On the Brink

Adam Hunger / AP Images for Bleacher Report

Before his fight he watches all his teammates, loudly yelling instructions from the crowd to escape the tournament's rules about official coaching during the bout.

The youngest, a nine-year-old from Ukraine who doesn't speak a word of English, goes through a spirited and precise warm-up with Zakirov before his bout—which ends up looking exactly like two nine-year-olds fumbling around a giant ring.

While the spirited tussle makes many in the crowd smile, it doesn't cause the men involved to dampen the intensity down a notch. Between rounds, Zakirov leaps into the ring with startling speed to deliver instructions like a world championship was on the line. I can't understand what he's saying, but I suspect it might make the Karate Kid's villainous John Kreese blush.

Kickboxing is not a sport for the meek, not as practiced by the extended Mati crew. His dad, Adrian, a burly, broad-shouldered construction worker and security guard with a close-cut crop of gray hair, learned his craft from his own hard-nosed father in the Albanian old country, and Zakirov looks like he's spent a lifetime teaching lessons to faces, his own chief among them.

Adrian is the general of an operation that runs like a military exercise—at least as executed by kids aged nine to 17.

The boys, unfailingly polite, are vicious in the ring, their boxing skill providing a leg up on kids who have clearly spent more time perfecting the arc of their spinning kicks than their punch to the liver. Whippet-thin and mean, the Iseni brothers look like a young Reshat, swarming opponents with combinations that defy belief in their sheer fury and volume.

As his bout gets closer, Mati's nervous energy gets the better of him. He works the pads with Zakirov and consults quietly with his father. When he enters the ring, he hugs both men. He'll repeat the ritual between each round.

Fighting and family know no boundaries here.

Spoiler alert: Mati wins the tournament. Of course, that wasn't really in doubt. This was light work, as light as organized fisticuffs can be—his mother and two sisters never even made an appearance, preferring the pool and spa to the fights.

The kid from Arkansas was as tough as advertised, hanging in there as Mati furiously worked the body and experimented with all varieties of spinning techniques. His opponent in the championship bout the next day served more as a human punching bag, surviving to the end thanks in equal part to gumption and Mati's gentle soul.

Neither was anything resembling serious competition for a kid who has, by his own reckoning, run up a cartoonish 245-19 record between boxing, kickboxing, MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. If it seems an absurd number of fights for a young man who has just turned 18, it's worth considering how high his tally might be if finding fights weren't itself such a challenge.

For years, especially after the viral video, potential opponents abandoned his division like they were the Titanic and Mati an unusually polite iceberg.

Sometimes Team Mati solved that problem by strategically taping full water bottles to Reshat’s body at weigh-ins, allowing him to fight in weight classes he would normally be too small for. Other times, however, a long drive to a tournament was rewarded not with a giant trophy or championship belt but with an interminable drive back home.

"At least have the decency to call us up so we don't have to make the trip," Adrian says, the closest he comes to changing facial expression in the two days we spend together. His voice carries his past with it, English accented by his native Albanian. Gruff is insufficient as a descriptor. Here, however, the icy glare seems appropriate.

"It's frustrating, but it comes with the territory."

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Many of Mati's losses came as a result of being in the ring with much bigger, much older kids, not by choice exactly, but by necessity.

"It was either that or no fight," Adrian says. "And we drove seven hours to get there. I always ask him, 'What do you think; do you want to give it a shot?' Now we don't take chances. When they were little, it's OK. Now the consequences are much greater for taking a beating."

Considering his status as a boxing coach and the stage parent of a martial arts prodigy, or perhaps because of it, Adrian is unusually sensitive to the horrors of combat sports.

"As a coach it's one thing, but as a father it's different," Adrian says. “Sometimes he gets hit. Boom, boom. The emotion comes out, as much as I don't want it. Every time he takes a blow, it's like you're getting hit. Sometimes he complains that I'm never happy with his performance. I told him, 'When you have your own kid, you'll see.' Even one shot is too much. One shot can be all it takes.”

Of course, his reticence is more talk than action. Week after week, year after year, the two find themselves in midtier hotel ballrooms and grimy boxing gyms, searching for whatever comfort combat brings.

Fighting, Adrian concedes, is dangerous. But so is life. Few know that better than Adrian, an Albanian from Macedonia who once served in the Yugoslav army under the command of future war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

He's seen horrors, seen his own brother injured in the unrelenting war that tore his homeland to pieces. Adrian was prescient enough to see Yugoslavia's future almost exactly as it unfolded, leaving his home for the United States in the early 1990s to escape the chaos. You'll have to excuse him if some fisticuffs aren't beyond the pale.

"Sometimes he complains that I'm never happy with his performance. I told him, 'When you have your own kid, you'll see.' Even one shot is too much. One shot can be all it takes."

— Adrian Mati

"Reshat has been in hundreds of fights," Adrian says. "You know the only time he's been seriously injured? Playing soccer." Reshat was seven when he broke a toe.

News of a terror attack in Germany plays silently on a television over our heads. Several Albanians are among the victims. It has Adrian worried for the future—somehow, suddenly, just as frightening as the past. Raising his own children in softer times than those he grew up in, he's made concessions to modernity. Perhaps, he wonders, all this sensitivity has created more problems than it's solved.

"I grew up, my father used to beat the crap out of me," he says. "I deserved it every single time. I turned out OK. At school, my math teacher would whack you. Old guy. He'd take off his watch and his wedding ring. That meant somebody was going to get it. We didn't know who, but somebody. But now, kids have no respect. Everything is going down the drain."

Respect is key at the three Atlas Cops and Kids gyms in New York. The gyms, funded by a foundation run by boxing trainer and announcer Teddy Atlas, are places for kids who often lack structure to learn a new way of approaching life and the kind of discipline that might otherwise be lacking. The rules start being enforced before you ever enter the facility.

"You have to pull up your saggy pants," Atlas says with pride, "just to come in the door."

Once inside, kids from some of the city's toughest neighborhoods are required to shake hands with everyone in the room. But that's the only respect given. In the ring, at least, it has to be earned.

"Sometimes you do it the hard way," Mati says. "It's nothing you get automatically. But that's what I like about it."

Almost everyone in Mati's gym in Flatbush, Brooklyn, from coaches to boxers to hangers-on, is black or Hispanic. Always one of only a handful of white kids in a sport that rarely attracts interest in the suburbs these days, Mati has to prove, over and over again, that he belongs. Not to his teammates—he's been there from the beginning and shown he belongs against elite competitors since he was 10 years old. It's when strangers enter that trouble follows.

"They see my face, and it's an advantage,” he says. “These guys look at me like, 'You?' They still look at me like that. They underestimate me. And I'm like, 'OK, we'll see.'"

Sometimes things get testy. When world champion Adrien Broner brought one of his young boxers to the gym to spar, he refused to let his fighter into the ring with Mati.

"That little s--t? Listen man, we're up here, and he's down here," Broner said, according to Adrian. "We don't want to waste our time."

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"I said, 'Give him a shot, man. It's sparring,'" Adrian says. "'If he's beating him up, we can just stop it.' Broner goes over and tells his guy, 'Beat up that white kid's ass.'"

Instead, Mati took over the sparring session with his often awkward, martial arts-inspired footwork. He dominated two rounds in the ring, and Broner stormed off after refusing to pose for a picture with the young fighter.

While the tension might have been unusual, the result wasn't. In the gym, Mati has faced both the top young fighters in boxing, such as teammate and Olympic alternate Bruce "Shu Shu" Carrington Jr., and a number of professionals looking to get work in. No one, according to coach Aureliano Sosa, has managed to outclass him yet.

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"They see Reshat, and they say, 'Oh, we don't want to go light,'" Sosa says. "And I tell them, 'I don't want you to go light. Treat him like you're sparring a pro guy.'" And when they come out of that ring, they are always impressed.

"We've had him spar with elite pros. Guys who have fought for world titles. And Reshat does his thing in there with them. Sometimes spanking the pro guys. He could be really special. But he needs to dedicate himself."

By that Sosa means stick to boxing, leaving MMA, kickboxing, jiu-jitsu and even wrestling, which Mati dabbled with in high school, behind.

"None of that? He would be one of the elite kids, not just in the country but in the world," he says. "But there's too many things going on with Reshat.”

It's a conundrum that is not exclusive to Mati. At some point in their lives, most elite athletes have to make a choice to focus on whatever sport can propel them into the future. But it's a choice Mati isn't ready to make just yet.

While his video got the most attention in MMA circles, and he won't officially eliminate the sport from his plans, his father talks about UFC more than he does. Mati still trains in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and, as he does in all things, wins. But he finds the brute force required in MMA to be off-putting. Memories of being trapped underneath larger foes weighs heavily too.

The puzzle-solving nature of boxing and kickboxing better suit his personality. On the surface, at least from the outside, that makes the answer to any questions about the future simple.

"If there are options in boxing or MMA, those are the obvious choices," kickboxing expert Dave Walsh of liverkick.com says. "He could turn pro in kickboxing with ease. But what does that even mean? Maybe make a few hundred dollars by selling tickets at your gym and through Facebook? Fighting the same exact competition that you faced as an amateur, just without the pads? If you want to be a pro kickboxer in America, the pickings are slim, to say the least."

Adam Hunger / AP Images for Bleacher Report

In his head, of course, Mati knows this. He knows boxing could possibly be the road to riches, especially if he makes the 2020 Olympic team and has his pick of the top promoters. Already, there have been offers to turn pro and successful sparring sessions with solid professionals like Erick Bone and former Spanish Olympian Jonathan Alonso.

Considering how close he's kept bouts with top amateurs, including a fight with teammate Shu Shu earlier this year that many observers thought he won, Olympic dreams are not beyond the realm of possibility, either.

That's the goal that will keep him going for the next couple of years, even as the martial arts continue to call out to him in his sleep.

Eventually, there may need to be a reckoning, a final battle between head and heart for his martial soul. For now he doesn't have to choose. Instead, he takes classes in air-conditioning repair at the College of Staten Island by day and trains six hours in the evening, five days a week.

The existence of a backup plan, he wants to be clear, is not a concession that he isn't going to make it big. The goals haven't changed.

"Make the Olympic team. Turn pro. Become world champion," Mati says.

The championship belts in the pros aren't cheap and tacky. And people pay attention to world champs even if they don't have viral videos. But one step at a time.

"I want to do this for a living," Mati says. "We'll see."