The superhero arrives at the nightclub just before midnight. Here he comes. Get a look at him.

Look at his carefully manicured flat top, sticking up on the crowded dance floor. Look at the laser lights flashing in his black-framed glasses. Look at his bright red T-shirt, the one with the blue epaulets, the blue pocket on the chest, the whole thing – and again, this is a T-shirt we’re talking about here – tucked into his blue slacks.

A guy like this, you can’t miss him as he comes bobbing through the Friday-night crowd. Which is kind of the point.

It’s less than 24 hours before the self-proclaimed superhero who calls himself “Phoenix Jones” will step into a cage to fight his adopted brother for the entertainment of thousands. The night before a big fight like this, most guys would be in bed, or at least somewhere near one.

But the superhero is here, at a nightclub called Stage in downtown Seattle. He has a private table, a bottle of champagne, and a plan to stay up as late as he possibly can before finally collapsing into a full day’s sleep.

But wait. Back up for a second, because the champagne is interesting. It arrives with a flourish, carried through the club by a team of waitresses. Just in case you failed to notice their delivery, they’ve taken the liberty of attaching a giant sparkler to the bottle, which throws off a frantic, sizzling glow to light their way. Once the bottle gets where it’s going, the waitresses plant it in a bucket of ice and fire off a small explosion. Pop!

First comes the shower of confetti, and after that the smell of gunpowder mixing with the scent of spilled booze and cologne and summer sweat coming off the dance floor.

Then the bottle just sits there in its bucket. No one at this table is pouring. No one’s drinking. Definitely not the superhero. His glass glows with a liquid as red as his shirt – Sprite and cherry juice, his own makeshift Shirley Temple.

The superhero has no use for the champagne anymore. It’s already served its purpose. With its elaborate entrance, it made people look his way. It forced them to. But he’s not going to drink any of it. Come on, man. He’s got a fight here in, well, in about 20 hours.

So then, wait. Why is he in this nightclub again? Especially when his opponent – his brother, his first sparring partner, the man he’s known all his life and with whom he shares a winding history of intimate warfare and antagonism and mutual abuse – is resting up for the battle to come? Who goes dancing in a club the night before a fight? Why do this?

“Man, why not do this?” he says, opening his arms up as if he’s preparing to hug the entire sweaty room.

Later he will make the rounds shaking hands, handing out free tickets, pumping up the crowd from the stage, behind which is a giant screen flashing a somewhat redundant message:

K.O. HIS ASS OUT

GOOD LUCK PHOENIX JONES

All good fun on a Friday night. Seriously, though. Why is he here?

“The way I look at it is like this,” he says. “You may never feel as good as you feel right now. You’ll never be this young again. You may never have more wins than you have right now. You may never look this good again. So why not enjoy it? Hell yes, I’m at the club.”

Pressed even further, he comes up with still another explanation: The night before a fight, even Phoenix Jones – the man who’s been shot and stabbed, who’s thwarted everything from assaults to attempted bus hijackings in the course of his self-appointed duties as Seattle’s premier street vigilante – he can’t sleep.

(A note about names: The superhero is named Phoenix Jones, and that’s how he’s billed when he fights for WSOF. His real name is Ben Fodor. But Ben Fodor is fighting Caros Fodor, which is bound to get confusing. So from here on out, Phoenix Jones is Jones, and Caros Fodor is Fodor. Cool? Let’s move on.)

The first thing to know about this fight is that very few people seem to think it’s a good idea. Not the Fodor family. Not the mixed martial arts community at large. Certainly not Jones, who waffles from reluctant participant to aggrieved party to inspired angel of vengeance, depending on when you ask him about it.

And Fodor? He’ll admit he was a little more gung ho about the idea than his little brother was, but he’s still not what you’d call enthusiastic.

Sitting inside the sweltering AMC Pankration gym in Kirkland, Wash., a few days before the fight, Fodor can only shake his head as the sweat runs down his cheeks. He’s 32. He wants to be out of this sport by the time he’s 35. He also wants to win a championship first.

“Honestly,” Fodor says, “this fight does nothing for my career.”

But that’s not exactly true, is it? Because six months ago Fodor fought Louis Firmino at WSOF 27 in Memphis and, at the risk of overstating it, no one cared. Before that he went 3-1 for ONE Championship, bouncing from Singapore to Cambodia, and it was more or less the same thing. He won or lost, performed or didn’t, and for the most part the fans and the websites back home remained aggressively indifferent.

This will be Fodor’s 16th professional fight in a career that’s spanned seven years, beginning shortly after he left the Marine Corps in 2007. He fought for Strikeforce. He fought exactly once in the UFC. His last fight for WSOF, he was the main event. But he’s never had more media and fan attention on him than he has right now, and all because he’s agreed to fight his brother.

Actually, depending on whose version of the story you believe, it’s more like he asked to fight his brother.

‘Why would you want to fight me now?’

According to Jones, he and Fodor were already at odds over an unrelated minor personal squabble when WSOF President Ray Sefo called him to say how excited he was to promote another Phoenix Jones fight, this time in Jones’ hometown, and against his own brother.

This was news to Jones. It was not welcome news, either. He initially declined, he says, until Sefo told him that Fodor had already signed his contract.

“So of course I’m going to sign, too,” he says now. “I’m not backing down from a fight.”

The fight was set up by Fodor and his longtime coach, Matt Hume, the founder of AMC Pankration. Jones had previously trained at Hume’s gym too, but usually just when he had a fight coming up. Once this bout between brothers and occasional teammates was finalized, Hume told Jones he’d have to find somewhere else to prepare for it.

“I decided it didn’t really set the right example for the rest of the guys there,” says Hume. “Ben has always kind of done his own thing. Caros has been loyal; he’s been a dependable person at the gym for years and years. At this point, the way Ben handles his fighting career, it doesn’t fit with AMC.”

Of course, Jones still blames Fodor for getting him kicked out of the gym. Their rift has only deepened. They went from giving each other the silent treatment to arguing in the media. It was no longer just about the fight itself. That his brother would want to punch him wasn’t so surprising, or even anything new, according to Jones.

“But right now, we aren’t even speaking to one another,” Jones says. “Like, we were legitimately mad at each other when they set this up. Why would you want to fight me now?”

The way Fodor sees it, that’s what makes this the perfect time to fight. If they were feeling friendly toward one another, fighting in a cage would feel wrong, he says. It’d feel forced, almost to the point of being fake.

“Me and him aren’t talking right now, so I think it’s best for it to happen when we’re not speaking,” Fodor says. “It’d be awkward fighting when we’re friends.”

The history of the Fodor brothers is filled with these long periods of mutual disdain punctuated by brief respites of friendship. They can’t help it. They’re just too different. On that, as on precious few topics, they agree.

Both were adopted at birth by their mother, Susan Fodor, who ran a series of homes for foster kids. Caros came first, Ben followed some five years later, with two more siblings added after that. Ever since they were kids, Jones and Fodor clashed.

“We fought pretty much our whole childhood,” Fodor says.

Jones was the emotional one, always on the verge of a violent eruption, escalating arguments into fistfights and fistfights into total bedlam, like the time when he was 14 and he tackled his brother out a second-floor window – an incident Jones insists took place, but Fodor says he has no recollection of.

Fodor was the tactician in these clashes, the careful thinker. He had some years on his younger brother, but Jones got big and strong at an early age, and he was likely to go nuts once petty sibling disputes crossed a certain threshold. In a way, it was good motivation for Fodor to learn martial arts, a way to arm himself with knowledge that might overcome a bigger man’s strength.

“I was pretty strategic when I’d push his buttons,” Fodor says. “I usually had a backup plan to get away or lock myself in a room somewhere.”

But while Fodor’s fury was sometimes slower to rise to the surface, it was no less intense. After returning from combat duty in Iraq, an argument with his brother ended with Fodor sticking the barrel of a gun into Jones’ belly and pulling the trigger. When the blank round in the chamber went off, it was loud enough to convince Jones that he’d been shot, that his brother had just fired a hole through his guts.

Looking back on it now, the funny thing is how totally not out of the realm of possibility something like that seemed to Jones at the time.

As adults, they’ve spent whole years not speaking. They’ve done it while working together in the same room, one just slightly more than arm’s reach away from the other.

Their current dispute is “maybe the second or third worst” in their history, according to Fodor, who ascribes the original source of the rift to the dueling forces of family and money, but declines to explain it in any greater detail. And really, the specific cause hardly seems to matter anymore. It’s just the latest flashpoint in a lifelong war that has seen temporary truces, though no lasting peace.

“We’re just opposite people,” Fodor says. “He’s very outgoing and seeks attention. I’m the opposite. That just always got in the way of us being friends.”

The superhero thing is a good example. To Fodor, it’s “ridiculous” that his brother dresses up in a costume and goes out to literally fight crime in the streets of Seattle. He sees it as one more example of his brother trying to draw the spotlight when he would have been much better served by being in the gym, working on his wrestling.

Fodor is quieter than his brother, more reserved. He shares his brother’s passion for helping people, but instead of doing it on the streets in a costume that’s a magnet for attention, he does it as a caretaker for adults with special needs through Washington’s companion home program.

Looking at his tattoos and his scar tissue, you might mistake him for an extra in a prison movie. But get him talking and he flashes this shy smile, like a kid shoved onstage for the school play, suddenly embarrassed by the flood of attention.

Jones, on the other hand, is the kid who waits all year for that play. Maybe he can’t sit still during math class, but in front of an audience he blooms into his true self. The man is a born performer.

What he’s not is the same caliber of martial artist his brother is. He hasn’t put the same time in to his training. He hasn’t approached MMA with anywhere near the consistency and the discipline that Fodor has. He also has no problem admitting that.

“Some of these other guys, MMA is their whole life,” Jones says. “That’s not me. My fight is out there on the streets, where the real bad guys are.”

But see, ask just about anyone who has trained with the two brothers and they’ll tell you the same thing: Jones is a gifted athlete, but in an MMA fight Fodor should take him apart. He’s just the more skilled fighter, and athleticism only gets you so far when you can’t stop a takedown or get up from side control.

Fodor understands this. His brother is always a threat to end a fight with one big shot, he says, but beyond that?

“In a way I’m comfortable, because I know how he fights,” Fodor says. “Skill-wise, I don’t have to worry about him taking advantage of me if I don’t perform to my highest level.”

Jones knows it too, which means he’s had a lot of time to sit and think about why his brother selected him, a man he knows he should beat, as his next opponent. The answer he’s come up with is one Fodor has more or less verified in interviews before the fight: money.

Fodor lost his last fight. He missed out on a win bonus he really expected to get. He had to know that if he signed on to fight his brother, he’d most likely get that win bonus the next time around. And signing the bout agreement without talking to Jones about it first, he had to know that was bound to throw his emotional little brother into a sudden fury, at which point he’d sign too.

What else was he going to do, say no?

So that’s how they got here, to Jones’ way of thinking. Big brother played him again. He pushed Jones’ buttons once he already had his plan in place. And honestly, that stings. For Jones, it brings up all the old wounds of childhood. It also reminds him of how he got through those vicious scraps growing up.

“I won a lot of fights with (Fodor) because I was willing to take it somewhere he’s not willing to take it,” Jones says. “That’s been my whole life. He doesn’t understand what commitment really is. He doesn’t get it. He thinks commitment is going to the gym every single day on time, and showing up and yes sir, no sir. Commitment is taking your body and hurling it out a two-story window, knowing either one of you could land on the pavement. I didn’t scream going out the window. I knew what the choice was.”

A gimmick too far



Weigh-ins take place on Friday, the day before the fight, in a cordoned off section of the 10,000-seat XFINITY Arena in Everett, Wash., about 20 miles north of Seattle. By the time Jones arrives, he has already had a very bad day, and it shows all over his face.

Jones’ usual weight class is welterweight, 170 pounds, and even that has been a struggle for him at times. But Fodor fights at lightweight, 155 pounds, and as much as he wanted to fight his brother, he didn’t want to concede the full extent of the size difference.

So they agreed to meet in the middle, at 162 pounds, which is another way you can tell what this fight is really about. Catchweight bouts are, as a rule, more about entertainment than sport. They tend to be gimmick fights, matchups that aren’t relevant to any particular division or rankings hierarchy, but still sell tickets, for one reason or another.

And brother vs. brother? Yeah, that works. It works even better in Seattle, where Jones’ superhero persona is something of a local legend. People here who don’t know MMA still know Phoenix Jones. For an organization like WSOF, which is struggling to find some way to stand out in a crowded combat sports marketplace dominated by the UFC, a gimmick fight that feels like something out of the pro wrestling playbook probably doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Still, it’s hard to escape the sense that this might be a gimmick too far, even for MMA. At the AMC Pankration gym a few days before the fight a team member who’d just returned from a brief hiatus stopped and gawked at a WSOF poster advertising the bout. The man turned to Fodor with wide eyes.

“You guys are fighting each other?” he said.

Fodor said they were.

“Man,” the guy said, “that’s going to be crazy.”

Whether or not it’s a good kind of crazy depends on your perspective. Hume, who has trained both fighters at various points, says he hopes the bout allows the two to “work through some of their issues,” though he admits he originally vetoed talk of this fight in the past.

“Brothers fighting each other,” Hume says, “that’s just not something I want to see.”

Most of the Fodor family feels the same way about it. Their mother tried to talk them out of it, both men said, but by the time they even got around to telling her about the fight, it was already too late. Other family members say they won’t watch.

“I understand,” says Fodor. “They don’t get to win in this. Either way it goes, they lose.”

Even within the MMA community, a group largely desensitized to all manner of violent pairings, there’s the sense that a fight between brothers – even ones who don’t share a blood connection – is just a little too unseemly to feel good about.

Before weigh-ins, BloodyElbow.com writer and Seattle local Zane Simon explains that one reason he’s not planning on attending the bout is because he’s seen a brother-vs.-brother bout before, from a regional promotion in Canada, and he didn’t like it.

“It just felt like watching an incident of domestic violence,” Simon says.

Onstage at XFINITY Arena, the feuding brothers angle is sold to a sparse crowd, mostly just fighters and their entourages. Fodor goes first, easily hitting 162 pounds. Jones follows, but from the way he shakes his head before stepping on the scale, it’s clear something is off.

He comes in just over 168 pounds – more than six pounds over the agreed upon weight. When he turns for the customary face-off, he puts his forehead against Fodor’s and utters something too quiet for anyone but his brother to hear. That’s when Fodor shoves him, and the two look for a moment like they might have their fight right there.

“It’s just bull(expletive),” Fodor will say after the incident. “For him to talk all the crap he has, then to miss weight like that and still get in my face and have something to say? It’s disrespectful.”

Later that night, outside Stage on a hot Seattle night, Jones reveals what he said to set his brother off.

“I told him this is all his fault,” he says. “I hope the paycheck was worth it.”

The battle of brothers

The video plays roughly halfway through fight night, and right away it gets the crowd’s attention. Up there on the big screen, hovering over the cage in XFINITY Arena, we see Phoenix Jones backstage, talking to WSOF interviewer Joey Varner.

They go through the whole bad blood angle, the genesis of this uncommon match-up. Then Varner asks if Jones feels betrayed by his brother.

“You nailed it,” Jones says. A moment later, his voice breaks and nearly gives way to tears as he leans in close and says, almost conspiratorially, “I mean, what are we doing out here, man?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wTxlLYxCVM

The crowd in the arena looks up in silence. For many of them, it’s the first sense that maybe both parties aren’t equally interested in making this fight happen. In a sport based on the presumption of enthusiastic mutual consent to do each other harm, it’s not easy to know how to feel about that.

Days after the bout, when video of this interview makes the internet rounds, MMAFighting.com journalist Ariel Helwani will tweet out a link to it with a question that expresses a common sentiment in MMA circles: “How did they let this happen?”

Then again, as Fodor will point out later, this fight is something they’ve discussed for years. It’s something they’ve done before, countless times, and in situations far less regulated and much more dangerous.

“We’ve always known we’d fight each other eventually,” says Fodor. “He can say I’ve wronged him or whatever, but he’s been talking about this for years.”

In fact, after Jones’ most recent win at WSOF 23 this past September, he did a post-fight interview standing next to a visibly uncomfortable Fodor. Flush with the joy of victory, Jones expressed an eager willingness to fight his brother, stopping just short of calling him out during the interview.

“I wish people would go look at that,” Fodor will say after this fight. “It wasn’t just my idea.”

It’s Fodor who enters first on fight night, making a brisk walk to the cage and heading directly to his corner. He’s strictly business tonight, doing his best to ignore the scattered boos from the crowd as he glares at the floor and paces in his corner. He pumps short uppercuts at the air. He mumbles to himself, waiting for his brother.

Jones enters to the biggest cheer of the night. A superhero’s welcome. He makes it a few steps before stopping and cocking his head to the ceiling as he lets out a roar. Then he sprints into the cage and jogs in a wide circle, passing right in front of Fodor. After that he heads back to his corner. He glares across the cage. He looks like he might cry.

“The battle of brothers is about to go down,” says the WSOF announcer.

Then it starts and there they are, really fighting each other, these two men who have known each other all their lives. This one counts.

Jones comes out swinging hard. Fodor pushes him toward the fence and takes him down. Fodor postures up and comes slicing down with an elbow from inside Jones’ guard. Jones struggles from the bottom, but can’t do much but hold on and hope.

“Yeah, hit your brother in the face!” shouts a man in the crowd, to tepid laughs.

The first two rounds go by like this. Fodor can take his brother down. He can hold him there, softening him up with short blows. Jones doesn’t have the wrestling or the jiu-jitsu to stop him.

Every once in a while, however, Jones pops back to his feet with an escape that’s more power than technique. Then he gets his chance, wailing away on his big brother with wild, angry punches. Until he’s taken down again. And again.

Standing in his corner before the start of the final round, Jones screams as he stares across at his brother, who looks more tired than intimidated. When the round starts they march toward each other. Jones takes a step and spins into a back elbow strike. It just misses a clean landing on Fodor’s skull. Fodor walks through it and scores another takedown.

Late in the round, Jones gets the chance he’s been waiting for. In a scramble for position on the mat, Jones seizes the top position on his fatigued and undersized little brother, moving to full mount as he rains down strikes.

A chant goes up from the crowd: “Phoenix! Phoenix!”

But the moment is short-lived. Fodor sneaks into half-guard, attacks Jones’ leg just long enough to allow himself to get up, eating elbows and punches as he does it, then it’s back down to the mat again, this time with Fodor on top. The natural order of the fight has been restored.

They will end this way, with Jones on bottom, flailing madly at his brother’s head. Fodor will wait him out, keep him down, wait for the final bell and the judges’ decision, which of course goes his way after three rounds of near total control.

Standing in the cage, separated by the referee, neither man seems to know what to do. Jones keeps glaring over at Fodor, talking to him. How’s your head, he asks, pointing to the cut from that spinning elbow. Does your head hurt?

Fodor turns quickly and exits the cage once it’s clear there’s to be no post-fight interview. He’s headed backstage to get his head stitched up. Jones is left standing there alone for a moment, looking like he didn’t get all that he came for.

Afterward, the only word Fodor can find to describe the fight is “weird.” Just like he thought it would be. It wasn’t easy looking across the cage and seeing his brother. It wasn’t easy punching and elbowing him in the head, either.

Now that it’s over, he can’t even say if he feels good about having won. Maybe they’ll talk it over later, he says. Maybe they’ll reconcile, eventually. Maybe they won’t.

For Jones, here’s where the night takes a strange turn. The day before he informed me that he had an after-party planned at a club in nearby Bellevue. If he won, everyone was invited. If he lost, he said, it was “homies only.” He said he’d put me on the list for both contingencies.

When I arrive shortly after Marlon Moraes knocks out Josh Hill in the main event, thus bringing an end to WSOF 32, I text Jones. Still on for the after-party? The reply comes from his girlfriend.

“Ben left his phone id and wallet and just walked off down the street in Everett about two hours ago,” she writes. “If you see him please let me know.”

The next day he shows up on Instagram to address his fans. The fight taught him something, he says. It taught him that he doesn’t put enough time into training, that he relies too much on pure physical ability. All things, it would seem, he already knew.

But now that these flaws have been exposed in a fight with his brother, it’s made an impact.

“So I’m going to go back to the gym,” he says. “I’m going to stop fighting crime for a little bit. I’m going to focus on becoming a well-rounded MMA fighter.”

He goes on to claim that, for the next two years, he’ll focus solely on MMA – something that, just a few days ago, he said he’d never do. When I get him on the phone later that week, I ask how much of that decision had to do with the fact that it was Fodor he lost to, and not some stranger.

“All of it,” he says. “One hundred percent of it.”

When he left the arena that night, he says, he walked off into “the woods” nearby. He stayed there all night, by himself, dwelling on the loss. He knew he’d been beaten. He knew he couldn’t argue with the decision. He also knew he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t dedicate himself to MMA full-time, if only to become the kind of fighter who would beat a guy like Fodor. He had to get serious.

“I hope he does,” Fodor says upon hearing this claim. “He could be really good. He’s got the ability. He’s got more heart than anyone I’ve ever fought. He just needs the technique. It was honestly probably the toughest fight I’ve ever had.”

The night after the fight, Fodor says, he hosted a small gathering of friends at his house. Jones showed up unannounced. They saw each other across the room, locked eyes, and for a moment Fodor didn’t know what to do.

“Then I thought, you know, he drove over here,” Fodor says. “He made the first effort, so I’ll make the next effort.”

He went over and hugged his brother, gave him a kiss on the neck, told him what a tough fight it had been, and how glad he was that it was over.

Jones had come to make amends, he would say later, but it all changed the minute he saw his brother.

“I just wanted to hit him in the face again,” Jones says. “I couldn’t stand it.”

After that, according to Fodor, things went downhill fast. Yelling. Threats of violence. They parted just as angrily as ever. They haven’t seen each other since. Jones says he plans to get a tattoo of a tombstone with the date of the fight.

“As far as I’m concerned,” he says. “I don’t have a brother.”

But Fodor? He’s not sorry the fight happened. And if it gives Jones the drive he needs to reach his potential, maybe it’ll be worth all the drama before and after.

“If it wasn’t for MMA, we would have nothing at all in common,” Fodor says. “And I’ll always be here for him. He’s my brother.”

For more on WSOF 32, check out the MMA Events section of the site.