There are moments these days when Ray Longo feels his age. It sneaks up on him, is what it does. He’s 61, can you believe it? His hair is still jet black, and his sharp blue eyes still sparkle with that same joy and enthusiasm for the fight game. But inside? Yeah, he feels it. He can admit that.

It’s especially true now, in times like these. You try making the long journey from New York to Australia only to turn right around and hold pads for a heavy hitter like Al Iaquinta in some Melbourne hotel conference room. See if your creaky joints don’t cry out for mercy when those punches thump leather.

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“I got to be the oldest fucking coach around, I tell you,” Longo said, leaning back in a leather sofa in the lobby of the Rendezvous Hotel in downtown Melbourne. “I try to set a good example and stuff, but 61 is no joke, man.”

This time, at least, he made the 10,000-mile journey in style. Along with fellow coach and longtime friend Matt Serra, he flew first class to the land Down Under. And having Serra along means having a traveling companion who always understands him. They speak the same language, that no-bullshit brand of Long Island-ese. They’ve also known each other so long that they don’t even necessarily have to speak at all. These two, they can crack each other up with just a look at this point.

Of course, if the two of them are here to corner Iaquinta, that leaves the question of who’s minding the store back home.

“(Former UFC middleweight champion Chris) Weidman’s supposed to be running the gym,” Longo said, raising his eyebrows in a manner that suggested some doubts. “He’s training for a fight himself, though. But it’s fine, we have an office manager, and really at this point the gym kind of runs itself. I don’t have to worry about it too much.”

That’s one of the nice things about the life that Longo has built for himself. The Longo and Weidman (LAW, get it?) gym there in Garden City, N.Y.? It’s not the biggest or fanciest facility in the game. It’s not the deepest team, either, with likely only a handful of fighters you’ve heard of.

What it is, however, is consistent. You know those gyms where fighters seem to drift in and out a lot, with new faces showing up on the mats all the time even as the old faces disappear? Longo’s gym isn’t like that, and it never has been. Talk to the people involved, and they’ll tell you that Longo himself is a big part of the reason for that. The man is a sort of glue that holds it all together.

Spend a little time with him, and it’s not hard to imagine how or why. There’s just something about him, this quiet intensity that is somehow also grounding and reassuring.

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“There’s almost this bipolar aspect to him, in that he can be the most calming influence in my life at times,” UFC commentator Jon Anik said. “When I need like a father figure type of person to give me guidance, no kidding, I go to Ray Longo. But he can do that and then also tell you to punch a fucking hole through someone’s chest, and both those things make sense coming from him.”

Anik grew closer to Longo after starting his own podcast in 2015. He knew he wanted to add a recurring segment with one of MMA’s better-known coaches, he said, “but as a Boston guy, I wasn’t looking to add New York anything to my show.”

Still, he couldn’t help it. Something about Longo kept drawing him back. The more he got to know Longo, the more he understood why the fighters who started out with him tended to stick with him.

“That facility ain’t going to blow you away,” Anik said. “They’re not trying to wow you with bells and whistles. What’s impressive is that, it’s not one of these huge gyms with a bunch of fighters. To have as many top guys as they do from a team that small, you know they must be doing something right.”

Longo was born in Astoria, Queens, then moved with his family to Long Island a few years later. He was drawn to the martial arts at an early age, back when the local options were basement karate studios and sweatbox fight gyms filled with mildewed heavy bags. As a young man, Longo couldn’t get enough.

“I remember as a kid hearing the stories about how a little guy could beat up a big guy, flip him or do some cool moves, whatever, and I was fascinated by it,” Longo said. “Even if it was probably bullshit back then, that’s what drew me to it. I was lucky enough to have some good teachers early on. In my 20s I met the jeet kune do guys who would come from California and do seminars, and the mix of everything — the boxing and Thai boxing and wrestling — that was wild to me. I was so fascinated by it, and I just wanted to learn more and more.”

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Longo’s own operation started small and spread by word of mouth. He’s never been the type to do much in the way of advertising or evangelizing. As one fighter said about him: “The guy has business cards from 2007, and he hasn’t had to order new ones.”

“That’s honestly not far off,” said Serra, one of Longo’s oldest friends and former students. “We don’t recruit people.”

Serra was still a teenager when he first met Longo. He walked through the doors for the same reason that most others did initially: He wanted to learn to fight. Longo would end up teaching him much more. It was Longo whom Serra credited with upping his conditioning game, showing him what it really took to get in shape for a fight as they went out on the Long Island streets and pushed cars up and down the pavement in the wee morning hours when the roads were deserted.

When he got his first UFC paycheck, Serra used it to open a school of his own. When Serra became UFC champion some years later, Longo said, “then he just gave me money.”

The two are practically inseparable now. To see one without the other feels strange. They’re a guaranteed highlight of any UFC broadcast featuring one of their fighters, with both of them shouting instructions through the fence in those accents that are so unmistakably New York they almost make you worry they’ll accidentally summon a taxi into the cage.

Together they have built something that, to them, is more family than fight team.

“We’re not going to anybody’s corner that we don’t personally like, first of all,” Serra said. “I’m not going into the corner, one, without Longo, and two, without really caring about you. I’m not flying around the world for just anybody. That’s not how we work.”

According to UFC lightweight Iaquinta, the core of the current team was formed by guys who knew each other from the local high school wrestling scene, but it’s more about a certain personality type and how it interacts with the group dynamic than about geographic origin. He pointed to Merab Dvalishvili, a Georgian-born fighter who’s become an integral part of the team after Longo helped him get free of some sinister neighborhood types who tried to sink their hooks into him shortly after his arrival in the U.S.

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“Now we’d do anything for Merab,” said Iaquinta, who would lose a unanimous decision to Dan Hooker in Melbourne. “We all feel that way. The people who don’t fit in with that, they don’t really come around. Or if they do, they leave pretty quick.”

For Longo, the hard part about having such a close-knit fight team is the emotional highs and lows. Taking time away from his family and his gym to travel around the world is something he’s gotten used to. But having to watch people you love suffer through the inevitable torments — physical and psychological — that come with the fight game? That might be the part he’ll never get used to.

“I’m really pretty fucking emotional,” Longo said. “It sucks. You could have three guys on a card, and two win but one loses. It’s hard to feel happy along with everyone else when you know that one guy is suffering. But I think that’s where the team aspect comes in. Everybody’s there for everybody else. I don’t know how you get through this any other way.”

But then, especially lately, there are those moments when he’s found himself wondering how much longer he can do it. Spending 16 hours on a plane, holding mitts in the middle of the night, asking himself if he’ll know it when it comes time for him to step back, or at least step into a different role. These are the things Longo thinks about now.

It’s like all the fighters he’s seen who couldn’t let it go, guys who required something close to an intervention before they understood the damage they were doing to themselves in pursuit of a goal that was only getting further away. Sometimes Longo thinks he might need an exit plan of his own, maybe spend his days barking orders from a comfortable chair rather than getting on the mats himself and laying hands on people.

“But then every time I have this conversation with friends,” Longo said, “they come with me to the fights and see the local guys coming up. They say, ‘You’re not going anywhere. Stop kidding yourself. You’ve got to be there for these guys.’ And, honestly, it’s a great feeling that these guys even still want me around at this point. I’m really grateful, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. If it all ended tomorrow, I don’t have a single regret.”

Here he paused for just a moment, scanning the room with his icy blue eyes before a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

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“But man,” he added, “would I love to stick around long enough to see Al (Iaquinta) and (Aljamain Sterling) become world champs.”

(Top photo of Matt Serra and Ray Longo: Patrick Smith / Zuffa)