SUKHUMI, Georgia – He is blind in one eye and has a bad hip that makes it painful to sit, never mind endure the kicks and punches that are an essential part of his job as a mixed martial arts fighter. He is also nearly twice the age of many of his rivals at the top of his harrowingly brutal profession.
Yet, as happens whenever Jeff Monson, a 45-year-old American known as “The Snowman,” visits a town in Russia – or, in this case, Abkhazia, one of the pro-Russian enclaves in the lands of the former Soviet Union – he was greeted with whoops of delight last month when he limped from the Dynamo Stadium locker room and clambered into a cage to battle a fit Russian in his 20s.
