His heart pounds. Drops of sweat roll down his face as he confronts his attacker. His whole body and mind are consumed in their goal of winning this fight. And although he’s on the ground, struggling beneath the weight of his opponent, he hasn’t lost. Different moves race through his mind, an array of techniques borrowed from different martial arts – Brazilian Ju-jitsu, Muay Thai, Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Greco Roman wrestling – and one thought keeps repeating in his mind: There is a way out.

“It’s a reality check,” said Alex Krutik, Business senior and president of Creighton’s Mixed Martial Arts Club. “You can kind of relate it to life, where mixed martial arts is teaching you that there’s always a different thing you can do and there’s always something to improve on.”

In the MMA Club, students train in a combination of stand-up fighting, which includes punches and kicks borrowed from traditional martial arts, and grappling on the ground, which involves moves from different styles of wrestling.

The club arose two years ago from Creighton’s Martial Arts Club, which employed Tae Kwon Do-style training. Students in the club had different backgrounds, and no one wanted to change the way they trained, Krutik said.

“We didn’t have a direction to take the club because we had too many different styles in it, and we needed someone who would be able to train us,” Krutik said.

That’s when Nursing junior Kevin Borges – and MMA – entered the octagon.

Before coming to Creighton, Borges, 27, trained professionally in Portland, Ore., with Team Quest Fight Club, a world-renowned fight organization and one of the most successful training teams in MMA history.

After dropping out of school and spending a few years in the real world, Borges said he decided he needed a change.

“I was pretty unhappy with most everything in my life, but I enjoyed watching UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] on TV and watching the fights,” Borges said. “One day I decided to mortgage my condo – take every penny that I could out of it – and I hopped in my car and drove to Portland.

“I moved my entire life for it.”

In his year and a half of full-time training with Team Quest, Borges learned how to fight.

Borges, who said he weighed around 280 pounds at the time, said it was a humbling experience that taught him how skill was the only thing that would make him a better fighter and mixed martial artist.

“I’d be wrestling, doing Ju-jitsu with much smaller guys, guys that I had maybe 80 pounds on, and they’d be able to beat me repeatedly, mostly because my cardio wasn’t good enough and my technique wasn’t good enough,” he said.

“Eventually the humility that I picked up through fighting just kind of transferred into the rest of my life as well.”

When Borges came to Creighton in the fall of 2008, he attended Martial Arts Club meetings and started teaching the other students how to incorporate mixed martial arts into their technique.

“It became obvious that it was a great way to grow the club into something that was a lot more popular, more relevant and as a fighting art, much more effective,” Borges said.

Borges picked four students out of the core group, including Krutik,­ and trained them in extensively in MMA.

“This year, I’ve been teaching what he’s taught me to people on days when he’s not able to come in,” Krutik said.

Nursing junior Kelly Bernth, vice president of the Mixed Martial Arts Club, was another one of the four. She has been with the club since her freshman year and said she enjoys training in different martial arts because it creates the most effective way of fighting.

“Not only do I love training because I am learning so many new skills, but I also find that it is a great outlet for stress and just all around fun,” Bernth said. “Few people realize how therapeutic it can actually be to punch and kick things for just an hour during the day. I think that everyone could use a stress reliever during the week.”

The club meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the multipurpose room of the Kiewit Fitness Center. Students start their meetings with warm-ups and cardio workouts and then move into a combination of grappling and stand-up training.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Krutik said. “It’s a workout, definitely.”

The club attracts a variety of students, from people who watch UFC, the leading mixed martial arts sports association, on TV to people who want to learn self-defense. Krutik said the club has members with backgrounds in Tae Kwan Do, Judo and Ju-jitsu, as well as a few wrestlers and people with no martial arts experience, only a desire to learn.

Krutik said the club has three or four female members who regularly attend.

“We had a lot more starting, but I think it’s just because of the nature of the practice – there’s a lot of grappling, a lot of sweaty bodies, and I think that might have been discouraging for some people,” he said.

Bernth said the lack of females in the club was the only disappointing thing about it.

“A lot of girls have told me that they don’t want to come because they’re intimidated,”

she said.

“What I think a lot of them don’t realize is that we’re not going to make them do anything they are not comfortable with, and anything that they don’t know how to do we will teach them how to do.”

At this point, no one in the club competes in MMA competitions, though Borges said he’d love students to get to the level where they could complete.

Krutik said competition is difficult because of the physicality of MMA.

“[The goal of] mixed martial arts is to get the opponent down – get him in a choke or knock him out, basically,” Krutik said. “It could be seen as a lot more violent.”

Borges said the apparent violence of mixed martial arts is a misconception.

“People want to call it ultimate fighting or cage fighting – there’s this idea that it’s such a brutal art,” Borges said. “People don’t understand that the safety record that exists in mixed martial arts, in ultimate fighting, is truly second to none.”

Borges said there have been no serious injuries or MMA-related deaths since the sport was created in 1993 – something no other major sport can claim. The most serious injury Borges has ever suffered was a

dislocated knuckle.

“There’s a clear-defined winner and a clear-defined loser, and there’s no animosity; there’s no hatred if you lose,” Borges said. “You can tap out, and there’s no disrespect in that.”

Krutik, whose background is in Tae Kwon Do, said he prefers MMA to traditional type of martial arts because it’s more realistic.

“Though I respect all the different martial arts and their meditation and all those things, mixed martial arts is more of a real type of fighting,” he said.

“In mixed martial arts, you can use all the tools you have and use them well, where in other martial arts you have a boundary. But most of all, I just like the variety of different things – just learning that there’s always a

way out.”