Enson Inoue recounts his brutal 1993–2008 MMA career, where he submitted Randy Couture with a rare armbar from the butt scoot and faced opponents like Igor Vovchanchin (broken jaw, finger, swollen brain) without painkillers, embodying Yamato Dimash—fighting fear to grow. He criticizes modern MMA’s focus on media appeal over raw intensity, comparing it to Pride’s Yakuza ties and controversies like Guy Mezger’s forced weigh-in confrontation and Morista’s suspicious death. Rogan agrees, arguing today’s rules strip realism, while Inoue’s old-school ethos—prioritizing honor over safety—remains a lost ideal in the sport’s evolution. [Automatically generated summary]
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All right, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Ensign Inouye is here.
Way, way, way, way back in, I think it was 1998, I first got to meet Ensign when you armbarred...
97. 97. Wow.
You armbarred Royce Alger, and Royce Alger was one of the latest and greatest of the wrestlers that was entering into the UFC, and they were going to take the place.
There was a Mark Coleman era, when Mark Coleman was smashing everybody, and he was 255 pounds of solid muscle.
All these high-level wrestlers were just starting to find their way into MMA. They're like, oh, this is finally an opportunity to use their wrestling skills.
You're one of the few guys to ever submit Randy Couture.
You submitted Randy Couture with an arm bar, and before you caught him with that arm bar, man, you landed some of the most devastating kicks from the butt scoot position I've ever seen.
Because everybody used to just throw straight kicks to kick guys off from the butt scoot.
But you figured out a way to torque your hips from the ground.
It's kind of interesting because you don't see that from other dudes.
And even to this day, that's a rare technique.
I think that fight, your fight with Randy Couture, might have been the most effective application of those low leg kicks from the ground I've ever seen.
Well, do you remember when they used to let everybody fight with wrestling shoes on?
That was a big thing, too.
They used to kick guys in the face with wrestling shoes, which I thought, maybe okay with the top of the wrestling shoe, but if you do shit like wheel kicks and sidekicks to the face, you could scratch the fuck out of someone's eye.
Like, with the bottom, the textured rubber part of the shoe.
That's a weird thing, the transitionary time of MMA, when they were sort of first sorting out the rules.
But this was a big fight, because Randy had left the UFC, and Randy was one of the elite guys in the UFC. This is after he had beat Vitor.
Yeah, and Randy was known as one of the best guys in the world, but John Powell slapped on that armbar, son.
And that's it.
Ensign Inoue is a motherfucker, ladies and gentlemen.
For everybody here, you know, you hear a lot of hysteria and you hear everyone's kind of scared because they're afraid the radiation is getting into the water.
And it's coming over to America.
What I've read from scientists that have actually been off the coast of Fukushima who have analyzed the fish is that it's not something to worry about yet.
They've caught fish directly off the coast that live there that are like not migrating fish and they say those fish are safe to eat.
As of right now, there's not much of a worry, but it all depends on what's going to happen with that because they're getting too much radioactive waste storage.
They got these big bins that they're holding them in and they're cracking now.
So as far as up by the plant, it's a lot of radiation.
But as far as the people who were displaced from the tsunami or from the radiation, they're in a real hopeless situation because they have temporary housing, which is boxes smaller than this room.
And they have to live there with their families.
And through the winter, it's like just a small wall that you can hear the rain hit the roofs.
Wow.
So that has been extended.
It was supposed to be a two-year thing.
They extended it for another three, so it's five.
And they're still not going to be able to move on from then.
It's kind of shocking how quick that whole thing went bad.
Everybody thought that when you see nuclear power plants, you assume they have some sort of a backup plan.
If it goes bad, I didn't know until this event that power plants, you can't shut them down.
I didn't know that either.
Isn't that crazy?
Like, what do you mean you have to keep them operating?
Like, what are you talking about?
Like, you have to keep them going to keep them cool?
And if you don't, they burn through the containment and they, you know, they melt down and go into the earth and they don't know what the fuck happened to them.
But it's weird that that's also one of the things that they do with nuclear power plants is they put them near the ocean to keep them cool so they could use the water.
Well, see, the thing is they have a 20-kilometer radius now that is an exclusion zone where people can't go in and out because of the radiation, but...
In actuality, it's supposed to be 30. Because when I went in there with my Geiger counter, I found hotspots higher than 10 kilometers from the plant and 30 kilometers.
One day they said they won't do that because they can't displace that much more people.
They can't afford it.
And I'm like, so you're gonna let people live in radiation?
Well, in Hawaii, you could also collect rainwater, too.
You know, I know a lot of people that do that.
I knew a dude who lived up on Mauna Loa, and he had a whole system set up.
He just lived up there.
He had solar electricity.
He had rainwater that they collected in a bin because it rains up there.
If you've been to the Big Island, the Big Island, I'm sure you have, but for folks who haven't, The Big Island has like a bunch of different ecosystems.
It's like desert, like arid, dry climate.
And then you go to another place.
It's like near Hilo is like a goddamn rainforest.
It's crazy.
It's like a Polynesian tropical rainforest.
And that's where this dude lived.
And he collected rainwater up there.
And that's how he got all of his water and all his electricity just from Mother Earth.
Grew all his own food in his garden.
Crazy.
Just lived up there, you know?
That island itself is one of the most magical places on earth.
I mean, all the Hawaiian islands are pretty goddamn magical, but the big island itself is just incredible.
And also on the Big Island, they have all these areas where you can see photos of houses that were lost when the lava came down and just wiped out certain towns that were just a little too close.
I'm super skeptical at this point in my life because I've just seen so much bullshit.
But I think that if you tell someone that a rock can help some part of their life, then it actually can.
The placebo effect is real, and I don't understand it, but you can give people sugar pills and tell them that it's medicine, and their body, thinking that it's medicine, starts to relax and concentrate on healing.
I think there's a lot of ailments that fall upon people because of stress and because they're imbalanced, and they can be somewhat alleviated by placebos.
We just don't understand how the mind works.
What frequency are you tuning into when you're taking in a placebo that you think is medicine that allows you to get better?
We don't know.
We have no idea, but we do know that it's a real effect.
I had a conversation with someone once when it came to religion and fighting.
And they were like, why are so many fighters religious?
And I said, well, it's probably the same reason why so many people at war are religious.
There's that old expression, there's no atheists in a foxhole.
It's like when you need to believe in something, a lot of times people fall on religion and that it can help.
Like there's people that have a real true belief in God and that true belief in God does benefit them substantially.
It's real.
The effect of that belief is real.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that what they believe in is real, but the fact that they believe in it and they give themselves to it can actually benefit them, so it becomes real.
Well, especially if you're too religious in a hypocritical sort of a way, which is a lot of times people, they pick and choose what they believe in when it comes to religion.
There's a lot of Christians that are angry people.
They're angry about people that are non-Christians or angry about people that don't follow aspects of the Bible that they believe in.
It gets kind of squirrely.
But the nature of it, I think, I think the nature of all religions, the best aspects of all religions that aren't tainted by man, Are the lessons that people learn over a life of trial and error and wisdom and sharing ideas and you kind of learn that to be a good person you have to do good things and to be a happy person you have to help others and you know when you treat each other like they're your brothers and sisters out there in the world you truly have a better life and you live We're
more connected to God.
And in a big sense, that's what you're doing with your life these days.
All your work, helping all these people in Fukushima, like you're not a guy who just kind of like does charity because it's a public thing and it makes you look good.
Like you feel very dedicated to these causes and it's very admirable because you go out there and you risk your health and safety.
Yeah, they said that they've started catching tuna that show a 3% increase in radiation, and everybody started freaking out, but they say that that's still negligible.
It's probably antioxidants, green leafy vegetables, things like that.
I mean, isn't that what...
I don't truly, totally understand the process of evolution, but from what I understand, a lot of it is from random mutations that are caused by radiation.
But this kid who has invented this process believes that in the future that they'll be able to take all of this radioactive quote-unquote waste and that it's not waste.
It's just that they don't completely understand the process of converting it back to fuel yet.
But once that process is understood, there will be no radioactive waste anymore.
There's an area in the ocean, enormous area, bigger than the size of Texas.
That is all plastic from the world, from all over the countries of the world, people that have littered, things that have fallen off of boats, things that have got picked up from the beach, and they've all swirled.
Because, you know, there's currents in the ocean, and these currents create these paths, and inside, yeah, inside these paths, in these areas where all this stuff is sort of congealed and congested, those aren't the right words, but...
It's formed this floating patch of garbage.
And it's really fucked up because it's in the water.
There's an image of it.
But they've done all these...
Missions to go out and try to figure out how big it exactly is.
The problem is a lot of it is suspended underneath the water and it's being broken down slowly by the water.
So fish are eating it, ingesting it and getting sick.
Birds are taking the plastic back and feeding it to their children, to their babies, because the birds don't understand what the fuck it is.
So there's islands that they find where these birds, these baby birds are dead and their stomachs are filled with plastic bits that their mothers have given them because their mothers don't know what the fuck they are.
Their mothers think that it's fish or food or something like that.
So this kid has figured out a way to take this gigantic, this machine, it skims the ocean, and it's going to suck all the plastic out of the ocean and clean the whole thing.
And then they've also said, well, you know, hey, we've got all these problems with the ocean, and there's these dead zones, there's lack of oxygen and pollution in the ocean.
They've figured out a way to throw iron, to take iron scrap into And pour it into the ocean.
And that iron scrap will create algae and create different environments for fish to live in.
Like, when people get their back pushed up beyond both of us.
I shouldn't even be allowed to talk about it.
I'm too fucking stupid to explain it correctly.
But it's fascinating.
There's this kid.
He invented this giant ocean garbage patch skimmer.
And that's this machine that he's invented.
I believe he's only 19 too.
But within a few years time, he did a TED talk on it, within a few years time they're going to be able to clean up that patch if this invention pans out.
Yeah, that's the weird thing about people.
We fuck everything up, but when we fuck everything up, someone smarter comes along and goes, okay, okay, okay, let's figure this shit out.
I don't know, man, but they're just not reimbursing the people.
They're not helping the people.
If you're gonna take a land and a house away, From a family who's worked hard to work for it all their lives because a company that's run by the government, which is TEPCO, the nuclear plant, is run by the government.
If your plant is going to fuck up, you're going to take responsibility and relocate them to an equal amount of things that they had instead of putting them in a little box.
Well, that was one of the few times, I think, that I can recall where I talked to...
You know, Japanese people are very orderly and very polite.
It's a very different society.
But when I was in Japan, what was fascinating, because it was only about a year after the Fukushima incident, and I was talking to this guy, and he was very reluctant to talk negatively about the government.
But he was trying to hedge his words.
And basically he said was, I don't think they've been entirely honest.
But because of the fact that he keeps the place so small and he doesn't have that many people working for him, he's not really concerned with...
Branching out.
If he was an American, they'd be like, we're going to sell our brand.
Our business is our brand, and what we're going to do now is we're going to spread out of the malls all across America.
Gero dreams of sushi stores.
Nope.
This guy has one place, and he's humble.
He is hardworking.
He's fucking 80 years old.
He had to quit smoking cigarettes because he had a heart attack, but healed back up, stopped smoking cigarettes, jumped right back in, still working 16 hours a day.
Not just being one of the pioneers of MMA, but you're known for that expression, Yamato Damashi, that you've always promoted that ideal, this samurai spirit and this spirit of Japan, this way of doing things wholeheartedly, and you've talked openly that you freely give yourself, like when you would go to fight, you would be ready to die.
Is it difficult for you, because you earnestly embraced that thought process, is it difficult for you when you see guys that are kind of dabbling in MMA? They're kind of like half-assing it, not training hard enough.
Maybe they have some talent, but they don't really put their will and heart into it.
Being cut by the UFC, you know, that kind of stuff didn't, because there was all these little associations, we're fighting for so little bit money.
The objective and the whole movement of that era was different, yeah?
So, you know, when fighters start getting lazy, you know, or they don't fight as hard, or they tap out a little sooner, you know, I understand that, because it's a whole new era, because you're fighting for a different reason, though.
They're fighting for money.
They're fighting for living.
They're fighting for sponsors.
They're fighting to look good.
So it's easier when you're fighting for those reasons.
I mean, there's only so much money will make you do.
But if you're fighting for your honor and you're fighting for your life, it's a whole different level.
And if he stopped it like a second earlier when Jason High got dropped and was kind of a little bit out of it after the flurry, it would have been a good stoppage.
But he waited and Jason High actually got his posture and started coming up again.
But the MMA of your era, pride was such a completely different animal because there was stomps and soccer kicks and the rule system was completely different.
It was just a completely different kind of fighting.
And to be a huge sport as it is, you need the media.
You need the sponsors.
You can't have guys getting hurt.
You can't make it too brutal.
So in this day and age, yes, you should be more cautious than anything in stopping the fights.
I agree with that.
But back in the day when you're fighting for honor, no.
I mean, if that fight was not televised and you didn't need to worry about sponsors and people getting hurt and suits and everything, In my day, I would prefer the fight not to have stoppages.
You know, the thing I think about that is, you know, if the stoppages weren't so soon, you know how many unbelievable inspirational moments we'd have in fighting?
But that's the sacrifice we make for it to be such a big sport now.
Now, when you say that, like, when you say that you would have three losses in a row, like, what would be the difference between the way you fought and the way, like, say, modern MMA fighters fight?
Well, I don't, I, I'm, for me, the win isn't getting my hand raised yet.
The win is hitting the fears that I have head-on and growing as a person.
Sometimes it really counteracts each other because for Igor Vovachanchi, when I fought him, the best thing for me to do was to take him down and get on top.
But the best thing for me to grow as a man, as a person, is to hit that fearful stage of throwing toe-to-toe with Igor.
For folks who don't know, when you were fighting him was one of the most devastating strikers in the sport.
He was a brutal knockout artist, and he was a small guy, but he fucked up Mark Kerr when Mark Kerr was big.
Remember, he caught Mark Kerr with a BOMB standing up.
I mean, Igor was only like 5'10", right?
He looked like A guy that should have probably been way bigger and longer, but someone like chopped his arms off at the end and put these knots for fists like in the middle of us and he was just this ball of muscle and bone.
Well, that fight would probably be it, but not at the moment, yeah.
Because at the moment, I didn't think I was that bad.
At the moment, when I was getting hit, I remember getting hit some shots that really rocked me, and I remember thinking in my head, the thing that I thought was, I can't let them know it hurt.
And I remember looking at my corner and looking at him and just saying, I'm okay.
They didn't ask me, but I just did it on purpose because I knew he'd be seeing me doing it.
Like, what the fuck's wrong with this guy?
I just hit him so hard.
What did you knock people out with?
And this guy's looking at his corner and saying, I'm okay.
And then, you know, that's the kind of stuff.
When the fight was stopped and I was screaming, no, it wasn't because...
I was, you know, trying to be tough.
I just felt, in that moment and time, I felt, okay, I got two minutes between rounds.
Why are you coming in at 30 seconds and saying the fight's over?
And the second thing I'm thinking too is, you guys don't know the training that I went through for this.
This is nothing compared to what I did every day.
I mean, I felt like, let me go on.
And I also felt that this is the time right here.
This is the time, my breaking moment.
This is a time where I can show myself that I can still go on.
But I didn't realize that my ear was perforated so bad that my equilibrium was off.
I didn't realize that I needed, you know, I was saying to the doctor, no!
I still got two minutes, you know, I'm thinking, I got two minutes, don't check me now!
But I actually should have been yelling, give me three months!
See, what the doctor explained to me was when your muscles get any type of trauma, even if it's just one area of your body, your muscles all act together as a team and they'll put off toxins.
That devastation was something like, well, can you imagine stepping in that zone knowing that that could happen to you at any moment, but standing there in that zone fighting that.
When I fought Mark Kerr, it was right after he beat up Hugo Doherty.
So I was looking at fights to grow as a person, not to get a win-loss record.
That's why I'm saying Anthony Noy of today wouldn't make it.
Well, that was a brutal, brutal, brutal KO. And that was Igor at his very best.
And look at this again.
Look at the way this guy's built.
I mean, he really does look like a guy who's way bigger, who's like cut off the ends of his body.
Look at this.
Clink.
And he had those crazy punches, too.
Those casting punches.
He was one of the first guys to throw the way Fedor was known for throwing those punches, where it's almost like your hand is perpendicular with the ground instead of horizontal with it.
He would throw a lot of his punches like this, in a very unorthodox way, casting punches is the way they call it.
Those are the days, the glory days.
When you look back, man, and you think from 1997, your fight with Royce Alger, did they have gloves on back then?
But these pride gloves, Tim Kennedy believes are superior to the UFC gloves because they naturally promote a curved fist, whereas the UFC gloves have much more of a straight line to them.
Everlast has a new glove that they're using with Bellator and it's a much more curved fist and it's also there's more padding across the top to reinforce the metacarpals when you're hitting and they apparently stopped a lot of bone breaks because of that.
But I almost feel like the same thing I feel like with football.
That, like, everybody is concerned about head trauma in football, but no one wants to look at...
There's a lot of people who have analyzed football, they say, well, the best way to stop this head trauma is probably to make people play football with no helmets.
Because if you play football with no helmets, you're going to play totally different.
You cannot go head-to-head and clash into each other if you have no fucking helmet.
And the only real way to control the way these guys do this is to make it so that it's impossible to...
I mean, they're spiking each other with helmets on and shoulder pads and shit.
They're saying if you really want to do it, look at rugby and look at Australian rules football.
Less head trauma, less instances of traumatic brain injury, and they're fighting with no pads.
That's a good point.
And I think that might be the way to do it with MMA too, man.
Because I get that people think that it's brutal to punch people with no gloves on, but guess what?
See, the Bellator glove is on the left, whereas the UFC-style glove is on the right, and the Bellator glove has more padding on the metacarpal, and it's curved more.
But then again, it goes back to the football thing.
Like, maybe you're better off knowing that you can't just tee off on someone's head without breaking your hand.
I mean, if guys had to be more conservative with their punches, maybe we would see more kicks, maybe we'd see more grappling, and maybe MMA would be more realistic.
Well, again, it goes to that question, you know, The reason why MMA is being changed in the way it is is for the sponsors and for the audience.
And I think it's...
Depending on the fighter, can you imagine...
You know you have those boring fights where they get to the ground and you just want them to stand up, but they're doing enough that they don't get broken up, and you're like, damn, five minutes is not that bad, but you can imagine that happening for ten minutes.
I agree, but there's a purist in me that I don't like stand-ups.
I don't think you should be stood up.
I think if the guy's on the bottom and you don't like the fact that the guy's holding you down, you got to get better at getting up.
You got to get better at sweeping them.
You got to get better at trying to attack from the bottom, attacking to try to get a better position to stand back up or to try to finish them from your back.
I just don't think it's realistic for a guy just to hang on and let the referee stand him back up again, which is a strategy.
I don't know if we talked about it before, but the middle line is to die when everyone thinks that's the end.
So everyone thinks that the normal reading would be to live as a man, become a man, and die as a man.
But I believe that until you face that most fearful test of dying, you don't know how strong you actually are.
So you live your life with all these little tests in life, all the little trials that you have to build your strength and build your heart to the last test of dying.
And the way you die is going to determine whether you've passed that test or not.
That's a, in today's day and age, this strange, soft, pussified society that we live in.
You know, and there's a lot of good things about the pussified society.
Don't get me wrong.
There's a lot of good things about people being civil with each other and about having laws and about having, you know, being able to get your food from a grocery store.
All those things are good.
But what's bad about all these things, and it's not bad about these things, but the The repercussions of them is that men don't develop character.
And a lot of men fold under pressure because they've never experienced pressure.
They don't know themselves.
They don't know what they're capable of because they've never had to face adversity.
True adversity.
When you're really worried about your life.
When you're really worried about your safety.
When your back is up against the wall and you either rise to the occasion or you are dwarfed by the moment.
And so many people that have never faced adversity, they just immediately fall apart.
And a lot of it in the book is a lot of the stuff that I've went through.
And it's not like me being a big hero and flying with bright colors in every experience.
Sometimes there's experiences where I really just fucked up.
And some of those fuck-ups actually really taught me about myself.
Like what?
The book starts off with this story about My friend that was little, like 12 years old, I watched a friend get beat up by bigger guys, and I didn't do anything about it.
I was so scared.
I was frozen.
I didn't know what to do.
And I just watched it.
And I was afraid of getting involved and getting hurt, physically hurt, you know, beaten up, possibly going to hospital, possibly a broken bone.
And I didn't do anything about it.
The thing about that now is, if I did something about it, say I got a broken arm, broken leg, they broke my orbital, I'd be here today probably healed up because the body heals.
But to this day, even if that episode was 30 something years ago, I still hurt from that inside.
Thinking about that, wishing I could rewind and do something about it.
Wishing I could see that my friend again and tell him I'm sorry.
But we're seeing my friend and telling him, man, fuck, I don't know why I didn't help you, you know.
Because when something comes up in the future, you've experienced the pain of the wrong decision, and then the right decision becomes the only decision.
Well, that one experience has helped me make the right decisions and a lot of other things that came later in my life, but still just that one, that one just still hurts, man.
Thirty-something years later, man.
Any bone that was broken would have been healed by that.
That's the true thing also about losses, is that everybody wants to win.
Winning is everything.
Winning is the only thing.
It's not everything is the only thing.
People always say that.
There are no second places.
It's just the first loser.
But the reality is...
Those losses and that awful feeling of those losses are so fucking important for the growing process.
If you don't realize what it's like to drop your hands and get cracked by a counter shot, you don't realize how important it is to really keep your hands up, you won't know.
You won't internalize it.
But when you've been cracked and rocked and you wind up losing a fight, you're like, fuck.
When you're in that fight again or in another fight, those lessons are concrete.
The book covers every fight exactly how I was thinking from when I got the fight.
To when I was preparing for the fight during the fight.
It's going to be interesting because a lot of people think that I'm this Yamato Damashi guy that has no fears and just comes out and has this iron type of thinking.
But it kind of tells you exactly what I'm thinking during the fight.
What happened what I thought after the fight and it's it's it's straight-up real stuff I mean well, you know custom motto the guy the longtime trainer Mike Tyson famous guy who was really but what his His take wasn't just the technical aspects of boxing but also the psychology behind Boxing and one of the things that he ingrained in Mike Tyson He said that a coward and hero feel the exact same thing It's just that the hero chooses to
Your impressive performances are more impressive, knowing that you were scared, knowing that you had all the fears that everybody else has, but you decided anyway to still clamp down your mouthpiece and fucking throw lead at Igor Vovchanchin.
This Yamato Dimash and, you know, Eastern philosophy, which is very different in a lot of ways than Western philosophy, the philosophy that a lot of people associate with martial arts, the respect and honor, integrity and warrior spirit, a lot of that is kind of missing in some MMA camps.
And it's almost like they've become jocks and athletes and not as much martial artists.
Because what happens when you run your gym and you fight in that mentality, once you're done with MMA, you can't fight forever.
When you're done with MMA, it will carry on with you as a person.
If you're just being a jock and doing this MMA and you're just doing that, once you're done with that, you're going to You're going to go into the real world the person that you were when you started fighting.
Yeah, but if you train with that honor and discipline and you develop that during your fighting career, you're going to definitely be a better man when you finish your fighting career.
Well, I got real lucky when I first started doing martial arts is that my Taekwondo instructor was very into the aspects of martial arts that we consider, like the philosophy and the mindset and the warrior code, indomitable spirit, like all these different things.
We're promoted very heavily.
One of the big ones was that martial arts are just a vehicle for developing your human potential.
Even when you can't kick and even when you can't punch and even when your body is old, you're still doing martial arts.
Because this path that you are on, this path of learning, this path of Testing yourself, this path of trying to overcome resistance, this will stay with you forever in life.
There's always going to be problems with guys in the gym that beat up on lesser talented guys or hurt guys when they're sparring.
They're supposed to be going 50% and they go 100%.
You're always going to have that.
You're always going to have gym wars where one guy elevates a little bit and the young guy catches up to him and then the other guy takes it to another level.
He was an interesting case, because he was one of those guys that sort of tested this...
In the beginning of MMA, when people would watch the various styles and the various strategies that people would be successful with inside the Octagon, They would try to figure out, what is the best way?
Is it the best way to be a big wrestler?
Well, no, if you fight Maurice Smith, because Maurice Smith figured out how to be a smaller guy, chip away at the legs of Mark Coleman, take it into the later rounds, and that's how he won the title.
He won the title with stamina and with his striking.
But then you see a guy like Mark Kerr, who was as far as you could go with the big, steroided-up, muscular frame and wrestling.
Pull up a picture of Mark Kerr.
Mark Kerr, in his prime, his nickname was the Smashing Machine.
He did a few fights afterwards, but after the Smashing Machine documentary came out, and the folks have never seen that documentary, that is...
He's got an incredible amount of courage for letting people into that world because Mark had a significant problem with painkillers and with drugs and showed it all in all of its...
They started that documentary wanting to...
Do a documentary to follow one of the best mixed martial arts fighters in the world, the Smashing Machine, the guy who a lot of people thought was the heavyweight to watch.
And along the way, they caught it at the perfect time where he was starting to unravel, and they got to see a guy whose life was just sort of falling apart.
Do you think that MMA in its current form right now, if you could change any of the rules and still keep it a sport, I think that, first of all, 12-6 elbows, that's got to come back.
I think 12-6 elbows is a ridiculous thing to have banned.
But I think knees to a grounded opponent would change a lot of shit too.
The only thing I have a problem with the soccer kicks is the cage.
I like the soccer kicks in a ring because you can move your head away, but the fact that you're trapped and you can get kicked and stomped when you're trapped up against the cage, that's the only time that I think that it would be a problem because the guy can't really defend himself because of the environment as opposed to because he's out.
And when you look back at that, and now you see the guys of today, you see like the Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnsons, and you see the John Joneses, the high-level guys, the pound-for-pound best guys of today, man.
Do you have pride when you look back and you think that you were like, I mean, you were one of the real pioneers of the fastest growing sport the world has ever seen.
There's never been a time in my lifetime, there's never been a time where a sport was introduced and became this gigantic thing over a matter of a decade, two decades, and grew.
When I first was working on a sitcom, I was on a sitcom news radio, and it was when I first started doing the post-fight interviews back when I interviewed you.
It was one of the first events.
That was the second event I ever worked at.
And I would tell people that I was going, you know, I was like, where were we at?
Augusta, Georgia or something like that?
Yeah, Augusta, Georgia.
And I remember telling people that I was going to go work for the UFC interviewing fighters after their matches.
And they looked at me like I was fucking crazy.
Like I was involved in dogfighting or something.
That's what it was like.
Like I was involved in porn or something like that.
You know, I think that you came at that time, you came as a sport was just exponentially expanding and you were starting to see like real world-class athletes.
I think when time, when we look in the future and they look back at this era, like the era between 1993 and 2008. Not only around today, but still fighting at the highest level.
Which brings up another point.
How do you feel about all this testosterone replacement shit?
People are like, fuck steroids and stuff, but when they go to watch bodybuilding, they ooh and ah at the muscle tone and the size, and it's like, I'm against steroids, but you go there and you love the bodybuilding.
So, I'm here, I go into the ring, after Egan loses, and I'm just going, you know how you go check on your fighter?
I checked on Egan, you okay?
Everything's okay?
And the guy walks up to me and says, it's not personal.
I'm like, what's not personal?
You beat up my brother.
Of course it's not personal.
He goes, congratulations.
He goes, no, no, no, what I have to do?
I said, what are you talking about?
And if you see the video, I'm shaking his hand.
And he's telling me that I was shaking his hand, and I'm like, I don't let go of his hand, and we're like, I'm guiding him into the corner, like, what do you mean?
What are you gonna do?
And he goes, I gotta call you out.
I said, you know, I'm retired.
He goes, yeah, but it's in my contract.
I said, no, no, fuck you.
I said, I told him, if you don't want to do it, don't fucking do it.
And he goes, Anson, I gotta do it.
I said, don't fucking do it if you don't want to do it.
And then I realized that the way Pride plays that shit with the fighters, and I realized, you know, Guy was in this position that, you know, he really couldn't do anything about.
And so I was like, you know, it's not Guy's deal.
You know, Guy's not the bad guy here.
And it's like, So he turned around, and he did it different, though he didn't be a dick about it.
He kind of went and he said something about, yeah, the better fight would have been with his younger brother, Ensign.
But after that, the...
It's all in the book too, but after that I went to the locker room and I guess, I don't know, I think Gary Goodrich was in my locker room.
Igor was in the locker room.
Those fighters all saw this happen, but I went on a rampage calling for the president of Pride to come in and see me right now because that's bullshit.
Because I talked to him a week before that and he told me that, I remember he telling me that he likes the way I fight and he wants fighters to fight more like me.
I remember him telling me that.
He had a big image about changing the fight game into more of aggressive fighters.
What was it like in that day, like dealing with that aspect of mixed martial arts?
Like it wasn't just mixed martial arts like it is in the UFC where it's a business and there's promoters and there's, you know, they have an agenda to try to promote to the fans and try to make money.
But you were dealing with a very intense organized crime aspect to it.
Yeah, I mean, Hickson got on top of him, and remember he gift-wrapped that arm across, and he was holding onto his arm and just beat him down, then took his back and choked him to sleep.
You know, he's the co-founder and the head instructor at American Top Team, so, you know, he's always there on a regular basis, but he still rolls with all those guys.
When I was first starting out, I started out at Carlson's place in 1996, and Mario Sperry was there.
And Mario Sperry was talking about how he got really good at triangles by making his girlfriend sit in his guard, and he would just slap a triangle on each side over and over again.
She's like, I don't want to do this anymore.
I was like, shut up.
And he just kept triangling her over and over and over again, which is kind of fucked up.
It's interesting how there was a lot of dudes that were heavy favorites, like, going into MMA. And everybody thought that, wow, this is going to be the next motherfucker in MMA. And, like, Salo Hibero.
Salo Hibero, a lot of people thought, like, he was going to be the next Hickson.
He was going to go into MMA and dominate because he was so good at jiu-jitsu.
Yeah, but I think that you're seeing now, like, I watch the Ultimate Fighter sometimes, you see guys gas out really quick, you see kind of low-level striking in jiu-jitsu.
I think the talent pool is kind of dry in a lot of ways.
I mean, every now and then, a new guy comes up, like a Uriah Hall...
Who got on the Ultimate Fighter and is just knocking everybody out and looks sensational.
You saw real talent in that guy.
Dillashaw came from Tuff and now he's a champion.
There's guys that have come from the Ultimate Fighter.
I think when we look back at history, they look at the history and the growth of mixed martial arts, of martial arts period, they'll see that martial arts grew more in 20 years than it did in 20,000 years.
It exploded out of nowhere.
They really figured out what works and what doesn't work.
You know what tripped me out is when I first went to watch the UFC in Vegas and I saw the fighters' pictures on the billboards, I couldn't believe that.
I mean, back in the day when I used to go to Vegas, we'd see Donna Summers and Kenny Rogers doing a concert, but man, the MMA fighters up on the billboards, it's like a whole different level.
I'm not someone that's going to try and promote or someone that's going to try and get involved, but if there's anything that I can do, like when people ask me to do seminars or to come and be involved in something, I'm more than willing.
There's some kind of big tournament, the Yuji, right?
Yeah, so I'm doing that kind of stuff and I think I still have a lot to offer.
To the fighters, but I don't know about doing it every day, you know, and teaching every day, and being stuck at a gym at, you know, 9 to 5, or even, like, every day at 6 to 8, you're going to teach a class.
I don't know if I'll ever be able to limit myself to that.
But basically what a fighter taps is because he's anticipating what he thinks is going to happen.
It's an anticipation of what you think is going to happen.
And that's why fighters tap.
You're anticipating your arm breaking.
You're anticipating going to sleep.
And a lot of times people, spectators think it's because of pain, because it hurts.
But a lot of times, you know, arm burn doesn't really hurt.
I mean, you can feel like, ah, you know, ah, fuck, my arm, my ligaments are going to start stretching, ah, fuck, you know, but it's not to that pain level where you're like, ah, fuck, it's so sore, I got to tap, you know, even chokes.
It's not like, you know, it's just anticipating what's going to happen, you know?
And I kind of develop on that kind of stuff, like, you know, that kind of mindset, yeah.
How many of those moments happen where a fighter has that door opens and either you can tap or you can push forward and occasionally the guys push forward and wind up winning?
And I always live my life thinking that if I get punished for something that I've done and I did it and it's the right thing and I get punished for it, then let it be because that's what's supposed to happen.
So if I get into trouble with stuff that I wrote in the book, I'm not bullshitting.
I'm not talking shit about nobody.
I'm not bullshitting.
I'm not exaggerating.
I'm just telling things as it is.
And if I'm going to get in trouble for that, then it was meant to be.