Brian Stann: The Reluctant Hero
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One word that will never be used to describe Brian Stann is “selfish”.
In spite of every obstacle he has determinedly driven through in his life and every accolade he has earned in his decorated military and mixed martial arts careers, Stann’s arms remain too busy saluting and shaking the hands of the platoon of supporters who stand behind him to stop for a moment and pat himself on the back.
To the retired United States Marine Corps Captain, who now runs a non-profit agency that finds employment for former military personnel, guts have always outweighed glory by tenfold. As such, it’s no surprise that heading into his fourth UFC fight, the former WEC light heavyweight champion is as busy making sure his men are looked after as he is planning for the imminent battle.
“There’s a Marine named Josh Glover who was wounded by an RPG in Afghanistan. He is in a wheelchair and could possibly lose his legs, and our organization, Hired Heroes USA, is flying him and his wife out to the Mandalay Bay for the show next week. We’re putting them up in a hotel and the UFC is giving him cageside tickets,” Stann explains with pride in his voice. “It’s just a little thing but it’s giving back to the military and that’s something I can’t do enough of. I satisfy my thirst for leading Marines and to be involved in the military by running my non-profit [organization].”
Reflecting the spotlight back onto his fellow soldiers is nothing new for Stann.
Awarded the Silver Star in 2006 for his exceptional leadership in seeing his platoon of 42 through seemingly insurmountable odds during a May 2005 Iraqi insurgent ambush and subsequent six day ground fight near Karabilah, Stann utilized artillery and air strikes to help ensure that each of his charge made it out alive despite being heavily outnumbered and in the middle of constant enemy crossfire.
Humbly accepting his citation, Stann added a caveat to his acceptance speech, diverting his praise for his part in the battle to his men he worked so valiantly to protect during that week as well as his whole career as a Marine.
“This award represents my guys. It’s an insight to what my men did over there. There were a lot of our guys who received awards from our group when we were out there, not just me,” Stann pointed out to those on hand for the ceremony.
Although Stann’s style of command and his pivotal role in the career defining battle nearly five years ago put him directly in harm’s way for a lion’s share of the skirmish, he says the reality that he knew he would still approach the battle the same way ten times out of ten, in spite of his family and their dependency on him, made him re-evaluate his roles.
“My decision to get out of the military was more based around my family than my fighting career. We had one of my daughters at the time and we were planning on having more children. Having children changes your perspective about a lot of things, but I knew that it wouldn’t change the way I was going to lead my Marines,” Stann says. “I don’t lead my men from the back – I lead them from the front. I’m not going to have them go into dangerous situations unless I’m right there shoulder-to-shoulder with them. I didn’t play it safe when I was deployed because I didn’t care about myself; I only cared about my men. I started to realize how terrible it would be to orphan my children at such a young age, so maybe it was time to switch gears.”
Raised by his single mother – his father, an Air Force pilot, walked away from his wife and son when Brian was two and hasn’t contacted them since – Stann vowed to himself and his wife Teressa that if and when they ever had children, he would never be an absent military dad. Not wanting Teressa to go it alone for months or years while he was deployed or for her and his two daughters to have to celebrate birthdays or milestones in their lives without him, Stann knew he had to make a change and that it had to be done sooner than later.
“My mom was fabulous. She was an amazing parent, but it wasn’t easy raising a kid alone. I knew if I continued working as a Marine, I would want to continue to approach my career seriously and I would want to be deployed and deployed often so I could fight. I knew that if that happened there would be a significant amount of my children’s lives that I would miss,” he explains. “When I came back from my second deployment in Iraq, I pretty much had to get to know my wife all over again because I was gone so long. Every time you go to war, you come back a little different, so my wife and I, after talking about it at great length, came to the difficult decision that maybe it was time to transform my life and begin to focus on my number one priority, which was my family.”
Leaving the Marine Corps in 2008 after more than a decade as a soldier, Stann admits that although he often thinks about his men and the role he left behind, he is confident that he made the right decision.
“I miss being a Marine every day. It was a really difficult decision to leave. Sometimes I regret it and other times I’m okay with it. When I have my daughters in my arms, that’s when I’m okay about it and that’s where I need to be. I loved every day that I was able to lead Marines and I love being a mixed martial arts fighter,” says Stann. “I always had my full-time job and fighting was just my hobby. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere and it did and I fell in love with it. I’m extremely lucky to have found something that I am as passionate about as I was about my military career.”
Despite not having a father figure in his life growing up, Stann never went off the rails like so many others who were raised under similar circumstances. A standout quarterback on the high school football field and an exceptional student, he says the decision to enroll at the Naval Academy after graduation had little to do with needing discipline in his life.
“I just knew in high school that I was way too serious of a person to go to a regular college and I thought it might be better to go to a military college. I figured that I’d be more likely to find people there who took things as seriously as I did. I took every sport I played, my academic career and my future very seriously and it seemed like everyone else I knew was more focused on the social aspect of school,” Stann recalls. “I figured the Naval Academy was as good as a place as any for a guy who was as intense as I was. The Marine Corps is known for, and willingly accepts, intensity, so I definitely landed in the right place.”
After spending so many years thinking as a soldier and being in the analytical mindset of one, Stann says switching his focus to MMA has helped appease his desire to fight and he believes his military training has helped him immensely in his new career path.
When he first started fighting in MMA, the 29-year-old former hand-to-hand combat instructor admits he had no formal fight training besides what the military taught him, which you could say proved the methods they are using are effective as he strung together a 6-0 record in his first two years competing as a pro between tours of duty. At the invite of the renowned trainer, Stann joined Greg Jackson’s camp in Albuquerque and immediately realized the merits of training day in and day out with top-tier training partners.
“I was jumping around from gym to gym to find decent training partners to train with and I remember thinking, ‘This is no way to do things,’” Stann recalls. “Hooking up with Greg has been incredible. He’s a lot like me in a lot of ways when it comes to analyzing fighting, as he has studied military tactics and philosophies at length.”
To prepare for his bouts, Stann says he and Jackson spend a great deal of time strategically planning for every scenario that might come up in the fight, good or bad – a tactic he credits the Marines for helping him master. Approaching his fight against Octagon newcomer Phil Davis (4-0) at UFC 109 on February 6, he feels that this meticulous mode of preparation will give him the edge, no matter what plan of attack the undefeated former NCAA Division I National Wrestling Champion tries to employ.
“When we prepare for a fight, we always do what we call turning the map around. We start by looking at the map from our perspective to decide what I’m going to do, then we turn it around to see what the enemy’s most likely course of action is going to be and what the enemy’s most dangerous course of action is. I do that for all of my fights — as soon as I get my opponent that’s what we immediately start to analyze. So for this fight, I’m looking at what Phil Davis’ most likely course of action is and what his most dangerous course of action is. I’m looking at the worst-case scenario for me and we’re training according to those standards.
Although fighting in the cage has obvious differences to fighting a war on the battlefield, Stann explains that the similarities between the two are what enabled him to effectively trade in his fatigues for fight shorts.
“The biggest similarities between going to war and going into a fight are in the preparations. If you have nine months to train before you know you are going to war, you spend that entire nine months going through your strategies ahead of time to ensure that your unit is as prepared as they can be for all situations that may occur in that one culminating event. For us it’s one fight in one night and obviously for a military unit it’s an entire deployment, but your mindset going into a fight and a war are very much the same. You have certain training blocks and benchmarks that you need to hit to be prepared for both. When you have nine weeks to prepare for a fight and you know you are going to be starting camp in a week, you sit down and plan all of the things that you need to work on to continue to improve overall as a fighter as well as the things that you need to improve on specifically for this fight. You need to bring in the right type of people to help you prepare as well to help you while you’re in battle. For me now, those are the guys on my team and in my corner.”
Since retiring from active duty, the Scranton, PA native who lives in Alpharetta, GA says he now spends approximately 60 percent of his time in the New Mexico city honing his skills by day and telecommuting to his two other jobs in the evening. Though he says it isn’t easy balancing his family and work lives, getting to tuck his little girls in and being able to fall asleep beside his wife every night makes it all worth the work.
“Besides training and running my non-profit agency, I actually work a full-time job handling all of the corporate real estate transactions for the company that started my non-profit. I’m up early every day training, and afterwards I go to work on the computer to make sure business is taken care of, so sometimes it’s ten o’clock at night when I’m closing my laptop. Guys on the team ask me why I put myself through it all and I tell them I have three reasons – my wife and my two daughters.”
Much like he did several times before as he waded into the scores of battles he was involved in during his time as a Marine, heading into his fight with Davis, Stann is focusing more so on
the challenge of overcoming the unknown elements that his opponent could bring to the fight, rather than what he assumes he might try. As in war, he says he holds no personal grudge against his foe as they both are just doing their jobs. Unfortunately for Davis, Stann has never taken his job lightly, and in his four years as a mixed martial artist and more than ten as a soldier, he has rarely lost a fight.
“I don’t need any animosity to motivate me to fight. I’ve watched some of Phil’s interviews and to be honest with you, I think if we met we’d be friends. I like the guy; he has a great sense of humor and seems to be a pretty funny guy. I don’t have anything against him personally. For me, it’s just about the challenge. Phil is a new puzzle that I have to come up with a way to solve. I can have all of these pre-conceived notions and my coaches can come up with the best game plan for me for that night, but there are always little things that come up that aren’t expected and that’s the fun part about fighting. Thinking on your feet during the fight and sitting in your corner between rounds with your coaches and changing your plan of attack on the fly by making little adjustments is the cerebral part of the fight.”
One glaring difference Stann, who is 2-1 in the UFC and 8-2 overall, recognizes between his former and current careers is that losing a fight has far less dire consequences than they used to. Granted, putting that into perspective is decidedly easier to do for a guy who has been to war on several occasions, but some fighters might do well to adopt Stann’s approach to MMA.
“A lot of fighters think that if you lose a fight you need to be embarrassed because everyone is going to be laughing at you, but there’s no shame in it. Someone’s got to lose and no matter how good you are, every night isn’t going to be your night,” he says. “I’m really confident heading into my fight next weekend, but to me it’s more about having fun than being worried about winning. If you’re training all day and you’re not having fun, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.”
Whether it’s in life or a fight, it’s tough not to root for a guy like that.
