from his chin, Cochran is serene in the middle of the maelstrom, quietly unwrapping the pulverized tape from around his left hand with one long, slow rip.

“You did good, Todd,” Galjour tells his fighter.

“Thanks,” Cochran says.

In a way it doesn’t matter whether the referee missed the earlier call. Not to Cochran. Not in the long run. Cochran stepped in that ring and heard the cage clang behind him. No turning back. He went toe-to-toe with another man trained to hurt him and hurt him bad.

To everyone else sitting in the war room, the fight is over. For Cochran, every day is a fight, and a fight he is winning.