If you spend even a little time with Max Metzgar, you might be prompted to sit down and think about your life and choices.
I know I did.
I talked to the Oak Park native Sunday evening, and we covered the full breadth of his career – not just his success as a mixed martial arts fighter and his aspirations to participate in UFC, but the two businesses he runs in Columbus, Ohio, and his counsel to people who are finding their way.
The key takeaway came in the last question I asked him.
Not everyone is going to be an MMA fighter, but I can see the parallels between that and life, as far as toughness and goal setting. How do you counsel people in those areas?
“It’s all about authenticity,” the 2015 Oak Park and River Forest High School graduate told me. “The hardest thing to find out is who you are and what you care about. Is there something that calls to you, something that makes you feel like you’re meant to be doing?
“Everyone has some kind of gift.”
Metzgar goes by the nickname Mad Max, and while you might think it has something to do with his fighting capabilities in the Octagon, you’d be only partially right. Back when he attended Ohio State, he was a philosophy minor. He was already on his way to eschewing the traditional 9-to-5 career path, and he’d go to parties and dish about what thinking titans like Plato and Aristotle would say about various issues.
“They started calling me Mad Max,” he said, “but I’d have to say that’s a misnomer because Max doesn’t strike me as mad at all. He’s just a guy who’s got a lot of enthusiasm for what he does and is working hard to get where he wants to go.”
That’s to the UFC, also known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He’s a member of the Cage Fury Fighting Championships promotion and his next bout is March 27 against Elvin Romero.
Get Max talking about that, and you’ll get a whole different side of him.
“He’s a dead man walking,” he said with a coldness that made me shiver just a bit from hundreds of miles away. “I’m going to kill him.”
Now come on, he’s not literally going to do that. But if he gets a submission or knockout against Romero, and another in a bout in late spring or early summer, the UFC will come calling. Why? The UFC wants finishes, he said.
His coach, UFC hall of famer Matt Brown, said Max will likely be fighting in UFC in the next year or so.
“He does a lot of things well,” Brown said of his prized pupil. “I would say number one, which is a prerequisite for what we do, is his athleticism. He closes the distance well with his feet. He’s a great wrestler. I’ve been working on his striking and that’s getting better all the time.”
Here, philosophy also plays a role in how he approaches a fight. It’s never personal, he said. Some knucklehead who tries to make it personal, well, “They don’t know me.” Again, a little cold, but point taken.
Max is a practitioner of Jeet Kune Do, and if that sounds familiar, it should. The legendary Bruce Lee pioneered the discipline in the 1960s, and it’s the art of the intercepting fist. The idea is, I am what you’re not.
“I’m waiting for the perfect opportunity to land a takedown or one devastating shot,” he said. “I want to put them on the ground and break them. Zap their life force until they give in.”
What if we all attacked our life challenges that way? But Max has another way of expressing this, as a personal trainer and coach, helping people learn how to exercise, eat and think healthy and generally cope with life. He also runs an amateur MMA program called Mad Max’s Fight Team.
Bottom line, to paraphrase Robert Frost, Max has taken the path less traveled. While he gets back to the area from time to time, including visiting the OPRF wrestling room, it’s never a long stay.
“I have my life down here,” he said. “I have my fiancée. I left Oak Park and started a life for myself in Columbus, Ohio. I just took it on my shoulder and tried to carve out a life in a new place. It was an uncomfortable thing to do. It forced me to grow and experience the world in ways that I wouldn’t have.”
