Top Contender Or Fading Star? Curran At A Crossroads

By Frank Curreri

He used to sleep every night in the bedroom with his wife. Now Jeff Curran catches his shuteye on a couch in the living room or the sofa at his mixed martial arts gym. It has been this way for weeks, and as much as Curran relishes his role as a husband and a father, he also recognizes that those duties have sometimes complicated his preparation and focus for the most important fight of his career against unbeaten phenom Joseph Benavidez (9-0).

“I remember sitting there, rocking my 12-week-old son, giving him a bottle and changing his diapers … and at the same time I’m thinking about killing another guy,” Curran confided. “The two states of mind really just clash. So I told my wife, ‘This next week I need to get away from this. I don’t really feel like thinking like a dad right now.’ She totally understands that. It’s hard because I have the responsibilities of being a father and I have to let go of running my gym and let other people handle that and have faith in them. I’m getting better at it, but it’s definitely stresses me out.”

Hearing that kind of unrestrained candor flow from Curran’s lips could irk politically correct or self-righteous types, who might rush to castigate him and label him a selfish-you-know-what. But the cold-hard truth is that Curran’s dilemma and predicament are hardly unique among elite fighters. Any fighter who is seriously pursuing greatness, and training two to three times a day to reach that Promised Land, must make a trade-off: Family life must frequently take a back-seat to fighting. There is no other way. Not willing to make that trade? Well, then find another profession or simply never find out how far you might get with absolute dedication. The guys who are willing to sacrifice the most – in terms of enduring torturous training, in terms of discipline and diet, in terms of spending substantially less time with family and friends – are going to enjoy a big edge. Achieving peak performance, fighting to your utmost capability, means constantly stretching and exploring the limits of your physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional powers. Single-mindedness, almost to the point of being afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder, would actually be a good thing for talented fighters on their pilgrimage to MMA nirvana. That is why so many head MMA fighters and boxers retreat to the mountains or head out-of-state for weeks or months to train so they can avoid the distractions that can disrupt progress.

Benavidez, for example, is just 23 years old. He’s single, has no wife and no children. He packed up and left New Mexico to live in California and train full-time with Urijah Faber. Benavidez lives with a bunch of fighters. All he has to worry about is paying his bills, training and getting better. That’s it. With so much at stake against a dangerous foe, Curran, who normally does most of his training in the Chicago metropolitan area, shook up his normal training routine and journeyed to Florida for a week with American Top Team. His training partners on the trip included Marcelo Garcia, WEC bantamweight Rafael Rebello, Rafael Dias and WEC featherweight champion Mike Brown, who beat Curran by unanimous decision last year.

“That was my first time there,” Curran, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt under Pedro Sauer, said of the experiment. “It’s been a couple years coming that Ricardo Liborio has been asking me to come there. I remember having a beer with him in Florida at the Hard Rock and he’s like, ‘Man you gotta come.’ So I went out there for a week and I got to spar with Mike Brown. It was good. It was a nice short shock to the system kind of training. Any time you visit another gym, guys are trying to take your head off, so it was a little risky but I had to do it for myself.

“I got to spend a lot of personal time with Liborio and he really took me in as one of his own and gave me a lot of time to work on strategy. It was enlightening because, back home I have my boxing coach, Doug Mango, who is there for me 24-7 but other than that I don’t have anybody there who is my leader … sometimes you need that competitive edge and somebody to fire you up. That’s kind of what the trip was all about is to get around other people who share that same motivation.”

Curran is open to resuming his affiliation with ATT in the future, but intends to make a final decision on the matter after his battle with Benavidez. The Big Frog was not the least bit shy about divulging his blueprint for dealing Benavidez his first loss.

“My strategy in this fight is to keep it standing on the feet,” said Curran, recognizing, however, that he has drawn up that same plan in past bouts but watched it blow-up after just a few minutes inside of the cage. “I can say whatever I want to say, what is going to happen is going to happen. I wanted to keep Urijah standing but when he charged across the ring I took him down right away. You just react. I would love to take Joseph down and be on top of him. I would definitely like to see how well he does in my guard – especially with the way my guard has been working these days. I’m curious all the way around the board. I would definitely like to stand for the fans’ sake and because I’ve put in so much time with my striking but I never get to showcase it. If you watch my fights, you can see I have standup skills, I just don’t have that natural finishing ability like Bart Palaszewski. He lets his hands go and people get knocked out. I let my hands go, people get close to me, I clinch and try to take them down. So I never get to showcase it. But I think Joseph is the kind of guy who doesn’t mind mixing it up on his feet, so…”

Curran is just 31 years old and despite a decade as a pro fighter, and frequently tangling with the world’s best, the sport has been relatively kind to his body. He’s never really been seriously or badly beaten up in a fight, even though he was often undersized and competing against guys who outweighed him by 15 pounds or more. Physically, he has a lot more left in the tank should he choose to fight past 35. But his own high standards, not the physical grind, could be the deciding factor in how much longer he competes. He has lost back-to-back fights to Urijah Faber and Mike Brown. Coming up short against two of the sport’s best is nothing to be ashamed of, yet Curran senses that a third consecutive loss might be catastrophic to his future in the WEC and his career.

“He (Benavidez) could perform well against me, lose and it’s still good for him,” said Curran, who is 29-10-1. “He needs to find out where he really stands, so this should be a good gauge for him, win or lose. For me, it’s a chance to take on an upcoming prospect and to earn a future shot at a title. The downside is if I lose I might as well get another job. It would be my third loss in a row and mentally I don’t know how well I could handle that. I’ve never lost three in a row, so…”

A week or so before his April 5 showdown in Chicago, a snowstorm hit Crystal Lake, Ill., sacking the power at Curran’s home. His wife, Sarah, and two kids stayed with relatives; Curran moved into the lounge at his 24,000-square-foot-gym where he was finally able to get five hours straight of uninterrupted sleep without being awakened by his baby son’s crying. Now, several days before the Benavidez fight, Curran has set up shop at an area hotel by himself.

There is much mutual respect between the two bantamweight contenders. Curran considers Benavidez to already be a Top 10 bantamweight, and praised his adversary’s well-rounded game, explosiveness, competitive fire and conditioning. While some expressed concern about how Curran’s body will handle the cut to 135 pounds, he noted this will not be his first go-round at the weight class. He said he had a professional boxing match last year at the same weight and prevailed by third-round KO. Curran is also confident that his juggling act with family and fighting will not be the difference between winning and losing. He’s been married for a long time. It is nothing new, he said.

“I don’t need two months of that stress-free relief, I’d be happy with just two days,” he said. “If I just get a couple of days to unwind I’m good to go because I train under this pressure all of the time, so to go fight is not that big of a deal.”