FLYING HIGH BY SHAWN PERINE Strength, both inner and outer, has carried Michael Jai White from Brooklyn to Hollywood, and beyond "You must tap the potential within you." — Michael Jai White "Now, I'm going to throw a punch at you, but don't let me connect. Okay?" The setting is the Weider office in Woodland Hills, California. "You" refers to me, and the man issuing the challenge is Michael Jai White, holder of black belts in seven martial arts, world kickboxing champion, sparring partner of top heavyweight K1 fighters and boxers, and quite possibly the most overqualified action hero in Hollywood. I'm not feeling it.
Tentatively, I raise my right hand as the man lovingly referred to as "Bam Bam" during his competitive fighting days directs, and hold it at about shoulder height, a foot out to my side. With fists raised and eyes fixed on his target, the star of the 1997 demonic action flick Spawn and the newly released Undisputed 2 talks me through this game of cat and mouse. "Ready? Now don't let me touch you," he instructs. Yet he's anything but catlike, even as he prepares to pounce. He doesn't recoil. I discern no sign of potential energy waiting to be unleashed. Everything about Michael Jai White, from his facial expression to the slope of his billowing shoulders, indicates a man in repose. SMACK! Suddenly my right palm stings. I look up at Michael Jai, all 6'2" and 225 pounds of him, with what must be an expression of shock. He remains composed and expressionless. A subtle drawing back of his right fist is the only sign he's just delivered a punch. A jab to be exact. "I told you to not let me connect," admonishes my benign attacker as I shake off the tingling sensation. "Connect? I didn't even see you move!" I respond. I mean, I didn't even see him move! "Here," he proffers, in a reassuring tone. "This time I'm going to step back and begin the punch with my hands at my sides. That should give you more time to react." He backs up and drops his hands as I draw in a deep breath to steady myself. "Now…don't…let…me…hit…you. Ready?" LIVING JUST ENOUGH "Change has to come from within." — Michael Jai White You don't escape from East New York. Not without scars, anyway, visible and otherwise. Located on Brooklyn's eastern edge, it's one of New York's most impoverished neighbourhoods, and was perhaps never more so than in the early 1970s. Here, young MJW spent the first eight years of his life, fatherless and exposed regularly to the enduring presence of gang members, prostitutes and drug dealers. Flashes of mean green and 14-carat gold and splashes of warm crimson were the only colours highlighting the boy's grey world. "I saw so many friends and neighbours killed right next to me at such a young age that I became sort of immune to it. I started to think this was just normal stuff," Michael Jai recalls. Eventually, against overwhelming odds, he would escape the virtually irresistible pull of his shackled existence and fight his way — literally and figuratively — to personal and professional glory. BEACON OF LIGHT "It's your mind that drives everything in your life." — Michael Jai White "See how far away that is?" Michael Jai points to a chair that sits maybe a dozen feet from me. "That's how far his front door was from mine." We're relaxing over a takeaway meal in Michael Jai's games room. Replete with pool table and a home cinema that includes nine plush recliners and a multiplex-sized screen, it's a building unto itself, set back from his sprawling ranch house and pool, all nestled in the heart of Southern California's San Fernando Valley. "So we couldn't help but become friends, living that close to each other," White continues. When Michael Jai was 7 or so, his mother Renel accepted a teaching job that took them straight out of Brooklyn to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Despite being located in Fairfield County, one of the nation's wealthiest, Bridgeport is New England's version of East New York, only rougher — an even more dangerous playground for the young Michael Jai. Yet in this dark, uncharted territory the boy would discover a beacon, one whose front door was as near to his own as I was to that chair. A beacon named Troy Alves, the future IFBB pro bodybuilder. From the start, Michael Jai and Troy hit it off, despite their disparities. MJW was a tough kid, hardened by the streets, always looking for a scrap. Troy had no such burdens to weigh down his innate youthful spirit. "Troy was a brat," laughs Michael Jai. Then there was the difference in their size. "When we first met, I thought Mike was a few years older than me," says Troy. "He was always so much bigger than everyone else our age." The Alves family's younger son provided a window on worlds that Michael Jai had never seen before. For one thing, Troy had a cohesive family — one that included a father. "That was something I just didn't see growing up. It was a revelation," reflects Michael Jai. Troy also introduced his friend to something that would eventually help define not only his career path but also his philosophy, his spirituality — his very being. "Troy and his older brother Johnny were enrolled in a karate class," says Michael Jai. "I wasn't allowed to go because my mum thought it was too dangerous. So when they came back from class I'd have them teach me everything they learned." Michael Jai was a good pupil. He had found an outlet for his intensity and would practise his moves for hours. When MJW was finally allowed to accompany Johnny and Troy to their dojo, the sensei asked to see what the boy claimed to have learned. "When I showed him, he was so surprised by my skill that he let me take class for free." Eventually Troy and Johnny's interest in karate waned, but not Michael's. His only grew, nearly as fast as his body did. By the time he was 12, Michael Jai was not only the biggest kid on the block but he also had four years of karate training under his belt, and the inclination to apply it when he could. "I could say that I was just looking to play the role of neighbourhood protector," he says. "But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I also was looking for a test, a way to prove myself physically. I had a lot of aggression built up within me and I welcomed the chance to take it out whenever I could — but never on innocent kids, only bullies." So the kids of Bridgeport found themselves with an unbidden guardian angel. Preternaturally big and innately talented in weaponless combat, Michael Jai was a self-styled preteen Rambo. Then he discovered bodybuilding. MILK CONTAINERS AND MUSCLES "Everything in my life must have balance, even my body." — Michael Jai White While watching TV one day, 12-year-old black-belt holder Michael Jai found a new source of physical inspiration from an unlikely origin. "I was watching Rich Man, Poor Man when I saw Falconetti [played by bodybuilder and actor William Smith]. I thought, That's what I want to look like!" he remembers. Michael Jai knew that lifting weights could put a person on the path to a Falconetti physique, but he was thwarted from buying a barbell set by his zealously protective mother. Undeterred, the street-smart kid made his own. "I would save used plastic milk containers and fill them with water, then tie them to the ends of a broomstick," he recalls. "I would do curls with them, always trying to add more milk containers. I had this attitude that I wasn't going to be stopped." Instantly Michael Jai's muscles began to swell as if they'd been starved of this kind of stimulation all along. By the time he was 13, Michael Jai stood 6 feet tall and weighed 190 pounds, much of it solid muscle. "Milk containers do a body good," he jokes. While MJW spent many of his formative years honing his muscles and studying the physiques of bodybuilders like Serge Nubret and Robby Robinson on the cover of muscle magazines, his best friend Troy focused on baseball. Troy was a wiry kid blessed with quickness and exceptional hand-eye co-ordination. The thought of bulking up his speedster's frame held little interest. At least, until he turned 16. It was then, after watching Michael Jai's body respond to progressive resistance training, that Troy started lifting. "When we were kids, we'd always tease Troy that he had all his veins on the outside of his body and that if someone were to cut him he'd bleed to death," says Michael Jai. "Then, when he started lifting weights, he just blew up." So much so that Troy eventually decided to give competitive bodybuilding a shot. Today, he puts "professional bodybuilder" on his tax return and has a fan base that spans the world and back. "It still amazes me when I think about how far each of us has come," Michael Jai remarks. ROAD TO SOMEWHERE "On the street, being hard and merciless is considered a good thing." — Michael Jai White By the time he was 17, Michael Jai had experienced several lifetimes' worth of tough breaks and sobering realities. As a child he became accustomed to the sight of a bloodstained corpse. At 14 he moved out of his mother's apartment, already more man than most twice his age. Soon after, he saw a friend shot point-blank in the face by a jittery drug addict. At 15 he himself was shot twice — once in the arm, once in the hip — simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. ("It didn't seem like a big deal at the time," he says. "A lot of people I knew had been shot.") He'd been a knee-breaker and a gang leader. All the while he was collecting black belts and championship fighting titles at a breakneck pace. Yet Michael Jai was well on his way to becoming Bridgeport's most wanted. In fact, he'd already been taken under the wing of the city's alpha drug dealer, who was known for carrying a machine gun in his car. A heady, if doomed, existence was Michael Jai's for the taking. Or, with his exceptional grades, he could go to college. The choice was entirely his own. HIS STUDENTS' STUDENT "If there's anything I'm proud of, it's what I did with those kids." — Michael Jai White While bouncing back and forth between political science and communications courses at Southern Connecticut State University and the University of Connecticut, Michael Jai enrolled in acting classes. He soon found that he not only enjoyed the dramatic arts but also had a gift for expressing himself onstage. Under the spotlight he was able to draw from his past experiences to instil his characters with depth and gravity. Acting became a joyfully cathartic release. After graduation he went to work with emotionally disturbed children at Wilbur Cross Elementary School in Bridgeport. In those kids he saw himself. There but for the grace of God, he realised. Maybe, had it not been for Troy, or for the martial arts, or simply for dumb luck, he too could have ended up battered and bruised by the demons of his youth. But here he was, a college graduate, a teacher and a man who was just learning to count his blessings. Michael Jai considers the three years spent with those kids among the most enriching of his life; the more he gave to them, the more he got in return. It wasn't an easy decision for him when he decided to pursue acting full time, but with his students' encouragement he took a confident step into the next stage of his life, as a professional actor. FUTURE'S SO BRIGHT "I've lived a charmed existence." — Michael Jai White When, in 1994, Michael Jai's agent asked him to audition for the lead in a biopic on Mike Tyson to be shown on US TV, he resisted. "I thought I didn't look or sound anything like Mike, so I didn't even see any point in going," he explains. Still, there was something undeniably serendipitous about the opportunity before him. To think, after six years of trying to cut it as a working actor, his big break might come portraying another Brooklyn émigré. "As it turned out, most of the other guys who auditioned for the role had no fight experience," Michael Jai explains. With black belts in seven martial arts and multiple kickboxing world championship titles to his credit, he was more than skilled enough to pull off the demanding fight scenes. When he nailed Tyson's distinctive speech pattern in one take, the role was his. As Mike Tyson languished in prison for the rape of Miss Black America contestant Desiree Washington, "Mike" White landed the role that would instantly turn him into a name in Hollywood. MJW was roundly lauded for his spot-on performance and heralded by many critics as a promising young star. Yet he never let the glare of the spotlight blind him to reality. "I never forget that it's all just make-believe," says Michael Jai. "I enjoy what I do, but I don't pretend for a minute that acting is any more important than teaching or being a doctor. I'm just an adult who's getting paid to pretend." At 28, Michael Jai had arrived, as an actor, as a martial artist, as a man. After his release from prison in 1995, Mike Tyson would continue to let his past weigh him down to the point where it became an immovable anchor. Michael Jai, however, turned his own history into a source of strength that buoyed him through tough times and made him appreciate the good ones. "After living through what I did in my youth, there's very little I can't handle as an adult," he says. BACK TO THE FUTURE "If I rest on my laurels, I'm missing the point." — Michael Jai White SMACK! Once again, the stinging palm. Once again, astonishment as I try to comprehend how a human being can move so fast. I redirect my gaze from my hand to Michael Jai, who's standing 4 feet from me, looking as if he has hardly a care in the world. And in truth, he hardly has. At 38, he's the father of two healthy children, Jai and Devin. Last year he married longtime girlfriend Courtney, who's a real-life obstetrician and gynaecologist but looks like an actress who only plays a doctor on TV. In the martial arts world he's well- respected, sought out by the best of the best for personal tutelage. He has a burgeoning film career that includes successes in acting, writing, producing and directing. All this, and he has a really cool games room, too. "You know," exclaims Michael Jai as I shake my head in disbelief, "I can show you the same thing with my feet." M&F