Jan. 22, 2013 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:57:23
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Live. | |
| Live already? | ||
| Alright. | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Onnit.com. | ||
| If you go to O-N-N-I-T and enter in the code name Rogan, you will save yourself. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| 10%? | ||
| Fuck these up? | ||
| I don't even remember. | ||
| I'm typing. | ||
| And I got Chuck Liddell and Ensign Inouye here, so I'm confused, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| I can't get my shit together. | ||
| But go to O-N-N-I-T, use the code name ROGAN, save yourself 10% off, alright? | ||
| Get it together, bitches. | ||
| Just hit the button. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, we seriously got two fucking legends in the house. | ||
| This is a ridiculous late night podcast. | ||
| It's 12.30 a.m. | ||
| here. | ||
| Ensign Inuit. | ||
| Where'd you fly in from? | ||
|
unidentified
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Portman. | |
| Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Just flew in from Portland, staying with Chuck Liddell and both of them. | ||
| The only way to do a podcast is to bang it out right now at 12.30 a.m. | ||
| So here we are, man. | ||
| Speaking in the microphone. | ||
| Tell everybody what's up. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Hi. | ||
| People have been asking for this podcast for a long fucking time, man. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder why. | ||
| You're a very unique character. | ||
| They want to hear you talk. | ||
| You're not just a pioneer of MMA, as is Chuck. | ||
| But you're also a very unique human being. | ||
| And there's a lot of stuff that you do both inside of martial arts and outside of martial arts. | ||
| It's very, very admirable. | ||
| And one of the things that I really appreciate is I keep seeing all this stuff that you're doing for the victims of Fukushima. | ||
| And you've gone down there several times, haven't you? | ||
| Yeah, 21 times now. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Twenty-one times! | ||
| And what are you doing when you go down there? | ||
| It was actually a change of different things that I did. | ||
| In the beginning we just went up there just to save people, help people. | ||
| It was like two weeks after the tsunami hit. | ||
| And then it moved to helping the people in the evacuation centers. | ||
| And then now it's people that are placed in temporary housing that don't have any source of income. | ||
| We're just trying to help them, supply them with their basic necessities. | ||
| Like water, stuff like water, toilet paper, tissue, dog food, cat food. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, a lot of people take things for granted. | |
| There's so much that these people need. | ||
| People forgetting about it because they're not on the news anymore. | ||
| Were you in Japan when the quake hit? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I was in Japan. | |
| Did you feel it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, it was the craziest earthquake I ever felt. | |
| The difference was it didn't... | ||
| Usually earthquakes last a few seconds. | ||
| And you're like, oh, earthquake, finish. | ||
| But this one just kept going and it kept getting stronger. | ||
| We're like, whoa. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was on the phone with a friend at the time in Hawaii, and I was like, oh, shit, this is huge. | |
| And then shit started falling in my house, in the cupboard, my pictures on my walls, and I was like, holy shit, this is something I never felt before. | ||
| It's kind of fucked up because the videos of the tsunami was, you know, we've all known about tsunamis for, you know, hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. | ||
| People have been aware that that happens when the ocean goes out, that you got to get the fuck out of there because something's going on. | ||
| We've never really seen it on video. | ||
| We've never captured it the way it was captured in Fukushima. | ||
| It's scary, huh? | ||
| When you saw those cars rolling over the ground, just going with the ocean and taking out houses and houses floating that were on fire. | ||
| It's like Mother Nature, man. | ||
| Even when they had it going over the rice fields and they had these white greenhouses on it. | ||
| You've got to realize those greenhouses are like 12 feet tall. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And they looked like little toys and it was going right over everything. | ||
| It was... | ||
|
unidentified
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Unbelievable. | |
| It was amazing to watch. | ||
| It was amazing to watch the physical devastation that Mother Nature can bring. | ||
| And by the way, shit like that, which happens every several hundred years, we just haven't documented it like this. | ||
| We didn't have video cameras the last time it happened like this. | ||
| What was amazing though, to me, was not just that something like this would happen, but How orderly everybody responded in Japan. | ||
| Like you saw the lines. | ||
| Everybody was, when they were waiting for aid or when they were helping each other. | ||
| It was really pretty amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a little different than the rest of the world, huh? | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| A lot different! | ||
| Yeah, they're lining up for food when they don't have food, you know? | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| I mean, is it just the culture of Japan? | ||
| Yeah, it's just the culture and the mannerisms and the type of, they have this, you know, the Spirit, you know, to suck it off. | ||
| You see it in the fighters too in Japan. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I hate to talk to Americans, but man, sometimes I go to my brother's gym and you got to tell guys to do a couple more rounds. | ||
| But in the Japanese guys, you got to tell them, stop. | ||
| Or they'll keep going. | ||
| You teach them a technique, they'll keep doing it. | ||
| I mean, I'll do a seminar in Japan, teach them a technique, I'll forget about it and start talking to someone and look back and they're still repeating the technique over and over. | ||
| But when I go and do something in the States, it's like... | ||
| Keep going, keep going. | ||
| They do it one story and say, okay, next move. | ||
| Keep going, keep doing it. | ||
| The mentality is a little different. | ||
| There's a lot of lazy bitches in this country. | ||
| We got it too good. | ||
| We got it too good. | ||
| Everyone's fucking soft over here. | ||
| It's hard to find super disciplined people over here. | ||
| It is a fascinating thing when you see that an entire country has a different philosophy. | ||
| You know, and I've only been to Japan once, but it was amazing. | ||
| It was really interesting. | ||
| And it was after the earthquake, and it was after Fukushima and everything. | ||
| It was when the UFC was there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it's a totally different world, man. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty neat. | ||
| It's very neat, you know? | ||
| I like it, I like it. | ||
| How long have you been over there now? | ||
| 22 years now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And you were born and raised in America. | ||
|
unidentified
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In Hawaii. | |
| In Hawaii. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what led you to go to Japan? | ||
| For, actually, racquetball. | ||
| Racquetball. | ||
| To play racquetball tournament. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't even fighting. | ||
| I was just training because we had a lot of street fights in Hawaii. | ||
| So I was just training just so I didn't get my ass kicked in Hawaii. | ||
| Pretty much because we're Japanese and back in the day, being big was being strong. | ||
| So for me, being an Oriental, we were smaller so we just had to really fight for our stuff. | ||
| We either had to give over our lunch money every day or fight for it. | ||
| Hawaii is one of the last places where street fights go down on a fucking regular basis too. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's kind of crazy, man. | ||
| Hawaii is one of the rare places that are left on this earth where things are decided with knuckles. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| There's a lot of places where there's all sorts of gun violence and knife violence. | ||
| I'm sure Hawaii has its share of that, but there's a lot of fucking fights going on in Hawaii. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It's amazing when you think about an island in the middle of the Pacific and how many great fighters have come out of there. | ||
| Both you and your brother, BJ Penn, you know, and just keep naming all the way down the line. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot that came out. | ||
| Yeah, God, Kendall Grove, and you know, there's so many guys came out of Hawaii. | ||
| There's a certain style of fighter that comes out of Hawaii. | ||
| Scrappy, wild, chance-taking, you know, in your face. | ||
| There's not, like, conservative fighters from Hawaii, you know? | ||
| Like, you don't see, like, a lot of stick-and-move, technical, like, trying to get out of there and stay safe, Remy Bonjowski-style, you know? | ||
| There's not a lot of that, man. | ||
| Dudes are going after it in Hawaii. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's true. | |
| It's interesting, man. | ||
| You and your brother, I was there for your USC debut. | ||
| I was there when you fought Royce Alger. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, I was the backstage interviewer. | ||
| I'm pretty sure I interviewed you because you got injured in the fight and you couldn't continue. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Way back in, like, what was it, 97? | ||
| Was that 98? | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had no clue when I was hurt. | ||
|
unidentified
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I remember it just felt a little weird, but I didn't think it was hurt. | |
| Yeah, what happened to you? | ||
| I went backstage and I felt that I got hit, so I just wanted to check if my nose was bleeding. | ||
|
unidentified
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And the basic rule, you know, don't blow your nose for hours. | |
| And I blew my nose and I felt the air come through and almost felt like I was going to push my eye out. | ||
| I was like, holy shit, what just happened? | ||
| For folks who don't know, when a guy in a fight gets a broken nose, they always tell you don't blow your nose because there's some sort of pressure buildup. | ||
|
unidentified
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There's a thin bone plate across your face here. | |
| That's like paper thin. | ||
| And if there's any hole in it, it actually holds in the air into your face. | ||
| Pretty freaky, huh? | ||
| And if you have a little crack there and you blow your nose, it'll just push the air out through that. | ||
| So that's pretty much it. | ||
| I think it's for fighting, especially for kickboxers or boxers. | ||
| I think it's a real simple, basic rule. | ||
| Don't blow your nose after your fight. | ||
| It's so hard to do though, right? | ||
| Because you can't breathe out of your nose and blood's coming out of it and you want to breathe out of it. | ||
| I was actually kind of just checking if my nose was bleeding and I just blew and it's like poof and like whoa. | ||
| That was a fight where Royce Alger was... | ||
| That was when Mark Coleman was on top and wrestlers like the high-end wrestlers... | ||
| Kevin Jackson was beating me extremely. | ||
| Yeah, Kevin Jackson and Randleman was in his prime and it was a lot of like high-end wrestlers were just starting to enter into the game. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, the wrestlers were the ones that were beating everybody. | ||
| Yeah, but I remember you caught him in the armbar, and I think you broke his arm. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
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unidentified
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It popped. | |
| But I remember your brothers, they were yelling something at you guys, and as you were leaving, your brother was like, wrestlers ain't shit. | ||
| There was some thing back and forth between the wrestlers and you guys. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh, really? | |
| I didn't notice that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I remember it, man. | ||
| It was interesting, because you... | ||
| In Armbar and him, it wasn't just an upset. | ||
| It was an upset, but it was also like the world got to know you. | ||
| That was like your first big fight on the big stage. | ||
| It was kind of good that they just blew up Royce. | ||
| It kind of helped me out. | ||
| Yeah, they made a big deal out of him because they thought, well, here's a very successful amateur wrestler. | ||
| He's probably going to be the next big thing in MMA. But it turned out that you were. | ||
| It's kind of shitty where we were going. | ||
| Everything was about rice, rice, rice, rice, rice. | ||
| And even the way they questioned me, it's almost like when I fought Randy, the same type of question. | ||
| Like, are you going to be okay kind of thing? | ||
| He's human, man. | ||
| He gets a mistake and I grab that arm and break it like any other arm, you know? | ||
| Did you fight Randy with pants on? | ||
| Were you wearing gi pants on? | ||
| No, I just fought in the tights. | ||
| You caught Randy with an arm bar as well, right? | ||
| Almost the exact same time too. | ||
| It was like right after, because Randy was there at that UFC. He won the heavyweight tournament. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I didn't expect for him to make that mistake. | ||
| Yeah, he fought Tony Halma, and then he fought that big black kid, who had a lot of promise, but after that Randy fight, we never really saw him again. | ||
| That kid was pretty good. | ||
| But you did one thing in that fight that we hadn't seen up until that point. | ||
| It was like in the Royce Alger fight, it was like we were just starting to get accustomed to what techniques were really effective in MMA. | ||
| And we'd seen Hoist, Gracie, of course, armbar a few guys. | ||
| But we hadn't seen him take on one of these big-name wrestlers that was just starting to enter into the game. | ||
| So when you caught him with that armbar, that was a big deal. | ||
| That was like, oh, okay. | ||
| You can't just be a wrestler. | ||
| You got to know what the fuck is going on when a guy throws his legs up like that. | ||
| Especially the way they hyped him up, too. | ||
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unidentified
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It still bothers you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well then after that fight, the next thing that you showed though was in the Randy fight. | ||
| You were kicking the shit out of his legs from like the butt scoop position, man. | ||
| From the bottom, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you landed some fucking hard leg kicks from that position. | ||
| Well, you don't see that very often. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I just have this style that just aggresses no matter where you're at. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we... | ||
| They weren't really checking the leg tape. | ||
| I literally put a whole roll of tape on my legs. | ||
| And it was pretty much 80% in the front. | ||
| And they let it go. | ||
| And it was like a little cast. | ||
| All over the shin. | ||
| You probably heard a little more than it looked. | ||
| Sorry, Randy. | ||
| That's part of the game, though, you know? | ||
| Well, back in those days, you know, like, Chuck, I've watched your fights. | ||
| I've watched some of those Valley Tudo fights where it was no knuckles and the bottom of the ropes were a net. | ||
| The net. | ||
| I had the guys stuck underneath the net, pinned under there, and I'm hitting them through the net. | ||
| All the way! | ||
| Hammering them through the net and just blood dripping. | ||
| Those IVC days, right, in Brazil? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Some of those fucking fights were nuts. | ||
| The thing is, that show I was on, they filmed a show at the same time they were doing a 155 pound tournament in there. | ||
| And watching these guys, the guy that won it actually had gone through, he got cut in the first fight, got cut in the second fight. | ||
| And then won a 30-minute fight in the third fight with two big cuts on him. | ||
| I mean, these guys, they went at it in there. | ||
| It was a different world back then, man. | ||
| It was a different world. | ||
| 30 minutes, they were 30-minute rounds, 30 minutes straight. | ||
| Yeah, and essentially no rules. | ||
| Do you remember when Gary Goodridge reached into the Pedro's pants and grabbed his dick and balls? | ||
| He grabbed his dick and balls and squeezed his dick and balls. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That was like a big deal when everybody was like, can he fucking do that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Yeah, yeah, he can do that. | ||
| There was like no eye gouging, no biting, he couldn't grab the ropes, and no oil I think was the rule. | ||
| Everything else, groin struts, illegal, headbutts, elbows. | ||
| How many dudes were oiled up though? | ||
| A lot of dudes oiled up, right? | ||
| Oh God. | ||
| Actually, Coleman went in the back and actually took the oil away from Vanderlei and, what's his name, and Pele in the back. | ||
| Coleman grabbed it from him and was in the back. | ||
| They were just oiling up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It's so funny how the world has changed. | ||
| I remember I was there for your first fight in the UFC, too. | ||
| You fought Noe Hernandez. | ||
| And he was a boxer. | ||
| And I remember Peretti didn't know that you were a wrestler up until that fight. | ||
| He didn't know until the weigh-ins. | ||
| The big thing was we were going to weigh-in, right? | ||
| And I'm thinking, oh, I'm in the UFC. We're going for a weigh-in. | ||
| They're weighing and sitting on a bathroom scale. | ||
| I'm like cutting weight. | ||
| I mean, not like a digital bathroom scale. | ||
| One of them aluminum ones. | ||
| So I weighed into 13. And they actually asked me, hey, I know he was two pounds over. | ||
| Is that all right? | ||
| I looked at him and went, on that scale? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I'm like, let me get him back on here. | ||
| I'll show him how to make weight. | ||
|
unidentified
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He's lean. | |
| I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| But yeah, but then I said something about it and he actually, he didn't know I was a wrestler. | ||
| He said, hey, you better keep this standing if you want to come back again. | ||
| He was in the back. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| Alright, whatever, man. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people don't know about that. | ||
| That's some fucking bullshit. | ||
| It's supposed to be MMA. You know, that someone would say that to you, especially right before a fight. | ||
| You better fight a certain way. | ||
| Yeah, it was... | ||
| I mean, you know, he was... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what his thing was. | ||
| He didn't like my haircut either. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| He told me, yeah, that's outdated. | ||
| You can't wait. | ||
| Outdated. | ||
| Get rid of that haircut. | ||
| Outdated. | ||
| Okay, whatever. | ||
| Meanwhile, 2013, you're still rocking it. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Where is he? | |
| Outdated. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Outdated in 97. When was it okay? | ||
| The fucking Time of the Pilgrims? | ||
| That was the real Mohawks. | ||
| I mean, when was it okay if it's outdated? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what he was trying to say about whatever. | ||
| He didn't like my haircut. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know what? | ||
| Nobody knew you then. | ||
| In time, he would have had to have accepted. | ||
| I couldn't have seen, when you were on your fucking title reign, him coming up to you. | ||
| Listen, man, your fucking haircut's outdated. | ||
| Enough already with this mohawk. | ||
| Cover up that tattoo in your head, too. | ||
| It shit's ridiculous. | ||
| It's funny, the things that people choose to focus on. | ||
| You guys were there, those early days. | ||
| We were just talking in the car on the way here about, I remember going down, there was a Cobra Challenge in Temecula and having to muscle the guy to get my guys paid $100 and $100. | ||
| I was like, we didn't make any money on the show. | ||
| I'm looking at him like... | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| We don't have a kid at the gate and the guy's getting $200. | ||
| We're not business partners, man. | ||
| We're private contractors. | ||
| And it was sold out, not to mention, the place is packed. | ||
| If you didn't make any money, you're an idiot. | ||
| Was that one of those fights where it was like a pancreation style where they had to use open palms? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Scott Adams was one of the first guys who was a leg lock specialist. | ||
| He became synonymous with leg locks. | ||
| Everybody knew. | ||
| He was 8-0 with 8 leg locks. | ||
| His longest fight was in the UFC. It was 3 minutes and 3-14, I think? | ||
| When you guys were competing back then, when you came in and UFC 18, 13? | ||
| I started working at 12, so you were 17. So when you guys were back there, and when you look back at that now, where the UFC is now, it's so fucking crazy. | ||
| It's like, did you ever think that it could ever get this big? | ||
| I was just telling him in the car, man. | ||
| I still can't believe how big it is, man. | ||
| Yeah, I was still telling Chuck in the car, man. | ||
| I can't believe how huge MMA has gotten. | ||
| Oh, it's insane. | ||
| I got pulled over on the way over here. | ||
| Because I was like, I'm going a little fast. | ||
| You know, I was trying to get here quick. | ||
| And the guy comes up. | ||
| He recognized me. | ||
| He goes, what are you doing? | ||
| I go, oh, my podcast studio's over here. | ||
| I'm doing a podcast with Ensign Inouye. | ||
| He goes, get the fuck out of here. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| I go, yeah, Chuck O'Dell's with him. | ||
| He goes, holy shit! | ||
| I thought he was going to ask to come and sit in. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm like... | |
| I was like, I'm going to hide the weed when this guy gets in here. | ||
| But where it is now, it's like you could say the word Anderson Silva to anybody. | ||
| Oh, I heard that guy. | ||
| I know who that guy is. | ||
| It's so popular now. | ||
| I never would have thought it would have gotten to this point. | ||
| No, not me either. | ||
| I thought eventually. | ||
| I just thought it would be a long time coming. | ||
| I thought it was going to take a long time. | ||
| It was so quick. | ||
| Once we got on free TV, it was over. | ||
| There's never been a sport in our lifetimes that was complete obscurity in the 90s and then huge today. | ||
| This is the only sport like that that we've ever seen. | ||
| And the difference in the athletes and the difference in the level of competition from 1993 to your title reign to today. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing when you see... | ||
| The evolution of the sport is so fast. | ||
| It's fucking crazy, right? | ||
| You slow down for a second and you're past. | ||
| You two guys are responsible for some of the most exciting moments in the history of this sport, man. | ||
| Your fight with Igor Vovchanchin might be one of the fucking wildest exchanges. | ||
| Somebody had a YouTube clip. | ||
| They took a clip of just the first exchange where you guys were. | ||
| Winging punches, man. | ||
| Everybody thought in that fight, well, Igor's a striker. | ||
| Ensign's probably going to take him down and try to submit him. | ||
| The fuck you were. | ||
|
unidentified
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You just ran at that dude swinging wild. | |
| I watched it live, I remember. | ||
| That was when you had to watch them. | ||
| They were on like 4 o'clock in the morning in America. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it was airing live in Japan, and we would all stay up late to watch Pride, like late night on pay-per-view. | ||
| And I remember it was me and a couple guys from Jiu-Jitsu in the house. | ||
|
unidentified
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We were fucking screaming at the top of our lungs. | |
| We're like, holy shit! | ||
| Because it was just like a movie scene. | ||
| You came in throwing these fucking bombs! | ||
| It's like you just bit down on your mouthpiece and said, fuck it, let's take him where he lives. | ||
| That was a crazy fight, man. | ||
| Do you ever look back on fights like that going, what the fuck was I thinking there? | ||
| Well, basically, what people don't understand is my... | ||
| Well, I went into my fights with a little deeper thing. | ||
| I was thinking of growing as a person. | ||
| And I didn't really worry that much about the win-losses because in my types of fights, I never, ever was pressured on winning and losing because my fights were always fun. | ||
| It was always exciting. | ||
| Is that a difference in the way the Japanese fans view fights as opposed to American fans who put so much emphasis on victory, on winning? | ||
| Well, see, what's hard now is, you know, I can... | ||
| Say, yes, I'd rather have the fighters fight with more honor and more about the pride and the deep thing about the fight. | ||
| But it's hard because back in the day when we were fighting, there were no big sponsors. | ||
| You'd never made six figures. | ||
| There wasn't much pressure about winning and losing. | ||
| Back in the day, you were fighting for peanuts. | ||
| Basically, if you're fighting in the ring and putting your life on the line in the ring, it's about pride and honor. | ||
| So the fights were different. | ||
| You'd say to fighters, is that the Is it dishonorable for people to fight that way now? | ||
| No, it isn't because they have so much to gain from it now. | ||
| They can set their life with it now. | ||
| Winning and losing is a whole different thing right now in this day. | ||
| So for you, it wasn't about winning or losing. | ||
| It was about finding what you were capable of. | ||
| Well, it was basically for me, I wanted to learn something. | ||
| MMA, for me, was a stepping stone in my life as a man to grow. | ||
| I mean, when are you going to ever be put in a willingly walk into an area that you possibly might die that day? | ||
| You know, I mean, the stress and the fears and the anxieties you've got to overcome in that moment is not something you're going to ever gain in a day-to-day, daily lifetime routine. | ||
| I mean, we're lucky as fighters to grow spiritually and grow in our heart as far as facing that fear every day. | ||
| I mean, you can get hit with the wrong punch. | ||
| This guy can hurt you real bad. | ||
| People didn't just respect that, but they responded to that in a big way, that attitude. | ||
| Yamato Damashi, is that how you say it? | ||
| Yeah, it was nicknamed that in Japan. | ||
| And that means? | ||
| It means the Japanese spirit, which was actually used back in the Samurai days, so I translate it as the Samurai spirit. | ||
| And you became known for that attitude. | ||
| And people knew that when Ensign Inoue stepped into the ring of the cage, there was no playing it safe. | ||
| There was going to be some wild shit going down every single time. | ||
| And, you know, man, they loved you for that. | ||
| The ovations that you got in Japan because of that. | ||
| They were gigantic. | ||
| Yeah, it was a real good nickname to have. | ||
| Basically, when I got it, I didn't know how big the word was. | ||
| And from being, okay, that's Kukanji, to, whoa, they named me that, to now I'm actually trying to live my life to be as close as I can to that way of life, which is hard. | ||
| So when they named you that, did you feel like a big obligation because of that? | ||
| Yeah, at first I didn't know what it meant, and then when I found out what it meant, I was really questioning myself, like, do I? You know, I mean, I show it in the ring, I mean, it's not just about being in the ring, and I have my fears in the ring, too. | ||
| I mean, if you watch the Igor fight, the first, I faked a tackle, I threw a right, and from there I was going to stand toe-to-toe with him, but all of a sudden I found myself clinching. | ||
| You know, so I got my fears, and everyone doesn't see that. | ||
| If you look back at the video, you'll see that. | ||
| I had fear took over me for a moment. | ||
| And I beat that battle. | ||
| I released and I threw down. | ||
| But, you know, I fight that fear too. | ||
| You know, so as far as, you know, people say Yamato Damashi, the undying spirit, you know, never taps and never gives up. | ||
| There's so many times in the fight, if you really look at it, that I'm fighting that myself, and I'm standing there thinking, am I justified to carry this, man? | ||
| Did you think that in the middle of a fight? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for me, when I say Yamato Damacy, the summer spirit, to have an experience to grow your spirit to that level, every time you have an opportunity to do it, it's not exactly, I can't tell you that, okay, Doing this is going to be a Yamatha experience because it depends on the person. | ||
| You know, like a phone driver, if you tell him to get in the car and take a hairpin turn at 200 miles per hour, it wouldn't be an experience for him to build his heart because he does it. | ||
| But if I were to do that, hell yeah, I'd be freaking shit in my pants, you know? | ||
| So for me, I mean, when I go into the ring, you know, it's like, it's the situation that happens. | ||
| So it was perfect for me, for Igor's fight, because if I went and stood in and just threw down, and just threw down from the beginning, it'd be like, cool. | ||
| I conquered that anxiety and the fear, but it wasn't really a Yamato Damish experience because it wouldn't have been if I didn't clinch. | ||
| So what happened, what made me happy was I actually had that fear take over me, you know. | ||
| So for me, I did some growing in my heart because I clinched and I actually hesitated in thinking of trying to take them down instead of getting top position. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you think that when you look at that attitude towards fighting and you look at how that attitude towards fighting was sort of a part of that era where there wasn't that much money to be made and there wasn't that much on the line to win, do you think that those days are gone? | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| It is because of the rules. | ||
| I mean, they stop fights way faster now. | ||
| I basically see a lot of fights where the spirit will start taking over someone, the fights are stopped. | ||
| But I understand it's a sport. | ||
| You have sponsors. | ||
| It has to be televised. | ||
| It can't be too brutal. | ||
| I mean, that's understandable. | ||
| It's like a, you know, damn if you do, damn if you don't. | ||
| When I see some of those fights, I cringe because I think, damn, this is right here. | ||
| This is where this guy's heart's going to have to kick in. | ||
| And they stop the fight and say, Yeah. | ||
| I get kind of bummed at that, you know. | ||
| You know what else was big? | ||
| Was that 10 minute first round in Pride. | ||
| Yeah, we have fought the 10 minute first round. | ||
| That 10 minute first round was big. | ||
| Yeah, that was great. | ||
| Because, you know, five minutes shit just gets interesting. | ||
| You're halfway through. | ||
| You got five more minutes after five minutes of hell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That first round was incredible. | ||
| It's not exactly the best thing for, you know, if you want to find sponsors and televise it and get people attracted to it that don't understand the sport, you know, it's... | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of a balancing act, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, it's hard, man. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| How do you soften up cage fighting, though? | ||
| How do you soften up mixed martial arts? | ||
| They did. | ||
| They're stopping the fight sooner. | ||
| Did you see the Bisping Belfort this weekend? | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| Did you think that fight was stopped a little soon? | ||
| Wait. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Someone else asked me the same thing, thought it was stopped too soon. | |
| He's laying in the fetal position with the guy behind him throwing hammer fist. | ||
| You're not trying to defend yourself. | ||
| At no point are you there trying to defend yourself. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't stopping him from rolling up to his belly. | ||
| He wasn't stopping him from trying to get up, and he wasn't trying to get up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're not defending us. | ||
| I mean, the only thing that I had heard... | ||
| The only question I had was, why did they touch him, step back, and once you touch him, it's over. | ||
| Well, it didn't last very long. | ||
| I mean, he dropped him, and then, you know, you look at the replay, you're dealing with, like, you're only talking about a couple of seconds. | ||
| Shots to the body. | ||
| He hit him, I think it was two times in the head, and then he went to a couple of levels to the body. | ||
| But he didn't even try to roll back up. | ||
| He wasn't trying to get out... | ||
| He turned his back. | ||
| It was over. | ||
| He turned his back and fixed the other way. | ||
| What's going on with the volume, man? | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| It's varying. | ||
| That was a big fucking head kick. | ||
| That was clean. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't trying to defend himself. | ||
| He didn't look like he was trying to do it. | ||
| I mean, nothing against him. | ||
| I don't think he knew where he was at at that point. | ||
| Instincts kicked in. | ||
| I'm all for it. | ||
| I think at the top level, I'm all for letting it go a little longer. | ||
| I complain a little bit about guys. | ||
| I mean, I understand stopping real quick at the lower levels, but at the higher levels, these guys, that's their career, their life. | ||
| They've been there. | ||
| You've got to give them a chance to pull the way out of it because we've seen fights with Big Nog almost holding on and coming back and winning the fight. | ||
| Well, how about Frankie Edgar? | ||
| Or Frank Yeager, yeah. | ||
| That motherfucker comes back. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| He survived that. | ||
| Crazy, you know? | ||
| His second fight with Graemean? | ||
| There's been a lot of times like that where you've seen guys that, and then you see another fight where, you know, that gets stopped in your way. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we got a real problem with referees that have itchy trigger fingers, and referees that get involved too much, and, like, they're telling guys to fight, and, like, when they are fighting... | ||
| They just make their presence known too much. | ||
| There's too much intervention by them. | ||
| They need to learn how to step back. | ||
| Too many fights get called where you have to look at the instant replay. | ||
| Like the controversy this weekend about hitting the back of the head. | ||
| Yeah, that one was bad. | ||
| Oh, it was terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you see that? | |
| He didn't get hit once in the back of the head. | ||
| No! | ||
| Mergliata called the fight a no contest. | ||
| And I don't know if the guy was complaining what happened, but he hit him once with an elbow to the ear, clean elbow, and then punched to the side of the head. | ||
| And, you know, he's saying, watch the back of the head, watch the back of the head. | ||
| And I don't know if the dude on the bottom was saying something, but it was bad. | ||
| It was a terrible, terrible call. | ||
| That's happened in Brazil a couple of times. | ||
| That happened with the Eric Silva fight when Eric Silva got the same thing. | ||
| Mario Yamasaki called it a no contest from shots to the back of the head. | ||
| And the guy played it up too, huh? | ||
| He definitely played it out because he was holding the back of his head and then you see the instant replay and the elbows hit him in the ear. | ||
| Yeah, it was really bad. | ||
| That is bad. | ||
| I was kind of stoked when I heard Dana tweeted something like, I will never find the UFC again. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think he tweeted that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I was kind of stoked. | ||
| I was thinking the same thing. | ||
| I think I should never forget an octagon ever again. | ||
| That guy's a disgrace to the sport. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad when you see guys do shit like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When you see someone looking for a way out and looking for an excuse, like, listen, man, there's a fucking camera there, and there's a camera there, and there's a camera there. | ||
| Everyone can see where those shots land. | ||
| Like, I don't know what you're... | ||
| You can't just pretend that it hit you in the back of the head. | ||
| I don't know what happened there, but refereeing, bad refereeing sucks, but bad judging is even more prevalent than bad refereeing. | ||
| We got a lot of that now. | ||
| Well, okay, first off, judging, it's hard anyway. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| But then you put that with a lot of guys that just don't understand the sport. | ||
| They don't understand either the jiu-jitsu or they don't understand the striking or they don't... | ||
|
unidentified
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And they're judging it on the highest level. | |
| And they don't really understand, you know, when a guy's working for something, or like, I mean, you know, you guys, oh, you got to count that attempted submission. | ||
| Well, hey, throwing your legs up into a triangle like this is not an attempted submission. | ||
| You know, it's got to be closer than that if you want to call it an attempted submission. | ||
| It's gotta be like a guy fights out of it. | ||
| You gotta fight out of it. | ||
| I mean, you know, wrestling. | ||
| Is it takedown? | ||
| Which takedown's good? | ||
| How much do you count the takedown getting up or getting back up? | ||
| What's the skateboard? | ||
| When you were fighting, you were famous for your takedown defense, but you were also famous for being able to get up off the bottom. | ||
| If you got taken down, were you thinking, man, how much are the judges gonna pay attention to this? | ||
| Even if I get right back up real quick, how much does that score? | ||
| Well, I never worried about that. | ||
| I mean, my thing was, I was always, it's a lot easier to get back up if you start as soon as I hit the ground. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, if I let you get on top of me and get set, it's real hard to get off my back. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But if you get a takedown, it's not over. | ||
| This isn't college. | ||
| No one's throwing up two points. | ||
| I'm still, as soon as we hit the ground, I'm fighting your takedown. | ||
| My thing was I was always trying to fight a guy. | ||
| I'm staying offensive, so he can't hit me when I'm down. | ||
| He can't really score when I'm down there. | ||
| I don't really think of a guy who just takes a guy down and holds him unless nothing else is really done in the round. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Does that mean you should win? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You've got a takedown. | ||
| You haven't been able to land a punch, haven't done anything. | ||
| If he gets up and lands some punches standing, he should win the round. | ||
| So is it a case a lot of times of a guy trying to conserve energy or trying to figure out when to explode, like when he gets taken down where he'll hang on for a second and then start moving, whereas you would... | ||
| As soon as your back touches the ground, you're scooting, you're fighting for underhooks. | ||
| The problem I tell a lot of guys all the time is if you get down, you get that oh shit moment, oh shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
As soon as you did that, you're fucked. | |
| Sorry, now it's going to be a bitch to get off your back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But, you know, my thing is as soon as you hit the ground, there's a little space. | ||
| Even when you hit a good hard slant, good takedown, boom, there's balance. | ||
| Guess what that is? | ||
| Space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that space. | ||
| Now I'm pushing already. | ||
| I'm already working to get back up. | ||
| So, I mean, that helps you continue to get up. | ||
| But what's interesting is you guys had to figure that shit out in the cage. | ||
| There wasn't a whole series of fighters that came before you that had already figured that out. | ||
| Essentially, takedown defense and the ability to get up off the bottom in an MMA fight was kind of written by you. | ||
| I put together some stuff from... | ||
| John Lewis taught me how to get out this way. | ||
| Scott Adams taught me how to roll the knee bar this way. | ||
| I kind of figured out how to do a push-pull thing with the guys. | ||
| And I just change something right at the end of each thing to get, because instead of going to roll that knee bar, I get halfway there and just stand up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And guess what? | |
| If I get halfway there, so I get people off balance and I can go, I do a push-pull and make it so I try to get you to push real hard to stop this one, I go the other way. | ||
| And you stop that and I pop under the other way. | ||
| But it's kind of fascinating when you think about it because you had to kind of figure all that out. | ||
| You came along in 97. I mean, there wasn't a lot of dudes who had already done that before you where there was like... | ||
| You look at a guy like Rory McDonald who's training at TriStar. | ||
| He's got George St. Pierre in his camp for us. | ||
| They got fucking charts and graphs and dry erase boards where they're writing down every day's workout where they're trying to break it down to each individual technique and skill. | ||
| Yeah, we were all trying to put it together. | ||
| You had to figure it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When we came in, you know, everyone's trying to figure out... | ||
| Most guys came in with one thing, you know, wrestling or striking or jiu-jitsu, and they come in and they're trying to mix them all together. | ||
| And we were also trying to figure out how to train them together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, okay, how do I train my wrestling and my jiu-jitsu and my striking and my jiu-jitsu together? | ||
| Like, how do I... What's the right balance of working out here and there? | ||
| What's strength training? | ||
| How do I mix everything? | ||
| You know, it was... | ||
| It was an interesting time. | ||
| Challenging. | ||
| Challenging. | ||
| And now you got guys, like you said, and you'll see guys get better and better because you got guys that now they're learning mixed martial arts from the start. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they have coaches that know how to train it, know how to teach it. | ||
| And then they're still going to be innovative a little bit. | ||
| And guys are still going to create their own little things that work better for you or for him or whatever body type you are. | ||
| Now, I talked to you about this and you don't know, but... | ||
| Have you thought about opening up a gym? | ||
| Are you thinking about training people and coaching people? | ||
| I want to open a gym. | ||
| I don't know if I'm going to get into all the coaching guys to fight, but I always like working with guys that are fighting. | ||
| I always like working with different things and showing them things I like or I do different than what they're used to doing. | ||
| And seeing someone use it. | ||
| You know, if you've got a guy at that level, I show a guy, I think one of my favorites, I remember teaching Forrest how to find point to something he'd done forever. | ||
| And he said, I thought that was a bullshit move, it never worked. | ||
| And he's like, oh, that's what I was doing wrong? | ||
| Because now it just, it worked, it was just a guard, you know, guard, guard pass thing. | ||
| But it was, he's like, oh man, damn, that's what I was missing. | ||
| And that's fun for me. | ||
| Well, you enjoy teaching. | ||
| I was just saying, we were talking about before the podcast ever started about Glover. | ||
| You've been training with Glover and getting him ready for his fight with Rampage this weekend. | ||
| Yeah, I've been working with Glover over the last two fights. | ||
| After he got back in the U.S., I mean, he'd been away from, you know, he was training with us for a long time and then he went back to, got stuck in Brazil for a few years. | ||
| I'm just working with him with stuff that we used to do. | ||
| Some of the stuff that he's forgotten. | ||
| Oh yeah, that's why that's not working. | ||
| Little fine points. | ||
| I had the same thing. | ||
| I come back from having done that movement in a while. | ||
| Why isn't this working? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You just forget one small technical aspect of it. | |
| It makes a whole difference. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating how much when you look at athleticism and you look at just sheer strength and size, that's all well and good, but it's really fascinating how much actual technique is involved and just subtle variations and changes in that technique make all the difference in the world. | ||
| And that's something that the layperson doesn't understand and that's something that it's a shame when judges don't understand that. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the hard part. | ||
| I mean, some of them I don't think they quite understand the basics. | ||
| No, they're government workers. | ||
| They might as well be working for the DMV. They got a gig and they went in and they learned how to, you know, this is a triangle, this is an arm bar, this is a kick, this is a punch. | ||
| I mean, I don't know how many times I've watched a round and just gone, okay... | ||
| I want to see the judge that gave that round to that guy and have him explain it to me. | ||
| I just want to watch. | ||
| For my own entertainment, I want to hear him explain it. | ||
| Justify. | ||
| You should do that. | ||
| It was one of the ultimate fighters I watched. | ||
| It was the live one. | ||
| I remember I went to overtime, and in the overtime, it was two to one for one guy. | ||
| I'm looking at it going, it was all standing. | ||
| One guy threw two punches, didn't land one of them. | ||
| The other guy probably landed five or six punches the whole round, but chased the guy the whole round. | ||
| And one of the judges actually gave it to the guy that threw two punches in the air and never landed a punch and was running the whole time. | ||
| I'm like, what fight are you watching? | ||
| I mean, I was like, you've got to be kidding me. | ||
| I had on Tebow, I rewound it and went... | ||
| Okay, I must have watched the round wrong. | ||
| I wasn't paying attention. | ||
| I must have missed. | ||
| Let me see what I missed. | ||
| Okay, no punches, no landing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How did they pick the referees? | |
| They were all guys. | ||
| A lot of them are from boxing, especially Nevada. | ||
| Nevada has a lot of Adelaide Birch. | ||
| Everyone's always giving Dana a hard time about it. | ||
| It's like, guys, he doesn't pick the referees. | ||
| It's not up to him. | ||
| You can't do anything about it. | ||
| Not only that, as a promoter, you really, you know, you don't get any say whatsoever. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You can't have any, it's like, it's illegal. | ||
| You can't have any say in who's judging or not judging. | ||
| You know, that has to be done by the Athletic Commission. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No wonder he rips on the refereeing a lot over judging. | |
| A lot of it's bad. | ||
| I feel like the refereeing is, a lot of it is just, it's fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard to make the right call in the moment, in the heat of the moment. | ||
| Well, hey, refereeing's a tough job. | ||
| It's not an easy job. | ||
| A lot of guys don't do well. | ||
| But the judging's a disgrace. | ||
| The judging, in my opinion, is a disgrace. | ||
| I think people make errors as referees, and that's just a part of being a human being. | ||
| But I feel like the referees, for the most part, know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| There's standouts like Big John or Herb Dean who, like, you know they're always going to – Josh Rosenthal, you know they're always going to ref a good fight. | ||
| And even if they make an error, it's rare and few and far between. | ||
| But some of these fucking judges, man, you've got to think they're just flipping a coin. | ||
| They don't know what's happening. | ||
| There's no way they know what's happening. | ||
| They're just taking a guess. | ||
| It's really a shame, man. | ||
| It really is a shame. | ||
| When you see guys that are competing in the highest level of the game, and they've trained for six to eight weeks, and they've given every fucking ounce of their soul, and here they are, and they edge it. | ||
| You think they won. | ||
| You think they pulled it off. | ||
| And then, you know, 30-27 for the other guy, and you're like, what the fuck?! | ||
| Nonsensical score. | ||
| So you threw away two months of this guy's life. | ||
| Two months of fucking, you know, eating the right food and getting up in the morning and drinking a gallon of water every six hours. | ||
| And you threw it all away because you're an incompetent judge. | ||
| You know, it's not even those ones where it's close. | ||
| Like, you pulled it out close. | ||
| I mean, the ones that bother me are the ones that are like, uh... | ||
| Okay, I'll give you that round was a toss-up, but the rest of the other two rounds? | ||
| How did he lose the other two rounds? | ||
| How did he lose them? | ||
| And someone's got to lose them to all three, and you're like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fucking crazy, man. | |
| You took a long time off. | ||
| You took like six years off and then came back again in 2010 for one fight. | ||
| Well, yeah, I came back for that only because I got put in jail. | ||
| I got put in prison and, you know, it was funny because after I got out of prison, it was on national TV. It was in all the newspapers, magazines. | ||
| Funny how I start fading out of the media. | ||
| All of a sudden, I get arrested. | ||
| I'm like a hot thing in the media again. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| That's a shocker. | ||
| So that's why you fought the media, man. | ||
| But anyway, you know, when I got out, you know, when I would go to bars and stuff, people would say, oh, some people would say, like, oh, I seen you on TV. And I'm like, fuck. | ||
| And I'm thinking to myself, is that the one with me handcuffed walking with police? | ||
| Or was it an old fight? | ||
| Yeah, I'm like, oh God, I hated that. | ||
| So I figured the only way to make it up to my fans, let them know that I'm back. | ||
| We get drug tested in Japan. | ||
| Marijuana is a big thing now in Japan. | ||
| We get tested for marijuana. | ||
| If you have any marijuana in your blood in Japan, you're not going to be able to fight. | ||
| What did you get arrested for? | ||
| Marijuana. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Well, I had 16 grams in my car. | ||
| I had like 20 joints. | ||
| We were going to have a little party in Roppongi and it was on the way down. | ||
| And they do a lot of inspections just randomly. | ||
| They walk around. | ||
| In Japan, it's kind of unconstitutional where they don't need a reason to search you. | ||
| They'll come right up to your car and say, I want to check in your car. | ||
| And it's like, I was stoned and I had a... | ||
| I had a joint, I mean, a roach on the dashboard. | ||
| And you know, when you're still and you think you're getting sneaky, but it's like so bad. | ||
| It's like, ah, what roach? | ||
| And I'm putting it in my pocket and they're following me the whole time. | ||
| It's in their pocket. | ||
| So I put my phone in the pocket, pull it behind my phone. | ||
| I said, nothing in my pocket. | ||
| This is behind your phone. | ||
| I'm like, oh, fuck. | ||
| I'm fucked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, what is it like? | ||
| Is it like being caught with cocaine or heroin in America? | ||
| Yeah, drugs are a drug in Japan. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| We eat anything. | ||
| I was facing some bad time, you know, because I was a famous figure and they wanted to make an example of me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| What was the worst case scenario? | ||
| I think it was five years. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I was facing that... | ||
| It all depended on what came up in my house and my gym when they did the search the next day. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And what came up? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing came up. | ||
| So that saved you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I was kind of baffled and I think. | ||
| I was like, shit, nothing came up. | ||
| Someone stole my fucking weed. | ||
| Yeah, so nothing came up. | ||
| It was then the interrogation came to finding out where I got my stuff. | ||
| In Japan, if you throw everything to a foreign person, they'll drop. | ||
| They won't want to go find someone in America. | ||
| I told them I was a student from Guam. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| They asked me for a name and I said, Tony. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I knew like three Tonys in Guam, so I said, keep it real, Tony. | |
| And we had like two days of questioning. | ||
| I mean, he talked in interrogation for like eight hours straight, just interrogation. | ||
| And late, like the third day, they said, so happened, caught me off guard, man. | ||
| And they asked me, what's Tony's last name? | ||
| And that's freaking ridiculous. | ||
| The first name that popped in my head was Montana. | ||
| And right when I said... | ||
|
unidentified
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So right when I said Montana, he was like, oh, fuck, if these guys watch Scarface, man. | |
| I was like, I'm screwed, you know, I'm screwed. | ||
| Because it'll start the interrogation all over if I get caught in a lie. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So I saw him write it down in Japanese, Montana, and then he just jotted it down, and I was like, fuck. | ||
| Did Scarface get translated into Japanese? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| It's not that popular? | ||
| I don't think it's that popular there. | ||
| That's fucking hilarious. | ||
| Tony Montana gave me my marijuana. | ||
| That story is worth a trip in. | ||
| How long was the ordeal from getting arrested to getting cleared? | ||
| 28 days. | ||
|
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Which isn't a big deal if you know it's going to be 28 days. | |
| But you're sitting there and you don't know what's going to happen to you. | ||
| And you don't know what's going on in the outside world because you're shut off. | ||
| And you're wondering if you're going to spend five years. | ||
| It's kind of... | ||
| 20 days is a long 20 days. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So you went from there and you said, fuck it, I'm going to take on another fight? | ||
| Well, I went in there and it was good for me, actually. | ||
| I mean, I always think back and think, okay, I should have done this, I should have done this, if I didn't put the roast in that. | ||
| And I keep thinking that and I catch myself and think, wait a minute, this is probably one of the best things that happened to you. | ||
| Because the biggest thing that happened to me in that was I learned how important my freedom was. | ||
| I mean, everyone takes a grand every day, wake up, but what are you going to do today? | ||
| And it's like, shit, I got nothing to do. | ||
| It's freaking overcast, a shitty day. | ||
| What I'm going to do is like, ah, damn, it's a shitty day, you know? | ||
| But, man, just the fact that you can choose to stay at home, you can choose to eat McDonald's, or you can choose to just hang out, or you can choose to be bored, you know? | ||
| Freedom. | ||
| Freedom's awesome. | ||
| So it was something that really made me realize how important freedom was. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people take it for granted. | ||
| You know, dealing with a situation like that, especially over something like weed, where it's so nonsensical and crazy, they could take away your freedom for fucking years. | ||
| Yeah, the thing about that is, I served the time, went to the court, I got three years probation, where I couldn't leave Japan for three years. | ||
| I didn't even get to go to my grandmother's funeral. | ||
| And I figured, okay, I gotta be good these three years, and I'm gonna start up again. | ||
| And then, next thing I know, I get a letter from him. | ||
| The immigration. | ||
| Telling me that I just lost my green card because of infringement and I gotta leave Japan. | ||
| And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. | ||
| I've been here for 20 years. | ||
| My whole life is here. | ||
| I bought a house there. | ||
| I got gyms here. | ||
| I can't leave Japan. | ||
| So I called them up and they had this real generic answer. | ||
| Okay, if you're contesting it, you're going to start an investigation. | ||
| You have to come down to Immigration Center and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I went down. | ||
| It was an eight-month I mean, it was ridiculous. | ||
| I had to go down there numerous times and just like all day interrogations and it would start from the beginning, the name of your mom and dad, what do they do? | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck does that have to do in anything, you know? | ||
| And I'm just going along with the role and it's like the next week I go in for another interrogation, they start all over again, a whole new investigator. | ||
| I'm like, what the fuck's going on? | ||
| I just told the other guy, you know? | ||
| And it got to a point, it was so bad that I got so frustrated in there. | ||
| As much as I needed to be in Japan, I looked at the guy, I said, you know what? | ||
| I love Japan. | ||
| I made this place my home. | ||
| And if fucking Japan doesn't want me, I don't want to fucking be here. | ||
| I told him straight up like that. | ||
| And I said, oh shit, I just screwed myself, man. | ||
| But I thought, you know, I got so frustrated. | ||
| I said, you know, I serve my time, man. | ||
| And I'm trying to do, I'm doing good things for Japan. | ||
| You guys are going to try and kick me out. | ||
| If you guys don't want me, you know what? | ||
| I don't want to fucking be here if they don't want me here, you know? | ||
| So, you know, the interrogation went on and there was one guy that was a fan of mine. | ||
| When he was interrogating me. | ||
| And then he kind of did something illegal where he told me that between these two red markers, he said, look at those two papers. | ||
| He said, he flipped it open. | ||
| He said, this is all petitions coming in for you not to get kicked out of Japan. | ||
| And I saw the papers like this thick. | ||
| I was like, oh shit, that's a lot. | ||
| He said, yeah, you got like 4,000 in there already. | ||
| And the petition in Japan isn't just names. | ||
| You got to leave your name, your phone number, your address, and everything. | ||
| You know, so you... | ||
| It's not a bullshit where you can just get people to sign their names. | ||
| Just write some fake email address. | ||
| Yeah, so they're writing this 4,000 and every time we get an integration I see that between those two red markers are getting thicker and thicker. | ||
| And I come to find at the end it came out to be 9,000. | ||
| In 8 months, 9,000 people sent in that they don't want me kicked out of Japan. | ||
| Immigration is there to protect Japan from so-called dangerous foreigners. | ||
| Their people that they're supposed to be protecting is sending 9,000 letters saying they don't want this guy kicked out. | ||
| So that was the overwhelming thing that kept you in there? | ||
| I could have been deborted, yeah. | ||
| How much press are you getting over there because of all the stuff you're doing for Fukushima victims? | ||
| Well, my movement in Fukushima isn't... | ||
| There's a lot of celebrities that went up there just once and had a big media thing and it was just for like, hey look, look what I'm doing. | ||
| People don't even know. | ||
| I'm going up on the 24th. | ||
| The day after I get back from here, I'm driving straight to Fukushima. | ||
| What is the radiation like there? | ||
| I went into the zone twice or three times. | ||
| The zone? | ||
| Yeah, we call it the zone. | ||
| It's from where the plants blew up. | ||
| It's like a 20 kilometer zone. | ||
| Where the radiation is high. | ||
| It's actually pretty high all the way through, 30 kilometers out. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But the town that I'm visiting now, where I'm visiting the temporary housing, is about 80 kilometers away. | ||
| So the radiation is a little higher than usual, but if I'm not living there, it's not a big deal. | ||
| Chuck, if you want, I can take him. | ||
| I'll take him home, because I know you wanted to get out of here. | ||
| Say goodbye to the people. | ||
| I know you got your kids at home. | ||
| Thanks for coming by, brother. | ||
| Very good to see you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| Come on back. | ||
| Mrs. Chuck Liddell, take care. | ||
| She's crashed out. | ||
| Oh, she's out there on the couch. | ||
| Yeah, grab some coconut waters. | ||
| So, when you're going there, are you bringing a Geiger counter? | ||
| How do you know what you're... | ||
| I have a Geiger counter and a docimeter. | ||
| Okay, Chuck, I'll see you later, man. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| Yeah, I have both. | ||
| A Geiger counter and what's the other thing? | ||
| A docimeter. | ||
| What's a docimeter? | ||
| A Geiger counter counts exactly what you're getting at that moment. | ||
| And the docimeter takes the accumulation of what your body is taking in. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you take iodine? | ||
| Yeah, we take potassium tablets, yeah. | ||
| Iodine, potassium iodine. | ||
| And that supposedly protects your thyroid, is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, just the thyroid, yeah. | ||
| I mean, for your blood chemistry to change, you have to take in 65,000 microsieverts. | ||
| And it depends on the win and depends on how long you're in the hot spots. | ||
| The first time I went in, I took in 25,000, which is pretty bad because you're talking a yearly count. | ||
| You only want 65,000. | ||
| After 65,000, it changes your blood chemistry, which could cause cancer. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| So then the second time I went in, how's this? | ||
| I got 19 microsieverts. | ||
| As much as you get flying from a trip from Hawaii to New York. | ||
| That's really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I actually did that. | ||
| I brought the docimeter in the plane. | ||
| On the plane? | ||
| Yeah, and it got 19. Yeah, that's a lot of things that people don't realize. | ||
| You get way more radiation from the plane than you do from those radar detectors. | ||
| Those metal detectors, rather, when you go in through the airport and everybody's terrified of those. | ||
| Just the plane itself. | ||
| We're probably sitting in radiation right now with all the electrical equipment. | ||
| I mean, that's what people don't realize right now, that there's radiation all over. | ||
| I mean, the sun gives off radiation. | ||
| When it hits the concrete and it bounces back off, it's giving off radiation. | ||
| You're getting radiation in everything you do. | ||
| I mean, you know, going into Fukushima the second time when I got only 19 microsieverts, it's like getting a chest x-ray. | ||
| Now, why was it less? | ||
| Because you spent less time? | ||
| Were you not as close? | ||
| Radiation is actually particles of dust, yeah. | ||
| And it depends on if it rained. | ||
| When it rains, it drains. | ||
| It accumulates in a certain area. | ||
| It depends if you're in that area. | ||
| I mean, I can stay right here and see zero on the Geiger counter and walk 10 feet and get 200. Yeah, it's like the craziest thing. | ||
| You don't feel it. | ||
| You don't see it. | ||
| You don't smell it. | ||
| You don't feel nothing. | ||
| I mean, it's ridiculously scary. | ||
| And the closer to the ground, the higher the reading, right? | ||
| I watched a video where a guy took a Geiger counter and was showing the air and then he went all the way down to the ground. | ||
| If it's stuck on the surfaces, even it could be on glass. | ||
| Glass? | ||
| Yeah, there's some radiations that get on glass and you can't even wash it off. | ||
| You gotta burn the glass. | ||
| How do you look at nuclear power now? | ||
| Do you look at it completely different after you've seen that? | ||
| Well... | ||
| It's a hard situation because without nuclear power, Japan wouldn't be able to run. | ||
| Or would be paying out of our asses and electrical bills. | ||
| I mean, it literally can't run without looking at power. | ||
| I mean, it's important. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a hard thing, man, because an incident like this, you know, where The tsunamis come in. | ||
| Something like that hasn't happened in about 100 years in Japan. | ||
| It's amazing, but 100 years ain't shit. | ||
| When you think about the geography, when you think about the surface of the Earth, 100 years is barely a blink of an eye. | ||
| We're so used to what we've seen so far in our lifetime when we take that as like, oh, this is our point of reference. | ||
| This is what we know. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| It hasn't happened in 100 years. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| That doesn't mean anything. | ||
| A lot of shit can happen. | ||
| I mean, Japan has active volcanoes, right? | ||
| There's a lot of shit that can go on in Japan. | ||
| There's earthquakes that go about eight or nine times a day, man, in Japan. | ||
| We're constantly getting earthquakes. | ||
| But you love it anyway. | ||
| Well, I love the people, and I love what I've established there. | ||
| I've been there for 22 years. | ||
| How many gyms do you have there? | ||
| I have only one gym now. | ||
| I actually close two of them. | ||
| I have a lot of gyms in Guam. | ||
| I have a big following that's like family. | ||
| I got brothers out there that I die for tomorrow. | ||
| A lot of them can't leave Japan. | ||
| Now, when you first moved there, you moved there for racquetball in what year? | ||
| It was in 1994. Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, 22 years. | ||
| Let's calculate that. | ||
| Yeah, it was way back. | ||
| I fought in 1995, so it was four years before that. | ||
| So 1991, actually. | ||
| 1990, I think, I moved there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was for a racquetball tournament. | ||
| Did you speak Japanese fluently before you moved? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, zero. | |
| Wow. | ||
| I had to learn it with flashcards. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And writing and everything? | ||
| Oh, the writing, the kanji, I understand a little bit, but it's not necessary in my life, so I haven't learned it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I teach fighters. | ||
| Like newspapers and shit? | ||
| I taught English. | ||
| Whenever I did anything, I taught. | ||
| I don't read the newspaper. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| There's an English newspaper, so I read that. | ||
| The most kanji I can write is my name, my address. | ||
| I can read more than I can write. | ||
| There's a whole different thing to be able to read it and to actually have to write it. | ||
| So when you learned how to speak it, did you just learn by talking to people? | ||
| I just learned flashcards. | ||
| I learned vocabulary. | ||
| Just slammed as much vocabulary as I thought I would use. | ||
| And as far as the particles, I just let it flow. | ||
| So I was speaking pretty much in just vocabulary. | ||
| When you communicate in Japan now, do they know? | ||
| It's like, you know, you hear like Borat talk English and he has a Kazakhstan accent. | ||
| Do they hear an American accent from your Japanese? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, if you hear me speak Japanese, you probably think I'm fluent, but considering I've been here for 20 years, I suck. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm fluent as far as I can communicate. | ||
| I have no problem communicating and I never misunderstand anything. | ||
| I pretty understand everything, but it's not fluent. | ||
| How much of your communicating over there is English? | ||
| Do you speak English? | ||
| No, almost zero. | ||
| It's all Japanese. | ||
| How many different fighters are you working with? | ||
| I know you were working with Kid Yamamoto for a while. | ||
| Are you still working with him? | ||
| No. | ||
| We had a falling on with that. | ||
| His idea of loyalty is a whole different thing than me. | ||
| He was a super fucking talented guy at one point in time. | ||
| Yeah, you know that kid, man? | ||
| He's a super athlete. | ||
| And all he needed was something behind him that he felt confident with. | ||
| Where he would have his confidence. | ||
| When he has... | ||
| When Kid has his head on right, man, nobody can beat him. | ||
| But that guy... | ||
| That guy can be broken, man. | ||
| I've seen him break so many times and he needs that something behind him that gives him that little extra confidence that puts him past that barrier, but he doesn't have it now, man. | ||
| That's too bad because when in his prime he was just a stunning athlete. | ||
| You're talking about a guy who entered into a kickboxing bout with Masato and dropped him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And he's a wrestler, essentially, you know? | ||
| And he's fighting K1 against one of the best Japanese kickboxers of all time. | ||
| He was like that the whole time when he first came in from wrestling. | ||
| I mean, he's defending jiu-jitsu moves, just being a wrestler, not even understanding jiu-jitsu, just on a natural instinct, which you don't see much in wrestling. | ||
| You know, wrestling has this bad habit of stretching their arms out, using their arms, and getting locked up a lot. | ||
| But he was just, so happened, was defending from the armbars, took him to Thailand, he started picking him up in the standing right away. | ||
| I mean, that guy was natural. | ||
| It was... | ||
| I mean, I still think he has it today, but he just doesn't have that confidence. | ||
| Yeah, when he first fought in the UFC against Kid Yamamoto, or against Demetrius Johnson, and then against Von Lee, I was telling everybody, I was like, man, wait till you see this guy. | ||
| But then by the time he got into the UFC, he had already lost some of his momentum. | ||
| He lost some of his fire. | ||
| You know, the fire that he had when he knocked out Hoyler Gracie, the fire that he had when he was in his prime. | ||
| Oh, man, he was a bad motherfucker. | ||
| When he was in his prime, it was like, you know, He was just a freak. | ||
| Just a real unusual athlete. | ||
| And I feel I know what's missing in him. | ||
| If I went and started training with him, I could get him right back. | ||
| I believe I can get him right back to what he was, but I don't want to deal with the father and I don't want to deal with the loyalty issues that he runs. | ||
| It's a shallow issue. | ||
| What is the state of Japanese MMA now? | ||
| It was gigantic for a while, when Sakuraba was big, when you were huge, when Pride was filling 90,000 seat arenas. | ||
| Yeah, it was huge. | ||
| It was like nothing else. | ||
| I experienced 60,000 at Rogers in Canada when George St. Pierre fought Jake Shields. | ||
| I couldn't imagine 30 more thousand people there. | ||
| But you were there for that. | ||
| Yeah, it was awesome. | ||
| If that was a 10 and before MMA actually came out when they only had Pancras and that was a 1, it's at like a 4 right now. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| It's Yakuza involvement. | ||
| I mean, the thing that people don't realize is in Japan, everything is Yakuza involvement. | ||
| Every big company, every big promotion. | ||
| Shuto tries to say that they never get Yakuza involvement, but they're backed by Sumiyoshi, which is the second largest group in Japan. | ||
| So everyone has Yakuza connections. | ||
| Any big Coca-Cola company, Johnson& Johnson, any company has Yakuza connections. | ||
| But it's not public. | ||
| So, say if Coca-Cola goes over there and they open up a plant in Japan, they must go through the Yakuza? | ||
| They'll have back connections, yes, definitely. | ||
| How do they negotiate that? | ||
| Well, it's really easy. | ||
| It's a turf thing. | ||
| If you know somebody, it's a percentage you pay. | ||
| It's a pretty given thing. | ||
| It's almost like taxes. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's just accepted. | ||
| Yes, it's accepted. | ||
| It's accepted. | ||
| That's why it's funny how when it became public, it got really bad because it's a weird thing. | ||
| It's accepted, but it's frowned upon. | ||
| It's something that they know they need to be a part of in society, but they don't want to make it public because the Yakuza does have a bad name. | ||
| That was the only place where I've ever been where they asked me to cover up my tattoos. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was weird. | ||
| That's why I try to keep them out from my sleeve so it comes out from there, but after that I stop because I don't want to walk around and be kicked out of places. | ||
| I just got denied to go in a hotel last week when I was in Japan. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because of my tattoos. | ||
| With the neck? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah, they sell the neck. | ||
| So if I wear a hoodie, it covers it up. | ||
| It helps. | ||
| Yeah, I got kicked out of a gym. | ||
| They made me go put a long-sleeve shirt on. | ||
| Yeah, the gyms. | ||
| Even big gyms like Goji Gym won't let you in. | ||
|
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That's crazy. | |
| What does it represent to Japanese? | ||
| It represents the underworld. | ||
| Gangsters. | ||
| You've got to figure, when you have a gang, there's two or three top men. | ||
| Those men are awesome people. | ||
| And then you got the rest of the hundreds and thousands that are punks. | ||
| And that's the ones that you see. | ||
| So basically a gangster, someone with tattoos, which equals Yakuza, would mean trouble. | ||
| And if you go into a sports gym and you're working out next to a guy and you're working on, say you take his weights by accident because he's in the middle of a set. | ||
| And if you're doing it to someone that's a normal person, he'll just say, hey, I was using those weights. | ||
| Oh, sorry. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But it might be different for the Yakuza. | ||
| And people would rather not work out in the area if there's a Yakuza guy working out there. | ||
| It's a bad rap. | ||
| I mean, it's justifiable, though. | ||
| I can understand that. | ||
| The UFC, when they went in and bought Pride, it's kind of a crazy story, but they paid $65 million, they bought Pride, and they thought, you know, hey, we're going to run Pride as well as the UFC. The same way they did with Strikeforce, when they bought Strikeforce. | ||
| They kept Strikeforce going for years. | ||
| They thought they were going to do that. | ||
| But meanwhile... | ||
| It turned out all of their contracts were illegal. | ||
| They really didn't have anybody under contract. | ||
| They spent $65 million and all they really got was a video library. | ||
| And then while they had offices in Japan and they were hiring these people and paying for them, they were starting up Dream. | ||
| They were starting up their own organization, organizing everything. | ||
| And then the UFC, it took years before they could come back and do a UFC there. | ||
| It took a long time. | ||
| I heard Dana was getting some underworld threats. | ||
|
unidentified
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Was he? | |
| Yeah, that's what I heard. | ||
| I sent Dana an email on that because if anything, I have a lot of pull in that side. | ||
| And I told him that if you have any problems with that, I can help you. | ||
| Well, what do you have to do? | ||
| Come to you and then you go to them? | ||
| I get really respected in that world. | ||
| So if I don't know the person directly, I have guys that know them. | ||
| So if he had any type of problem, it still stands still today. | ||
| If Dana has any type of underworld problems there, if he calls me, I'll take care of it for him. | ||
| It's interesting that there's such an underworld presence in Japan because it seems so safe when you're there. | ||
| People are so polite and you don't see violence. | ||
| You see drunk people walking to the street. | ||
| No one hurts them. | ||
| Everyone's fine. | ||
| The girls walk down dark lanes and it's okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a strange sort of contrast. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost like you just have bad areas. | ||
| Like in Shinjuku, they have over 300 Yakuza offices there. | ||
| Roppongi only has three. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, so you got these districts that they're accumulated in. | ||
| They have offices? | ||
| They have offices, yeah. | ||
| The Mafia doesn't have offices. | ||
| Yeah, see, that's the thing. | ||
| For me, I guess I grew up in America, so for me, the Mafia just scares me way more. | ||
| I mean, I have this image that you screw with the Mafia. | ||
| You better change your name. | ||
| You better move, and you better hide who your family is, and you better get the hell out of, just disappear. | ||
| But when you get in trouble with the Yakuza, I've been in trouble with them before, and it's like you can kind of pretty much deal with them the way you want to deal with them. | ||
| It depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice. | ||
| What was your issue with them? | ||
| There was one with Kid. | ||
| When I, this guy, this Yakuza guy wanted to open up a gym, And I agreed to open up a gym with him called Purebred Tokyo Killer Bee. | ||
| And I just told him that the only thing you have to do is you have to hire two of my fighters so they can make a living through fighting. | ||
| And I wanted to help them out. | ||
| I want no money. | ||
| You can use my name of my gym, but you have to hire my two fighters. | ||
| They hired Kid and they hired Ryan Bull. | ||
| And those two fighters and everything was good. | ||
| And what happened was Kid started, I guess from the influence of his father, he started being, the loyalty issue on him was getting, was swavering, where he wasn't telling me stuff. | ||
| He was hiding stuff. | ||
| He was lying to me. | ||
| And then I put that Yakuza guy in charge of him that ran the gym. | ||
| So I told him, I called him and said, what's going on, man? | ||
| You got to take care of it. | ||
| He goes, I'll take care of it. | ||
| I'll take care of it. | ||
| He's told me that. | ||
| And it got to a point he didn't take care of it. | ||
| So I called him and I was pissed already by now. | ||
| And I called him and said, you know what? | ||
| Call me. | ||
| He avoided my calls for three weeks. | ||
| And I'm sitting there. | ||
| This guy's running from me. | ||
| I'm thinking, this is ridiculous. | ||
| So I'm thinking, okay, this guy's running from me. | ||
| I'm not going to look for him. | ||
| He's going to pop up. | ||
| These guys that try to run, they pop up all the time. | ||
| So I'm sitting there watching the Uno kid fight. | ||
| And kid wins the fight, and this guy's in the ring jumping and hugging him. | ||
| I'm thinking, motherfucker, this guy's hiding from me. | ||
| He's on national TV, hugging me, saying, hey, Anson, I'm here. | ||
| So I guess this is it. | ||
| So I called my students to find out where the after party is. | ||
| I went out to the after party and I was literally going to walk in there, grab that guy with a hair and pull him out of the party. | ||
| But my students felt it was going to be a problem. | ||
| It was going to make too much commotion. | ||
| Cops are going to be called. | ||
| So they decided to get him in. | ||
| They brought him up and brought him to the park. | ||
| And pretty much beat him for like 20 minutes. | ||
| Which is something you shouldn't do in Japan. | ||
| Because in the Yakuza world, they work by face. | ||
| They work by being tough, being scary. | ||
| To collect money and stuff. | ||
| And if you've got a black eye and bruises on their face, it kind of goes against the fact that they're tough people. | ||
| So I beat him up pretty bad. | ||
| But see, the thing is, I never did pick on anyone. | ||
| I never did do anything without a reason. | ||
| And I believed that I would die for my beliefs tomorrow. | ||
| And I believed that I was right. | ||
| And this guy really deserved that shit. | ||
| So if they didn't like it, if the top guys didn't like it, then they can... | ||
| They know where to find me and so what happened was it was going on for 20 minutes and when I went down I let people and some people my friends know and they were all worried so they made calls and we had two other Yakuza guys come down to the scene to try and stop me to kind of get in between not stop me physically but to ask for forgiveness for this guy. | ||
| And they're kind of like bowing in the middle of me and the guy and I'm getting around and just giving him whacks at a time. | ||
| And if he were to fall from a hit, I'd grab him and stand him right back up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, shit. | |
| Yeah, so it was kind of getting brutal. | ||
| He was all bloody. | ||
| These guys were kind of my friends too, so they weren't going to get involved, but they were trying to stop me from going too far. | ||
| And when we... | ||
| There's this old lady. | ||
| You know how you have the old ladies in the neighborhood that don't give a fuck who you are? | ||
| This lady comes on and starts screaming at us. | ||
|
unidentified
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She's making too much noise! | |
| And one of the jackals gets on the lady and I say, no, no, hey, man, don't do that, man. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| So we moved over to the next part. | ||
| And as we're moving over to the next part, like three freaking monkeys, this guy's higher-ups find out what's happening and come out. | ||
| And they're walking up like these, you know, like the movies. | ||
| It was funny because I call them monkeys because they're walking through bushes. | ||
| I saw them walking through the trees. | ||
| And they came out and I was like, oh shit, these are the guys. | ||
| These are like the hothead guys. | ||
| And they came up to me and they were screaming in Japanese to me, oh, we're going to hurt you now because you hurt our brother. | ||
| And then some of my guys came and held them back. | ||
| And I was like, okay, wait a minute. | ||
| If it's going to happen, it's going to happen now. | ||
| So I told my guys, let them go. | ||
| I said, let them go. | ||
| I said, I just want to say one thing to you guys. | ||
| And they came up, and they're all, you know, they got this stance, and they're all mad at me and looking at me. | ||
| And I'm looking, I said, I got one thing to do. | ||
| I got one thing to say. | ||
| If I say that you don't like it, we can have it out. | ||
| I said, I'm ready to die tonight. | ||
| And then this guy goes, okay. | ||
| And so I tell him, okay, if someone fucked you over, I said, you want to punish him. | ||
| Wouldn't that be fair? | ||
| He goes, yes. | ||
| But look what you did to him. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at him. | |
| He's all bloody. | ||
| He's standing here all bloody, you know. | ||
| And I said, well, you know what? | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| I'll ask you one question. | ||
| If I wanted to kill him with my hands, how fast do you think I could do it? | ||
| He said, probably five minutes. | ||
| Within five minutes. | ||
| I said, hell, within two minutes I'd kill that fucker. | ||
| And he goes, yeah, but what does that mean? | ||
| And I said, well, I've been hitting him for 20 minutes. | ||
| I said, dude, this is like 10% of what I could do. | ||
| And I said, don't you agree? | ||
| If you had somebody fuck you over and you decide to just do 10% out of respect to the people behind him, wouldn't you think that's fair? | ||
| And that guy just changed straight up. | ||
| Boom. | ||
| Stopped. | ||
| And he said, you're right, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Wow, that doesn't fly in America. | ||
| That's an interesting code that they operate on. | ||
| They believe in the underworld side. | ||
| There's two sides of the fence. | ||
| There's the legal side and the illegal side. | ||
| The illegitimate side. | ||
| And you are never, ever, if you're on the illegitimate side or you have an illegitimate problem, you are never, ever allowed to go to the other side to get help. | ||
| If you're going to stay, you're going to get other guys to help you on this side and retaliate, that's fine. | ||
| But if you ever go to authorities, then you lose face and you never can ever work in that world again. | ||
| Wow, so you have to deal with things on your own. | ||
| When it's a problem like that, yeah. | ||
| You pretty much... | ||
| If you're someone from the outside and you're like a regular businessman and these guys come and bother you, the best thing to do is go with authorities. | ||
| Because the police are just waiting to grab the yakuza. | ||
| So it's like a real... | ||
| It's like kryptonite to the yakuza. | ||
| If you say you're going to the police, they'll back off. | ||
| But if... | ||
| I live my life in that side pretty much, you know what I mean? | ||
| A lot of my friends are part of those groups and a lot of my beliefs run really deep with their beliefs. | ||
| See the thing is, when you hear about the Yakuza, they get a bad rap because you talk about child pornography, drugs, extortion. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| When they steal money from people, you know. | ||
| But the thing that they don't see, that's all the things in the media. | ||
| But the things that they don't see, which I feel is really unfortunate, is the honor and the loyalty they have for each other. | ||
| And that's where me and them click really well, you know. | ||
| I mean, they will die for anyone in their group tomorrow. | ||
| They'll go to jail for 10 years for their boss tomorrow if they have to. | ||
| I mean, you don't see that type of loyalty around nowadays, you know. | ||
| Non-American. | ||
| I dig that loyalty. | ||
| I think that's why they respect me so much. | ||
| I will die for my values. | ||
| I will die for my people that are close to me. | ||
| It's just such an unbelievably fascinating culture how different Japan is in so many ways. | ||
| There's big gaps in it. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's really, really, really fascinating stuff. | ||
| It's just that all these different cultures evolve independently. | ||
| The Japanese culture evolved independently from the American culture, independently from the European culture. | ||
| And it's so different. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| I think all the places are different, man. | ||
| It's hard to really move into a different country and run yourself in the way that you learned in another country. | ||
| Because it's... | ||
| You know, when in Rome... | ||
| What do you think about the state of Japanese MMA right now? | ||
| Because it's kind of in a transitionary period. | ||
| At one point in time, it was gigantic. | ||
| And you say Yakuza involvement is why... | ||
| Corporate sponsors backed out and they lost a lot of viewership. | ||
| But, man, it was not that long ago that they were selling out these gigantic places. | ||
| What's going on right now? | ||
| Well, right now, like I said, it's at the number four right now. | ||
| There's people that are real hesitant. | ||
| There are not many sponsors that want to put money into it. | ||
| On the flip side, the big thing that's happening is gangster events. | ||
| Where they allow gangsters to fight in the ring. | ||
| And yeah, it's crazy, dude. | ||
| It's like, I attend all those. | ||
| I'm like a guest in most of them. | ||
| They pay me just to be there and to judge sometimes, to make a speech in the ring, maybe in the beginning, because I'm so respected in that world that to have me there A lot of these gangsters tone down. | ||
| When they want to riot, they don't riot. | ||
| I mean, you go to an event and it's not unusual to see a picture of two stick figures fighting and have a big X on it. | ||
| Don't fight! | ||
| It's like, isn't that given? | ||
|
unidentified
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You never see any signs of the UFC saying, please don't fight in the audience. | |
| It's already given. | ||
| It's not something you should do. | ||
| But yeah, that's a big thing right now. | ||
| But it's good because the gangster events actually... | ||
| They have headbutts, they have elbow striking, you can foot stomp, you can knee the groin, you can do whatever pretty much. | ||
| No holds barred. | ||
| They have two on one, they have two on two. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| It's crazy, dude. | ||
| How often do they have these fights? | ||
| They have them about once a month, man. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, and it's like these guys, it's become, it's a good trend because it's become where these guys just came off the streets thinking they're tough, gassing on in one minute from these guys actually spending time in the gym now and being off the street. | ||
| So it's actually a good movement. | ||
| A lot of there's about three or four gangsters already now that's actually made their pro debut in deep. | ||
| So these guys are actually gonna run gangs and start selling drugs and you know doing illegal activity. | ||
| They're now training and having a future in fighting which is awesome. | ||
| As far as the legitimate side of MMA, I see it. | ||
| I can see it picking up again and it's all due to the UFC. So the UFC's done a couple of events there now. | ||
| Yeah the last one they did when I went to that it was it's huge man that's so big I mean As much as the Japanese fans are kind of losing hope in Japanese MMA because a lot of productions were floating. | ||
| When I went to the UFC, I felt that energy again. | ||
| When I was fighting in Pride, that energy that they had in the audience. | ||
| Especially when Rampage came out with the Pride music. | ||
| It gave me goosebumps because when he came out to that, I looked around the arena. | ||
| And I was like, damn, this is just like a pride. | ||
| This is a pride. | ||
| And it's the first time since that big incident with the Yakuza movement and pride that I've actually seen that again. | ||
| It was surreal to me, actually. | ||
| And I was like, this is gonna be the ticket back, is the UFC coming to Japan. | ||
| If the UFC did an Ultimate Fighter in Japan, a Japanese version of it, would you be interested in coaching? | ||
| Oh yeah, definitely. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| That would be perfect. | ||
| You would really be perfect for something like that. | ||
| Yeah, I would love that. | ||
| I hope they do it, because they're starting to do that in other countries now. | ||
| You saw they did it in Australia, the Smashes, the Brazilian show. | ||
| I mean, it's natural for it eventually to go to Japan, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's probably inevitable someday. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So, as far as Japanese standouts, obviously Aoki's probably one of the bigger guys right now, right? | ||
| And who are the other guys that are coming up that you see? | ||
| I like Ricky Fukuda. | ||
| Ricky Fukuda's very good. | ||
| I'm a little biased on that because I used to train with him, so I'm a little biased on that. | ||
| Very good wrestling. | ||
| Yeah, and that guy's still young. | ||
| He's real hungry. | ||
| I think he just needs someone in the corner to keep that killer instinct going because he's such a nice guy. | ||
| And he's an AKA now? | ||
| Yeah, and he's such a nice guy. | ||
| I mean, you've got to convince this guy that this guy's going to try and hurt you. | ||
| You've got to hurt him first, you know? | ||
| So he has that little teddy bear instead of him that It's got to be ignited. | ||
| You got to get that on and get the Grizzly on. | ||
| Yeah, he's going to be a good fighter. | ||
| What about Hatsu Hioki? | ||
| Yeah, he's already good. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| Yeah, he's awesome. | ||
| I thought Omigawa was going to do better too, man. | ||
| Yeah, Omigawa has had some tough breaks. | ||
| Yeah, he had some bad calls, but the last one he actually did really lose. | ||
| Yeah, I thought Omigawa was going to do something like that. | ||
| Well, it's also Omegawa is at the tail end of a long career. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| How many years do you think a guy can compete at a Fedor level for? | ||
| I mean, there's only a certain amount of years where your body can kind of redline at those high RPMs and keep it going when you're at top form. | ||
| It all depends on the fighter, I believe. | ||
| Like a fighter like me, I think maybe five, six years. | ||
| A fighter that goes in there training with everything he has and willing to die in the ring. | ||
| I mean, not accepting the fact that I might die, but fighting with the will to die. | ||
| It's a whole different thing. | ||
| But then you got another fighter like Sakuraba. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That goes in there and takes the fight in two days and is just having fun and does this weird ass, dumb ass entrance coming in with this riding a scooter and, you know, and actually literally having fun in the fight. | ||
| Those fighters can go on forever, you know. | ||
| Yeah, Sakuraba, man. | ||
| That guy has had some incredible fights. | ||
| I think that guy's got to retire, though. | ||
| He's been taking too much hits. | ||
| The Melvin Manhoof fight was fucking scary. | ||
| When Melvin Manhoof was beating on him, you're like, man, he doesn't need that at this stage of his life. | ||
| He's done so much for the sport. | ||
| I mean, I think he should, you know, don't want to do another Muhammad Ali. | ||
| Yeah, there's been so many. | ||
| There's been so many beatdowns that he's had, like, in the later stages of his career. | ||
|
unidentified
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You've got to really look at a guy like that and, like, man... | |
| But his ability to absorb punishment is fucking shocking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's unbelievable, man. | ||
| The one that freaked me out was the Nino Elvis. | ||
| Yeah, when he got dropped by that, it was weird. | ||
| That's not the same Sakuraba. | ||
| I think he's been taking too much hits, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's no question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you were honest about yourself. | ||
| You're like five, six years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Your style is so fucking aggressive and wild. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Well, I write letters to everyone that's close to me before every fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, and every time I come back alive from the fight, I burn them all. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| And so, literally, I'm training, the three months that I'm training for a fight, I'm literally training not to die. | ||
| And if you knew there was a possibility you were going to die in this certain area, most people would avoid it. | ||
| But we have to do, I have to walk there on my own will. | ||
| And the stress level for me, I mean, I wish I could just take it lighter and say it's a sport. | ||
| I mean, I have to like play, you know, like I had, you know, you ever heard the Tenacious D song, Fuck Me Gently? | ||
| No. | ||
| Nagara Fight, if you look at the Nagara ring entrance, after the ring entrance, I put on headphones. | ||
| That's the song that I was playing. | ||
| Because it's like a joke song. | ||
| It makes, it lightens my, like, you're not going to die today, you know. | ||
| There's going to be a tomorrow. | ||
| I go into fights, if it's the fights on the 19th, and someone asks me on the 21st, I got a party, can you come? | ||
| I'm literally, I'm feeling inside, man. | ||
| If I am at that party, I'm super happy because that means I'm still alive. | ||
| You know, I'm really, really preparing for death that day, you know. | ||
| And for me, it's so stressful, man. | ||
| I mean, I actually didn't feel I could do it anymore. | ||
| I mean, every time I fought, after I fought win or lose, I always felt like, shit, it's over, I'm alive. | ||
| Because I was willing to die in the fight. | ||
| It's a little bit too intense for me. | ||
| What was the closest you think you came to death in the fight? | ||
| Igor, probably. | ||
| That was a crazy fight. | ||
| It's actually the fight where I thought that I should retire. | ||
| Not because of the beating, but because I didn't think there was anything else in MMA that would ever teach me to be a stronger man. | ||
| I didn't once feel that I wanted to give up. | ||
| I never contemplated giving up at all. | ||
| Not once. | ||
| I mean, I had a broken finger, I had a broken jaw, I had a swollen brain, perforated eardrum. | ||
| And apparently my liver count was like 2,000 times the normal person. | ||
| You had a swollen brain? | ||
| Swollen brain, yeah. | ||
| So they hospitalized me for the first four days because they wanted to CAT scan my brain every day. | ||
| Because when the swelling's impacting the veins, if there's bleeding, you can't tell. | ||
| And when the brain goes back to its size and it's not compacted anymore, if there's bleeding, that's when you can tell the bleeding. | ||
| So they were worried that my brain might be bleeding. | ||
| There might be bleeding in the brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| So while this is all going on, how are you feeling? | ||
| I felt fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Well, the thing is, if you watch the video of the fight, when I was done, I remember laying down thinking, oh shit. | ||
| Got over, got through the first, you know, the big 10-minute round, you know, I said, okay, got best at round. | ||
| Second round, I know I cut him. | ||
| So I'm thinking, we're going to stand, go start standing again. | ||
| I'm going to stand toe-to-toe and I'm going to open that cut up. | ||
| And I remember Egan leaning over to me and looking at me and saying, I'm going to stop the fight. | ||
| And I was like, whoa. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| You're not stopping in the fight. | ||
| And we have a rule that you don't throw a towel. | ||
| You know the towel that we have? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In the ring engines, I always throw it into the fans. | ||
| They give us that towel. | ||
| I throw it off. | ||
| And when Egan told me that, I said, shit, I wanted to lay down at least another maybe 10 seconds to kind of recollect and everything. | ||
| And And he said that I said, oh shit, I gotta get up because Egan's gonna stop the fight. | ||
| So I started getting up and I remember getting up and walking to the corner but my legs weren't under me. | ||
| And it was the weirdest feeling because I felt like below my waist was a whole different machine. | ||
| I mean, I was dragging on me and I was saying, oh shit, my legs. | ||
| And then when I sat down in the corner, when you see the video, I mean, everyone says, you know, that I'm screaming, no, no, no, because this guy's trying to stop the fight. | ||
| But we got two minutes between rounds. | ||
| And he comes in 10 seconds after I sit down and saying, looking at me, saying, I'm going to stop the fight. | ||
| And I didn't realize how bad I looked, you know. | ||
| So I was saying, no, no. | ||
| I'm saying, no, no, meaning that there's two more minutes. | ||
| Give me two more minutes. | ||
| Check me after two minutes. | ||
| And then we give your assessment then. | ||
| And I'm screaming, no, no, no, no. | ||
| And they called the fight, you know, and What so happened was that I had a perfect eardrum and I lost my balance. | ||
| So basically I couldn't, unless I had like two days or three days between the rounds, I probably couldn't have done the second round anyway. | ||
| So I didn't know that. | ||
| But the thing that made me really happy about that is when I saw the video on the fight, my heart and my spirit didn't die. | ||
| As much as punishment I was taking, it was never an issue. | ||
| Which really made me realize that if I take any more in the beating, I'll probably die. | ||
| And I think to myself that in MMA, as far as a test in my heart and a strong hands as a man, it's probably not going to go any further than that. | ||
| So you were thinking that you should retire because you proved to yourself that you were willing to die, literally. | ||
| Yeah, and I already knew that I wasn't going to be the best in the world. | ||
| I wasn't interested in grabbing a pride belt. | ||
| I basically was fighting. | ||
| If you look at all my fights, when I took fights, it was always when they were at the top of their game. | ||
| I took Heath Heering when he just beat Erickson. | ||
| I took Nogueira when he was the top of the world. | ||
| I took Mark Kerr when he was still considered a specimen. | ||
| So all these fights that I took was when people were at the top of their game. | ||
| I took those fights not because I thought I could win. | ||
| I thought that there was the fights that there's no way I could win. | ||
| That's the reason why I took those fights because I thought I was going to put myself in somewhere that was going to test my heart. | ||
| You went to sleep in the Noguera fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| You got caught in a triangle and you just didn't tap. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You see, the thing is, this is a thing that people always ask me. | ||
| They think that not tapping is about being tough and being macho and being someone who can't feel pain. | ||
| But the truth of the matter is, I have this saying that I always refer to as, a strong man feels no pain, but a man with the samurai spirit, Yamato Damashi, feels pain, but can continue through the pain. | ||
| When you read the first part, the strong man feels the pain. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| That's what I want to be. | ||
| And when you read the second part, it's like, it's not really that real. | ||
| I mean, but the real man is the one who feels the pain but works through the pain. | ||
| The strong man fears no opponent, but the man of Yamatomashi fears the opponent and sees it as a challenge and takes it on head-on. | ||
| That's my belief in my fighting. | ||
| When I fought, that's what it was all about, you know, facing those fears. | ||
| You still fought after the Igor fight, though. | ||
| You fought Heath Herring, then you fought Nogueira, then you fought Nishida, and then you fought Tom Sawyer. | ||
| Yeah, it was all, you know, it was so funny because it was all a thing of my way of saying goodbye to fighting, you know, because when I fought... | ||
| Igor, I thought, okay, I could retire today. | ||
| But I thought, you know, after all MMA has done for me, I want to give him a fight. | ||
| And so I said, the hearing. | ||
| And Pride knew I was going to retire after the fight. | ||
| But they didn't want to give me the mic. | ||
| And no one knew. | ||
| No one knew that I was going to retire. | ||
| And I just grabbed the mic at the end and I said, this is the last of Yama Tlamashi. | ||
| And everyone freaked out on that. | ||
| And the reason why I fought Nagara was because when 9-11 happened, I had a friend die in the second tower. | ||
| And I felt, I really felt that I was being hypocritical because I would look in the, see the special stuff in the TV of the building collapsing and really literally feeling like shit, you know, and pretty much really downing my day. | ||
| And I can actually switch off the TV and walk to the game center and laugh without a problem with my friends. | ||
| And I felt like a real prick, you know, like, oh, there's no honor. | ||
| I mean, if you really feel shitty about what's happening, do something about it, you know? | ||
| So I thought to myself, what am I going to do? | ||
| And I felt really shitty every time I had that wave of change. | ||
| And I was thinking, I got to be freaking real to myself, man. | ||
| I'm going to lose my honor if I don't take care of this shit. | ||
| So I thought I'm going to enlist in the army. | ||
| So I decided I'm going to enlist. | ||
| And I tried to enlist. | ||
| I was 36. The cutoff age is 34. And the biggest thing I couldn't get around was the tattoos out of uniform. | ||
| The head and the palm tattoos. | ||
| So I couldn't enlist. | ||
| And my thing was okay. | ||
| If I'm going to enlist, I didn't know I couldn't enlist. | ||
| I thought, I'm going to enlist. | ||
| I want to fight. | ||
| One more fight. | ||
| Because I don't know if I'm going to die there. | ||
| I don't know if I'm going to come back mentally deranged where I'll never be able to fight again. | ||
| And I figured I wanted to say a farewell fight. | ||
| And I asked for Vanderlei. | ||
| And they gave me Vanderlei. | ||
| It was $200,000 to fight Vanderlei. | ||
| And I was like, you guys just fucked up. | ||
| I would've fucked Van Der Le for free. | ||
| Because that's one guy I figured at the end of my career with a bang. | ||
| We'd stand toe-to-toe, dust clear, someone's going to be standing. | ||
| If it's me, fine. | ||
| If it's Van Der Le, fine. | ||
| I'm good with it. | ||
| As long as I threw toe-to-toe to the very end. | ||
| So it was cool because I was saying, this is awesome. | ||
| This is like picture perfect. | ||
| I'm going to fight Van Der Le, I'm going to war. | ||
| I die there, I'm fine. | ||
| And all of a sudden, two weeks into the fight, they call me and tell me that they want me to fight Norgara. | ||
| And I'm like, you know, I got my ass kicked by a lot of heavyweights. | ||
| You know, I kind of want to fight at my weight now. | ||
| And I'm not interested in Norgara. | ||
| He was a pride champion at the time. | ||
| I thought it was more real for me to fight Vanderlei. | ||
| I mean, for the weight. | ||
| Why did they change that? | ||
| Apparently what I found later was they got tomorrow. | ||
| So, Tamura wouldn't be able to fight Nagara with a size difference. | ||
| So, Tamura fought Vanderlei. | ||
| Yeah, so they figured it was a big draw for Tamura. | ||
| I mean, Tamura is a huge name in Japan. | ||
| Pro wrestling? | ||
| Yeah, from some of the UW and UWF, the pro wrestling. | ||
| As much as fireworks as the world would have loved Ensign Vanderlei, the Japanese crowd would have loved probably Tamura Vanderlei bigger. | ||
| Damn, that would have been a crazy fight. | ||
| You and Vandele would have been a fucking supernova. | ||
| Yeah, my whole thing about fighting Vandele was to push him backwards. | ||
| Because every time he gets caught in every one of his fights, and I always notice that he's had such fast recovery that as he's going down, he recovers and shoots for a single or a double. | ||
| And he'll recover then. | ||
| But I figured if I even move like Vitor did, if you move Vandele backwards, you hit him going backwards and he falls backwards and you can end the fight. | ||
| Now, knowing your beliefs and your philosophy of Yamato Dimashii, how did you feel about the fights that were There was some obvious works over there. | ||
| There was some definite fights where people were paid to lose and paid to win and there was a lot of fuckery going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did that drive you crazy? | ||
| Well, it pissed me off. | ||
| It pissed me off too. | ||
| I went public on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did you? | |
| I mean, I had public about Takata Kerr. | ||
| Takata Komen. | ||
| Takata Komen was one of the most obvious ones. | ||
| Yeah, and I went public on that and I tried to be nice about it. | ||
| I mean, for a fighter who's willing to die in the ring, that's total disrespect. | ||
| To go into our ring, that we're dripping our real blood and sweat in, and willing to die in, and these guys are pulling works in there, that's totally disrespect. | ||
| And when he did that, it was such a big thing that the MMA magazines in Japan actually interviewed me about that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I didn't be blatant and be a dick about it and say, you know, he fought a fake fight, he's a dick, he's a faggot. | ||
| I just said that the rules that Takara fought and the rules that I fought are two different rules. | ||
| And I believe the rules that he fought should be in a different ring. | ||
| So pretty much painting it out that it was a bullshit fight. | ||
| So I just stated that way and Takara got pissed off at it and he banned all interviews with me and Sakuraba together because Sakuraba was fighting under Takara. | ||
| And yeah, he was kind of pissed off about it, but you know, he can go suck my eggs because you know what? | ||
| I'm telling the truth. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's all. | |
| Yeah, it was pretty obvious. | ||
| The Coleman fight was like, it was like pro wrestling. | ||
| It was so obvious. | ||
| He was like, almost going to tap, and then like adding drama to it. | ||
| It was so silly. | ||
| But he had a few real fights. | ||
| You know, Takata had a real fight against Hickson. | ||
| That was a real fight. | ||
| You could tell, you know, Hickson was... | ||
| And plus, there was no way Hickson was going to throw a fight. | ||
| Yeah, no way, no way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you ever get to roll with Hickson? | ||
| Yeah, but that was when I was a white belt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And of course, he probably would have toyed me when I was a black belt, but he toyed me when I was a white belt and just kind of went through the whole school. | ||
| You know how he lines over and spars with everybody? | ||
| Yeah, he did that. | ||
| Yeah, I've got a video of that, of one of his seminars back when he had the samurai ponytail thing going on. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And he just lines everybody up and just taps them over and over. | ||
| I mean, nobody knew what the fuck they were doing. | ||
| Everybody was essentially a white belt. | ||
| Maybe there was like a blue belt in the mix. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But still, it's so fascinating watching him just Gently toy with everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, just choosing how he's going to catch you. | ||
| Yeah, that guy was one and only, I believe. | ||
| He's the one that, for me, I'd go, God damn, I wish he had more fights. | ||
| He's one of the ones where I would have loved to see him fight. | ||
| I mean, I had dinner with him many years back when Fedor was on top, and he wanted to fight Fedor. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That would have been interesting. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, very, very. | ||
| You know, the real question was, could he fade that ground and pound? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| You know, Fedor's ground and pound, like the Noguera fight. | ||
| It was fucking incredible, man. | ||
| Especially that first fight where he got him stuffed in the corner by the turnbuckle and was just blasting with shots. | ||
| And that was when Noguera was at his most durable. | ||
| Very few other human beings would have been able to take those shots the way Noguera was taking them. | ||
| But I would have really loved to see Hickson against top-level guys. | ||
| Just to see if... | ||
| Because he had this effect on people. | ||
| When he got a hold of them on the ground, like, you're fucking done. | ||
| No one was getting up. | ||
| No one was getting out of mount. | ||
| No one was hip-escaping and getting back to their feet. | ||
| There was none of that in Hickson's fights. | ||
| It was Hickson mounts you, and then he punches you until you give up your back, and then he chokes the shit out of you. | ||
| That was every fight. | ||
| Becomes tech book finisher. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I wanted to see him against higher guys. | ||
| To this day, he's the one guy that, man, it just really drives me nuts that he's in his 50s now and we missed it. | ||
| We really missed his opportunity. | ||
| Yeah, that's the guy that's unreal. | ||
| It's too bad. | ||
| Everybody does in jujitsu. | ||
| The Japan Valley Tudo days, you know, when you saw him, you know, like right after Hoist had made his mark in America, Hickson had made his mark in Japan. | ||
| Really amazing. | ||
| That documentary, Choke, if you've never seen it, folks, if you're an MMA fan, ah, it's a classic. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Really shows you what Hickson's all about. | ||
| And, you know, a very similar philosophy to you was where, you know, he was willing to die in there as well. | ||
| And, you know, he was fighting with honor. | ||
| He would have never thrown a fight. | ||
| So you saw Takata setting up a fight with Hickson, and you're like, well, he's going to have to fight this one. | ||
| Yeah, for real, yeah. | ||
| That's got to be weird, where some of his fights were fake and some of his fights were real. | ||
| Yeah, that's disrespectful. | ||
| That guy has no business being in the MMA ring. | ||
| He won by one a body kick. | ||
| Who the fuck did he fight? | ||
| He kicked somebody and it was like, you were watching and going, what is that? | ||
| Like, just didn't look legit at all. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that guy, I got no good words for Takato. | |
| But he was a big time pro wrestler, right? | ||
| Yeah, he was a big time pro wrestler. | ||
| Was he like the rock, like the Japanese version? | ||
| Yeah, sort of like that, yeah. | ||
| But, you know, pro wrestling is pro wrestling. | ||
| But it's big over there, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's still going on pretty big here in Japan, yeah. | ||
| A lot of people don't realize that, like, American MMA fighters, sometimes they go over there and take fights, too. | ||
| Like, I know Tim Sylvia's had MMA. Yeah. | ||
| He's had, you know, pro wrestling. | ||
| Josh Barnett's huge over there, right? | ||
| He does a lot of that shit, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Josh is one of those few guys that can do both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And does it well. | ||
| Oh, Sakuraba also. | ||
| Oh, Bob Sapp is pretty good at it, too. | ||
| Well, he doesn't do fighting that well, though. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| As far as, yeah... | ||
| Josh is unreal. | ||
| That guy's so funny. | ||
| He enjoys it. | ||
| Josh really likes the pro wrestler. | ||
| I think he's more of a pro wrestler than an MMA fighter. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| He's an MMA fighter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, he's a pro wrestler that just is really good at MMA. Yeah, I'm fascinated by Josh's longevity. | |
| I mean, you look at him. | ||
| He's a guy that was the UFC heavyweight champion in... | ||
| 2001, I think it was. | ||
| And he's still in the mix. | ||
| 2013, still top five heavyweight in the world. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Hasn't lost a step. | ||
| I believe that guy can be the best in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even at the Strikeforce tournament. | ||
| Was it a Strikeforce tournament? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He lost to Cormier, but he broke his hand in the first round. | ||
| Yeah, I thought Joss hands down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even with Fedor in it, I thought Joss hands down. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I picked Joss in the beginning. | ||
| That was another fucking loss to the MMA world when he pissed hot and he couldn't fight Fedor and they closed affliction down. | ||
| Yeah, that was huge. | ||
| That would have been a crazy fight, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Josh against Fedor would have been very, very interesting. | ||
| And that was Fedor in his prime, too, after the Tim Sylvia knockout. | ||
| It was like everybody was terrified of Fedor. | ||
| He just looked like a fucking destroyer. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| He was a destroyer. | ||
| But again, somebody wrote this thing about fighters where you look at fighters from the time they entered into high-level MMA competition to the time they started to fade. | ||
| And with almost all of them, it's like seven to nine years. | ||
| Between seven and nine years, you see the transition where it drops off. | ||
| Not Josh Barnett, man. | ||
| 15 plus years, still at the top of his game. | ||
| I met that guy in 97 when I was training for... | ||
| Well, actually, maybe it was 2000-something when I went to Maurice's gym to train. | ||
| Well, he was fighting in Hawaii when you were living there, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was like a little fat kid, though. | ||
| Yeah, he was fat as fuck. | ||
| He had a big crazy belly, but he was gangster, man. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| Fucking wild. | ||
| That dude is wild. | ||
| You know, his trainer, that's another interesting story, Matt Hume. | ||
| You know, Matt Hume is one of those guys that was a pioneer, was there in the early days. | ||
| And is still viable and on top of the game today. | ||
| Still on top of the curve. | ||
| Trains Demetrius Johnson, the flyweight fighter, world champion. | ||
| He's training Matt Brown. | ||
| A lot of top-level guys like Rich Franklin. | ||
| Spend a lot of time down there training him. | ||
| Everybody respects him. | ||
| Being very well-rounded and a great... | ||
| Gnosis thing. | ||
| He's one of the few guys that made it all the way through. | ||
| In the early days, he fought in Shudo, he fought in that Contenders thing. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Still on top of it. | ||
| Still training guys at the highest level today. | ||
| I think that's fascinating that some guys figure it all out along the line and some guys... | ||
| Like, whether it's the Lion's Den or whether it's, you know, Militich fighting systems. | ||
| They sort of, like, disband and move away and step away from the game. | ||
| Kind of feeds out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas AMC Pancration, still on top of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He's still, like, right... | ||
| That's a smart guy, man. | ||
| Very smart guy. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| I love listening to him give advice in the corner because you'll hear like sometimes in the corner like a fighter will have his friends in the corner or it's like you'll hear stupid advice like go kick his ass! | ||
| Come on kick his ass! | ||
| You'll hear Matt Hume, like, you gotta check that leg kick. | ||
| Move to the left. | ||
| You gotta do this. | ||
| When he's shooting, when he's shooting, that's when you're punching. | ||
| When he's, you know, he'll give you, like, real technical shit. | ||
| You know, you'll see, like, what the guy, applicable to what's going on inside the cage. | ||
| Like, real point-for-point instruction to deal with his very specific situation that he's facing. | ||
| That's so rare. | ||
| When I fought Joe Estes in Japan, Matt was in his corner. | ||
| And every time I was trying to set something up, Matt would tell him. | ||
| It was the first time in my career that I ever felt like, shit, the corner man really screwing up my game. | ||
| Every time I thought of something, wash your arm, wash your arm, and he'd suck it in. | ||
| I'm like, oh, shit. | ||
| I couldn't set anything up because Matt was seeing it ahead. | ||
| And he knew when my hip shifted, what's your left arm? | ||
| When I did this, what's the turnover? | ||
| What's the hip throw? | ||
| He was giving them the heads up one step ahead of time. | ||
| So huge to have a guy like that in your corner. | ||
| Yeah, and it's rare. | ||
| And so huge to have him in your corner in Japan where you could actually hear him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's what a lot of people don't realize. | ||
| It's quiet. | ||
| It's crazy quiet. | ||
| During these Pride fights, there would be 90,000 people in an arena, and you could hear everyone's corner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was nuts! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you could hear. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| And they're super attentive too. | ||
| It's not like they're not paying attention either. | ||
| And clapping when someone passed the guard. | ||
| You would hear a big group of people clapping and then everyone settle down and be quiet again. | ||
| Do you miss that respectful approach to the sport? | ||
| Well, I think it's good and bad too. | ||
| I mean, the American public where they're screaming like idiots, you know, they're screaming at the every punch thrown when they stop brawling, start booing, you know, I mean, it's that animal atmosphere is also pretty good for the event, you know? | ||
| I mean, there's a give and take to both. | ||
| The booing drives me nuts. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's like they're making awesome transition on the ground. | ||
| Get a clue, you know? | ||
| The real problem is people that go there just to see blood or just to see an event, and they don't know what they're seeing. | ||
| And so everybody knows what's going on. | ||
| If you and Igor are thrown down in the middle of the cage, everybody knows what's happening, or the middle of the ring, as it were. | ||
| Everybody knows. | ||
| You could see that. | ||
| You go, this is crazy. | ||
| Someone's going to get knocked the fuck out. | ||
| But when you're watching some high-level transitions on the ground, if you don't know what they're doing, you're lost. | ||
| And so people would start booing. | ||
| That's so disheartening to me. | ||
| It just drives me nuts. | ||
| I love the fact that the UFC can fill up these big arenas, but I hate the fact they're filling them up with a certain percentage of douchebags. | ||
| Yeah, I guess the money is still green. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like, I wish that the martial arts aspect was respected and appreciated. | ||
| And I feel like the only way that's ever going to really happen is for a much larger percent of the audience to be martial artists themselves. | ||
| To be training, and not just to be... | ||
| Isn't this trend actually happening? | ||
| I think it's increasing. | ||
| There's not much drunk idiots just screaming for blood, no. | ||
| There's definitely less, and it depends on where you are. | ||
| There's some places where they're super polite, and some places where they just go fucking crazy. | ||
| Where would be the worst? | ||
| Brazil is the most vocal, but they're getting a lot better, too. | ||
| Whereas Brazil, it used to be that foreigners just got booed no matter what. | ||
| Mike Pyle, for instance. | ||
| Mike Pyle, he won in Brazil, and he knocked out... | ||
| I forget who he fought. | ||
| He knocked it. | ||
| He's a guy from Ludlow, Massachusetts. | ||
| He trades out of Team Link. | ||
| He trains with Gabriel Gonzaga. | ||
| But Paya was super respectful, didn't do anything wrong, just won. | ||
| And after he won, he was in the ring, in the cage. | ||
| I was interviewing him, and the whole crowd is chanting something. | ||
| So I asked the translator, I'm like, what are they saying? | ||
| And they're saying, he's a faggot. | ||
| That's what they were chanting. | ||
| The whole crowd was calling him a faggot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, wow! | |
| That is crazy! | ||
| And he didn't do anything wrong. | ||
| Ricardo Funch, that's who he fought. | ||
| All he did was win. | ||
| He stopped him and knocked him out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All he did was win. | |
| He called a faggot. | ||
| Yeah, and Mike Pyle was super... | ||
| He was, thank you very much. | ||
| He was bowing to everybody, waving, and everybody was like, fuck you. | ||
| There were kids, like, 16-year-old little kids, like, fuck you, like, yelling, screaming, giving him the finger, and he stepped out of the cage, and he's like, hey, what can I do? | ||
| And they're like, get him to the back, get him to the back. | ||
| The whole place was chanting, you're a faggot. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Brazil's the most vocal. | ||
| But they lightened up about that, the nationalism. | ||
| Because I think the first time I was there was only the second event that the UFC had done in Rio in many, many, many years. | ||
| So it was a big thing to have the UFC there. | ||
| And they were like super, super nationalistic and charged up. | ||
| But then after we did two more events in Brazil, they kind of relaxed a little bit on that and would even applaud fighters that showed sportsmanship and won who were foreigners. | ||
| You know, even if they beat a Brazilian, you know, they, you know, they, they showed, they, they, they clap for people like Rich Franklin. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| When he beat Vanderlei, they actually clap for Rich Franklin and he tried to address them in Portuguese. | ||
| He had something that he had prepared and learned. | ||
| You know, so it was kind of cool. | ||
| It was cool to see that even though Rich had won and beaten Vanderlei. | ||
| Yeah, they liked him. | ||
| They were happy. | ||
| But I guess, you know, he had also shown like a massive respect of Anderson, you know, when Anderson had beaten him. | ||
| And, you know, I think a lot of people had a lot of respect for Rich there. | ||
| But as far as the sound they make, though, no one's louder than Brazil. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I hear, man. | ||
| I've been in fights where I had to take my... | ||
| My ear pieces off and just turn around and listen because I couldn't believe how loud it was. | ||
| I'm like, this can't be real. | ||
| So I took the headphones off because the headphones mute most of the shit you hear. | ||
| But I'm hearing this crazy noise through the microphone. | ||
| And then I take these off and you hear the volume like, whoa! | ||
| So I tap Goldberg. | ||
| I'm like, take your shit off. | ||
| Take your shit off. | ||
| And as they were introducing Anderson... | ||
| You take your headphones off, you look around, like the sound was a roar. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was just like a jet was going off behind your ears. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And they're all pounding on the ground. | ||
| Anderson! | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Spider! | |
| Silva! | ||
| They were going fucking crazy. | ||
| I've never experienced that before. | ||
| Yeah, that's what Dana was saying. | ||
| Louder than anywhere. | ||
| They are passionate motherfuckers in Brazil, man. | ||
| That is a passionate country. | ||
| They get excited for their own. | ||
| But they relaxed on the foreign hate, which was kind of cool. | ||
| They're the most loud. | ||
| But as far as the most polite, England's pretty fucking polite. | ||
| They're pretty polite in England. | ||
| They're pretty nationalistic themselves. | ||
| They're rooting for Bisping and rooting for Brad Pickett and anybody who's fighting that's an English guy. | ||
| But they're pretty polite in England. | ||
| You know, I just went to New Zealand last year, the end of last year, and it tripped me out because New Zealand is like 20 years ago America. | ||
| I couldn't believe it, man. | ||
| These guys don't know what MMA is. | ||
| And when I finally explained to one of the immigration officers what it is, he goes, oh, so you beat people for a living. | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's that animosity you had back in the day when they were saying it was human dogfighting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you go to, and they're running through the same problems. | ||
| The Boxing Commission is the one that's interfering. | ||
| It has so much power to stopping it because they're afraid that MMA is going to take over boxing. | ||
| And it's like the whole same thing all over again. | ||
| And the craziest thing about New Zealand is you got these crazy fighters there. | ||
| I mean, guys that can... | ||
| Jaws of Stone. | ||
| They can hit. | ||
| A country full of Mark Hunts. | ||
| Oh my god, there's a lot of them. | ||
| They're big boys and they're all aggro to fight. | ||
| And I'm wondering, man, how the hell is this country 20 years behind? | ||
| I mean, I couldn't understand that. | ||
| Corruption? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| I mean, how is New York State still illegal? | ||
| That drives me nuts. | ||
| That drives me nuts. | ||
| And that's all corruption. | ||
| We know the root of that. | ||
| It's the Culinary Union. | ||
| The Culinary Union... | ||
| They want station casinos to go union, so they're bribing politicians, and politicians are trying their best. | ||
| That's probably something else happening in New Zealand, too, because damn, I couldn't understand it. | ||
| I couldn't understand how this country would be so way behind. | ||
| It's stupid, too, because it's not going to hurt boxing. | ||
| It's not going to hurt kickboxing. | ||
| I really feel like there's plenty of room for all the combat sports. | ||
| I think that there is something to watching a Floyd Bayweather or watching a guy who's a fantastic boxer. | ||
| And it's always going to be something that people want to watch. | ||
| And I'm a big fan of high-level kickboxing too. | ||
| I love K1 and Glory is doing a lot of big shows now too. | ||
| I love watching that as well. | ||
| I think there's room for all that shit. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Yeah, there is. | ||
| They can work together. | ||
| They can promote each other. | ||
| And they should start promoting MMA. Don't be stupid. | ||
| Don't try to fight it off. | ||
| They're fighting it. | ||
| You can go into New Zealand and half the people will hate martial artists. | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| I mean, back in the day, you remember back in the day when MMA was considered ridiculous, barbaric? | ||
| I mean, like, way back. | ||
| It's like porn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I first started doing post-fight interviews, it was like 97, and I was on the TV show Newsradio, and I would tell people I was going to fly to Dothan, Alabama, to go work at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event. | ||
| They're like, why are you doing this to yourself? | ||
| Like, what are you doing to your career, your reputation? | ||
| It was like I was gonna go do some porn. | ||
| Like, yeah, I'm gonna go fucking film some porno films. | ||
| Like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Like, why are you getting involved in cage fighting? | ||
| And I was like, well, I think someday it's going to be bigger than football. | ||
| They're like, you're out of your fucking mind. | ||
| I'm like, well, all right. | ||
| The day's here, man. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Nobody would have ever thought it. | ||
| Nobody would have ever thought back then that it would happen so fast. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's got to be a trip for you to have been there in the dawn and to see it now. | ||
| I mean, it... | ||
| Makes me happy, man. | ||
| Because mixed martial art has made me who I am today. | ||
| Everything that I have, the reputation that I have, the people I know, is all due to that. | ||
| And just to see how big it's become. | ||
| I mean, I don't even have this envious thing where I wish I was fighting this time with more money. | ||
| I'm really happy with what I did and where I was and the opportunities I had. | ||
| And I just, you know, as much as some people like to rip on Dana, man, I got nothing but good words to say because it's what he's done for the sport, you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, the people that rip on him either don't know him or they've got some business issues with him. | ||
| Must be, yeah. | ||
| I love that dude. | ||
| He's straight up, too. | ||
| I like the way you and him are straight up. | ||
| And if you don't like the guy, you don't like the guy. | ||
| No bullshit in that. | ||
| That's the only way to be. | ||
| Especially in this business. | ||
| This is the realest business ever. | ||
| This is the realest sport of all time. | ||
| It's sport broken down to, I mean, more so even than boxing, broken down to its rawest element acceptable by society. | ||
| What is real sport? | ||
| It's man dominating another man with discipline, focus, technique, will, intelligence, and heart. | ||
| That is all sports. | ||
| That's the root in what people admire in all sports. | ||
| But MMA embodies that. | ||
| It's the purest form of sport. | ||
| If you say you love sports but you don't like MMA, you don't really love sports. | ||
| You don't know what sports really are because every man in a fucking football uniform running into other men wants to beat those guys' asses. | ||
| Every time a guy slam dunks a ball on a guy's face, he really wants to beat that dude's ass. | ||
| You want to win. | ||
| You want to win when it's most important. | ||
| That's the most important thing. | ||
| The incredible thing I like about MMA is that fighter has to do everything. | ||
| You've got a quarterback, you've got a center, you've got linebackers, you've got wide receivers. | ||
| You've got everyone that has A certain job in the whole sport. | ||
| But I don't have... | ||
| Okay, I'll do the ground. | ||
| And I'll get Rampage to do my standing. | ||
| And I'll get maybe Chuck to do my wrestling. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| You can't tag off and say, hey, oh, okay, offensive time. | ||
| Come in, get the strikers in. | ||
| I mean, you're in there and you've got to learn how to be the quarterback. | ||
| You've got to learn how to be the center. | ||
| You've got to learn how to make blocks. | ||
| You've got to learn how to catch the ball. | ||
| I always thought it was weird when you heard trainers say, we. | ||
| We want to win this first round. | ||
| We want to go out there and do this. | ||
| What we worked on in the gym is this. | ||
| There's not really a lot of we going on here. | ||
| It's fucking that guy. | ||
| It's him. | ||
| You really shouldn't be saying we. | ||
| We trained him to do this. | ||
| We showed him that. | ||
| He's been working hard in the gym. | ||
| We've been pushing him. | ||
| But when it's in the cage, we want to win this first round. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| He's going to win that first round. | ||
| You really don't have anything to do with it. | ||
|
unidentified
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We hope to prepare, but he's going to fight the fight. | |
| If you don't have the mind for it, that is really where it all boils down. | ||
| The mindset and the ability to overcome obstacles, so much of it is mental. | ||
| So much of deciding the right things to do. | ||
| And when you were talking about seeing guys break and knowing that guys are breaking, How many times have you seen guys give up a choke? | ||
| You know they know how to get out of that, but they tap. | ||
| You know that they're just looking for a way out of the pressure of the moment. | ||
| Well, you know, when you really think about it, have you ever questioned why people tap? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not because of the pain. | ||
| It's because of the anticipation of what they think is going to happen to them. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Rarely do you have a guy like Noguera or Hanzo or Misha Tate who gets her arm broke and then taps. | ||
| These people, I see a lot of guys tapping out to arm bars and waving to their friends, shaking their hands after with the same arm. | ||
| I see people tap out to chokes and go out drinking that night. | ||
| I mean, it's anticipation. | ||
| It's basically what it is. | ||
| Tapping out is basically a mind focus. | ||
| If you're focusing on getting out, you're focusing on hurting the guy before he hurts you. | ||
| And you're not focusing on, oh shit, my arm's going to get broken. | ||
| It's going to be all fucked up tomorrow. | ||
| Oh, I hear a ligament pop. | ||
| Oh shit, I'm going to be fucked up tomorrow. | ||
| I better tap. | ||
| It's anticipation. | ||
| And when you really put it black and white, man, it's kind of funny because that's what it is. | ||
| It's The faster the person taps, the earlier he was broke. | ||
| And once you break it, you're anticipating what you think is going to happen to you. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Yeah, I had Jimmy Smith on the podcast earlier today. | ||
| We were talking about... | ||
| He's the guy who does the commentary for Bellator. | ||
| And we were talking about when Jacare fought Hadra Gracie. | ||
| And got his arm broken and then tucked it into his belt and defended for the last minute with a fucking broken arm so that he could win on points. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| This dude let him break his arm. | ||
| He knew he was getting out. | ||
| He's like, but I'm not tapping. | ||
| And Hadra broke his arm and he just tucked that shit right in his belt and just started fighting with the other arm. | ||
| And did he win that fight? | ||
| Yeah, he won that fight. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, he won that fight with a broken arm. | ||
| Which is, you know, Tim Sylvia when Frank Mir broke his arm. | ||
| You know, Tim Sylvia was trying to... | ||
| He was making sure that he didn't stop the fight. | ||
| He was telling Herb Dean, do not stop this fight. | ||
| Let me keep fighting. | ||
| His forearm just got snapped. | ||
| Yeah, this bone broke out. | ||
| It snapped. | ||
| And he was like, you know, whatever. | ||
| I'm fucking... | ||
| I'm going to hit him with the other hand. | ||
| Let me back in there. | ||
| That's all about focus, I think. | ||
| That's about focusing on what you want to do. | ||
| What are you focused on when you're in there? | ||
| Are you focused on losing? | ||
| Are you focused on getting out of there without being injured? | ||
| Or are you focused on finding a way to win no matter what? | ||
| Yeah, that's a thing. | ||
| That's a big thing. | ||
| One of the most impressive fights that I ever saw, where a guy lost the fight, but I'm like, damn, this motherfucker is trying to win this fight, was when Uriah Faber broke both his hands on Mike Brown. | ||
| He had no hands. | ||
| By the second round, he broke both his hands. | ||
| He broke his thumb on one hand, he broke his knuckles on the other hand. | ||
| So he couldn't punch with either hand. | ||
| So he's throwing elbows and he's throwing kicks, and he did it for five fucking rounds. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, he, like, couldn't do anything. | ||
| He couldn't grab a hold of him, couldn't hold on to him, couldn't grapple, couldn't, you know, all he could do was try to throw elbows and try to take him out with kicks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| But he still never complained and went in there and tried to win every minute of every round. | ||
| Just with whatever he had left. | ||
| I'm a big fan of that. | ||
| And every now and then a guy will pull that shit off like Rich Franklin. | ||
| When he knocked out Chuck, Chuck broke his arm. | ||
| And Rich had a broken arm and he punched Chuck with a broken arm. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's moments like that where guys, even in the face of that kind of an injury, figure out a way to pull it off. | ||
| Those are special moments, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's what MMA is about, man. | ||
| That is what MMA is about. | ||
| Listen, man, it is late at night here. | ||
| I know you probably want to get some sleep. | ||
| It's 2.17 in the morning. | ||
| I want to thank you very much for doing this, man. | ||
| Thank you for all the fucking great fights that I've watched you compete in over the years from... | ||
| From being there live and seeing you on board, Roy Salger, to watching the Randy Couture fight, to all those crazy fights on Pride, man. | ||
| It was a pleasure. | ||
| And having you on this podcast was a blast, man. | ||
| Well, thank you for enjoying them, man. | ||
| It makes me stoked, man. | ||
| And thanks for all the people that asked for this and helped pull this podcast off, man, because it was a big one for me, too. | ||
| I really appreciate you doing that. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| And follow Ensign on Twitter. | ||
| Ensign Inoue on Twitter. | ||
| That's I-N-O-U-E on Twitter. | ||
| Do you have a website? | ||
| I have a bracelet website. | ||
| It's destinyforward.com. | ||
| But basically, if you want to follow me, Facebook. | ||
| Facebook. | ||
| Ensign Inoue on Facebook? | ||
| Yeah, I have a fan page on Facebook. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
| And I'm going to go drive you to Chuck's house. | ||
| Okay, sure. | ||
| And thanks to Onnit.com for sponsoring the podcast as well. | ||
| Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| We will be back tomorrow with David Cho, who is the dude who was the artist for Facebook who decided to take stock options instead of getting paid. | ||
| And now he's worth like $100 million or something fucking crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| So he's going to be on tomorrow with our pal Yoshi. | ||
| So that should be a good time. | ||
| And thank you, brother. | ||
| We appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, thank you, man. | |
| All right, you fucks, go to sleep. | ||
| It's 2.30 in the morning. | ||
| It's over. | ||
| Oh, it's 2.30. | ||
| Yeah, it is. |
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