Meet the anarchic American MMA star fighting his way into Vladimir Putin’s inner circle
Anarchist. Child psychologist. Professional wrestler. Jeff ' The Snowman' Monson is many things, the latest of which happens to be Russia's things the latest of which happens to be Russia's new 'youth ambassador' and confidant to one Vladimir Putin. But how did a washed-up, all- American cage and controversial sportsman? MH travels to Moscow to find out
t is 6pm on a December weeknight in central Moscow. The Russian capital’s glitzy promenades throng with wealthy gentlemen in velvet; well-manicured women in fur cling to their arms. The thermometer reads -15°C as MMA legend and A-list Russo-american celebrity Jeff Monson lumbers into the lobby of the city’s plushest shopping centre.
Stooping at the glass entrance, he scans the crowds outside. The 46-year-old from Minnesota – whose career has seen him win three gold FILA World Grappling Championships and a haul of ADCC and IBJJF titles – is an 18-stone sack of contorted muscles, inoperable bone injuries and painful soft-tissue contusions. Once upon a time he was considered to be among the best cage fighters in the world. Now, he’s contemplating how best to exit a press conference organised in his honour – to mark his appearance on Russia’s version of Dancing with the Stars – without attracting too much media attention.
Pulling a cap over a clean-shaven pate, hewn with quasi-anarchist tattoo art and scars from years of bare-knuckle punches, Monson assesses the gridlocked traffic near the Kremlin with a glacial scowl. Only 10 minutes earlier he was ably performing a complex rumba routine with his dance partner for a horde of TV executives. Now he’s late for a meet-andgreet with dissident diplomats from the exiled government of Palestine, just one of many diplomatic appointments he has undertaken since renouncing the US and setting up camp in the former USSR.
In the eyes of some states (including his homeland) the kind of soiree that Jeff Monson has planned tonight is tantamount to an endorsement of terrorism. It’s enough to get the average Joe deported by Uncle Sam. But Monson cares little. As a committed anarchist and communist, Monson – who fights as The Snowman – has fast ascended the ladder of Soviet celebrity to become one of Russia’s most powerful sportsmen. In the process, he has initiated his own Cold War.
ON THIN ICE
MH was invited to meet and spend time with Jeff Monson in Moscow over two days at the end of 2016 as he readied for the final fight of his colourful career. The invitation came care of a Russian-American political lobbyist called Marshall Comins, who works on the campaigns of presidents in Russia and has now signed Jeff as a client. Comins remembers Monson from the US fight circuit in the ’90s and views him as a character that might appeal to the Russian psyche. As a fighter who never backs down – even if he doesn’t always win – Monson is widely regarded in the country as a perennial underdog. It’s a position that endears him to the millions of Russians accustomed to the dual hardships of constant conflict and freezing weather. However, after a series of setbacks, simply securing Monson’s final fight is proving almost as gruelling. But more on that later.
Born in the US midwest, Monson’s upbringing was the typical all-american experience, the only significant aberration being the death of his father – a truck driver – when he was just two years old. Before long, however, it became clear that Monson Jr was developing a talent for violence. He put this to use as captain of the University of Illinois’ wrestling team, a role he performed alongside undergraduate studies in psychology. He then went on to obtain a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota before practising as a child psychologist for five years. Outside of office hours, any spare energy was spent on more wrestling.
"PUTIN TOLD ME I HAVE A RUSSIAN SOUL. . . I NEVER GIVE UP"
Eventually, the pull of the octagon became too powerful to resist. After competing in several large-scale MMA shows, including the Abu Dhabi Combat Cup, Monson decided to pursue a fighter’s life and in 2000 signed a contract with the UFC. It was in these days that Monson earned his nickname after beating four Brazilian fighters in a row. The Brazilians dubbed him ‘ The Snowman’ because he was white, compact and gathered more and more momentum as the contest went on. The momentum didn’t stop there. Over the next seven years, Monson won numerous medals – notably at the ADCC World Wrestling Championships, FILA Grappling World Championships, Pan-american Jiu-jitsu Championships and IBJJF Jiu-jitsu Championships. In 2006, he even had a shot at the UFC World Heavyweight title, narrowly losing on a technical decision after five rounds.
Shortly thereafter, Monson’s latent beef with the US administration became increasingly public. His career was taking him to different third world countries – not least Brazil – where he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed. Meanwhile, the credit crunch was beginning to turn the screw on ordinary Americans. Seeing big banks and corporate institutions as the culprits, Monson fell in with an anarchist group and faced down riot police at the 2008 Republican National Convention. That same year he spraypainted an anarchy symbol on the Washington State Capitol building and was charged with malicious vandalism.
BACKING THE USSR
His criticism of America became more vocal as he grew enamoured with Russia, a place where, as a hulking, uber-macho American with a powerful dislike for the stars and stripes, his popularity soared. Monson made his allegiance clear when he had a huge hammer and sickle tattooed on his calf, along with Soviet-style portraits of Trotsky, Lenin and Marx. The knockout blow was his decision in 2016 to renounce his US citizenship, and adopt the Luhansk People’s Republic – a selfproclaimed state in eastern Ukraine, on the border of the Russian Federation – as his new homeland.
“I am an anarchist,” Monson has said. “[I am] someone who would like to do away with all class hierarchy in society and the institutions that promote this inequality. [Russian socialism is] the only way as a human species that we’re going to survive.”
It is a befuddling trajectory, but then, very little about Jeff Monson is predictable. Monson talks fervently about both the plight of children in eastern Ukraine and the sports academy he’s helped them found as a youth ambassador to the Russian Communist Party. In areas where the local economy is dire, he explains, there is little for young men to do; the stark alternative to sport is war. By promoting wrestling, he reasons, Monson gives these men a means to work out stress within defined boundaries. As he dives into this topic, Monson’s syncopation remains soft as he delivers diatribes against the US. He is unrelenting yet considerate and humble. He is at once a gentle hulking giant and an intimidatingly eloquent orator.
Monson’s love affair with Russia began on 20 November 2011, a moment he recalls on our journey to his next appointment. Jet-lagged and disheveled, he left the US to fight Fedor Emelianenko, a heavyweight mixed martial artist widely considered to be the best fighter of his generation. When Monson took him on before 20,000 spectators in Moscow, Emelianenko was one of the most feared men in the sport. The spectacle that unfolded was beyond brutal. For 35 minutes, Emelianenko struck at Monson, using a powerful roundhouse kick to break his leg, targeting the area of the calf where the sciatic nerve is closest to
the skin, before pounding at his face and torso like an overzealous chef tenderising an octopus. After hearing his bone snap, Monson fought on stubbornly until the referee declared a unanimous victory in Emelianenko’s favour. As Monson was carried from the ring, Vladimir Putin stepped in to congratulate the victor. Putin was booed by the full-capacity stadium. The spectators wanted less of the president, and more of Monson.
“They reckon it’s the first time Putin’s ever been booed in public,” Monson says. A black-belt jiu-jitsu enthusiast himself, Putin was immediately impressed by Monson’s resolve. “He called me in my hotel room afterwards,” Monson says. “I was lying there in pain, with a splint on my leg, when Putin told me I have a Russian soul because I never give up. Then he told me that I’d always be welcome in Russia.”
This presidential stamp of approval placed Monson en route to mega-stardom. He has since led a procession to the mausoleum of Lenin alongside the leader of the Russian Communist Party, dined with the president of Abkhazia (who gifted him a handsome gold watch) and hung out with the infamous Night Wolves motorcycle club, a gang of Harley enthusiasts and vigilante social workers endorsed by Putin. Next, Monson hopes to embark on a government-chaperoned trip to Syria. Then there’s the issue of Palestine, a cause about which he cares passionately. “If wrestling in Palestine did some good, then sure, I’d go tomorrow,” he says. “I’d set up a school, just like I did in the Ukraine. You got it. No problem.”
COLD RESOLVE
For many souls, such occupations would prove a distraction from the day job. But Monson remains first and foremost a fighter, dedicated to maintaining his principal weapon for change: his body. When we arrive back at Monson’s hotel that evening, he hits the gym where he works out until the early hours. Following that, he returns to his suite to continue an insomniac lifting session, swinging a 32kg kettlebell until well after 5am.
The next morning when he is awoken, Monson feigns surprise that fellow guests might have been able to hear every rep of his workout. In his room – which is informally referred to as The Monson Suite – he kneels on the floor, elbows pivoted at right-angles on the bed, and stretches the back which has suffered years of irreparable damage during high contact cage-tussles. “It’s just the lower part of my spine,” groans Monson, as he pushes his diaphragm upward. “It’s all these aeroplanes,” he says, explaining that he knelt in the aisle for the entire duration of a recent trans-atlantic flight because sitting caused too much pain. He now elects to stand, or lie sideways on the backseat or floor, of any transport he takes.
“I live in this hotel because they allow me to store a lot of stuff in the suite,” he says, alluding to the aforementioned kettlebell and skipping ropes, along with a substantial cache of granola, Monson’s snack of choice. “I can’t take kettlebells with me when I travel,” he says. “Although, I guess it is possible to take a kettlebell as check-in baggage, right?” When he asks this question, perhaps to himself, he is enthusiastically and deadly serious.
It’s needless to say that, for a man in his mid-forties who has had approximately 13 reconstructive surgeries for injuries ranging from broken bones to busted ligaments and biceps tears, Monson is in impressive shape. He admits he suffers from the occasional hernia, but these are mere annoyances. In fact, there’s one the size of a Malteser currently protruding from his lower abdomen, which Monson wants to prod back inside with a pencil. An advisor of sorts cautions against it, but then, Monson does things his own way.
During his ascendency to fame in the late ’90s Monson was known for his ability to endure barrages of punches and remain standing. Later, however, Monson became better known for his ground-game. Yes, he can take a punch, but he has come to rely on his psychological advantages over his opponents. He typically fights at a weight disadvantage to others in his class, allowing them to wear themselves out before clawing them to the floor and pinning them into redfaced submission. It is a technique that demands less cardiovascular training and more of an emphasis on lifting.
Working out again in the hotel gym after breakfast, Monson explains he does not believe in recovery. In his modest yet persuasive opinion, recovery simply does not exist. Instead, Monson opts to work every muscle group in his body every day – including his damaged leg – through a mixture of dumbbell, barbell and his beloved kettlebell maneuvers. “I don’t do cardio anymore,” Monson shrugs. “I just lift. I eat stupid stuff. I train old-school.”
Miraculously, the compound effects of this full-body stress don’t seem to be slowing him down. There can be no doubt that Monson packs phenomenal strength into a body that has been repeatedly broken. A few months prior to meeting in Moscow, Monson decisively beat Alex Kardo to submission with a north-south choke in Belgorod, just north of the