The reinvention of Kalib Starnes

By Dan Ferguson - Surrey North Delta Leader

They were sitting down for dinner one night when Kalib Starnes’ father started needling him for no apparent reason.

Insulting him, talking trash, watching the teenager get madder and madder.

When Starnes was on the verge of taking a swing, he got up to leave the table and walk away.

That’s when his dad started laughing. 

It was a lesson about keeping his temper. 

If you let another person provoke you into losing control, you are giving them power over you, his father said.

Seventeen years later, following the worst professional fight of his career, an outraged Starnes responded to the jeering and negative comments with strong language of his own.

But he didn’t flip out the way just about everyone else did.

It was a three-round bout against Nate Quarry before a sell-out crowd of more than 21,000 people at the Bell Centre in Montreal in April of this year.

It was the first major Canadian event promoted by the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), the American league which dominates mixed martial arts – the 15-year-old sport that combines striking and grappling, both standing and on the ground.

Things got ugly quickly.

As Starnes described it later, he first tried to box with Quarry and couldn’t find his range.

Then, when he tried to kick-box, Starnes broke a bone in his right foot.

After that, Starnes kept circling Quarry, looking to get his opponent on the ground where Starnes’ knowledge of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and wrestling could prevail.

Quarry, who was recovering from a back injury, stayed on his feet.

People began booing.

The stalemate ended in a unanimous decision for Quarry, with Starnes receiving the worst scores in UFC history.

In a post-fight press conference, ticked-off UFC President Dana White said “if I was Kalib Starnes and I was fighting in my own home country, I’d rather get knocked out than run around in circles the whole fight.” 

Two days after the event, at his request, Starnes was released from his UFC contract.

He issued a written broadside slamming his critics. 

“My injuries weren’t enough to satisfy Dana White, who made comments after the fight insinuating that I would have been better served allowing myself to be knocked out,” Starnes stated. 

“For him to come out and make a statement like that as though I should be willing to suffer a brain injury while being paid less than $10,000 is beyond comment. How much is a brain injury worth anyway?”

Starnes denied reports he appeared on a Montreal radio station after the Quarry fight to attack the UFC and dismissed suggestions that he deliberately threw the fight to protest the terms of his contract with the league.

“I tried to win but on that night I couldn’t do it and I lost. Instead of allowing me to lose with dignity I was booed and called names and ridiculed beyond anything which seems reasonable to me.”

Starnes had a record of 11 wins, three losses and one draw, including victories against name fighters like Chris Leben and Jason MacDonald.

He’d also had a profile-raising run on a reality television fighting program (the Spike-TV series “The Ultimate Fighter 3” in 2006 where he made it to the semi-finals before suffering a dislocated rib).

He’d fought some of the most intense fights in the recent history of the sport, including one match where his forehead was split open to the bone, requiring more than 30 stitches.

None of that seemed to matter to foaming-at-the-mouth online critics who called Starnes a coward, the “running man” and worse.

“You’d think that I had knocked up Britney Spears, or strangled Paris Hilton’s pet Chihuahua,” Starnes said.


Five months after the Montreal debacle, the 6’3” Starnes is circling a heavy bag in the Black Belt Academy martial arts studio in Fraser Heights, throwing punches for the benefit of a Leader video camera.

The bag, normally reserved for kicking, shudders with the impact.

He loves this part of the sport. The training, refining his technique.

“I like the feeling of struggling and trying to push myself and see what I’m capable of doing,” he says. 

“I’ve always enjoyed it. I don’t think an eight-hour day, regular job suits my character.”

He laughs.

He’s not so fond of certain other aspects of his profession, what he calls the “travelling circus” of pre-fight hype, photo sessions where a fighter gets greased up and sprayed with a water bottle to look sweaty and intimidating, and pre-fight interviews where he is expected to look and sound pugnacious and cocky.

Starnes tends to give rambling, thoughtful responses that don’t neatly fit into five-second sound bites.

One pre-fight interview became a discussion of the burgeoning micro-credit movement where small loans are advanced to help people in impoverished countries start their own businesses – something Starnes would like to see in North America.

“It’s very difficult to find literature on the topic,” Starnes told the interviewer. 

He’d just spent $500 to buy a graduate level-textbook on micro-credit from Harvard University Press.

And he managed to wangle a one-hour meeting with famed American intellectual Noam Chomsky at M.I.T. to talk about Starnes’ plans to one day establish a charitable foundation for micro-credit.

When he gets really interested in something, Starnes likes to go deep, conducting what he calls his own personal “research project” to find the most authoritative source. 

He is an occasional insomniac who would rather read something thoughtful than stare at late-night television informercials.

A list of recommended books and authors on his official website (http://www.kalibstarnes.net) includes historian and philosopher David Hume, poet and author Charles Bukowski, Nobel Prize-winning author Bertrand Russell, and anti-war activist Helen Caldicott.

Starnes grew up in Fraser Heights, not far from the Black Belt Academy, back when it was mostly farmland.

He was an athletic kid, good at track, who would occasionally skip school to go to the local library where he would bury himself in historical accounts of the Second World War.

His interest in mixed martial arts developed when he saw legendary fighter Royce Gracie on television taking on larger opponents and winning.

The Gracies, the family who developed Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, were the authorities on mixed martial arts. And they were in California.

Starnes saved his money and headed south, working as a landscape security guard, bouncer, surveyor, first-aid attendant, martial arts instructor and other pay-the-bills positions while he honed his craft at the Gracie Academy in Torrance.

He’s since returned to Surrey where he lives with girlfriend Betty Ann Casey, a professional soccer player, and his daughter Sienna. 

On a recent grey and damp morning, Starnes got up early to make Sienna breakfast, comb her hair and drive her to school before heading to Fitness World in Whalley for his morning workout.

The North Surrey facility is one of four training locations in Surrey where Starnes works out. In addition to the Fraser Heights Black Belt Academy he also goes to Suitela Fitness & Self-Defense Centre, and Revolution Martial Arts.

By the time a Leader photographer and reporter arrive, he has already worked up a good sweat.

With six weeks to go before his next scheduled fight in Hawaii, he is 206 lbs., 20 heavier than the middleweight class he will be fighting in. That will come down as the training becomes more intense.

In a big room full of exercise gear and surrounded by sweating, straining people, Starnes is close to serene, an expression of quiet concentration on his face as he moves through a circuit of exercises that mix weights and endurance training.

As the weights get heavier and the pace quickens, he will wince slightly and crack a joke about going to his “happy place” as he performs an agonizing-looking leg stretch.

He is soft-spoken and courteous to a fault, enduring interruptions to his workout to answer questions and have photos taken with good-humoured grace. He says “sir” a lot.

He asks, politely, to have the name of his absent sparring partner Andrew Peterson included in the article because he believes Peterson should be recognized.

He also wants to make sure that the name of his personal trainer Adrian Crowe is included.

The two men started training together after Starnes began asking Crowe questions about weight training, and got answers that established the certified trainer as an authority on the subject. It’s the first time in his career that Starnes has used weights to do more than recover from an injury.

Crowe describes Starnes as a physical phenomenon who can train full-out first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.

Starnes, Crowe says, is someone willing to change his training regimes, to try new things – so long as he is fully informed and understands the reasoning behind a suggested change.

“He won’t go through something blindly,” Crowe says.

He never does.

dferguson@surreyleader.com

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