By Rick Wright
Albuquerque Journal
CLOVIS N.M. — When Harvey Park reports to his job each morning as a Curry County Sheriff’s deputy, he has no idea how his day might unfold.
Catching bad guys? Ticketing speeders? Lending aid at the scene of a car crash? Helping change a flat tire? Assisting the elderly in crossing a street? All the above?
“You’re there to help,” Park said in a recent phone interview. “It feels good to help people.”
As an MMA fighter, Park wants to present the same unpredictability to an opponent that he faces in his job.
Well, except he’s not trying to help.
Fists? Feet? Elbows? Knees? Stand-up? Ground-and-pound? Submission holds?
“I can do it all,” said Park (7-1). “Not one (phase) more than the other.”
Saturday at Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino in Pojoaque, Park is scheduled for what likely will be his sternest test thus far in the form of Brazil’s Robert “Corvo” Amorim (7-2). The lightweight (155-pound) fight is the main event of Jackson’s MMA Series XXII.
“I know he’s a jiujitsu black belt,” Park said of Amorim, who trains in Albuquerque at Jackson-Wink MMA. “But I’ve seen he says he wants to strike and likes to strike. … He’s well-rounded as well, so it’s gonna be a good fight.”
Park’s professional fight-by-fight record does, in fact, suggest he’s a versatile fighter: three wins by submission, two by knockout, two by TKO. His only loss, by second-round knockout, came against an opponent who outweighed him by 30 pounds.
Fans who saw Park land devastating leg kicks in defeating Albuquerque’s Brandon Trujillo by TKO in February, on a Fresquez-Winkeljohn card at Isleta Resort & Casino, might have come away thinking Park specializes as a kickboxer.
Not so. It was, he said, simply a matter of choosing the right weapon.
“Don’t fight your opponent at their strongest, but at their weakest,” he said. “(Trujillo) was a wrestler, and I thought he’d want to wrestle. So I decided to strike with him.
“That’s what’s good about being well-rounded is, that you can kind of pick how you’re going to fight.”
Unlike many MMA fighters, Park came to the sport with no background in the martial arts. Growing up in Melrose, some 25 miles west of Clovis, he played football and basketball for the Melrose Buffaloes.
During a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy, Park began his career in law enforcement in a program called Master at Arms. After his discharge at age 23, he came home to Curry County and signed on as a sheriff’s deputy. He lives and trains in Clovis.
At approximately the same time, he began training toward an MMA career.
Not having a specialty in the martial arts, he believes, has been far more a blessing than a curse.
“When mixed martial arts first started,” he said, “People would (come from) 15 years of wrestling or 15 years of boxing and say, ‘Now I’m gonna learn how to do these other things and fight.”
In starting with a blank slate, he said, “you learn them all. … They’ve all kind of developed at the same speed.”
At age 31, Park continues to develop as an MMA fighter. But law enforcement pays the bills for him and his family, and he has no plans to compete and train full time.
“I love MMA and I love being a cop,” he said. “The good thing about what I’m doing is I don’t have to fight. … I have a career.”
That feeling of security, though, vanishes when he steps into the cage. He wants to win, he said, as much as someone who’s fighting for his rent money or his next meal.
“I’m very competitive,” he said. “I don’t want to lose at anything.
“Fighting for me is about ‘I trained hard, I put in the work. Let’s see how much work you put in, and let’s see who’s better and who wants it more.’”
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©2017 the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.)