By Scott Meeker

smeeker@joplinglobe.com

It would be hard to pin down Fred and Rico Engberg and get them to do just one thing for a living.

Their Team Pain Fight Club gym at 2226 S. Main is filled with heavy bags, weights and a large red mat in an adjoining room for sparring. A quick look around the gym might lead one to believe that they would be easy to size up.

But go a few rounds with them to kick around the things that they are passionate about, and you’ll find two men who enjoy all that they do and hope that they’ll be able to make a difference in the lives of others.

The Joplin father and son have seen their interests combined into a hard-hitting work ethic that keeps them busy training fighters, sleuthing, hauling and setting up a giant steel cage all over the state, and working to help children caught in an abusive situation.

And, if one might happen to need to be bonded out of jail, they can help them, too.

“None of it is big time, just stuff we do in our spare time and try to make it work,” Fred said. “But between all of them, it is full time.”

Round 1: Bondsmen, investigators

Rico, 35, worked in law enforcement for about nine years, including undercover work for the Southwest Missouri Drug Task Force.

A few years ago, he and his father decided to go into the private investigation business together.

“We started taking the PI classes online,” Rico said. “With my background in law enforcement, I didn’t have to have them, but I just wanted to make sure I had all my ducks in a row.”

They opened Engberg Investigations at a small location at Eighth and Main streets after becoming licensed, bonded and insured through the city. Their work has involved doing background checks, digging through trash cans in the middle of the night on a search for drug paraphernalia and trying to catch cheating spouses.

“The biggest job we’ve had was for 24 hours a day for a solid week,” Fred said. “(The wife) was out of town and her husband wanted us to never let her out of our sight, so we didn’t. We took turns driving and sleeping, and we watched every move she made.”

The wife, as it turns out, wasn’t cheating.

“(PI work) didn’t make us rich, and it still won’t,” said Fred. “But we’ve got lawyers here in town that will hire us.”

From there, the father and son got into the bail-bonds business. Like their PI work, it didn’t translate to full-time work.

“We can be rich one week, and then for a month we don’t get a dime,” Fred said.

There’s one financial avenue that the pair won’t take, however.

“We won’t bail out anyone who has committed a crime against a kid,” Rico said.

Round 2: Team Pain

Fighting has always been in the Engbergs’ blood.

Fred, 70, said that one of his biggest bragging rights is having once knocked down professional boxer Ron Lyle.

“It wasn’t a regular fight, but a practice session,” Fred said. “Ron looked the wrong way at just the right time and I nailed him. I’ve been bragging about that for years.”

Years later, Fred ran into Lyle again. The retired fighter was working at the door of a nightclub in Las Vegas.

“I hadn’t seen him in years and he didn’t recognize me,” Fred said.

The next day, Fred brought Rico to the club to introduce him to Lyle and get the fighter’s autograph, and soon Lyle was training the youth on the side at a local Golden Gloves gym.

Fans of the mixed martial arts fighting that has exploded in popularity over the past few years, Rico and Fred founded Joplin’s Team Pain Fight Club, which currently has between 18 and 20 members.

“Our training here is pretty tough,” Rico said. “It’s not just coming in here and rolling around. We make them go through a solid hour of cardio work, and then about a half hour of technique and then sparring.”

Every MMA club has a different focus, and Team Pain puts its emphasis on boxing, wrestling and jiu-jitsu. Many prospective fighters have found that the training is much more intensive than they expected and quickly dropped out.

The club also has strict rules for its fighters, which have also cost them several members.

“If you fight in the street and you caused it, you’re a bully and you’re out,” said Rico. “We’ve had to kick out a couple of our champions for that.”

At a recent MMA event at Memorial Hall, Team Pain had four fighters compete, with three of them winning their matches.

“We’re pretty proud of that,” Fred said.

Round 3: Cage rentals

Eventually, someone suggested to Fred that he and Rico should buy their own cage and get into the rental business.

The cage — a steel, 25-foot octagon — stays in their truck because it is too big to put together in their gym. It takes about three hours for them to put it together and two hours to tear it down.

The cage-rental business turned out to be a busy one, and the pair has sometimes had to turn down bail bonds or other work in order to get it to MMA events around the state.

“We do a lot of work in St. Louis and Kansas City,” said Rico. “We’ve got one of the biggest cages in Missouri.”

Round 4: Just the FACT

When he worked with the drug task force, Rico once arrested a man after an informant reported that her 5-year-old daughter was being molested by a man who lived nearby.

“We caught him and he ended up being sentenced to just four months in prison,” Rico said. “I used to catch meth cooks all the time and they go in sometimes for a year.”

Several months ago, while the father and son drove back from St. Louis after setting up the cage for an event, Rico mentioned that the issue of child abuse was one that had been weighing on his mind.

If Bikers Against Child Abuse could make a difference in the lives of abused children, maybe fight enthusiasts could do the same thing.

Two months ago, they got Fighters Against Child Trauma (FACT) off the ground floor and immediately found that people around the country wanted to get involved.

“We want to help any traumatized kid, whether they’re hungry or don’t have shoes, or if they’ve been molested and mistreated,” Fred said. “We’ll be there to show them that somebody loves them.”

With parental permission, they will attend sentencings and parole hearings to show support for victims of abuse.

Within two weeks of launching FACT, they had clubs from as far away as California, Oregon and Louisiana asking how they could help.

“There may be people out there that think someone is a lowlife because they fight for a living or something, but they want to protect these kids,” Fred said. “There are so many kids who are mistreated and grow up with a little haunting feeling that they’re a failure. There ain’t no kid who’s a failure.”

Team Pain will soon begin offering self-defense classes for women and children in order to help them protect themselves from a bad situation, Fred said.

“We’re just hoping to make some kind of difference,” he said.



Want to know more?

For more information about Team Pain Fight Club, visit www.myspace.com/team_pain_fight_club. To find out more about FACT, visit www.myspace.com/against_child_trauma.