Fighter at heart

Expat Lives | Vincent Soberano

A Filipino-American, who gave up a software job in the US, finds his punch in Beijing with a club that offers training in combat sports. Tiffany Tan reports.

There's probably no better advertisement for Vincent Soberano's business than the man himself.

He boasts an upper body with corded shoulders and arms, a muscular chest, a trim stomach, as well as strong legs and quick feet. Most people think Soberano is in his 30s, when he's actually 50.

The Filipino-American, who hails from California, owns the Black Tiger Fight Club in Beijing, which offers training in muay Thai, boxing and mixed martial arts. He teaches some of the daily classes in his two gyms, alongside four instructors.

His dozens of wins at US and other international muay Thai and kickboxing events haven't hurt in attracting students either.

"I haven't done any martial arts since I was young, so it was an opportunity to train again and learn new styles," says Ben Penna, 39, an Australian who has been attending Black Tiger over the past six months. "When you look at who he is and what he's done, it's a good choice."

The majority of Soberano's students are foreigners, a growing client market that propelled him to leave a software executive job in the United States and move to Beijing in 2006. But during Black Tiger's first year, to make ends meet, he had to take a part-time job teaching computer science at Tianjin University. He thought the business was worth the risks and sacrifices.

"I saw that there was a really, really big potential to pioneer the sport of MMA in China," Soberano says while waiting for a boxing class to start. "Here in China it was, like, nonexistent."

From being a niche sport in the 1990s - one that some people called a blood sport before tighter rules were implemented - MMA emerged in the 21st-century Western world as a crowd-drawer akin to boxing.

Yet when people heard of Soberano's China game plan, everyone asked him the same thing: You plan to pioneer a martial art in the land that gave the world kung fu?

Although both Chinese martial arts and MMA teach fighting styles, the latter developed as a sport. And as its name indicates, mixed martial arts incorporates a variety of fighting forms, such as boxing, muay Thai and Brazilian jujitsu, to build up a fighter's combat arsenal.

Soberano's road to MMA began with muay Thai, which he discovered on a visit to Bangkok at age 10. As a boy who was lousy at sports, such as basketball, volleyball and soccer, which were popular among his Filipino peers, he was immediately drawn to the solitary and elemental nature of Thailand's national sport.

Besides punching with gloves, muay Thai, or Thai boxing, also allows fighters to kick, elbow and knee their opponents.

"I just remember it sunk in: 'I love this. This is what I wanna do'," Soberano says. "It was the contact. It was the ferocity of the sport. I've seen so many martial arts, and they all look great. People jump in the air, doing stuff, but no one hits as hard as in muay Thai."

He entered his first fight at 12 and won his first US state title in kickboxing at 24, four years after immigrating to the US. He bagged his last muay Thai championship belt in Thailand in 2008, and has appeared as a coach in the Chinese reality TV series The Ultimate Fighter: China (2013).

This summer, Soberano released 50: Fit and Fighting, a book that talks of how he has stayed in shape through exercise, nutrition and nourishing relationships. He wants it to send a message of hope that no matter how old people may get, they can take steps to keep fit and enjoy life.

When he visits his childhood friends, Soberano says he sees how some of them have just given up on staying fit.

"I sit next to them and I feel like I'm their grandson. The age difference between us physically is so huge," he says. "Some of these guys were top football players in school, top basketball players ... These were the same guys who wouldn't let me play with them because I was so crappy."

Soberano can be a model not just to men and women in their middle years but also to those in their adolescence. Among the students at his northeastern Beijing gym is a plump 12-year-old boy who has been training for about a month.

His movements are slow and heavy compared to those of the muscular adult men around him. But in an hourlong boxing class, he doesn't give up on the punching drills, footwork and pushups. Maybe the boy knows that 40 years ago, his teacher also faced similar challenges.

Contact the writer at tiffany@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 09/22/2014 page11)