Hawaii has been an MMA hotbed for years, before the name “MMA” even existed, and it’s not hard to imagine why. The Aloha State has its share of tough guys from the wrong side of the tracks, and it boasts a predominantly Asian/Pacific Islander population with a rich heritage in the martial arts. In fact, it’s probably the only state in the union where your local newspaper features high school judo results.

But the genesis of Hawaii’s first MMA fight team is a less likely story, and a story that continues to this day, as Team Jesus Is Lord continues their unique fighting fellowship under it current leaders, David Padilla and Bob Ostovich.

To understand it, you have to go back almost twelve years ago, long before MMA was profitable or popular, when a band of friends from an Oahu church began entering Hawaii’s seminal promotions. Ostovich, who returns to competition at NAGA Hawaii today, remembers those days well.

“The actual beginning of Jesus is Lord was when Ray Cooper fought in SuperBrawl 2,” Ostovich says. “He wanted to express his Christianity in the ring, and he wore that ‘Jesus Is Lord’ shirt.”

Cooper would win that 1997 tournament, in a show that also featured Frank Shamrock’s vale tudo debut. He would go on to more local success and eventually became a top ranked welterweight for Japan’s Shooto organization.

“Everybody decided, hey, we want to train with him!” Ostovitch recalls with a laugh. “And everybody would wear the Jesus Is Lord shirt. It was not yet a team… but promoters like T. Jay Thompson started promoting it as a team, Jesus is Lord Gym. That’s pretty much how it happened. It actually wasn’t supposed to be a team!”

But the name caught on, and the team’s membership trained together in Waipahu, including David “Kawika” Paaluhi, who fought prior to Cooper and encouraged him to begin training, and of course, Stephen “Bozo” Palling, who would become the top featherweight in the US, winning bouts against the likes of Norifumi “Kid’ Yamamoto and Mark Hominick. The team was known for hitting hard, but always keeping a standard of sportsmanship; as they shook hands and presented their opponents with a “Jesus Is Lord” shirt after each fight.

“We used to train out of a high school gymnasium,” Ostovitch recalls. “We either trained in the school’s wrestling room or, we’d train in Ray Cooper’s backyard… on rugs! We didn’t have mats. We were in his house training on three layers of rugs. We were real prehistoric back then!”

“Most of the guys were wrestlers and boxers,” he continues. “We had to learn submissions as we started. We watched a lot of videotapes in the early days. It took us a while but we loved submissions.”

Ostovich never competed in striking or grappling prior to his MMA career, “just street fighting… I thought I was tougher than I was,” as he puts it, with a laugh. His biggest win came when he fought Jason Von Flue in Warrior’s Quest 2, a victory via a first round heel hook. In classic Jesus Is Lord fashion, the two met at a lu’au the next night to share stories.

Team Jesus Is Lord eventually left the rugs behind and established their own gym in Waipahu. But sadly, they had to close it due to a lack of funds.

“We used to have a lot of talented young people training with us,” Bob recalls. “We had a facility, we had classes. But the rent was getting a little hard to keep up with. The problem is the young guys aren’t always stable, they don’t have a job, they can’t pay their dues, so we couldn’t really keep the gym open. We had to pare back down to our core members.”

“We do have a few youngsters training with us now,” he says when asked about the future of Jesus Is Lord. “We’re blessed. We see it as a great fellowship where we enjoy each other’s company. My son is coming up, and Bozo’s son is a talent. There’s so much talent in Hawaii. We do pretty well in the amatuer shows, and we have a couple of pros. Ron Verdadero, who fought Phil Baroni in the last Icon Sport show, and David “The Tan Superman” Padilla are our most active pros now.”

While looking for a permanant location, Team Jesus Is Lord continues to train and develop amatuer and professional fighters in Ewa Beach. But times have changed, and so has the team’s approach.

“We bring guys up a little slower now,” Ostovich says. “We’ve been known to take fights that are a little over our heads. We wanted to do the impossible and beat the guy we’re not supposed to beat. So we would take fights that, basically, (are) not good fights for us. But to us, a fight was not about bragging rights. It was to give faith in other people, by doing something that most people think they can’t do.”

Ostovich describes the faith that binds the team’s core members as more than just the way they met, but crucial to both turning his life around, and keeping the team together.

“I grew up kind of a knucklehead, always getting into trouble,” he says. “The real thing that turned me around is when my two kids were born with life threatening situations.”

Ostovich’s daughter was born with a heart murmur. When she inexplicably beat the odds to live a healthy life, he pledged to change his hard drinking ways and begin attending church. But within months he was back to partying. A year later, his son was born with spinal menangitis.

“And it was the same thing,” he recalls. “I hear that he’s not going to make it. Then I realize, wow, I went back on my word, didn’t I? There ain’t no other Ostovichs in Hawaii but my family and my brother. My son was so important to me. That’s when I caught the revelation, that God said, hey, now you know how I feel, my son; I gave Him for you, my only Son. That really stuck with me. Ever since, I began attending church and changed my ways. If it wasn’t for my kids, I probably never would have changed.”

“A lot of us at the gym, we were of different backgrounds, but a lot of us were knuckleheads,” he says with another easy laugh. “We sit back and say, if we weren’t going to church, we’d probably be at each others throats. But because we had one common denominator, that was Jesus, we were able to keep our personalities in check, and we became real close friends, lifelong friends.”

Ostovich and Padilla are seeking fights for their amatuers and professionals, and interested parties can contact him through the website Ostovich maintains,
Jesus Is Lord Gym.