MMA champion Brandon Vera on the ‘hurt business’ – fighting prejudice, getting knocked down and rising to the top
The One Heavyweight World Champion talks about everyday violence, growing up brown in the black-and-white US South, and trying his hand at acting
One in ten I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia. There were seven boys and three girls in our family – not all from the same mother and father. Even though our parents didn’t always get along, all the kids always got along.
My father is Filipino and my birth mother is Italian – she came back into our lives later on. I grew up in a different time, a racist time. Whenever I had to fill out a form for federal paperwork, I had a choice of two boxes to tick: “Asia-Pacific Islander” or “Other”. We were just south of the Mason-Dixon Line. “Other” describes how my life was growing up – I wasn’t the white kid, I wasn’t the black kid, I was something in-between. I learned to be polite at all times and understand that violence is part of everyday life. How to react to violence was something I learned as a brown person in a black-and-white world.
I was bullied a lot when I was a little kid. I learned how to take care of myself. One day, I decided I’d start hunting bullies and standing up for kids that got bullied. My friends were nerds, we weren’t in the cool crowd. I told them to tell me if anyone was picking on them.
Basic training I got a four-year athletic scholarship to go to Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, but I only did a year or so because I didn’t believe in the traditional college system, that you need a degree to be successful. I thought having some discipline in my life could be a good thing, so I joined the United States Air Force.
When I was in basic training, the wrestling coach told me I was pretty good and should try out for the team. I would go back and forth between my normal duties (refuelling aircraft) and wrestling. In my second year, I got invited to become the first athlete from the military to become a resident athlete at the Olympic Training Centre, in Colorado Springs. I lived and trained there full-time, I did meet and greets for the US Air Force, I talked about wrestling and competed around the world. It was perfect for me.
I lost the use of my right arm [...] The doctor told me that if I didn’t force myself to use my hand, I’d never use it again. Reaching for a tissue could be a 10-minute ordeal. It was 2½ years before I fully regained the use of my right arm.
Elbowed out After nearly three years, I got injured in a wrestling match – the guy was trying to turn me and I was refusing to turn, and it tore my elbow apart. In the operation, they severed my nerve, so I had severe muscle atrophy in my right arm. I lost the use of my right arm and no one could tell me when, or if, my nerves would grow back.
