GILROY, Calif. — Several hundred yards from the spot where a gunman cut open a perimeter fence, crossed a creek to evade detection, and then sprayed bullets from a semiautomatic rifle into a crowd of festival goers, a law enforcement officer wearing tactical gear emerges from a port-a-potty.
Six days earlier, the parking lot next to Gilroy High School’s softball and baseball diamonds served as a staging area for first responders after 19-year-old Santino Legan shot 16 people at Christmas Hill Park, killing three and wounding 13 before taking his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after being hit several times during a firefight with police officers.
Advertisement
By the next weekend the firetrucks and ambulances are gone, along with the gaze of much of the media. The law enforcement presence at Gilroy High is less pronounced around the areas of the campus adjacent to Legan’s target, the Gilroy Garlic Festival, though those sections remained cordoned off until Monday as authorities work to untangle how the 30th mass shooting in the U.S. in 2019 came to be.
As the terrible events that took the lives of a 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl, and a 25-year-old man blurred against a week’s worth of rising and setting suns and the sickening churn of the news cycle, normalcy, or whatever passes for it these days, seeks to regain its grip on this agricultural enclave 30 miles south of San Jose, where every inhale is infused with hints of garlic and the memories of what happened here linger in the air just the same.
Only the cop in the loo distinguishes the campus from the way public schools are supposed to feel during the dog days of summer. It is mostly quiet around 11 a.m. on Saturday when Jimmy Saldate joins his two sons, Chase and Logan, at the Gilroy High track that encircles the Mustangs’ synthetic football field. They’re awaiting UFC heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier for a workout that was tangentially for them and a handful of others but specifically for the man who, over the course of his first season in charge of the Gilroy wrestling program, made the kids in this now grief-stricken town believe it could reach new heights.
“Obviously it’s very sad,” said Jimmy, a truck driver for UPS over the past two decades who moved to Gilroy, in part, to give his older son an opportunity to wrestle at a higher level. “You’ve got to get back to the drawing board and get back at it, make it normal again, as normal as you can make it. The kids are still a little rattled, but you tell them to stay focused. Things like this happen. There are sick, crazy guys out there. You’ve got to be aware. It’s crazy because it happens in other places and you go, wow, it happened here at home. That’s the amazing part.”

The boys bide their time by playing catch with the Mustangs’ returning varsity starting quarterback, Tanner Eastus.
Advertisement
Between the throws come recollections of the previous weekend.
Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. They all agree.
The quarterback was quoted in one of the many news stories that have carried a Gilroy dateline since July 28. He told CNN that the shooter, who attended the same high school, seemed like a normal guy. Chase and Logan weren’t there, but Tanner attended the Garlic Festival with friends on the night of the shooting.
“When they called me, I hopped in my car, and I drove straight over to them and picked them up,” 18-year-old Chase said.
Cormier spent that fateful Sunday with his family away from Gilroy, and after news of the attack broke, the first thing he did along with his assistant coach, friend and fellow UFC fighter Deron Winn, was send a group text checking on the kids he had assumed responsibility for when he took the coaching job.
“We know it’s a big fundraiser for a lot of the sports programs, and they get these booths that sell things and they work the Garlic Festival,” Cormier said. “Your first thought is making sure everyone is home and safe.
“Once we figured out that all of our kids weren’t out there, you start thinking about the people who have been affected and thinking about how it’s going to impact the community. It was rough.”
Cormier, the 40-year-old UFC light-heavyweight champion originally from Lafayette, La., settled here a few years ago, choosing a cul-de-sac in Gilroy as the perfect place to raise his son and daughter alongside his wife, Salina. He made a life of fighting and coaching kids to wrestle at American Kickboxing Academy, which resides a half hour north on the 101 freeway. Daniel said he and Salina grew up in families with lots of love, and the notion of keeping their kids cloistered behind a gated community somewhere made no sense regardless of how much his success as a two-division UFC champion and TV analyst had brought them. Seeing his son and daughter develop friendships that will last a lifetime has been proof positive that their decision to live in Gilroy was the right one.
Advertisement
“I love Gilroy,” he said. “Gilroy’s my town. I love living here. I don’t want to move, man. I want to stay in Gilroy.
“It’s a very small community but a very strong community. You see everyone really drawing close and coming together over something you’d never think would happen to a place like Gilroy.”
Since taking over as the Gilroy High head wrestling coach, Cormier, a two-time Olympian and an All-American at Oklahoma State, has increasingly enmeshed himself in the community. He had to convince some parents that he would make good on his word, that everything else he had going on in his life would not get in the way of supporting, coaching and motivating their kids, and it hasn’t. Cormier gets on the mat with the boys all the time, but when he can’t he makes sure his world-class backups, including Winn and Bellator fighter Shawn Bunch, operate in his stead. That was a promise he made to the school’s recently departed principal, Marco Sanchez, who wrestled in the 1996 Summer Olympics for Puerto Rico and agreed to let Cormier take over an already successful program so long as he was willing to commit himself to the team.
“I had a few parents who were just so tied to the previous coach, and I had to go like, ‘You’ve got to trust us, you’ve got to trust us. And if you trust us, I promise you your kids will be in college for free.’” Cormier said. “Ultimately that’s what it’s about.”

Jimmy’s older son, Chase, will wrestle at 152 pounds this coming season and has committed to Michigan State; he’s one of three seniors who have already secured full rides to college.
The Saldates credited Cormier with elevating their wrestling to another level. The day they moved into the same neighborhood as the UFC champ, “D.C.” knocked on their door to say hi. He’d seen Chase compete in local tournaments, and he told the then-seventh grader that he could come work out at AKA when he wanted.
“You’d see him at local tournaments,” Jimmy said. “He’d say hello to everybody. We really became friends when we moved into the neighborhood. He’s a great guy. He took both my kids underneath his wings. My younger one doesn’t even wrestle as much. He treats them like his own kids.”
Advertisement
After spending seven years working with young children, the chance to impart his work ethic and wisdom on an older crop of boys who were capable of picking up techniques and training like he expects wrestlers to train added fuel to Cormier’s competitive fire.
“Teaching them to win but not only to win,” Cormier said. “Teaching them to understand expectation. And also with that expectation it’s not given. And with that expectation comes a whole lot of responsibility. When you’re expected to do something, you’re responsible for working really hard. When you’re expected to do something, you’re responsible for making sure your grades are always in order. When you’re expected to be at the top of the podium, you are responsible for doing everything the right way to assure that you’re successful. It’s just teaching them that mentality of perception versus reality. What level of work are they going to do to ensure all of this plays out the way it is supposed to? What level of commitment ensuring all this hype and all this hope and all this what can be becomes reality — it takes a lot, and a lot of people can’t even do that.
“I want them to get that championship mentality. I want them to believe they’re as good as anyone on the country.”
Last season the Mustangs broke nearly all of its previous records — seven wrestlers placed at state; a new conference scoring mark was set; more pins than ever before were finished; a second-place result for the team at the state tournament for the second year in a row.
On the ride home from Bakersfield after the team’s runner-up finish, Cormier was already plotting out where they could close the gap on four-time defending state champions Buchanan, which outscored Gilroy by 53 points, and he expects as the young kids he worked with mature into teenagers, that the next few years will cement Gilroy’s place in the national rankings. Under Cormier they finished 11th in the nation in 2019, an all-time best for the program.
“We had good coaching, but our kids grew up with one coach basically all their life, and it gets stale. D.C. came in and kind of got these kids who didn’t want to do it anymore and mentally got them to believe they could be state medalists. And they became state medalists.”
Cormier preaches that it’s not OK to be a part of the conversation; they need to strive to be the conversation. This is a concept he is intimately familiar with.
Advertisement
Two weeks out from defending the UFC heavyweight championship belt against Stipe Miocic (18-3), the man he took it from a summer ago thanks to a big-time knockout, outside distractions — no matter how heinous they are — will not stop him from preparing for the Croatian fighter from Cleveland. It may be difficult to understand how the controlled aggression Cormier (22-1) engages in during a mixed martial arts fight could possibly help a community in the midst of recovery from an increasingly common form of deranged violence, but he believes it can.
“I think when people think violence, they think punching and kicking, but in reality the real violence is the people that got affected in Gilroy,” said Cormier, whose meets Miocic in UFC 241’s pay-per-view headliner in Anaheim. “There’s another mass shooting today in El Paso. These are the things that are violent.”
Call it another hard lesson from a wise man.
Cormier has loved competition his entire life and instinctually knew that working hard was the first ingredient of being a top-notch competitor. Working hard with a purpose, however, is a lesson he learned later, and it is how he approaches almost everything he does.
“I think now today I work with more of a purpose than I’ve ever worked in my life,” he said.
Although his training session on Saturday began a bit later than scheduled, Cormier made sure that the time he put into hitting pads under a hot midday sun with AKA head coach Javier Mendez and the grueling pool workout with strength-and-conditioning guru Chris Camacho that follows are geared toward giving him the confidence to fight Miocic to the very end if required.
For the kids and fellow fighters who joined along, the do-as-I-do messaging is impossible to miss. Never quit. Gilroy Strong.
“Nothing is ever wasted,” Cormier said. “Everything is specifically made to try to get me one step closer to where I need to be when I step into the octagon.”
Advertisement
When he does so on Aug. 17, Cormier will see it as another opportunity to be the best. More importantly, he said, this is a chance to “try to inspire the people of Gilroy with my performance. Hopefully I can do well and they can be proud.”
(Top photo of Daniel Cormier and his kids: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kGpocW9ja3xzfJByZmlwX2WDcLPIpamosV2owbO7zaBkmp6kmr9uucCsqmarmKS8tbXNoGSdmZ6esq15wqippqGVp3qntcahq6xllqS%2Fbq3DqKetnZRitbC5xK2msKZf