On eve of PFL's $500K tournament finals, Thad Jean is feeling in control

Yahoo

6 days ago

Talk to enough of them, and one word you'll commonly hear fighters mention when comparing combat sports to team sports is 'control.'
There is an early section in Ben Askren's book, 'Funky,' when he zeroes in on the precise moment he understood team sports weren't for him. It was in the fifth grade in Wisconsin, when he was playing football for the Lake County Chiefs. They were taking on the Sussex Sabercats, a team that had a reputation for being very good.
'Everybody knew [they were better than us], but it pissed me off how easily it was accepted as a foregone conclusion that we'd lose the game,' Askren wrote. 'Once Sussex got up by a bunch of points, my teammates wanted to just end it and go home. The huddle turned into a bunch of whining. I was like, 'Screw this, I came to play football!' I remember being deeply annoyed that I'd be forced to share in a loss with people who were giving up. I didn't want that to become a reflection of me or, more to the point, what was inside of me.'
A pair of Hodge Trophies, some collegiate national championships, a run at the 2008 Olympics and multiple MMA titles later, Askren got his point across.
Thad Jean played football at Northeast High in Broward County, Florida. He had dreams of playing for the University of Miami, bursting the through the line of scrimmage and dashing down the sidelines to paydirt. People were paying attention to him, too, before a knee injury derailed his plans his junior year. For the next couple of years he went about searching for the thing that might replace that original passion, and he eventually found his way to fighting.
It was within those fight gyms the silver lining presented itself.
In a dictation of wills, fighting is literal. He didn't have to rely on teammates to win or lose a competition, and he didn't have to be one of 11. He could control his own destiny by simply being better than the guy in front of him. The outcome could be held in his own hands.
'I love that,' Jean told Uncrowned this week, as he gets ready to fight in PFL's $500,000 welterweight finals on Friday night. 'No one else other than you is in control. It's you. It's you versus him. It's on you whether you come out of this victorious or not. I am so grateful for it because I don't have to think, 'My teammate, has he come to play today?' You know what I mean? Have they come to play?
'I hate to lose, man.'
Here he shakes his head.
'I really hate to lose. So I'm always coming to play. I'm always coming to play. [In football,] I'm always coming to make sure I'm running down the field. I'm always coming to, if I have to make a tackle when I'm on defense, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be the guy that is trying to turn the tide of the game we're losing. Is my teammate doing it on the same mentality. Does he know how to separate life from competition? Because I don't care what happened outside. I don't care if your girl did that. I don't care if your mom did that. You need to learn how to separate it. Is my teammate doing that same thing?'
Jean is just 27 years old, born of Haitian roots. He's a man of faith. He smiles when he talks about prizefighting, which means he's in the early stages of his career. The game hasn't reached into him yet or darkened the edges. When they latch the cage door, it still sounds like a springboard to possibility.
'But in fighting, I know what I'm doing,' he says. 'I know what I'm bringing. I know that every time I wake up, it doesn't matter how I'm feeling. I'm ready to go. Is my opponent ready to go? I mean, it's me against you. Are you ready to go? If you're not ready, you're going to have a long night.'
That has been the case for Jean, who carries the nickname of "The Silverback.' He has been a pro fighter for the past four years, racking up a 9-0 record. He's coming off a high-profile win over former champion Jason Jackson in the semifinals of PFL's welterweight tourney. Jean has thus far been in control. And if he beats Logan Storley on Friday night in Atlantic City, he stands to win $500,000 and become a champion.
Although, to use the word 'if' is to tread upon Jean's faith. The word he prefers in this instance is 'when.' As in when he wins $500,000. On a recent visit to New York, Jean did a media circuit in which he simultaneously pinched himself and showed how deep his confidence runs. He stopped at Barstool Sports and made an in-studio appearance on Uncrowned's "The Ariel Helwani Show," making it clear on both he's projected himself into these spots a million times.
He said he wanted to be the face of the PFL, the counterpart to Dakota Ditcheva on the women's side. That he was prepared to be the star of the league, and all that came with it. The media obligations. The target on his back. The spotlight, however bright it can get.
This is what he was meant for.
And he said he'd already won the loot in his mind, the $500,000 that is being dangled for the tournament winners, because his belief was uncompromising. It didn't seem blowhardist or bombastic; if anything, it sounded reasonable. It sounded like he said something completely ordinary, like, 'Later tonight I'm going to bake a cake.'
He echoed all that a week later when asked where he got that kind of confidence.
'When I pray, I don't pray as in hopefully I get it,' he says. 'I pray and I'm like, 'OK, I'm just excited for when I'm going to get it.' Not, will I get it? No, no, it's when will I get it. You know what I mean?
'And that's what's so good about this tournament. I know when I will get it, so I'm not saying, 'Oh, it's going to come at some point.' No, it's going to come August 1. That's when I'll be crowned as a champion.'
Jean's opponent, the former Bellator interim champion, is a fighter who proudly telegraphs his game plan, daring anyone to stop it. He is a wrestler, first and foremost, a guy who wants to take you down and do work. He's just the kind of fighter who wants to break your will by rendering such thing as 'striking prowess' — which Jean has — entirely moot. One of Storley's conquests was Michael 'Venom' Page, whom he sapped the electricity out of in a controversial split decision.
If Storley has it his way, he'll drown out the buzz of an 'it' fighter one double-leg at a time.
'I finish Logan early in the first round,' Jean says, as if reciting the prophecy. 'I clip him. He gets desperate. I don't jump in for the shot or anything to finish him off, because he's going to jump down and grab my leg. I'm going to clip him. He's going to get desperate. He's going to try to go for shots. I'm going to back out, be patient, because I know he's going to shoot for my legs. I'm going to catch him on the way down and he's going to go down, and I'm going to finish the job as I always do.'
Jean has played it all out in his head, down to the last detail.
'And that's exactly how it's going to go. I don't see it going past the first round, but if it does then I'm finishing him off early in the second round. We know what Logan Storley has, and that is one dimension. He's really good at it, his wrestling — but at the same time, I'm good at wrestling too. I'm not really good at wrestling. But I'm good at wrestling, and when you're going against someone that is good at something, you have to be able to do more than just that to be able to play your game.'
Five hundred thousand. Thad Jean sees it in his hands.
'Yet that's all Logan has. It's just his wrestling," he continues. "He doesn't have no striking, he doesn't have jiu-jitsu. He doesn't have scary strikes from the top. No, it's just holding you down and making it a snooze-fest, a hump-fest for the entire five minutes. So, I'm not going to let that happen. Not at all. He doesn't win off the damage off the ground. He wins off control off the ground.
'That's how he wins. He doesn't win off damage. He wins off control time, and I'm not going to let him control me.'
There's that word again. The name of the game. Control.