[aussie neil]

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courtesy of boxinginsider.com




Gresham, Oregon -- As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

A proverb from the Bible, it’s also a saying at Team Quest, one of the most dominant fight teams in the history of mixed martial arts.

In an era in which professional athletes are often synonymous with greed and selfish behavior, Team Quest operates according to an unspoken code of honor, character and personal growth.

In a sport once vilified as a gruesome spectacle of human cockfighting, Team Quest has come to epitomize the sportsmanlike image that MMA organizations such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship are trying to sell to the mainstream public.

No doubt some fighters are motivated by money and the primal desire to beat people into semi-conscious nightmares. At Team Quest, however, it’s all about the man standing next to you in practice—helping him achieve his goals in life, as well as in fighting.

In case you didn’t already know, Team Quest has produced some of the best fighters to ever compete in MMA. The record speaks for itself.

Randy Couture, a founding member, was the only two-time UFC heavyweight champion and the only two-time light heavyweight champion as well. Many consider him to be one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the history of the sport. Though he retired recently following a knockout loss to current UFC light heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell, and hadn’t trained with Team Quest for more than a year before that, he is still part owner of the gym.

Dan Henderson, another founding member, has been at or near the top of the MMA ranks for several years and recently captured the welterweight title of the Pride Fighting Championship.

Matt Lindland, a former Olympic silver medalist in Greco Roman wrestling, has been a fixture in the 185 pound division since his first fight back in 2000.

Nate Quarry fought for the UFC middleweight championship a few months ago, losing to Rich Franklin by knock out.

And the list goes on and on.

“Over the years Team Quest has come to personify one of the foundations of MMA in the United States,” said Loretta Hunt, a writer for Full Contact Fighter. “They’ve produced a lot of great fighters.”

Few teams have had a greater impact over such a sustained period of time.

“The original Team Quest is definitely one of the best fight teams ever,” said UFC President Dana White. “The Team Quest of today, I’d put in the top three [in the UFC].”

What began eight years ago in the back room of a fitness club is a now a world class stable of 25 fighters and a successful gym open to any member of the general public who wants to learn kickboxing, grappling or simply get in better shape.

At the core of it all is head trainer Robert Follis. The 36-year-old former bartender has become the focal point of the Team Quest machine—though he would never put it that way. Unflinchingly polite, yet firm in what he believes, Follis has worked hard to foster an environment as conducive to self-improvement as to fighting.

“Part of why this gym is so successful is this gym isn’t here to produce fighters,” Follis said. “It just produces fighters because that’s what we’re good at. But what it really does is helps a lot of people fulfill their goals and become better people.”

The Beginning

It all started in 1998 in Gresham, Oregon, along the Columbia River a few miles east of Portland, with a gym called Performance Quest owned by Couture and Henderson.

“The original sign on the building said Perfomance Quest and they forgot an r in there, which was kind of funny,” Follis said.

Follis was a relative newcomer to the martial arts scene, with only a year and a half of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and kickboxing experience. Couture was preparing to fight then UFC heavyweight champion Maurice Smith in Japan and needed “bodies to come in and throw punches and kicks at.”

Follis was invited to drop by the gym, but had no clue what he was getting into when he agreed to be a sparring partner.

“I remember the first day I met [Couture],” he recalled. “He threw me on my head.”

Couture wound up defeating Smith, establishing himself as one of the top fighters in the world. Performance Quest, however, wasn’t working out, so Couture, Henderson and Follis moved to an empty room in the back of a car dealership co-owned by Lindland.

“They had space in the back that they kind of donated for guys to come work out in,” Follis said. “At the time it was basically for anyone that wanted to come train—just show up and we’d put on gloves and beat the hell out of each other.”

A few years later Follis was looking to open his own gym. Couture, Lindland and Henderson came up with the idea for Team Quest and asked him to become a partner.

That was four years ago. Tonight, on the eve of the Team Quest grand reopening, he is sitting in the back of the grappling room, contemplating the evolution of his dream. He points to the blue mats, saying “there used to be cars there.”

“I remember when we got the sign out front here that you see lit up behind us,” he says, pointing through a large window that allows random pedestrians to watch training sessions. “We had just got that done and I was the last one to leave the gym. I walked out and I just kind of looked at that and I was like ‘what happened?’”

The Formula for Success

Although many things have changed, the core philosophies of Team Quest remain the same. Ask the fighters what makes their group so successful and almost every one offers the same answer in one form or another: Intensity, teamwork and friendship.

First and foremost, Team Quest fighters train as hard as or harder than anyone in the sport. Conditioning is rarely an advantage for their opponents. They prepare themselves for the worst possible scenario in every fight.

“We train hard and we train the way we want to fight,” Henderson said. “A lot of guys will just go out there and roll around and do some jiu-jitsu.”

Even fighters who’ve come to the gym after training with other top programs are sometimes unprepared for the level of intensity during Team Quest workouts.

Mike Dolce, an amateur fighter and the team’s strength coach, came to Team Quest one year ago from New Jersey, where he’d trained at Renzo Gracie’s academy in New York.

“What they were doing out here, it blew my mind how advanced Team Quest was from the rest of the world,” he said. “I was training with some really serious, top-level Pride and UFC fighters on the East Coast and what Team Quest was doing was really light years ahead of them.”

Injuries, however, can occur in training as easily as a fight. Dolce understands this as well as anyone, only recently returning from a medical suspension after having his skull cracked open, courtesy of a Matt Lindland knee. But there were no hard feelings.

“For us to compete at the level we do we have to push each other to the very limit of our potential and guys get injured,” he said. “That’s part of the game.”

The Coach

Perhaps no individual is in a better position to gauge the caliber of teams that have passed through the UFC over the past 13 years than “Big” John McCarthy, its longtime lead referee. McCarthy is the only person who’s been involved with the organization since the beginning. He’s watched teams reach the pinnacle of the sport, only to fade into relative obscurity as MMA evolved at a breakneck pace. He places Team Quest among the elite teams in UFC history.

“Team Quest has done a great job of being a place where people have known they could go, not only to learn the basics, but to learn how to compete at the top level,” he says, adding that Follis is a big part of that success.

“[Follis] really does care about each guy,” he says.

Though Follis goes out of his way to deflect attention away from himself, many people consider him the central component of the Team Quest juggernaut. To say the fighters look up to him is an understatement.

Long time ago he planned to become a therapist. He got into coaching because he likes helping people.

“I wanted to work with people and make their lives better,” he said. “What I found was that as a martial arts coach I could do that and bypass 12 years of school.”

In some ways, Follis is a life coach who tries to teach self-improvement as much as arm bars and roundhouse kicks. It’s no secret that some fighters come from troubled backgrounds seeking an outlet to unleash a lifetime of pent-up aggression and rage. Some have darker pasts than others and Team Quest is no different.

Follis does his best to nudge his fighters onto a more productive path in the world.

“I’ve helped a lot of guys stop drinking or stop drinking so much, stop doing drugs,” he said. “A lot of our younger guys that we’ve had come up have maybe come from backgrounds where they didn’t have good parenting and they hadn’t learned good life skills, but they were tough as nails.”

Though Follis certainly encourages the tough part, the John Creese of MMA he’s not. You won’t catch him giving his fighters the “defeat does not exist in this dojo” speech. He pushes his guys hard, but in a positive way.

“You hear me raise my voice in a ‘come on, let’s go, let’s get it, you can do this!’ kind of way,” he said. “To me you’ll get more out of an athlete, long term, than you will with the ‘what the hell is wrong with you?’ sort of thing.”

In other words, Follis doesn’t believe in breaking fighters to improve their skills.

“I think most good teams have a pretty good, solid, positive foundation,” he said. “You can only tear down for so long. If you’re not building back up, you’ve got problems.”

Attitude is Everything

The importance of having a selfless attitude is the hallmark of Team Quest fighters. While guys like Lindland, Ed Herman, Ryan Schultz and Chris Wilson beat the crap out of each other in practice, at the end of the day they pick each other up off the mat and pat each other on the back. They are brothers as well as teammates. Their wives are good friends and their children play together.

“When we’re not training we’re out with each other,” Dolce said. “When we’re not in the gym we’re at a restaurant with each other or at one of our teammate’s houses watching the fights or watching the ball game or whatever.”

For Dolce, it’s “much harder” to watch one of his teammates lose a fight than it is losing one of his own.

Fighters routinely come to Team Quest from all over the country, even the world, looking to train with the best. Street toughs with an attitude are weeded out, Follis noted, because “people like to be around people that they’re like.”

Sometimes, guys who thought they were bad asses find out they’re not.

“Most of these guys show up and think they’re tough,” Follis said. “You know, we get a lot of those guys that think ‘I’m a street fighter,’ and they roll in and take one of our beginner classes and they can’t even make it 15 minutes because the cardio is tough.”

Camaraderie is a big reason why so many fighters drop everything to move to Gresham and join Team Quest. Dolce is a classic example. At 24, he was the youngest municipal property tax assessor in New Jersey, a far cry from the life he has now. He made a good living, putting in 60 hours a week in addition to the time he spent working as a strength coach for many of Renzo Gracie’s students.

But that all changed after attending a three-day Team Quest mini camp more than a year ago. Getting to know Follis and Wilson, the head kickboxing instructor, he felt at home almost instantly.

“I felt like these guys were all my best friends—like I’d known them for years,” he said.

The camp went well and he impressed people with his wrestling ability, natural athleticism and tenacity. After he got home he received a call from Follis out of the blue, asking him “how would you feel about fighting for Team Quest?”

“It was probably a 10-second pause where I just kind of pulled the phone away from my face and I just stared at it, absorbing what was actually happening here,” he recalled. “It was a changing point, I guess you could say, in my life.”

Two weeks later he got another call from Follis offering him a fight in six weeks in Sportfight, an MMA organization co-owned by Lindland and Couture. So armed with a 7-1 amateur boxing record and a week of training at Team Quest, Dolce ventured into the unknown waters of his first mixed martial arts fight. Although he lost to a larger, more experienced opponent, he proved himself worthy of being a Team Quest fighter. Nothing would ever be the same.

“I was no longer a suit and tie guy after that fight,” he said. “I stepped into the ring a businessman and I stepped out a fighter—bar none.”

Changing With the Times

Despite the new blood coming into the gym, Team Quest has lost some big names over the last couple years. Former UFC middleweight champion Evan Tanner left in late 2004 to go it on his own. Henderson moved back to California and recently opened a new Team Quest gym in Temecula. Chris Leben, who gained prominence during the first season of The Ultimate Fighter show, recently moved to Everett, Washington, to be with his girlfriend. He now trains under Matt Hume at AMC Pankration.

But the most significant loss, by far, was the departure of Couture, who left one year ago as a first step toward retirement. If anyone was the public face of Team Quest, it was the Natural. Although the team is far bigger than any one man, the absence of Couture and others has been felt by everyone who remains.

“Well, you miss them,” Follis said. “Randy is a good friend, Chris Leben is a good friend and those guys leaving is definitely a bad thing, just from the shear fact that we started kind of with this small core group.” But, he added, “as time goes on people are going to progress and move on and some people are going to retire.”

Some top MMA teams in the past have let the sport evolve without them as fighters trickled out of the gym. To avoid that, Team Quest will have to cultivate new talent and continue to improve the skills of up and coming fighters such as Wilson, Ed Herman, Ryan Schultz and Matt Horwich, who recently scored a victory over tough veteran Vernon White.

Ultimately, Team Quest’s longevity will rest on the shoulders of its second generation of fighters, Loretta Hunt said.

“That’s how you’re really going to be able to tell how top their team really is, by their staying power,” she said.

Follis, for one, seems prepared to meet that challenge.

“I think it’s something that as a team, for us to be successful, it’s not going to be can we keep the same group of guys together for the rest of our lives,” he said. “More importantly, how do we move on and adapt and continue that team spirit and foster that team spirit as people flow in and out.”

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

[QuestFan9]

Great article... Team Quest was and still is one of the best teams out there