Four Daysin LASort of
I find myself reflecting on this more and more these days.
I certainly didn't have some grand plan that one day I'd be flying around the world with a UFC World Champion, going to events in places like Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi, meeting people I'd previously only ever seen on television, and somehow finding myself in some fairly ridiculous situations along the way.
I'm 47, still working in sport, still getting opportunities I couldn't possibly have imagined when I started out, and probably appreciating them more now than I ever have.
Part of that has come from something I've been thinking about a lot lately - my little REM philosophy.
I was reading Ben Crowe's book and came across the way Ash Barty had thought about what really mattered through her career and life. It was one of those things that made me stop reading for a minute because it put words around something I'd probably been feeling without ever really defining.
Relationships. Experiences. Memories.
In that order.
The relationships you build.
The experiences those relationships allow you to share.
And ultimately, the memories you get to carry with you.
REM.
I've shamelessly pinched it from an Aussie legend, adapted it for myself and found myself coming back to it more and more.
The real reward has been the people I've met because of it, the places and situations those relationships have taken me into, and this increasingly ridiculous collection of memories that I could never have planned.
And this little four-day trip to Los Angeles probably captured that better than most.
So when flights get cancelled, plans change, you lose almost an entire day of an already insanely short trip, or you find yourself hustling around Australian airports trying to work out how you're actually going to get to America, it's worth maintaining some perspective.
You can laugh about it. You can be frustrated by it. You can shake your head at the absurdity of it.
Thursday, Sydney
A pretty good start. For about an hour.
The plan was fairly simple.
Sydney to Los Angeles on Thursday. UFC 331 commitments Friday and Saturday. A content day on Sunday. Midnight flight home Sunday night.
As we were heading to Sydney Airport on Thursday, I got the news that my daughter Libby had been named School Captain.
Anyone who knows me knows how proud I am of my kids, but this one felt particularly special. A pretty amazing achievement for Libby and a lovely piece of news to get as we headed off.
REM was already doing its thing and we hadn't even made it to the airport.
Then we arrived at Sydney.
We were literally in the process of getting our tickets sorted when our Qantas flight to Los Angeles was cancelled.
What followed was the usual airport chaos when hundreds of people suddenly need to be somewhere else.
Phones out. Bags moved. Options considered. Different airlines. Different routes. Different cities.
The travelling party was Alex, Jake and me.
Jake was there to shoot the trip and look after Alex's content, which would become increasingly important over the next few days - not just for Alex, but for me.
As I was about to discover, Los Angeles has an entire ecosystem of people who are very famous on the internet.
Eventually we found a way.
The last Jetstar flight out of Sydney to Melbourne that night, followed by a 10am Delta flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles on Friday.
Not quite the Qantas itinerary we had planned, but we were moving.
Instead of waking up in LA on Friday ready to start the trip, we woke up in Melbourne.
By the time we eventually got across the Pacific, Friday and Sunday were essentially travel days.
Our four-day American adventure was now going to contain approximately one actual full day in America.
Friday, Los Angeles
Straight into it
There wasn't exactly time to settle in once we arrived.
We were there for UFC 331, with Alex appearing at the press conference on Friday night as part of the ceremonial weigh-in event at Crypto.com Arena - home of the LA Lakers (and I guess for the Hockey fans the LA Kings) - before cornering Mauricio Ruffy on Saturday night.
Ash Belcastro - manager of Alex and Ruffy, amongst others, and the owner of Engage, the Australian fightwear and combat-sports brand - was already there, and Friday became one of those days where we basically landed and started moving.
There was a test run for the Engage pop-up, then across to Crypto.com Arena for the press conference at the ceremonial weigh-ins, followed by the Engage meet-and-greet afterwards.
By the time we finally got back to our hotel it was about 10:30pm.
We were staying at the InterContinental Downtown Los Angeles.
Friday night, Downtown
Room service had finished by the time we got back and Alex and I hadn't eaten, so we decided to venture out to find something.
It was Friday night in downtown LA - how hard could that be?
It turned into one of the more bewildering 500-metre round trips I can remember.
There was this constant air of unease.
People standing almost motionless on corners. Others wandering around seemingly disconnected from everything happening around them. I'm not sure I'd ever really understood the description of someone looking like a catatonic zombie until that walk.
Then someone openly smoking what appeared to be crack cocaine outside a 7-Eleven.
I've been fortunate enough to travel to a lot of places through sport and work over the years. Downtown LA certainly wasn't going to trouble the top of the list.
Maybe that's unfair. I'm judging it based on the immediate few blocks I saw for a couple of days and there is obviously an enormous Los Angeles beyond what I experienced.
But it was certainly an introduction.
Twenty-four hours earlier we'd been standing at Sydney Airport wondering whether we were going to make it to America at all. Now I was walking through Downtown LA late at night with Alex Volkanovski looking for anything that was open, both of us taking in a version of Los Angeles neither of us had quite expected.
The People's Champ
“Of course, of course”
One of the things these trips continually reinforce is just how good Alex is with people.
I reckon over the years I've heard at least a thousand people tell him that either they, their kid, their partner, their mate or someone they know is his biggest fan.
I'm not sure how this is judged.
There appears to be no formal competition that I'm aware of, and with this many confirmed biggest fans, the mathematics is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile.
And, of course, he obliges.
A photo. A selfie. A video for someone's kid. A handshake. A quick chat.
And the thing people don't see is what is happening around those moments.
He might be tired, dieting and in a calorie deficit, desperate to get off his feet, or we might already be late.
He understands that while it might be the hundredth photo he's taken that day, for the person standing in front of him it's their one photo with Volk.
And he treats it that way.
I've been lucky enough to work around professional athletes for most of my adult life, and Alex is the best representative of his family, his hometown and his country that I've seen.
People throw around the phrase “people's champion” pretty easily in sport.
Spend time anywhere in the world with Alex and you understand why it fits.
Saturday, UFC 331
Fight day
Saturday was the reason we'd made the mad dash across the Pacific in the first place.
Alex was there to corner Mauricio de Lima Santos - better known in the fight world as Mauricio Ruffy - which gave this one another layer for me.
I'd spent the previous five weeks treating Ruffy more than six times a week, trying to keep him fit enough to train and ultimately fit enough to fight.
My Portuguese remains, to put it generously, limited. His English was considerably better than my Portuguese, which isn't saying much.
So we'd managed five weeks together through a combination of phone translating, pointing, demonstrating, miming and the trusty translator app.
And now he was walking into a UFC fight in Los Angeles with Alex in his corner.
The bulk of my work had been done. Now we got to find out whether we'd kept him fit enough to do his.
Around all of that was the other world that increasingly surrounds Alex.
Content. Brand work. Appearances. Cameras. People filming people who are filming other people.
I'm slowly learning the language.
I now know what an influencer is. I know what a collab is. I even know what a streamer is.
Sunday, Baldwin Hills
Finally, outside
By Sunday, the fight was done and we had what I was reliably informed was a “content day”.
There was one other thing I'd wanted to do while we were in LA.
Our one tourist goal had been to get up to Griffith Observatory and see the Hollywood sign, but horrible air quality, late nights and a schedule with something squeezed into every available hour meant it never happened.
I won't pretend I was devastated enough to immediately start planning my return.
Instead, I headed up around Baldwin Hills for a walk.
It was about 28 degrees, the sun was out and for an hour I was outside, moving, looking across Los Angeles and enjoying a completely different side of the city.
Something about the hills, the warmth and the Californian landscape made me think about scenes from Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer or Ballard - Michael Connelly fans will understand.
This felt more like the California I remembered from the 2024 trip to Orange County.
Then it was back into content world.
Sunday, content day
Cooking with Volk
First stop was filming some Cooking with Volk material with Owen Han and H Woo Lee.
These are two names that apparently mean something to millions of people.
Owen has built an enormous following making food content, particularly some fairly extraordinary sandwiches, while H Woo is a chef and food creator with a huge following of his own.
I quickly discovered the best part about sitting around watching Cooking with Volk get filmed.
And lucky for Ash and me, we were the someone's.
The first episode was salmon three ways: sashimi salmon with rice and homemade sauce, a deluxe salmon burger, then crispy-skin salmon straight off the grill.
After about an hour-and-a-half break they reset and went again - deboned, butterflied, pan-grilled chicken with homemade fries and gravy.
And I can confirm that a little Vegemite in homemade gravy is absolutely a winner.
By this point I'd gone from wondering what a content day involved, to thinking this might be one of the better jobs I've accidentally stumbled into.
I also left with a signed copy of Owen's book, Stacked: The Art of the Perfect Sandwich.
Calling him the “sandwich guy” probably undersells things considerably.
I left with a full stomach and a signed cookbook.
Sunday, Venice Beach
White Men Can't Jump
From there we headed towards Venice Beach.
And this was where I started getting interested.
White Men Can't Jump arrived at exactly the right time for me in 1992.
There are movies that instantly transport you back to an age, and this is one of those for me.
So when we ended up within walking distance of the Venice basketball courts, there was absolutely no chance I wasn't going down for a look.
I've since discovered the famous opening court wasn't actually the exact court I was standing on - they built that one elsewhere along the Venice Boardwalk for filming.
Obviously, I would have recreated the movie properly and thrown down a dunk, finally disproving the title.
Unfortunately, I was carrying Chuck Liddell's cold brew and I wasn't prepared to risk spilling a drop.
Sunday, the content house
Chuck, content houses and famous people I apparently should know
The reason I had Chuck Liddell's coffee probably needs some explanation.
We'd spent part of the afternoon inside what I can only describe as a content house - an Airbnb about five levels high and maybe 50 metres from Muscle Beach.
Everywhere you looked someone seemed to be filming something.
People arriving. People leaving. Podcasts. Cameras. Creators creating. Streamers streaming.
And people who were apparently very famous.
Someone would walk in, everyone else would know exactly who they were, and I'd look at Jake.
Thank you, Jake.
Streamers - this is just bizarre. I still couldn't necessarily tell you why anyone was watching them, but progress is progress.
Thankfully there was one person who required absolutely no explanation.
Chuck was one of the fighters who initially made Alex fall in love with the sport, so watching the two of them record a podcast together was a pretty special collision of two different UFC eras.
It also made me think about how much the way we consume sport has changed.
In my day, there was no streaming. No YouTube. No social media.
You went to the video shop and rented a VHS.
I can still remember The Ultimate Warrior v Hulk Hogan being enormous.
Those larger-than-life characters arrived in our lounge room on a tape we'd physically gone to the video shop to rent.
Now I was sitting in a five-storey house in Los Angeles watching Chuck Liddell and Alex Volkanovski record something that could be chopped into clips and sent around the world before we'd even left the building.
How on earth did I end up here?
Sunday, Venice
Muscle Beach
Then there was Muscle Beach itself.
For anyone of my generation who has spent their life around gyms and sport, it's one of those places you've almost absorbed without ever having been there.
Arnold. Gold's Gym Venice. The old bodybuilding documentaries and images. Then later Ronnie Coleman and the ridiculous training footage.
And suddenly you're standing there.
Of course, there's now another cultural reference for Venice Beach.
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling rollerblading along Venice looking considerably more at home than I did carrying Chuck Liddell's cold brew.
Same location. Different generation. Different training program.
Venice itself was everything you'd expect.
Tourists. Locals. Bodybuilders. Basketballers. Skaters.
And an extraordinary number of streamers walking around pointing phones and hectic camera set ups (with lighting!) at themselves while other people, somewhere in the world, apparently watched them walk around pointing phones at themselves.
But compared with Downtown, Venice felt alive in an entirely different way.
This was the Los Angeles I was happy we'd found before heading home.
Sunday night, the airport
Kenny
Eventually it was time to head to the airport.
And somehow LA had one more completely random moment waiting for us.
I'll happily admit there was a bit of fanboy in this one.
Kenny is one of those Australian movies that has stayed with me, and Shane is one of those people who somehow feels familiar even though you've never met him.
We ended up chatting for probably half an hour.
Parenting. Kids. Neurodiversity. His recent conversation on The Imperfects. Life.
Then things got even more surreal.
It turned out Shane had been following Alex on social media the day before and could pretty much quote back what he'd said at the press conference about not liking his opponents getting booed.
That said plenty about the kind of person he is.
Alex has spent years fighting in the US and knows exactly what the other side of that feels like - particularly through the Max Holloway trilogy, where he dethroned one of the most loved fighters in the sport and then had to do it again and again.
And plenty of American crowds that weren't exactly hoping he would succeed.
Yet there he was at the press conference saying how much he hated seeing people boo someone else.
Shane had watched it on his phone the day before and it had clearly stuck with him.
Now, less than 24 hours later, through nothing more than chance, we were sitting together at an airport talking about Alex, parenting, kids, ADHD and life.
A completely random conversation with Australia's own Kenny that I couldn't possibly have planned.
Sunday night, the runway
Surely not again
We boarded, settled in and taxied out.
We were already on the runway and seemingly about to take off when there was a disturbance towards the back of the plane, not far from Jake.
Eventually we were told we had to return to the terminal.
A passenger needed to be removed after her own Los Angeles experience had apparently got the better of her.
The less said about her condition - and the condition she reportedly left the bathroom in - the better.
After the cancellation in Sydney only three days earlier, there was definitely a moment where we wondered whether we were actually going to get out of Los Angeles.
Passenger off. Doors closed. Back out.
Home, Sydney
Time travel
I then managed what might have been my best performance of the entire trip.
There is something quite satisfying about getting onto a plane around midnight in Los Angeles, shutting your eyes for most of it and effectively waking up in Sydney.
And when I thought about everything we'd somehow fitted into that tiny window, it was ridiculous.
- A cancelled flight.
- An unexpected night in Melbourne.
- Delta to LA.
- UFC 331.
- Crypto.com Arena.
- The Engage pop-up.
- A late-night Taco Bell expedition through Downtown.
- Fight night.
- Baldwin Hills.
- Cooking with Volk.
- Salmon three ways.
- Vegemite gravy.
- A signed sandwich book.
- A five-storey content house.
- Chuck Liddell.
- Muscle Beach.
- White Men Can't Jump.
- Venice Beach.
- More streamers than I knew existed.
- Shane Jacobson.
- A passenger removed from our plane.
- Ten hours sleep.
- Sydney.
- Home.
And perhaps that's the bit I'm appreciating more these days.
What I don't think I understood when I first dreamed about working in professional sport was everything that would come attached to it.
And after all of that, the best part was still walking back through the front door to Bee, the family and, of course, Frank - who was comfortably the most excited of the lot to see me.
Maybe that's REM in its simplest form too.
The relationships that matter don't always require a passport.
Which brings me nicely to the next trip.
Queenstown next week with my beautiful wife to celebrate 20 years of marriage.
That's a relationship that has created more experiences and memories than all the fight trips, airports and sporting adventures combined.
Four days in frames
More from the road
Fight weeks, camps and the odd cancelled flight, written up from the ground.
mickbaines.com.au