Taken to Greece: Theodore Macuka recounts family torment and how it made him stronger

UNCASVILLE, Conn. – After the car crashed, Theodore Macuka looked down at his abdomen, where the pain was radiating from.

Dazed and in shock, he saw the stick shift of the car wasn’t in its normal place. Instead, it was lodged into his stomach. His sister no longer was in her seat in the vehicle. She had been thrown outside the car, though somehow she was OK. His father, an alcoholic, was behind the wheel. Although drunk, he, too, was unscathed.

For Macuka, the memory of the day he split his spleen in half is perhaps the most gruesome – and the one that nearly changed his life the most, considering it nearly handicapped him for life. But the tale begins long before that when he was taken overseas by his father.

When Macuka was 6 years old, his mother encountered health issues that required hospitalization. In the midst of the fray of paperwork and confusion, his father saw an opportunity and capitalized on it when he slipped a document into the health forms. With the swipe of a pen, his ailing mother inadvertently OK’d his father to take the children and leave for Greece.

At the time, Macuka didn’t question it. His processing skills weren’t developed. When he got to the age at which he started wondering where his mother was and why she wasn’t in the picture, the slander began.

“Basically, my family and my grandparents and my dad weren’t too nice to us about our mom, so they didn’t want us to have contact with our mom,” Macuka recently told MMA Junkie. “They would call her names and stuff, which was pretty much like abuse, you know? Anything that happened, it was my fault, and because I was my mom’s son. They didn’t really like me.”

Macuka reflects on his time in Greece with mixed emotions. The country is beautiful, but the positives were few and far between for a child of mixed heritage. Growing up, he was targeted for being an Albanian-American in a foreign land, which only made the issues at home worse.

“The first month or two, it was nice for me,” Macuka said. “Then everything started becoming more realistic. They would show signs of hate toward me. They showed a lot of different things that I didn’t expect as a 6 year old.”

Macuka vividly remembers one of the turning points in his feelings toward the paternal side of his family when he was struck in the back by a plastic chair. His family members couldn’t explain their way out of that one, at least not in a rational way, even if they wanted to.

“That’s not a spanking,” Macuka said. “That’s child abuse. I personally went through a lot of child abuse and a lot of mental abuse, also. They’d say stuff – stuff that would get in my head and make me think until an age that I grew up and started understanding that, ‘Wait this stuff doesn’t make sense.'”

The car accident was gruesome and the imagery still sticks in Macuka’s mind today, but it also serves as a landmark turning point for the now 1-0 professional fighter. After the crash, he was given two options by his doctors. He made a risky decision, but it paid off in the end.

“I literally saw that handbrake almost penetrating through my body,” Macuka said. “I come to find out that I have a spleen that’s almost cut in half. The doctors told me in Greece at the age that I was, either do surgery and I’d have 50 percent of being handicapped. … The other option was to stay three or four months in the bed, not moving, not walking, and maybe you come out clean – but you won’t be able to do sports. I chose the second. I didn’t choose what the doctor said. Guess what? I’m healthier than ever.”

On his 18th birthday, Macuka became an adult. It was time to escape, but there was a problem, one he loved very much: his sister. She was 16 and still under their father’s control. Macuka thought long and hard and eventually developed a plot. It was time to get the authorities involved.

“I went to the police in Greece and made paperwork that my actual father would have to sign to bring my sister with me,” Macuka said. “That paperwork was smartly made by my lawyer saying that he’s given full custody to my mom. What happened is, I go renew her passport. I bring my sister back in America and the torturing, the whole mental thing, gets done with.”

Relieved to be back home to America, he met his twin sisters, whom he’d never met, and felt his mother’s love for the first time since he was a child. His father’s family had only allowed a couple of FaceTime calls and one hour of in-person time during his time in Greece. It didn’t take long to realize the villainization of his mother was a farce.

“I was a kid when I first thought, ‘What is my mom trying to do?’ I thought she actually abandoned us and everything made sense,” Macuka said. “When I started growing up and I started putting things together and everything started making sense, that’s when I realized that things weren’t as I thought in my brain. She tried to do a lot of things, but a lot of things didn’t go her way.”

Approaching his promotional debut at Bellator 262 to face Cody Law, Macuka shares his story to perhaps help out others struggling through hard times, not for any sort of shaming or revenge. But how does he feel about his father? Macuka said he’ll never use the word “hate,” but it’s hard to forgive the torment he endured as a child.

“They try to keep contact with me all the time, but I don’t respond,” Macuka said. “The reason why? One, I know they feel what I felt now. They kept me away from my mom and they kept me away from things – I could have lived a better career since younger here … many, many, many things that I could have had a better childhood. I’m making them feel the way I felt, one, which I don’t call revenge. I just ignore them. I don’t care. It’s not even in my brain. I don’t think about them. I don’t care about them.

“The reason why – we could have been a happy family, even though my parents were separated. You guys chose to act the way you acted. It’s not my fault. You cannot blame me for your actions. I don’t wish them bad, because even to my worst enemy, I don’t wish bad. I want to see you eat. I just want you to be seated at the same table as me. That’s it. I don’t want to keep contact with you. I want you to be successful and have a happy life. I’m out of it. That’s all.”

Macuka, now 21, resides in Stamford, Conn., and trains at the Serra Longo team in New York. In 2020, Macuka gifted his stepfather with legal adoption papers, hoping to have the kind of father-son relationship he never had naturally. Not born a “Macuka,” he considers himself one now even though the legal adoption process has been delayed by COVID-19.

“He’s going to become my actual father as long as a court decides that COVID is finally getting along and I can change my name,” Macuka said. “That’s why they call me Theodore Macuka. But my legal ID name, I keep as a secret because I want the name, my last name, to be like something I can be proud of.”

Bellator 262 takes place Friday at Mohegan Sun Arena. The main card airs on Showtime after prelims on MMA Junkie.

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