I really must learn to stop being shocked by MSM coverage of MMA. David Samuels, writing in The Atlantic, looks at Quinton Rampage Jackson and his trainer, Juanito Ibarra:
After a particularly humiliating loss in Japan during which the newly born-again Jackson was publicly berated by his corner men before being taken to the hospital with broken ribs, Ibarra called the fighter and offered to train him. “I kept hearing through the gyms that Rampage went crazy because he found Jesus Christ,” Ibarra remembers. The trainer shared his own experience of being born again, which followed the soul-crushing ordeal of losing the fighter Oscar de la Hoya, who went on to become boxing’s richest fighter under the tutelage of another trainer. What Rampage lacked was exactly what Ibarra had to teach — technique, control, and an older man’s knowledge of the fight game. Ibarra’s plan involved building up Jackson’s skills to the point where he could win and keep a championship while creating a network of profit-participation deals that would make both men rich. “He has his own rims out now and his own energy drink, his own toy, and we’ve got some other things in the works,” Ibarra explains. “No one uses his name without paying big bucks.”
Apparently “Jackson is glad to tell the story of how he was born again”:
During a two-week partying binge that followed a victory over the Brazilian fighter Ricardo Arona, whom he knocked unconscious with his trademark body-slam, which has been judged to be the hardest blow in all of professional sports by National Geographic’s Sports Science television program, Jackson woke up one night in the middle of a terrifying dream. The devil had his hands on his chest and was preparing to remove his soul. “He had some female spirits around him and he was saying ‘It’s okay,’” Jackson says, his eyes widening at the memory. “Then I heard this strong voice say, ‘Do you know this man?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ He said, ‘It’s not okay.’ And I woke up and grabbed my chest and made a noise that I’d never made before in my life.”The fighter woke up gasping for air, and spent the next few weeks feeling increasingly frightened and alienated. Some time later, Jackson suffered another moment of chest-gripping terror that was triggered by a radio ad for a Universal Studios theme-park attraction after he had dropped his son D’Angelo off at preschool. “The first thing it said was ‘The curse of’ something—I can’t remember,” Jackson recalls. “And it says, ‘Your soul is mine.’” The voice weirdly echoed Jackson’s dream, and left the fighter feeling even more freaked out. “Later on, when I turned the radio back on, when I got used to being a Christian,” he remembers, “I said, ‘Oh, that’s a damn commercial for the Revenge of the Mummy ride.’”
A few months ago, after losing the belt, Rampage went on a rampage:
The story ends with the line, “Jackson’s trainer, Juanito Ibarra, did not immediately return phone calls.” Internet rumors suggest that Jackson had gone off the deep end and fired his trainer, who had been caught stealing from him.
[...]
I ask him to tell me what he did in the week after the fight.“You know, what a lot of people don’t understand about me is, I have fun,” he says. “I laugh and joke around all the time. My life is a fun life.”
I ask him why, during that time, he stopped eating food and drinking water.
“I learned something about somebody I loved, and I still love to this day. I love him dearly, and it hurt me,” he says. “I stopped eating and stopped sleeping. I get touched by God, because I’m reading the Bible and I’m staying up and I’m fasting, and when you’re fasting, you get close to God.”
He was afraid to go to sleep, because he was close to God, and when God or Jesus reveals himself to you, the devil comes too, he says. After he came back home from the police station, he had everyone in his house reading the Bible. His door was open. People he didn’t know came in and out of his house. “This one guy I never seen before in my life, Asian dude, came to my door,” Jackson tells me. “I said, ‘If you’re a child of God, you can just walk into my house. If you’re not a child of God, you can’t.’ I remember saying that. That’s about the only thing I remember.”