On a March afternoon, inside a non-descript gym on Indianapolis Boulevard in Hammond, Ind., that looks from the outside like it should be a carpet store, a warrior is working.

The gym is sweltering, the air hanging with the faint smell of stale perspiration. Even the drops of sweat are sweating. Inside a cage made of smooth, black chain-link fence, one of the best mixed martial arts fighters in the world is showing a training partner how if he had done one thing differently, he would have ripped his arm out of its socket.

The teacher stands the student up, gets back in position and explains the technique, which involves controlling the opponent’s arm, then jumping in the air and throwing himself onto his back on the cage floor. Snap. Crackle. Pop. Done.

Lesson learned, the two go back to work, this time on striking techniques — kicks, jabs, crosses, uppercuts, all in slow motion, never fully connecting. And all the while, a worker is vacuuming the floormats outside the cage and stacking metal folding chairs against a wall — a certain distraction to a less focused fighter.

Without warning, a row of folding chairs topples, domino-style. Miguel Torres sits up in the cage, looks toward the ruckus and says, mockingly, “Whoops, bro.”

Quickly forgetting the interruption, he gets back to work. Torres is training to defend his World Extreme Cagefighting bantamweight championship.

Humble beginnings

Drive around Northwest Indiana enough, and it’s hard to miss the big, white decals on the backs of vehicles: “Torres Martial Arts Academy.”

Torres is head instructor at the school, though his time to teach dwindles each day he gets closer to his own fight. The 300-some students, by Torres’ count, have other instructors to fill his void.

The gym is far from fancy. Tell someone this is the training home of one of the top five fighters in the world, and they’d surely expect something more. There’s a cage, free weights that look like they were borrowed from a high school, wrestling mats and a corner populated with heavy punching bags hanging from the ceiling. There are posters from Torres’ past fights, including cards at the Hammond Civic Center, photos of him with his students and other fighters, championship belts and press clippings.

And there is a samurai sword, because Torres considers himself a warrior. From the time he was a scrawny kid in East Chicago, Torres has been a kung fu movie star in his own mind.

“I remember going into karate — for me that was like the biggest thing in the world,” Torres said. “I felt like I was like a ninja. I would go to class in my gi. We would walk four blocks to the Clemente Center and I would walk with my chest in the air, and I had my white belt on and I was acting like I was a tough guy. All the kids on the block would see me and they would point and laugh, but I didn’t care. I felt proud of what I was doing.”

But in working class East Chicago, even 7-year-old ninjas sometimes have disappointment forced on them. After a year, when Torres’ family could no longer afford to send him, he had to quit karate, a young fighter silenced.

“My dad used to send money back to Mexico all the time,” Torres says. “One of my uncles was having a really hard time with his ranch. So my dad was sending more money (than normal). It was only like $40 a month (for karate), but we still couldn’t pay.”

Torres focused his attention on soccer, which he could play for free, he says, because his father knew a guy. But the fighting desire never was far from his mind.

“I played soccer, but I still watched tae kwon do and karate movies, (Jean-Claude) Van Damme in ‘Bloodsport’ and all that stuff, and I always wanted to do it,” Torres said. “I would watch boxing with my dad and my hands would itch. I would clench my fists and I would move around. For my birthday, I wanted boxing gloves. I didn’t want new shoes — I wanted to fight. I wanted fighting stuff. My mom always hated that.”

She may have hated it, as most mothers would, but it’s hard to stand in the way of the inevitable. After getting a cheap pair of novelty boxing gloves as a birthday gift from his uncle in Mexico, Torres took a bad situation and used it as a way to keep pursuing a dream.

“My grandma’s garage had burned down,” Torres said. “So we used the foundation, and it looked like a ring. All the kids from the neighborhood would show up and we’d just fight each other. That’s how we did it.” Thanks to saving money from wherever he could find work — from mowing lawns to collecting cans — Torres was soon paying his own way to tae kwon do classes, his dream back on track.

At 37-1 as a professional, Torres, 28, hasn’t lost in nearly six years. His record doesn’t count another dozen unsanctioned wins in region bar events. But despite his success and the publicity, which is just now beginning to hit rock star levels in his sport thanks to a big marketing push by the WEC (sister promotion of the billion-dollar empire that is the Ultimate Fighting Championship), Torres remains loyal to his region upbringing. He is never very far from the kid who was left with no choice but to quit karate, and that memory is a major motivation for how he runs his own gym today. He has vowed to never turn a student away.

“I look at the kids that come in and I see myself when I was little,” Torres said. “The kid wants to be in jiu-jitsu and martial arts and (the parents) don’t have the money. For me, I went through that and it sucked. I have kids that started three years ago, same thing – their parents said they were going to pull them out, so I said, ‘OK, well, only pay $50.’ And then the dad loses his job. ‘OK, don’t worry about it, just keep bringing your son.’ I even pay for them to go to tournaments because the experience when they go there is not just going to make them better fighters — it’s going to help them in other aspects of life.”

WEC co-founder and general manager Reed Harris, a Chicago native, speaks highly of his prize bantamweight. But for Harris, it goes beyond Torres’ skills inside the cage.

“Miguel Torres has impressed me probably more than any other single fighter I’ve ever had in our organization,” Harris said. “Miguel is the consummate mixed martial artist — when a guy challenges Miguel to fight him at his game, Miguel accepts that challenge every time. But the other thing that Miguel does that personally I’m very happy about is that Miguel does a lot for his community. I know that he does a lot for the kids in Hammond. From a personal standpoint, that’s what I’m proudest about.”

April 5, 2008:

Fight Night

For this particular fight night, Torres had more distractions leading up to it than any before. It’s the WEC’s first event in Chicago — a fight card that was put together almost solely to showcase one of the promotion’s biggest stars in his own backyard. An ambitious new public relations boss for the company meant Torres did more media for this fight, WEC 40, than ever before — in both English and Spanish. The pressure of a hometown crowd, the mental drain of talking to cameras and reporters, even doing promotional stops in Chicago 16 hours before making weight would be enough to take most fighters out of their comfort zones. But though Torres will admit later the whirlwind exposure is a nuisance, he isn’t about to let it show. Not when there is work to do.

Former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir has spent time training with Torres — despite being about 100 pounds heavier. Mir, who also does commentary for WEC fights on the Versus cable network, said Torres is a throwback fighter and very much the kung fu warrior that Torres has dreamt of being since childhood.

“He just lives and breathes battles,” Mir said. “It’s not so much fighting. As far as just the aspect of kicking the daylights out of another human being, I’ve never met someone who has immersed himself so much as he has.”

In his locker room at the UIC Pavilion, Torres says nothing. The expression on his face never changes. He seldom even blinks — just frozen. His cornermen are with him, but they, too, are quiet. Dressed in a sponsor’s warmup jacket, jeans and a Fred Sanford t-shirt, Torres sits in the corner, his eyes fixated on the undercard fights being shown on the house feed on a 12-inch monitor set on a folding chair. When sometimes-training partner Eddie Wineland, a Chesterton fighter and one-time holder of the belt Torres is about to defend, walks out for his fight with Rani Yahya, Torres finally breaks statue mode and moves to within a few feet of the screen. It will likely be the only five minutes of his day he isn’t thinking solely of the task at hand — Japanese striker Takeya Mizugaki.

Torres has promised for weeks leading up to the bout that he would fight Mizugaki’s game — he swears he will “stand and bang” with him. And stand and bang he does. For two rounds of back and forth knees and kicks, elbows and fists, they battle — and into the third. A wicked gash over Torres’ right eye brings the fight to a temporary halt as doctors look at it before allowing the hometown hero to continue. After three rounds of nothing but “stand and bang,” the safe money is on Torres taking the fight to the ground, where his skills far outweigh Mizugaki’s. As the fourth round starts, Torres is in uncharted territory — in his fight career, he has never had to learn to count past three. But for two more rounds, Torres continues to stand and he continues to bang. And so does Mizugaki, never once going down. Worse, in Torres’ eyes, after the fight, Mizugaki looks completely unphased, as if Torres has done no damage to him.

Torres wins a decision on all three judges’ scorecards, his third straight successful title defense in the WEC, leaving Mizugaki and his cornermen devastated and visibly weeping as they leave the arena floor. Torres takes solace that though he didn’t finish his opponent, he proved his stamina and toughness. And his determination to trade blows with his opponent, knowing the safer route was on the ground at the advice of his cornermen, owes a lot to his father, whom Torres says is “the most stubborn person I’ve ever met in my life.” But Mir says it’s more than that.

“Stubborness is one perspective on it; I call it determination,” Mir said. “Miguel is not just about combat. Miguel likes to be a warrior. He likes to fight full-blast and hurt you. He wants to dominate you and destroy you. He refused to accept that this guy is still here. It’s not just about winning. It’s all about conquering and destroying the guy in front of him. That’s how he lives his life. It’s about battle.”

Torres, the family man

Like most of his life, Torres has very little time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labor after the Mizugaki war, which the next day is already being called the best fight of the year. Not 12 hours after leaving the arena, he is on a flight to Mexico City for a PR tour for the WEC. On the plane, four hours of cabin pressurization causes the cut above his eye to swell up like a balloon — not exactly the look he’s going for when he greets a slew of reporters at the airport.

When he returns to the region in mid-April, he’s already preparing to train for his next title defense against Brian Bowles. His hectic schedule of training, teaching classes when he can and going on the road for the WEC or sponsors doesn’t leave much time for another priority — his family.

When Torres gets into training mode, he moves into his gym. A small studio apartment above the gym is what Torres calls home during his camps. With a wife and baby, the pressure on the homefront can be daunting.

“This week, I went home twice for lunch,” Torres said, still more than three months away from his next fight. “I’m more relaxed right now. All that stops (when it gets closer) — for about two months where the training gets real intense.”

He says the arrangement is not easy, but it’s one he was up front about.

“I see them — they’ll come here. They’ll come visit,” Torres said. “My wife will come in for three hours at nighttime.They come watch me train, so I see my daughter a little bit. It’s hard on (my wife), but she knew that this was going to happen. She understood that from a long time ago. I told her that I was gonna live in the gym (when I’m training).”

For Torres, training is a full-time job — one in which there are no vacations. “If I could, I would just stay here. I’d be a hermit – stay upstairs in the closet and that would be it,” Torres said. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be around his family; quite the opposite, in fact. His work ethic comes from his parents, and Torres believes his hard work now will pay off for his family later — even if it means they all make sacrifices in the present tense.

“She understands – my personality is to be the best at whatever I’m doing,” Torres, who has a degree in marketing from Purdue Calumet, said. “If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be doing whatever job and I’d be putting the same hours in. It gets rough. She gets real angry. I’ll come home and she’ll complain about the most menial thing in the world – like, ‘The grass didn’t get cut again.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry. You were home all day.’ ‘I don’t cut grass!’ She’ll be angry and then she’ll calm down – we’ve got a system worked out.” Torres tells the story through a sly grin and the hint of a glimmer in his eye, not quite winking, but sending a message that somewhere beyond the warrior, there’s a devoted husband and father and jokester, too.

‘I’m living my dream’

Despite many opportunities to move to more ideal training locations like Las Vegas, home to some of the world’s best fighters, Torres’ roots keep him committed to the region.

“I’ve been wanting to do this since I was a child,” Torres said. “In my mind, I’m doing what God wants me to do with my life, and it’s hard to beat that. I didn’t come in (to this sport) for fun to impress a couple of buddies or stumble upon this. I’ve always wanted to do this. And I’m living my dream. It’s been a long road to get where I’m at, and I haven’t forgotten where I came from.”

At the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas tonight for WEC 42, he steps into the cage against an unbeaten challenger in Bowles. Torres doesn’t care. Bowles has a strong wrestling and submissions game. Torres doesn’t care. Bowles thinks he can shock the world and, as Torres puts it, change his life forever with an upset. But Torres doesn’t care.

At the end of the day, beyond the moments of playfulness, of teaching, of keeping his gym in Hammond to give back to his community, of family time, there’s a switch that he throws in his head.

“I’m gonna break his hand with my forehead,” Torres says. “He’s gonna throw a big right hand and I’m gonna head-butt his fist and I’m gonna shatter his hand ... and then I’m gonna punch him in the face a bunch.”

Miguel Torres is a teacher and a student. He’s a son and a husband and a father. He’s still that 7-year-old ninja walking up the block in East Chicago, and very much a wanna-be kung fu star.

But beyond all, Miguel Torres believes he is nothing if not a warrior first.

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