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| At the height of it, when the
vodka is gone and his blood is up, Tank Abbott
will reach up and take out his front teeth.
Turns out what you first thought was fat
actually helps him bench press 625 pounds, and
toss 300-pound guys across the room. Things are
never pretty after that. |
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| Oleg Taktarov’s first touch is
more of a caress, like you were made of tissue
paper. If you look, you can almost see the
calculations going on behind his eyes – angles,
vectors, rotations. What happens next is as
clinical as it is debilitating. Like an
orthopedist gone bad. |
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| These two guys first met in
the octagon in the original Ultimate Fighting
Championship – no weight limits, no time limits,
no rules. Tank was an unknown Huntington Beach
bar fighter who’d had taken out his first two
opponents that night - guys with a combined
weight of 700 pounds - in seconds. Oleg was a
recent Russian immigrant, former Soviet
military, back for a second go at the title, and
still trying to figure out why someone stopped
his last attempt because he was bleeding (for
chrissakes). | |
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---- the
Concept | |
| Today, these two veteran
soldiers become captains and coaches, building
teams of fighters in their own images to compete
against each other.
Each man will draw on his eye for skill, and
his reputation as a champion, to recruit raw
talent. Tank will draw from the back-room fight
clubs and Mexican gyms of working-class SoCal;
Oleg from ranks of hungry youth from Russia and
the ex-Soviet Republics.
Each team: three men, one woman. Their
training regimen: the same study in contrast as
their captains.
Oleg believes in a monk-like focus on
developing skills and spirit, and will take his
team on retreat to the forests outside Moscow -
chopping down trees, carrying the trunks and
each other across their shoulders as they run in
deep snow.
Tank believes that to fight, you need to be
where the real fighting is – the street. When
the boxing gym gets boring, it's fun to go to a
bar and beat down someone with an
attitude. |
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