How Sean Patrick Flanery Brought a Marine Veteran to Life in 'Born a Champion'

"Born a Champion" follows a Marine Corps Gulf War veteran as he masters Brazilian jiujitsu and fights his way through the earliest days of the MMA phenomenon. The movie is available now on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital.

Actor Sean Patrick Flanery wrote the story, co-wrote the screenplay and plays the lead role of fictional Marine Mickey Kelley. With a story inspired by his own love and practice of the martial arts, Flanery fought for over a decade to get this movie made.

Flanery has enjoyed a long and varied career since his breakthrough starring role as in "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." He co-starred with Norman Reedus in the cult classic "The Boondock Saints" and has worked constantly over the past three decades.

"Born a Champion" details the real-life underground fights held in the Middle East in the early '90s. Those early fights have a direct connection to the earliest days of UFC, and the movie takes place against the backdrop of all the controversy and drama that dominated the sport's rise.

Flanery's movie is just as much about family as it is about sports. Kelley meets his future wife Layla (Katrina Bowden) while he's teaching jiujitsu in Dubai, and their love story is just as central to the movie as the realistic fight scenes.

Dennis Quaid makes an appearance as a fight promoter who's also a Marine. Flanery and Quaid's characters have an intense connection related to Mickey's wartime service. That story is only revealed in the movie's final moments and gives the film one of its most moving moments.

Sean took the time for a conversation with us about "Born a Champion" on the eve of its release and shared his story.

"I've been into martial arts since I was nine years old," he said. "Like every other martial artist, I saw UFC 1 in 1993, and it didn't make sense to me. I always wanted to train jiujitsu. A handful of years later, Rickson Gracie rented some space from Jerry Banks. I met Rickson, and he was putting mats down. I signed up for that class that night and I got comprehensively destroyed, but I never looked back. I mean, the clouds parted and the martial arts answer was exposed in the sky for me that day. And I became completely obsessed."

The early days really were as chaotic as they're depicted in the movie. "It was the Wild West back then. In the early '90s, a lot of people didn't know what jiujitsu was," Sean remembers. "It really was a time where if somebody else knew it and you didn't, you were f---ed. It reprogrammed all the martial artists out there to add some sort of ground system into their game."

Flanery said the Middle Eastern connection was real. "Those types of fights in Abu Dhabi really happened. Sheikh Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al Nahyan was a dear friend of Rickson’s brother, and I met him in San Diego. He's the one that started ADCC, the Abu Dhabi Combat Club, which is now the no-gi Olympics of grappling. Just to give you perspective, the sheikh took it back home to Dubai, and now it's required learning in every high school. I don't disagree with the fact that it's required learning in every high school. That's kind of amazing."

Like most fans who lived through the early years when MMA was hugely controversial, Flanery bears some scars. "Anytime something becomes that popular, it forces people to become educated," he said. "Initially, you had, quite frankly, a bunch of idiots offering opinions on something that they knew nothing about. Eighty-year-old women who have never done a combat sport in their life are trying to legislate the legality of something they no more understand than complex string theory. It's laughable how they were proposing to be the authority on a subject."

Flanery espouses the notion that MMA fighting is safer than boxing because it's actually the gloves that are dangerous. "Sooner or later, the cream rose to the top, and they had to get educated and they had to realize that, even though there's no gloves, the reality is that the gloves just protect the hand. All a glove does is keep you from getting cut so you can repeatedly be concussed. If you take the gloves off, concussions go away drastically. In boxing, you're forced to stay in the pocket, you're forced to stay within striking range. In jiujitsu, you can take the fight to the ground, you can close the distance to clinch inside of the dangerous range of somebody's punches. There are far more avenues to avoid blunt force trauma in MMA than boxing. Every educated person knows that.

"You still have people on the fringes who look at it and think, 'Oh, that's human cockfighting. It can't be good,'" he continued. "They have no idea what they're talking about. It'd be no different than somebody looking at a surgeon and saying, 'He's taken a knife and he's cutting the skin. It's evil.' Sit down, intellectual giant, we're replacing a heart valve here to save a life."

Making the movie turned out to be a challenge. "I wrote the story in bed in 2007. I woke up the next morning, and I fleshed it out as a complete story, top to bottom. I sent it to Paul Alessi, a buddy who is a producer. He read it and agreed that it should be our next film. It took us until 2019, over 12 years to get it onto the screen. That gives you an idea of the gestation process. That's the time it takes to find somebody to support your film and to finance it. I'm very grateful to Morgan Lucas and Forrest Lucas of Lucas Oil. They read the script and believed in it enough for us to put it on the screen. I'm very grateful. They read it, they loved it and they took a chance on us."

The fighting in the movie isn't flashy, but it's true to the discipline. That made the script a harder sell. "Even getting down to the fight choreography, studios have a tendency to want to put flash moves in their movies that you'd never see in a street fight on YouTube," recalled Flanery. "This fighting is ugly. It's slow, it's dirty, it's methodical. And it's very rarely graceful. So I really wanted to pay homage to old school, ugly jiujitsu, the type that's at my core. That type of jiujitsu was taught to me by Rickson Gracie. And yes, it's a tough sell. Because they want to know how many backflips or how many flip hook sidekicks are thrown? Well, none."

The fact that the movie combines action with a family drama was also an issue for some studios. "At its core, it's a love story about family, and achievement and drive, and fatherhood, and legacy," Flanery said. "That may be a little bit of a harder sell than some of the normal American plot signatures. But I'm very grateful that people took a chance and let me make this and stay true to the martial art in its purest form.

"The love story is one of the reasons it was a tough sell. Because people say, 'Wait a minute. Either we need 17 more fights in it or take out the fight and concentrate on the family and the love story.' This is a hybrid, and those are my favorite films. When I saw 'The Champ' with Ricky Schroder and Jon Voight, that film played on all levels to me and hit every string. And the love story in 'Rocky' was as impactful as his striving for greatness."

Sean comes from a military family. "I'm the first of the men in my family that never served in the military. It's a hole in my life. I came of age at the end of the Reagan years, and there was absolutely nothing going on. I wrote a piece of children's theater, and I wanted to see if I could produce this play. If not, I would have gone into the Air Force because my dad was in the Air Force."

"But it never happened. I think there's two types of people in the world: the ones who admit to regrets and liars. I do regret never having served my country. It was always a big part of Flanery family and for the majority of the people that I come into contact with."

"In some ways, the military quite closely parallels the martial arts. If somebody comes to you with a hard-to-get black belt, it's almost like they're pre-approved in some way. I've found that people who were decorated in the military don't stray too far from the achievements and character that earned that decoration. For this character, it's something that was there from the inception. And I hope I drew it out in a way that people appreciate."

Casting Quaid was a huge thrill for Flanery. "That was an important scene for me. I thought very carefully of every word that I put in his monologues and his exchange with Mickey. And I was honored that he would say those words. He's got two important speeches. There's his speech at the urinal that speaks to the martial arts culture and his speech on his military service. Those are two things where I considered every syllable before I typed those keys in. I'm blown away that Dennis Quaid said those words. It's hard to even realize that it's true. I think he slayed that role."

It's 2021, theaters are open in only a few places and it's a strange time to release a movie. "I learned early in my career to not alter my appreciation or pride for a project based on the viewership," Flanery said. "It's probably easier now than it was in the past because I have kids now. As long as this film is something that one day my kids will hand it to a friend and say, 'My daddy made this.' That's all I really ask for.

"This is a weird time. I certainly wish all the theaters were open and this could be released on on a scale that can't happen into the situation that we're in right now. But I certainly hope people tell each other about it if it means something to them. Even if just you and me and five other people see it, it's not going to change my feeling for the film. I'm very proud of the end result.

"We did this on a shoestring budget. In hindsight, there's a lot of things we could have done … if we had more money, but, man, I'm proud of the final product. I hope the people who are important to me love it. I hope it moves people whose opinions I respect. That's all I can hope for."

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