Oct. 24, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:54:09
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Hello, Dan Henderson. | ||
|
unidentified
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What the fuck's happening? | |
| Good to see you, brother. | ||
| Good to see you, too. | ||
| Man, what have you been up to, other than coaching? | ||
| You're coaching a lot, I know that. | ||
| I watch a lot of your videos. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm coaching a little bit. | ||
| Got some decent up-and-comers, but other than that, I've been working on a project where I own the building my gyms in, and I'm putting a brewery distillery restaurant in. | ||
| Oh, nice. | ||
| Part of it will overlook there. | ||
| So we're in mid-construction right now. | ||
| So it's been... | ||
| We started construction and it got put on hold when COVID happened. | ||
| So it's been almost the biggest fight of my life trying to get this thing done. | ||
| But yeah, it's finally... | ||
| Finally going to be done, hopefully end of the year. | ||
| You're still down in Temecula area? | ||
| Yeah, in Temecula, yeah. | ||
| That's a good area. | ||
| No, I love it there. | ||
| Last time I saw you was at that casino. | ||
| That's a fun little casino. | ||
| Oh, at Petranga? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, no, I love it out there. | ||
| I was born and raised in California, so it'd be hard to leave. | ||
| I got so many roots there, but living in Temecula, I feel like I'm in one of the best spots in California. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of the best. | ||
| It's most sane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's pretty sane. | ||
| Yeah, pretty. | ||
| A lot of ranches and it's like normal people. | ||
| Not a lot of craziness going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You get closer to Los Angeles, it just gets polluted. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just toxic fucking thinking. | ||
| Where did you live up there? | ||
| I lived in Bell Canyon, which was like a half hour outside of LA, which was nice. | ||
| Like I had land and a lot of coyotes and a lot of owls and hawks and shit and mountain lions. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It was good juxtaposition. | ||
| It was a nice relief from Hollywood. | ||
| I get there. | ||
| It's quiet. | ||
| And how was the little community, though? | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| Yeah, it's fine. | ||
| Like it here better, though? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Way better. | |
| I'm never leaving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, this place is the best. | ||
| It's just the freedom that you get in Texas. | ||
| It's just so much... | ||
| You just get so accustomed to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I couldn't imagine. | ||
| I don't know if I could deal with the humidity out here. | ||
| You get used to it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've always liked the heat. | ||
| It doesn't bother me at all. | ||
| Because I do the sauna every day anyway, so I think my body's acclimated to heat. | ||
| So during the summertime, you don't really have to get in the sauna? | ||
| I get in the sauna, too. | ||
| I do it every day. | ||
| But during the day, like getting ready for elk season, I was out in my yard every day for three hours at 105 degrees. | ||
| I'd just bring a 64-ounce hydro flask filled with electrolytes and water and just drink that. | ||
| And I would come inside, and it was literally like I went swimming. | ||
| I would just be drenched. | ||
| My jeans, my shirt, everything drenched. | ||
| What are you doing out in the yard? | ||
| Just shooting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Just shooting, you know, getting ready. | ||
| So I had to practice. | ||
| So it's like there's only one place I could practice 100 yards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's in the yard. | ||
| So I was out there practicing every day. | ||
| Have you taken a 100-yard shot? | ||
| No way. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Never. | ||
| I would never do that. | ||
| Never. | ||
| But when you take a 100-yard shot every day, 50-yard shots look like a chip shot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like I shot my elk last week at 50, and it was... | ||
|
unidentified
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Easy. | |
| It was perfect. | ||
| It was perfect distance. | ||
| I knew I was going to hit it. | ||
| Yeah, I've gotten a couple at 50. I think one at 60 was my longest shot, but yeah. | ||
| My friend Cam shot one at two yards. | ||
| He shot at two yards. | ||
| A frontal shot at two yards. | ||
| He just made a video of it. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| This elk, he was on his knees, and the elk was coming up the trail, and the elk had no idea he was there. | ||
| He was just standing there at full draw, and then the elk looked down and saw him there. | ||
|
unidentified
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What?! | |
| And it caught him right in the chest. | ||
| It went right through his heart. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, this is the video. | ||
| This is a real clip of it. | ||
| So he's moving up this trail and this is the elk. | ||
| Well, you'll see the show. | ||
| Well, it's very hard to see. | ||
| You'll see it on his YouTube channel. | ||
| It's much better, but that's how close he was. | ||
| It was two yards from it. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| My first elk I ever shot was with a bow, but it was at like 10 feet, so three and a half yards. | ||
| But yeah, it was in a burn area, so there was a lot of new growth going up, and there was a little quakey tree, and I saw an elk a couple hundred yards away. | ||
| I called him, and he started coming over, and then I called again kind of in a different direction, so we'd kind of go into a nice little spot. | ||
| I could shoot him and I'm kind of jittery getting my trigger on the loop, you know, my release on there. | ||
| By the time I look up, he's like right on the other side of this quake, 10 feet away from me, you know, just kind of looking to see where the cow is. | ||
| And just same thing, plugged it right through the middle. | ||
| I've never taken that shot. | ||
| I had an opportunity to do that shot last week at 45 yards, but there was some shit in the way of him, and I don't like that shot. | ||
| Yeah, not at that distance. | ||
| No. | ||
| That shot's like a 20 and under. | ||
| I passed right through him. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a devastating shot. | ||
| Just right at an angle. | ||
| Yeah, it's devastating if you hit it. | ||
| There's so many videos online of guys hitting that. | ||
| They just spray blood and die instantly. | ||
| He managed to run 20 yards down the hill and didn't make it any further. | ||
| It's a great discipline for fighters. | ||
| A lot of guys who leave fighting and the excitement and the intensity of fighting, nothing can match that. | ||
| The only thing that comes close for a lot of them is bow hunting. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that for sure. | ||
| I mean, I've done it. | ||
| I was doing it when I was fighting too, but yeah, I mean, I grew up hunting, but never really started shooting animals until I got a little bit older and getting a little better at it. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I need to get out and bow hunt a little more. | ||
| That's my favorite hunt is a bow archery elk hunt. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's the most exciting. | ||
| It's also the most crazy. | ||
| There's screaming, and there's so much chaos, and you've got to duck those cows and sneak around. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| To me, it's like the best way to get meat, first of all, and then it's also the best way for me to decompress. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's really good meat. | ||
| Oh, it's the best meat. | ||
| It's the best meat. | ||
| I ate the heart last night. | ||
| Oh, I don't know if I can do that. | ||
| You don't eat the heart? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's good, man. | ||
| You just fry it up. | ||
| I just put salt, pepper, and garlic on it and butter and fry it in butter. | ||
| I feel like it would have a different texture. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It's chewy, but it's good. | ||
| It tastes good. | ||
| I'm not a fan of liver either. | ||
| I eat the liver too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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I can't do it. | |
| It's good for you. | ||
| I mean, it's the best meat for you. | ||
| Well, it might be good for you, but... | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| I don't eat too much. | ||
| I ate a couple ounces in the morning with eggs. | ||
| I just slice it up and vacuum seal it and freeze it and then thaw it out for breakfast. | ||
| It's a good breakfast. | ||
| Gets you going. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm not into that. | ||
| You're more of a man than me for sure. | ||
| That's definitely not true. | ||
| So how have you adapted to retirement? | ||
| I feel like I'm pretty good. | ||
| It's not like I have the itch to get in there and do it again. | ||
| Occasionally when I see some of these guys with a little bit different style, I feel like it would have been fun to match up or see how I do against them. | ||
| I'd do it in practice. | ||
| With no cameras, just to see how it would be. | ||
| Not for any type of title or money. | ||
| It would be fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For a lot of guys it's so hard to not just resist that urge to come back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I started wrestling when I was five years old, and two Olympic teams, and then I started fighting, and I fought for 20 years, so I feel like I did enough. | ||
| You definitely did enough. | ||
| You did a lot. | ||
| A lot more than most, over that span of time, than most guys compete at that level, and I felt like... | ||
| I was ready when I retired. | ||
| I was, you know, honestly, my body felt okay. | ||
| I hadn't really had too many big injuries at all for a while, and I just was spending too much time on the couch after practice, just too tired to do anything else during training camp. | ||
| So family life was kind of, you know, with the kids and not spending time doing stuff like that was taking a toll. | ||
| So I was like, you know, it's time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you did it at the right time. | ||
| And it's good that you didn't come back. | ||
| It's just like so many guys come back and you kind of wish they didn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I wouldn't be one of those guys if I did come back. | ||
| I still feel really good. | ||
| But I don't plan on it. | ||
| But nobody's offered me enough money to get off the couch anyway. | ||
| Well, what I'm interested in seeing is like there's so many different options now with guys. | ||
| You know, like bare-knuckle boxing. | ||
| It's nice seeing a lot of guys going into that. | ||
| And I felt like that would be a thing that you would excel at. | ||
| Yeah, I hadn't really watched it until I watched Chad Mendez fight last year. | ||
| And I'm like, man, I like those rules. | ||
| That would be right up my alley. | ||
| Like, I don't think I would do okay at boxing, straight boxing, but not that great. | ||
| I would do a lot better at the bare knuckle rules with the dirty boxing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hold on to the guy and... | ||
| Yeah, it's very different. | ||
| I really like what Jorge Masvidal is doing, where he's got bare-knuckle MMA. It just shows you... | ||
| It's like, when you don't have... | ||
| First of all, grappling is way better. | ||
| Because you don't have the padding over your gloves that prevents certain chokes. | ||
| It just gets in the way of stuff. | ||
| But also, it's more realistic. | ||
| We talked about this before, but I think it was Tank Abbott was the first guy who figured out that if you wear MMA gloves, you actually could punch harder, because you're not worried as much about breaking your hands. | ||
| Wrap your hands up, put gloves on, and it's not a disadvantage, it's kind of an advantage. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't necessarily protect your opponent that much. | ||
| It really protects your hands. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| But it just seems to me weird that, you know, your elbows are unprotected, your knees are unprotected, your shins are unprotected. | ||
| You can go bone to bone with that, but not with your hands. | ||
| It just seems like it doesn't really make sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And when they first started UFC, there was no gloves, and that's how it was. | ||
| And when they started wearing gloves, that was my thoughts exactly, was more to protect your hands than, you know, I guess without your hands, if your hands break or fall apart, then the fight kind of doesn't happen as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, it's interesting to see how effective it is, too. | ||
| Like, Mike Perry has done an amazing job transitioning into bare knuckle. | ||
| Like, he's probably the most successful at it. | ||
| Definitely the most successful at it from MMA guys. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I saw him with Luke Rockhold. | ||
| Knocked some teeth silly. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, when it's just raw knuckle on your face, like a regular mouthpiece, it's not quite good enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's interesting that guys are still using the upper mouthpiece only with bare knuckle. | ||
| I would think you might want to use an upper and a lower. | ||
| Yeah, I always just did the upper. | ||
| Yeah, most people do. | ||
| I mean, very few people fought in MMA with an upper and a lower, right? | ||
| I don't think anybody. | ||
| Not that I know of. | ||
| Not that I know of. | ||
| In boxing, you used to see it. | ||
| You used to see guys who had like a full mouthpiece, but it just gets in the way of your breathing too much. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I have a problem with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you breathe out of your nose? | ||
| Can your nose work? | ||
| My nose works fine. | ||
| A lot of guys, you know. | ||
| I started snoring and so I went and got a sleep test. | ||
| But they went in and cleaned it up. | ||
| No, they put a scope up there to see how my nose was because they, you know, just like you, they thought my nose couldn't breathe. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And he said it was completely clear and no, it was all good. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing that you haven't had too many big injuries. | ||
| I know you broke your hand at least once, right? | ||
| Was that the Vanderlei fight? | ||
| That was a wild one. | ||
| That was... | ||
| In the first round, I broke it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I just remember going back to the corner, shaking my hand saying my hand hurts, and they started talking about something else, what I needed to do, and then I never thought about it again the rest of the fight. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I was throwing it. | ||
| So, you know, just the adrenaline or whatever I had in me just didn't even feel it again. | ||
| You got some wild highlight, real knockouts. | ||
| Some wild fights. | ||
| I remember the first fight I ever saw of yours, I think it was in 1997. I think you just posted it on Instagram. | ||
| Or someone did. | ||
| It was like me interviewing you backstage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right after the fight. | ||
| 97. That was in 97? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I'm pretty sure. | ||
| That was when I first started working for the UFC. I think that was a tournament back then. | ||
| Yeah, what year is that? | ||
| Does it say? | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| UFC 17. It was 17, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was, yeah, 1997. No, 98. 98. I fought in 97 in Brazil in a tournament, just to make some money to keep wrestling, and then I did the UFC a year later. | ||
| Who talked you into doing MMA in the first place? | ||
| Well, you know, Randy and I were training partners forever for wrestling. | ||
| And, you know, we'd always watched it on TV and said, you know, that'd be fun. | ||
| But I don't know if I'd want to get in there with some of those three or four hundred pounders, you know, those big fuckers. | ||
| And Randy called me up one day and said, hey, I'm doing this tournament down in Brazil at heavyweight and they got a lightweight tournament. | ||
| And this is like two weeks before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you want to go do the lightweight tournament, which is like, it was like 176 or something. | ||
| And I was like, well, okay. | ||
| And I was wrestling 180 and a half at the time, so it was an extra five pounds, but... | ||
| Yeah, I went down and did it. | ||
| But in the meantime, I guess Randy had already put an application into the UFC and they said no, which I didn't know he put in the application. | ||
| But then he got a call. | ||
| Somebody got hurt. | ||
| So he didn't go down to Brazil. | ||
| He went to the UFC instead. | ||
| It was like within a week before, a week after that fight. | ||
| No, not that one, but the one down in Brazil, which was I think it was UFC 13 was his first one. | ||
| Yeah, I was there for that too. | ||
| And he had a tournament against two big heavyweights. | ||
| Yeah, he fought some big muscular guy the first fight who had a lot of hype on him. | ||
| And I don't remember who he fought in the second fight. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| But that was like when we first started seeing elite wrestlers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| First started seeing Royce Alger, Coleman, all those. | ||
| Did Kenny Monday fight in the UFC? Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Was it Kevin Jackson? | ||
| Kevin Jackson. | ||
| Kenny Monday fought Submission. | ||
| I remember Matt Hume submitted him. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| I think I wrestled with Frank Shamrock. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I had a screwed up ankle. | ||
| I rolled it right before the World Championships a month before that. | ||
| So I went in there wearing wrestling shoes so I could hide the tape that I had on my ankle. | ||
| Frank's pretty good at ankle locks. | ||
| That was me not knowing anything about it. | ||
| Well, Frank was really one of the first guys that had like a full overall MMA game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| He really did. | ||
| I mean, when he submitted Kevin Jackson, like very impressive. | ||
| He could submit you off his back. | ||
| He had crazy cardio, full range of skills. | ||
| He could strike. | ||
| He could grapple. | ||
| He could do everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the cardio. | ||
| He was like one of the first guys that showed like cardio could be a weapon, like the Tito Ortiz fight. | ||
| You know, his cardio was a real weapon. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, for sure. | |
| And Tito's usually in pretty good shape, too. | ||
| Yeah, well, Tito learned from that fight. | ||
| I mean, I think that was a big wake-up call for him, that how much cardio plays a factor. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it's a different pace from wrestling, so that was something we had to learn. | ||
| Wrestling was a little bit higher paced, a little more action, shorter durations, though. | ||
| So I had to learn to kind of pace myself a little bit when I first started doing this. | ||
| When you first started doing this, what were the distance of the rounds? | ||
| Was it five-minute rounds? | ||
| No. | ||
| The one down in Brazil, I think, was... | ||
| A 15-minute straight round and then maybe a 15-minute overtime if there's no submission. | ||
| Then they go to judges. | ||
| But, I mean, I didn't go. | ||
| I think I went like seven or eight minutes the first fight with Crazio. | ||
| It was my first fight. | ||
| He was like a black belt. | ||
| Which I didn't know a whole lot about. | ||
| After watching that fight again nowadays, it just, you know, I see so many mistakes that I did. | ||
| And I didn't know how to punch either. | ||
| I never sparred before. | ||
| I never sparred before I fought in the UFC on that one you just put up. | ||
| Never? | ||
| Never. | ||
| And then I started sparring after that. | ||
| Well, no, I hit the bag and hit focus mitts and, you know... | ||
| It was just kind of awkward to punch your friend in the face, you know? | ||
| But after that, it was like, me and Randy were like, fuck, we need to start sparring. | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| You guys didn't spar at all before the first year. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| I was off balance a lot, you know, getting hit, falling down. | ||
| Because, you know, when you don't spar, you don't have the same balance or... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a lot better to practice the way you fight. | ||
| That's so crazy that you fought the first... | ||
| So did you have a striking coach? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had boxing guys and kind of kickboxing guys that would come in, but there was no coaches back then. | ||
| MMA coaches, I should say. | ||
| And then we just started really figuring out what works really well with our styles and, you know, takedown offense and, you know, setting up strikes and... | ||
| I think the first real MMA coach was probably Miletic. | ||
| Probably Pat. | ||
| Pat and Matt Hume. | ||
| Yeah, Matt Hume. | ||
| Good call. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are the first guys that were really putting it all together. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, and even back then, guys kind of didn't know exactly what the right... | ||
| I mean, now, if you go to ATT or one of these big gyms, I mean... | ||
| They have protocols. | ||
| They know exactly what they're doing. | ||
| They have training schedules all mapped out in advance. | ||
| Hard days, easier days, technical days. | ||
| I mean, they really have it down to a science. | ||
| Monitoring recovery. | ||
| It's kind of crazy when you think about your first fight, no sparring at all. | ||
| Yeah, my first four fights, because there was two fights each one of those events. | ||
| And then the UFC, you fought Carlos Newton, right? | ||
| Yeah, Carlos Newton and Alan Goez and then Carlos. | ||
| Two very elite submission guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Carlos Newton, people forgot about him. | ||
| That fucking guy was good. | ||
| Yeah, no, he was tough. | ||
| He was good. | ||
| Real well-rounded. | ||
| He broke my jaw. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just like a last minute of the fight, he kind of hit me. | ||
| It didn't daze me or anything, but... | ||
| And then, you know, shortly after, five seconds later, I took him down. | ||
| And when I took him down, my chin kind of pushed against his chest, and it kind of shifted, and I'm like, ooh. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That doesn't feel right. | ||
| When did you realize that you had that kind of crazy power? | ||
| Because it's kind of funny that a guy who started out grappling and didn't do any sparring at all for his first four MMA fights was one of the most dangerous strikers in the sport. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I grew up playing baseball and threw really hard. | ||
| And then When I started, not sparring, started MMA, I'd hit the focus mitts and everybody would say, oh shit, you hit hard. | ||
| It's just natural. | ||
| It just took me a while to figure out where to put it. | ||
| There's a few guys, I think Gomi, I think Takanori Gomi started out as a pitcher, which makes sense. | ||
| You see the way that guy throws punches, just fucking whips his whole body into it like a fastball. | ||
| Put a lot of weight into it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's actually probably a great thing to start out with, just to learn how to put a lot of force behind your arm. | ||
| Driving with your legs and everything. | ||
| Yeah, it completely makes sense if you think about it. | ||
| Because you think about how many guys practice medicine balls now. | ||
| You know, they whip medicine balls against the wall to advance your punching power. | ||
| Yeah, it's hard to teach. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Yeah, you either have power or you don't have power. | ||
| Yeah, I mean you can definitely get better at mechanics to make it harder, but not like what a lot of guys have naturally. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Isn't it wild? | ||
| That's a crazy thing because you can't really tell. | ||
| Sometimes by looking at guys like there's guys that just me well you look pretty strong but there's some guys like They just don't look like they carry that much power, but they have crazy power, right? | ||
| It's so it's weird powers a weird thing like if you either have nuclear power or you know And again, I think a lot of that is... | ||
| It is mechanics, but a lot of the most mechanics come naturally. | ||
| Like some of those pitchers that can throw the ball so goddamn fast. | ||
| And some of them are skinny as fuck. | ||
| They just whip that thing around. | ||
| And then there's also your frame. | ||
| Some guys just have bigger shoulders, bigger hands. | ||
| They're just naturally designed to hit things more. | ||
| More leverage points. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, when you think back, like as a pioneer in the sport, I mean, it's pretty wild what you guys did. | ||
| Pretty wild that you entered into the sport that at the time was just kind of a way to make some money. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It wasn't, there was, I mean, when I started doing the post-fight interviews, it was banned from cable. | ||
| The only way you could get it was DirecTV. | ||
| I actually got DirecTV. | ||
| That's when you started? | ||
| Yeah, 97. Because it was... | ||
| I feel like it was right after... | ||
| It wasn't banned from cable yet until after I fought. | ||
| I think it was banned from... | ||
| One of those years it was banned from cable. | ||
| And there was a lot of shenanigans with Budweiser and... | ||
| You remember McCain? | ||
| McCain was trying to keep it out. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| They were calling it human cockfighting. | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't a fan of his. | ||
| No. | ||
| Most MMA guys weren't. | ||
| Because it was so ridiculous. | ||
| There was no deaths in MMA to speak of. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not like in boxing, which we have a few every year. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they were trying to say it was more dangerous. | ||
| I'm like, I don't think it is. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I mean, everything's dangerous. | ||
| Even combat sports is dangerous. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But to say that MMA is more dangerous is just ignorance. | ||
| You just didn't understand what was happening. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| I have heard that over the years, a lot of different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got nothing bad to say about MMA. I mean, I grew up as a wrestler and, you know, kind of competing is what I've done my whole life and... | ||
| Yeah, I don't feel like it affected me in a bad way at all. | ||
| If anything, it was positive things that made me tougher, made me have more drive with other things in my life. | ||
| Well, you're very fortunate that you came out of it on the other end healthy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We know guys who haven't. | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| There's a few guys that are pretty messed up. | ||
| I'm not saying that it hasn't affected some guys, but I'm just saying, fortunately, I went through it fairly good. | ||
| No, you went through it great. | ||
| And I think a lot of it was, and Randy's the same way, just being smart in training. | ||
| A lot of these guys just... | ||
| Bang way too much in practice. | ||
| And I'm always an advocate of sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes in training. | ||
| If you're training to fight, you have to fight in training. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you know how to manage that? | ||
| Yeah, I think over the years, you know, you just, you definitely have one, we have one hard, solid spar day a week, and then more technical sparring another day with the big gloves on, and then The other days of the MMA gloves, you know, we're still going hard, but not with the striking part. | ||
| Just lighter strikes, which, you know, it's kind of hard sometimes. | ||
| Some of these guys, when they go lighter, they slow down their punches instead of... | ||
| Keeping your speed there and your timing and not punching as hard. | ||
| That's kind of a hard thing to get used to. | ||
| It took me a while to have that control. | ||
| I would accidentally drop guys a lot in practice because I didn't have control when I was kind of new to the sport. | ||
| Is there a way that you do now where you train guys to learn how to punch fast but not hit hard? | ||
| Yeah, you yell at them. | ||
| Don't do it in slow motion. | ||
| Don't do it in slow motion but also don't connect full clip. | ||
| You don't need to hit hard but don't go slow. | ||
| You just got to remind them because guys just do it naturally. | ||
| But it's kind of crazy for you as a pioneer because you guys had to kind of figure it out. | ||
| That word makes me feel old. | ||
| A pioneer? | ||
| I hear it all the time now. | ||
| What's a good word? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But you are. | ||
| That is a good word, but it just does make me feel older. | ||
| You're the definition of a pioneer. | ||
| I mean, UFC 17? | ||
| I mean, come on, man. | ||
| That was back in the dark days. | ||
| I feel like I should have a fucking panda and do some gold mining. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, there's no better word for it. | ||
| But back then, you guys had to kind of learn along the way as the sport evolved. | ||
| I've always said this, that there's not a sport that you could ever point to that has evolved more since 1993 to 2023. It's nothing even close. | ||
| You watched fights today, like the Makachev-Volkonowski fight. | ||
| I mean, everything's so high level now. | ||
| Everyone's so good in every aspect of the game. | ||
| Yeah, that was a good... | ||
| I mean, their first one was a good one. | ||
| That was a... | ||
| I didn't expect that. | ||
| I didn't expect it either. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That guy evolved. | ||
| He got better. | ||
| He got better and he figured out a lot of the things that he was doing wrong in that fight and then setting up that head kick with those body kicks. | ||
| I thought Volk was going to get him this... | ||
| I just felt like he had more tools and easier adjustments. | ||
| Did you ever have to take a fight like that on 10 days notice? | ||
| Because that's what's crazy about it. | ||
| They took it so short notice. | ||
| Yeah, a number of times. | ||
| Especially in Pride, that was pretty common. | ||
| Yeah, Pride, they would just call you up like a week before the fight, right? | ||
| I fought Big Nog. | ||
| He was heavyweight champ at the time on 10 days notice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| Yeah, I mean, there was a couple of others. | ||
| I fought Bustamante on probably a week's notice. | ||
| So, during the Pride days... | ||
| Two and a half months after a knee surgery, a new ACL surgery. | ||
| No way. | ||
| They called me up and I was hunting out in Colorado and they tracked me down on my buddy's cell phone up in the mountains and said, hey, you need to... | ||
| And I didn't have a contract at the time and I went and had knee surgery because I tore my knee and it's like, well, if you don't take the fight, we don't know what will happen with any future contracts. | ||
| So I'm like, alright, I'll do it, but you're paying me win or lose, you know, the win bonus also. | ||
| And so I took the fight. | ||
| Luckily, I knocked him out real quick with that knee. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| And who was that against? | ||
| Bustamante. | ||
| Bustamante. | ||
| I don't remember that fight. | ||
| It was after he was UFC champ and then left. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| You fought two and a half months after ACL reconstruction. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That basically means your ACL was useless. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was like a minute into the fight. | ||
| How? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, now I'm remembering that fight. | ||
| See if you can find that fight. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| Here it is right here. | ||
| Now, this was, which way did they do it? | ||
| Did they do a cadaver? | ||
| Did they do a patella tendon? | ||
| I did the cadaver because it was a quicker recovery. | ||
| Yeah, much quicker. | ||
| I did the cadaver on my right knee and I had the patella tendon on my left knee. | ||
| My right knee was good to go in six months, but my left knee, it took like a year before it felt normal. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Which knee is it? | ||
| My left. | ||
| My lead knee. | ||
| And so you're supporting on it. | ||
| You already threw a kick. | ||
| So you're trusting it. | ||
| Do you just not think about it once you're in there? | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I was hiking like 10 miles a day for about four days before they tracked me down up in Colorado. | ||
| That's crazy too. | ||
| Luckily I was, you know, but I was also drinking beer every day. | ||
| Well, that doesn't get you in shape though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The beer doesn't, but the hiking 10 miles a day in the mountains, that's actually probably pretty good for your fucking endurance. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Oh, there it is. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That must have been such a relief to take a fight like that two and a half months after surgery. | ||
| Yeah, no, it was definitely a good moment for sure. | ||
| I was a little nervous about it because he's a tough dude. | ||
| Yeah, very tough dude. | ||
| Very tough dude. | ||
| The funniest thing about that, you know, the one week that I had at home training, I threw like a wide left hook and dislocated my thumb and it popped out. | ||
| You can see it still screwed up now, but... | ||
| When I got there, I'm like, hey, can I get a shot to numb my thumb before the fight? | ||
| Because they can do that there. | ||
| They don't let you do it here. | ||
| They're like, yeah, but you got to go to the doctor. | ||
| They'll x-ray you. | ||
| So I went in there and they got one of those things. | ||
| You can see the chicken x-rayed me doing this. | ||
| There was nothing wrong. | ||
| And then I'm like, but... | ||
| They had the x-ray machine where you could see the bones move, and it's just so weird how the bone just comes right—the ligament is gone. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So— Is it still gone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just torn off? | ||
| Yeah, I just—by that time, I just taped it for about a year, and then it was good. | ||
| But my other thumb got jammed in the fight. | ||
| Like, when I was trying to finish him, it must have— My whole thumb was so swollen, so I couldn't even wipe my ass. | ||
| I couldn't take my pants off. | ||
| I had no thumbs for like a week. | ||
| So both thumbs were fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, that was the funny part about that. | ||
| The Pride days were so wild because did you – when you were under contract with Pride, did you just like when an event was coming up just prepare like you were probably going to fight in the event? | ||
| Because they didn't contact anybody until like a couple of weeks out. | ||
| For their New Year's Eve shows, you know, I knew that I'd probably be fighting most likely on most of those shows once they started because that was their big event of the year. | ||
| I think I did two or three of those. | ||
| But I was ready to go. | ||
| The only ones that really that I noticed that was real short notice were those two, you know, against Big Nog and then Bustamante. | ||
| Remember when Bustamante fought Tom Erickson in that one crazy event? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was one of those no time limit things or like a 30 minute round or something like that. | ||
| And Tom Erickson was like 300 pounds. | ||
| Was it an MMA fight or was it a grappling? | ||
| No, it was an MMA. It was an MMA fight. | ||
| I think it was the same event where Oleg Tektaro fought Henzo Gracie and Henzo Gracie KO'd him with an up kick. | ||
| It was like the first time we ever saw an up kick. | ||
| Was that in the UFC? No. | ||
| No, that was... | ||
| That was some one-off. | ||
| Some of the first few UFCs, they were doing goofy stuff. | ||
| Like, they had super long fights, no time limits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The first UFC was no time limit, each fight. | ||
| No time limit. | ||
| They just fought. | ||
| And Pride had, when I first got to Pride, it was two 10s. | ||
| And then they turned into 10 and two 5s, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you like that? | ||
| I think the 10-minute round is a good idea. | ||
| I liked it because I thought it separated the men from the boys, really. | ||
| I mean, about 7, 8, 9 minutes in, you know, guys start breaking. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Also, if you're a grappler and you take a guy down with four minutes into the round and you've got six minutes to go now instead of one minute. | ||
| You've seen the UFC guys struggle so hard to get a takedown and they finally get a takedown and then boom, round's over. | ||
| Whereas I just feel like in that situation, maybe the right move is to start him in the next round exactly where you left him off. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| No, I would like that. | ||
| Because you think about the advantage that it is for an elite striker like Alex Paheta or something like that. | ||
| If you take that guy down and dominate him in the first round and then the second round starts and he has to go right back to side control or wherever you had him. | ||
| Or just do three eight-minute rounds or something. | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| Three eight-minute rounds for a championship round. | ||
| For a championship fight. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| For any fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's just, I think, you know, Chael Sonnen has said this. | ||
| It's just like, no one can really fight all out for 25 minutes. | ||
| You've got to kind of pace yourself. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what I said. | ||
| Coming from wrestling to MMA, I kind of learned how to pace myself, and then Sometimes, like my fight against Shogun, which was five rounds, but I got tired because I tried to finish him in the third round and just fucking shot my wad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That fight was fucking crazy. | ||
| That was a crazy one. | ||
| It was probably more crazy to everybody else watching than it was to me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Why's that? | ||
| Because, I don't know, I felt like I dominated him the first three rounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't a close decision on those three rounds. | ||
| The fourth round was kind of close, so it could have went either way, I thought. | ||
| And then the fifth round, he was on top of me, but he wasn't hurting me at all. | ||
| So I knew he wouldn't finish me. | ||
| In my mind, I knew for sure he wasn't going to finish me and I already won the fight. | ||
| Anytime he did hit me, I'd try to get out. | ||
| He just kept mounting me again every time I'd almost get out. | ||
| I was so tired. | ||
| Well, I want to say crazy in that it was entertaining. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| It was a very wildly entertaining fight. | ||
| But a lot of people, like, oh, they didn't know what was going to happen, if he was going to finish me or not finish me. | ||
| But I knew that he wasn't going to. | ||
| So that's why it wasn't as exciting to me. | ||
| It definitely was a lot tougher fight than I was hoping for. | ||
| Well, because of trying to empty out the gas tank. | ||
| Yeah, that. | ||
| I don't know if he was coming off injuries in the past with some of his other fights where he kind of almost quit and they broke him or finished him. | ||
| So that was my goal was to go out there and get on him pretty hard and try to break him and finish him. | ||
| He's a guy that I feel like maybe fought a little too long. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| And he definitely manned up and was a lot tougher than I thought he was. | ||
| Oh, he's a tough motherfucker. | ||
| In pride, he was amazing. | ||
| In pride, he was fucking amazing. | ||
| I think a lot of guys left their best days behind in pride, unfortunately. | ||
| You know, a lot of guys, by the time we saw him in the UFC, Big Nog, Cro Cop. | ||
| Cro Cop, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's a few of those guys that just... | ||
| Fedor. | ||
| Fedor, yeah. | ||
| The wars that they had in Pride were so insane. | ||
| I feel like Fedor didn't have big wars, though. | ||
| A couple, but not... | ||
| No. | ||
| Not where he got hit much. | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| I mean, even in the Cro Cop fight, he was basically walking down Cro Cop, which is crazy when you think about what an elite striker Cro Cop is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fedor was a motherfucker, dude. | ||
| Goddamn, that guy was good. | ||
| I feel like some of the referees or something told me, like, when they were in there reffing Krokop in the UFC, he's out there saying, I'm too old for this shit, or I don't, you know, like, why am I here type of thing. | ||
| That's not the attitude you should have when you're out there. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think also, I don't know what he was doing when he was in Pride, but I know a lot of guys, when they were in Pride, were doing a lot of shit. | ||
| And then they came over to the UFC and all of a sudden they're getting tested. | ||
| Whereas in Pride, they were saying like specifically, we don't test you for nothing. | ||
| Like Ensign told me. | ||
| They did P-test, but I'm not sure what they tested for. | ||
| They didn't do anything with it. | ||
| They just wanted to make sure you were on steroids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I asked them if they would. | ||
| And the answer I got, well, if we did that, it would be you and no Garrett would be the only fighters we'd have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I always wondered. | ||
| I always wondered how much of what you saw was guys that were sauced up. | ||
| We know some guys were sauced up, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| I think a lot of sports have that evolution in there. | ||
| Before they get big enough to be concerned about that, they're already doing it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, then there was the testosterone replacement error. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was the first one to get on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was like, there's no way I'm doing it. | ||
| I don't want to do that. | ||
| And, you know, the doctor's like, well, you'd feel a lot better. | ||
| And I asked the athletic commission if I even could. | ||
| They're like, yeah, if you get a Doctor's prescription and, you know, they say you need it, no problem. | ||
| I was like, oh, really? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then everybody started kind of abusing it. | ||
| They abused the shit out of it. | ||
| Fucked it up for everybody. | ||
| Well, those days, the Vitor days, everybody talks about TRT Vitor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because testosterone replacement Vitor was fucking, Jesus Christ, he was scary. | ||
| When I found him in Pride, he tested positive in Vegas. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because we were in Vegas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ah. | |
| Their first Pride event in Vegas. | ||
| Well, you were one of the only guys who didn't show a performance decline when you got off of it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I wasn't taking much, but I was... | ||
| And I always... | ||
| Even when they weren't testing me... | ||
| Like they do now, they randomly show up. | ||
| And I was asking for the UFC to do that for years, even though now they're getting rid of it. | ||
| Well, they're getting rid of it, but they're implementing some sort of a new program called Drug Free Sport. | ||
| But I don't know what that means. | ||
| Their logo might be a wink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, it depends on how much money you're making them. | |
| Yeah, I think they wanted a little bit more control of when the tests were going on because you thought it would show up at 6 o'clock in the morning and test guys on weigh-in days and shit like that. | ||
| Well, I mean – and I had to deal with that when I wrestled on the national team. | ||
| Top three guys were subjected to that as well and I had that for years. | ||
| And then – That's why I was like, oh, I don't want to do that. | ||
| But they're like, oh, you can. | ||
| But I would test myself at least once or twice every training camp. | ||
| So I could, if anybody questioned me or how I was doing it, I could show that I'm not abusing it. | ||
| This is what my levels were during training camp. | ||
| So I did that all on my own just because. | ||
| Even though I would only get tested by them at the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Did you have to do anything differently once you got off of it, once they removed the TRT exemptions? | ||
| No. | ||
| Didn't do anything different, just stopped taking it? | ||
| No, just... | ||
| A lot of that shit's in your head anyway, so I was like, fuck it, I'm just... | ||
| At that time, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure that I was a little bit affected, but I felt like, yeah, I could push through it, no problem, and I did. | ||
| And as I got older, though, like in my early 40s, mid-40s, I really started feeling the age a little bit as far as just not recovering. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Did you adjust your training to handle that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I made my training camps like a month longer, three weeks longer, just to kind of ease into it and not really go real hard for the first two, three weeks and then really start a hard training camp and then taper off a little bit better, but just a little bit shorter practices with more intensity. | ||
| So going back to being a pioneer, I know you hate that word, but you really are. | ||
| I don't hate it. | ||
| How did you guys figure out what's the best way to train? | ||
| Like, who helped you put together camps? | ||
| Because you're going from this one discipline, wrestling, which you excelled at, and now you're competing in MMA, and there's so many different ways to do it, and nobody really knew exactly the right way to do it. | ||
| There was a lot of, like, different camps were doing it different ways. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How did you guys figure out? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Knowing how much there was to learn in the sport, we kind of broke it up into different categories. | ||
| One day we're going to spar hard, but we also needed to learn how to grapple on the ground, how to use our wrestling to control certain positions. | ||
| So I think just knowing that, we didn't spend every day sparring hard or, you know, three, four days a week sparring hard because we needed to learn the other shit too. | ||
| So I think it just naturally went that way. | ||
| And then as we got a little bit older and more experienced in the sport, you know, kind of fine-tuned that a little bit. | ||
| On certain days, we do certain harder things and Really try not to beat your brain up too much. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Just one day, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of... | ||
| It's interesting that even today, there's different schools of thought. | ||
| Like, Sean Strickland spars basically every day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas Max Holloway... | ||
| He was at my gym for like three years. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Was he? | ||
| He's a wild boy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I kind of had to let him go. | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| The crazier days? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| He just kind of gets too involved talking shit about people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I can see that. | ||
| I liked him in the gym. | ||
| I liked him there. | ||
| He was a great training partner. | ||
| You need at least one guy in your gym that does that and goes hard and makes everybody else go hard when they're going against him. | ||
| So I liked it, but... | ||
| Other people didn't. | ||
| Yeah, he just was too disrespectful to teammates and stuff. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How's the young Sean Strickland? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I definitely see that. | ||
| I always rooted for him when he left. | ||
| It wasn't like I was like, I hope that guy... | ||
| No, I always rooted for him. | ||
| I thought he had a ton of potential. | ||
| I was yelling at him to go up a weight class because he was always trying to make 170. I'm like, dude, you need to go 185. You'd feel a lot better. | ||
| You'd be fine competing up there, but everybody's always mentally afraid to be against the bigger guys. | ||
| Yeah, he's a different fighter at 185 than he was at 170. At 170, you could see he was compromised. | ||
| I mean, he ought to have cut 25 pounds. | ||
| Easy, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, he's big. | ||
| He's way too big for 170. But when you saw his fight with Adesanya, were you shocked? | ||
| I only saw parts of that. | ||
| I didn't see the whole thing. | ||
| I was somewhere else. | ||
| I didn't get to see it. | ||
| It's fucking amazing. | ||
| Yeah, no, I saw parts of it and yeah, he looked great. | ||
| He looked fucking amazing. | ||
| The crazy thing is how good his defense is. | ||
| I thought he would do well against him. | ||
| I didn't think he'd do well just standing up with him. | ||
| I mean, I thought on your side it would get, would outpoint him a little bit. | ||
| But I thought Sean would take him down and beat the shit out of him if he got on top. | ||
| Well, that's a lot of people don't realize. | ||
| Sean has a very good ground game. | ||
| No, very good, yeah. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| He just doesn't use it very often. | ||
| He's black belt in jiu-jitsu, good wrestling, good takedown defense. | ||
| He's solid everywhere, but he just loves to bang. | ||
| He loves to stay in the front of guys. | ||
| He doesn't have huge power. | ||
| He's probably getting better at putting it in better places now. | ||
| But he's not a big knockout guy, but he definitely adds them up. | ||
| He's by far one of the biggest pressure fighters that just moves forward all the time. | ||
| Well, he's also able to do that because of his defense. | ||
| His defense is so underrated. | ||
| He's hard to hit, yeah. | ||
| So underrated. | ||
| And in that Adesanya fight, you saw it so clearly. | ||
| Yeah, he's really hard to hit. | ||
| So good at moving just out of distance and then putting more pressure back on you, checking those calf kicks. | ||
| He's quick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was super impressed with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's even more impressive, you know, coming back from an accident like he had, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And he talks about it. | ||
| It's like, my quad's all fucked up on his right leg. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like his one leg is just like, the quad's not even attached. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, no. | ||
| But again, it just shows what the body can do if you just let it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, if you're just mentally tough enough to push through something. | ||
| Well, he changed his style a little bit because of it. | ||
| You know, he stands different than most people. | ||
| He stands very straight up. | ||
| He always has. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Always? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I'd spar him, I'd have to... | ||
| I quit aiming for his head. | ||
| I just aimed for his chest, and it kind of stopped him. | ||
| And then I could, you know, follow up. | ||
| If I hit him in the chest, I could follow up and hit him again. | ||
| But he's hard to hit. | ||
| Yeah, it's impressive. | ||
| And he's the only guy doing that sort of Philly Shell style at a championship level. | ||
| It's, like, very interesting seeing him out there. | ||
| He looks different than everybody else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's quick. | ||
| That really helps him not get hit also. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just also I think when we're going back to the different schools of thought in terms of sparring, he spars every day. | ||
| It's most of his training is sparring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when you see him fight Adesanya in the fifth round, the guy wasn't even breathing heavy. | ||
| I mean, he looked like ready to go five more after that. | ||
| He's got like just... | ||
| His natural ability is his cardio. | ||
| Among, you know, he knows how to fight well too, but naturally he just has cardio for days. | ||
| Well, I gotta think that has a lot to do with constantly sparring. | ||
| So the sparring thing is not, there's not a lot of tension. | ||
| Very loose and very composed and very efficient. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whereas some guys... | ||
| But then again, you look at Max Holloway, he's about as good as it gets, and that guy doesn't spar at all anymore. | ||
| He says, I don't want to get beat up. | ||
| He shouldn't. | ||
| Yeah, he just says... | ||
| Especially the way his fights are typically wars, you know? | ||
| Oh, he's had some fucking crazy wars. | ||
| Crazy wars. | ||
| Crazy wars. | ||
| But he's like, I want to go into those fights fresh. | ||
| And I think that was something that he picked up during training camps. | ||
| Like some of the training camps where he sparred a lot. | ||
| He was a little beat up by the time he actually got into the octagon. | ||
| And so now he's like, look, I already know how to fight. | ||
| So I'll just do drills and hit mitts and pads and constant conditioning and it works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But that's what's interesting is like there's no one perfect way to do it. | ||
| It depends upon the athlete, depends upon the skill set. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| And, you know, you could, like, I set certain days to do certain things because of, you know, how tough certain things are on certain days and you want to go hard, then you want to kind of take it easy for a day. | ||
| Easier, I should say, but... | ||
| It doesn't work for everybody. | ||
| Some guys just need a little bit more. | ||
| Some guys need less. | ||
| Do you think that's something that you just need to tune in on your own with a coach and with the people that you work with and just figure it out over time at multiple camps? | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| But, I mean, for the most part, you get what you get put into it, out of it. | ||
| So, if one day you're not feeling it, you know, you kind of get in there and you get lazy. | ||
| You might get beat up a little bit, but that means you're having to push through some adversity to kind of keep going, which is also a good thing in training to have to do some days. | ||
| and on the flip side, you might feel great someday and you're the one beating the other guy up in practice. | ||
| And I think it's good for the guys to get beat up to have to see how they respond to that. | ||
| Right, and to have that experience once you actually get in the fight. | ||
| Right, because it's definitely going to happen in a fight. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| What do you think was your toughest fight? | ||
| Do you have a toughest fight? | ||
| I have a toughest night of fighting. | ||
| That was when I did that tournament, the rings tournament, the 32-man unlimited weight class tournament. | ||
| Oh yeah, I forgot about that one. | ||
| How many times did you fight that night? | ||
| Well, the first event I fought twice, and then I came back and fought three times in a night. | ||
| How much of a gap between the first two fights and the... | ||
| So I fought Gilbert Yavelle, whatever his name is, the first fight that night and had about an hour probably, which is pretty good, 45 minutes to an hour. | ||
| And then I fought Big Nog. | ||
| And he fucked my knee up. | ||
| We were in the clinch and he jumps to guard and his ass landed on my leg and just popped my MCL. So my leg really hurt, my knee dead. | ||
| I made it through that fight, beat him. | ||
| And then I had about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. | ||
| There was one fight in between. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And then I had to fight Babalu in the finals. | ||
| And Randy was in my corner and Ryan Parsons. | ||
| And I find out afterwards they're like, oh, there's no problem. | ||
| He's going to be able to fight. | ||
| I was just a bucket of shit out there in the locker room. | ||
| It hurt. | ||
| And then... | ||
| But that fight, I never made that much money. | ||
| This was in the year 2000, so I think the most I had ever made from wrestling with everything combined was when I fought in the UFC the year before that and made like 20 grand. | ||
| This final fight was worth 200 grand. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Win or lose, it was a $200,000 difference. | ||
| Just the one fight? | ||
| Yeah, the finals. | ||
| The champ got everything. | ||
| It was basically a winner-take-all type of thing. | ||
| If I would have taken second place, I would have had five fights for about $30,000 total, and I made $230,000 instead. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| Yeah, and I'll tell you what, when I went out there and they played the national anthem beforehand, that got me pumped up, ready to go. | ||
| And the thought of $200,000. | ||
| Did you tape your knee up or anything? | ||
| Ah, no. | ||
| I mean, there wasn't really much time, and I just went out there and fought, kind of defended takedowns. | ||
| And this tournament was, they had a little bit different rules. | ||
| It was two fives. | ||
| And kind of like the ultimate fighter and the possibility of another five if it's a draw. | ||
| And Babalu was a fucking stud too. | ||
| Yeah, him and Nogueira were both pretty big, like 40 pounds bigger than me. | ||
| Babalu had one of the most horrific KOs early in his career. | ||
| He fought Brad Kohler and he soccer kicked him with wrestling shoes on. | ||
| Remember those days? | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| Brad Kohler was like a bodybuilder. | ||
| He was a tank. | ||
| Yeah, I remember him. | ||
| He was a tank. | ||
| And Babalu stuffed his shots and got him down and soccer kicked him into the next realm. | ||
| Yeah, I think I remember that. | ||
| Yeah, see if you can find that. | ||
| Babalu was an animal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very tough guy. | |
| Yeah, no, he was tough. | ||
| Him and Noguera, up till the time when I had fought them, they'd submitted everybody in the tournament that they'd fought so far. | ||
| So Noguera had finished three guys. | ||
| He hit them with a lot of low kicks. | ||
| That was back in the wrestling shoes days. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| The difference in your amount of grip that you have with wrestling shoes. | ||
| Big fucking difference, right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, Babalu's super high level. | ||
| Yeah, he was tough. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| He gets him right here. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Soccer kick. | ||
| What show is that in? | ||
| Is that in Brazil? | ||
| Boy, I don't know. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| 2000... | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| World Extreme Fighting. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| January 15th of 2000. Just different fucking rule sets. | ||
| About a month later is when I fought in that tournament. | ||
| I think it was like February, the King of Kings finals. | ||
| World Extreme Fighting. | ||
| Go on plow. | ||
| Jens Pulver was in there. | ||
| No shit. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That Phil Johns dude looks like Justin Gaethje. | ||
| He does. | ||
| I thought it was at first. | ||
| Oh, Pele fought fucking Pat Miletic. | ||
| I forgot about that fight too. | ||
| John Lewis, Jeremy Horn. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Noguera. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Rodrigo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Matt Hughes was in there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Bunch of legends. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Just those days, man. | ||
| That's never going to happen again, where you have just the emergence of a sport like this that becomes one of the biggest sports in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they should do tournaments again. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Multiple fights in a night. | ||
| It would be wild. | ||
| I think they should start doing that, and then it kind of gears it up to be an Olympic sport after that. | ||
| What do you do, though, if you have injuries? | ||
| Well, I think you've got to tame down the rules a little bit, but there's typically alternates when they do any MMA tournament. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they have an alternate—yeah, but, I mean, if someone—like, say if you have a war against one—like, say if you have a war against somebody, and then in the next round, the guy who also fought, he has to pull out, and then they put it in an alternate, and he's fresh. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but they make the alternates fight. | ||
| Oh, do they? | ||
| Like, my fight with Bustamante was an alternate fight. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| I see. | ||
| So the alternates fight... | ||
| I actually could have fought again that night. | ||
| I'm thankful I did, and I didn't have any thumbs and a skinny knee. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, that would work. | ||
| That would work where you have a potential alternate. | ||
| You might need two. | ||
| Well, if you needed the other guy, I guess you would take the loser of the alternate, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| I guess. | ||
| I guess you would. | ||
| Unless you got KO'd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it depends on where it's at. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If it's in Japan, like dust him off, put some ice on his head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is interesting when you see tournaments, though, because it's like you have a built-in super fight, right? | ||
| You see over the night guys winning, and you know their style, and so you're looking forward to the matchup when it comes to the main event. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, that was the early UFC. Right. | ||
| I thought UFC 17 was a tournament. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the tournaments were wild. | ||
| The first one I went to was UFC 12. That was when Vitor fought Trey Tellegman, and then he fought Scott Ferozo. | ||
| And he won the heavyweight tournament when he was 19. Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Randy came in after that, I guess. | ||
| Just don't... | ||
| Yeah, Randy was... | ||
| That was back when Vitor was like 240 when he fought Randy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He looked like his trap started at the top of his ears. | |
| He had a little bitty head on top of a huge body. | ||
| He was crazy big. | ||
| He was so bulked up. | ||
| But I just wonder what athletic commissions would allow you to do that. | ||
| I know Los Angeles, just a few years ago, when they had Glory Last Man Standing, they had a big tournament there. | ||
| It was a big kickboxing tournament. | ||
| I wonder if they would allow something like that with some athletic commissions with MMA. Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't see why they wouldn't. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Be exciting. | ||
| They could tame it down a little bit, kind of like they do The Ultimate Fighter, but, you know, have it all in one night, not over... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, it certainly would be exciting. | ||
| I think the options that would be interesting are one 15-minute round instead of three fives. | ||
| I think that would be very interesting. | ||
| And then a tournament. | ||
| That would also be very interesting if they decided to do it. | ||
| I mean, if someone wants to stand out from another organization, like the PFL or one of those... | ||
| Like the PFL's got some weird point system that they do that I don't really understand. | ||
| You get a certain amount of points for a submission, a certain amount of points for a KO, and it's like you're ahead in the score. | ||
| Is that like to go for the whole season to see where you're ranked? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I thought the whole season was a tournament. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| Well, I guess it's only certain weight classes or every weight class? | ||
| It's weight classes. | ||
| Well, I don't know if they do it with all weight classes, but I think that's just how they run their organization. | ||
| I hope they stop doing that. | ||
| Well, they're now going to own Bellator. | ||
| Yeah, which is interesting. | ||
| They got a lot of cash, apparently. | ||
| A lot of oil money going that direction. | ||
| A lot of investor money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Listen, the more big organizations, the better, I think. | ||
| For the athletes, for sure. | ||
| For the fans, for sure. | ||
| And they have Francis Ngannou. | ||
| Francis Ngannou becomes their heavyweight poster guy, and he's their heavyweight champion. | ||
| It could be very interesting if they throw a bunch of money at it. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I think it's great for the sport and, you know, great for the fighters. | ||
| Yes, definitely great for the fighters. | ||
| The fighters can't just have the UFC. And it's good for the UFC too. | ||
| Everybody needs competition. | ||
| You know, the UFC needs the... | ||
| And it's great for the fighters. | ||
| If you got the PFL bidding on you, you got one championship bidding on you, and you got the UFC bidding on you, that's a good place to be. | ||
| Well, for sure. | ||
| If there's only the UFC around, you've got to take what they give you. | ||
| I was kind of in that boat for a bit when the UFC bought Pride, and then I was in the UFC again, and then Strikeforce came along, and I went there, and then they bought Strikeforce. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's what I told the press. | ||
| I said, Dana is like a stalker. | ||
| He loves me so much, he's got to buy the companies. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| You remember Affliction? | ||
| They were out for a hot minute. | ||
| Yeah, I think they basically broke the bank when Josh Barnett tested positive. | ||
| He was going to fight Fedor. | ||
| And the fight, they just canceled the whole event. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And never had another show. | ||
| Dana didn't know about it. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he was gambling. | ||
| I think he was playing blackjack. | ||
| And I texted him. | ||
| And I said, hey, did you hear what's going on? | ||
| I go, Josh Barnett tested pot, and then he called me up. | ||
| He goes, what the fuck's going on? | ||
| And then I told him, he's like, holy shit. | ||
| He was so happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was so happy. | ||
| It would have been nice for, I think Trump was getting ready to be involved as a, he was at the event to watch, or he was at the previous event to watch, and I think they were kind of grooming him to be an investor. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| That would have been interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was back when everybody loved Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Boy, do fucking things change. | ||
| He was in all the rap songs. | ||
| Rappers would always talk about Trump. | ||
| Everybody loved Trump. | ||
| He was like this wheelin', dealin', billionaire character that everybody enjoyed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I felt like he'd done a decent job. | ||
| As president? | ||
| When you look at his regulations, it certainly helped the economy. | ||
| I feel like we were in a lot better spot then than now, for sure. | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of shit that happened. | ||
| COVID and the world. | ||
| The world scares the shit out of me right now. | ||
| Right now, I'm like, boy, this is not good. | ||
| None of this. | ||
| This Ukraine thing, not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everything not good. | ||
| Everything scares the shit out of me. | ||
| I'm looking at all of it going, fuck. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| There's no good solutions to the Middle East. | ||
| All of it looks terrible. | ||
| And the Ukraine thing looks terrible. | ||
| It just scares the shit out of me because it's just like all it takes is one person to fucking launch a nuke and the world changes forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I've never felt like that was a possibility in my lifetime until now. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, this is, it is a little bit on the unsure realm of how I, you know, I feel definitely a little bit unsure about what's going to happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Very. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I'm looking at like moving to Iceland or some shit. | ||
| We're going to be safe from the fallout. | ||
| Go do some more research on aliens and figure out where the next vacation spot is. | ||
| Well, that would be fascinating if the aliens come down and stop at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If they're just going to listen, you dipshits. | ||
| We've been watching, waiting. | ||
| It's like the way I describe it is like two brothers fighting in the backyard. | ||
| The parents are like, hang on, let them fucking work this out and just figure out when one of them grabs a rock, then run in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Enough. | ||
| That's enough. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Just, I've never felt more like the world's on the verge of being forever ruined. | ||
| This is what it feels like right now. | ||
| It just feels like I've never felt more like we're on... | ||
| I mean, this must have been what it felt like at the beginning of World War III, or World War II, rather. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't say III. I know, I know, I'm sorry. | |
| Freudian slip. | ||
| Yeah, it's fucked. | ||
| So what have you been up to other than obsessing over hunting? | ||
| Oh, that's my main hobby these days. | ||
| But other than that, you know, running the club. | ||
| We have this comedy club that you went to last night. | ||
| I was impressed. | ||
| It was pretty cool. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| That's a nice thing, because, you know, in L.A., we had the Comedy Store, and one of the things that I realized when I moved out here, there was no real home base. | ||
| And all these comics had already moved out here. | ||
| There was a shit ton of comedians that decided, fuck California, I can't deal with this anymore, I can't perform. | ||
| Because they were locking everybody down for like a year and a half. | ||
| They wouldn't let anybody do shows. | ||
| They wouldn't even let them do shows in the parking lot of the Comedy Store. | ||
| The whole thing was so crazy. | ||
| It didn't make any sense. | ||
| And out here we were doing full shows indoors. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing how that is, huh? | ||
| Yeah, nothing happened. | ||
| You know, we're all gonna die! | ||
| No one died. | ||
| I shut my gym down for six weeks. | ||
| Oh, that's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I live in a good spot. | ||
| That is a good spot. | ||
| And our county sheriff said, fuck you, Governor Newsom. | ||
| You're a hypocrite. | ||
| I'm not going to arrest people for being responsible and owning businesses and still trying to make their money and keep it afloat. | ||
| Well, it destroyed LA. I mean, it destroyed the restaurant industry. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| It destroyed it. | ||
| At one point in time, they lost somewhere around 70% of all restaurants. | ||
| It was just insane. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Just insane. | ||
| And they never corrected. | ||
| Because you know what it is? | ||
| The people that run the government, the amount of money they make is not dependent on whether or not businesses stay open. | ||
| If it was, they would have never shut jack shit down. | ||
| If they worked it like, say, if you work for a company, I agree. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You would have seen a completely different response. | ||
| They would have been like, ladies and gentlemen, you just need to get vitamin D and everybody needs to start drinking water and exercising and losing weight. | ||
| And here's some ways to boost your immune system. | ||
| Instead of everybody has to stay indoors and all the kids have to fucking be home and mask up and... | ||
| It's just nuts. | ||
| It's just nuts to watch it all work. | ||
| And so many people stepped in line. | ||
| So many people were like, okay. | ||
| And nobody got angry about it. | ||
| I was one month in. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| I started looking in May of 2020. Because I was like, these motherfuckers are never going to let this go. | ||
| They're never going to let this go. | ||
| They keep ramping up all the new regulations and ramping up what can be closed. | ||
| They shut out outdoor dining, which made no fucking sense. | ||
| None of it made any sense. | ||
| And that's when I started moving. | ||
| When I came out here... | ||
| First thing we did with my family, we went to a restaurant. | ||
| We sat indoors. | ||
| And my kids were like, we can eat at a restaurant? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| And we went on a lake, on Lake Austin. | ||
| We were looking at this house and we went on a boat on the lake and there was people jumping in the water and drinking and playing music. | ||
| And my kids were like, I want to live here. | ||
| So then it was just talking my wife into it. | ||
| It's like, come on. | ||
| Like, listen, we could just, if we don't like it, we could always move back. | ||
| Where was she from? | ||
| From L.A. area? | ||
| Well, we both lived in L.A. for 20-plus years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's like I had all these friends there. | ||
| I had all my business was there. | ||
| Everything was there. | ||
| You know, comedy was there. | ||
| Everything was there. | ||
| But I just didn't like—I don't like people telling me what to do, especially people that are hypocrites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And those photos of Newsome came out when he was dining indoors with no mask on. | ||
| And it's like these fucking— And his kids were still going to school at a private school. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, all of it. | ||
| The whole thing was fucked. | ||
| It was just the whole thing was fucked. | ||
| You're just allowing these people that... | ||
| I never thought about who the governor was before. | ||
| I never thought about who the mayor was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, me neither. | |
| It didn't bother me. | ||
| I never really cared. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| I did what I had to do and hopefully they did a good job and they didn't fuck the economy up. | ||
| Now we need Joe Rogan in there. | ||
| Fuck that, dude. | ||
| You don't want me. | ||
| You don't want me in there. | ||
| I would rather have you than... | ||
| Yeah, you probably would. | ||
| You'd probably want to have me in there, but they'd probably assassinate me. | ||
| It wouldn't take long before I'd be like, hey, why are we spending money on all these things? | ||
| Fuck out of here with this. | ||
| How many people are working on the Homeless Committee? | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| We looked into that. | ||
| The homeless thing is nuts. | ||
| There's people on this, whatever, governing body that's supposed to be handling the homeless crisis. | ||
| There's people on that that are making $240,000 a year. | ||
| They have zero incentive to get rid of the homeless problem because then they don't have a job. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| Are you going to transfer over to somewhere else and make the same amount of money? | ||
| They could probably use that money to actually help homeless out. | ||
| I don't know how the fuck they do it. | ||
| They've ruined it. | ||
| It's gotten so bad that I just don't know how you pull the... | ||
| How do you turn it around? | ||
| Well, I think a lot of homeless, a lot of it stems from getting mixed up with drug use and being dependent. | ||
| Drug use and mental illness. | ||
| That's the primary cause of most of it. | ||
| You know, and they try to make it seem as if it's just like people down on their luck, like, eh, there's a view. | ||
| Probably should have finished that wall. | ||
| Would have helped. | ||
| That's what the craziest thing is. | ||
| Two things are happening simultaneously. | ||
| The southern border wide open and people are pushing for people to be able to vote with no ID. Those two things are insane. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| Did you see that they're sending people back from Venezuela? | ||
| Because Venezuela has a communist government and the people that come over to here, they escape socialism. | ||
| And those people are most likely to vote like Cubans do in America. | ||
| Cubans in America vote Republican. | ||
| And so when they're having these issues, they're trying to actively send Venezuelans back to Venezuela. | ||
| Of course they are. | ||
| It's so transparent. | ||
| It's so transparent. | ||
| I don't care what their other excuses are. | ||
| The fact that they're targeting Venezuelans and that Venezuelans 100% hate socialism, the ones that come over here, It's nuts. | ||
| I mean, look, there's always these periods in history where things get bad and then they get better again. | ||
| They get bad and they get better again. | ||
| I mean, things were great for a long time, but they are on a slide and we got to pull out of that fucking slide. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And if we don't, it's not good. | ||
| I'm real nervous about next year. | ||
| Real nervous. | ||
| No matter who wins. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The country's going to be in a frothy uproar because of this fucked up media that we have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I think they're the biggest problem that we have. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, they are. | ||
| On both sides, not just... | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Well, their business is just get people riled up, get people paying attention. | ||
| And the most outrageous shit that they can say, the most outrageous stories they can publish, those are the ones that are going to get clicks. | ||
| So those are the ones they publish. | ||
| And then everybody gets into this frothy panic in the meanwhile. | ||
| It's amazing the spin that they could put on, you know, if both sides were airing the same exact story, it sounds like two completely different things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| There's no, like, real, like, objective news source that everybody trusts anymore. | ||
| There's not one thing where you go, oh, this is the buh-buh-buh news. | ||
| They're always legit, above board. | ||
| It's a complicated issue, and they're going to lay out all the different sides to it. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Everything's got a spin to it. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's not good and I don't know how it gets better. | ||
| Yeah, I don't either. | ||
| It just sucks that you have to think about it. | ||
| For most of my life, I didn't really think about it that much. | ||
| I never did. | ||
| I always worried about wrestling and then fighting and then, you know. | ||
| Simpler things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Getting better at what I did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I would never go into politics, so it didn't matter to me. | ||
| I never really cared. | ||
| Just like what you said, I was the same way. | ||
| I didn't really pay attention to much of it until recently. | ||
| I talked to Dana White once. | ||
| I said, you should run for president. | ||
| And he's like, dude, the skeletons that would come out of my closet, it would be like the walking dead. | ||
| Yeah, that's absolutely true. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| They don't give a shit if you'd be good at your job. | ||
| They just give a shit about getting their side in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this country is so polarized. | ||
| The whole right versus left thing is so crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I feel like racism is a lot worse than it was before, all this, just because... | ||
| They talk about it all the time. | ||
| They're talking about it, too. | ||
| And when it's not even there, they're still talking about it. | ||
| Yeah, they're making an issue when it's not even there. | ||
| And they're stirring the pot. | ||
| Yeah, because that's what their job is. | ||
| Their job is just to get people outraged. | ||
| I mean, if your business is just to get people fired up and paying attention to things and angry... | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| It's just our job to kind of, like, figure that out now. | ||
| And I think trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. | ||
| I don't think there's ever been a time in my life where people trust the mainstream news less. | ||
| Well, I know that I don't trust them, but I don't know how even... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, no one's watching them. | ||
| CNN got its lowest ratings since the 1990s the other day. | ||
| They have 43,000 people watching. | ||
| You know how crazy that is? | ||
| And that's 43,000 people worldwide or just in the States? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I was just reading it. | ||
| It's crazy, yeah. | ||
| But even if it's just in the States, that's nuts. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| Especially when they do the points on how many millions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's literally a Taylor Swift concert. | ||
| Not even a big one. | ||
| It's one of her smaller concerts. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| But I would like to see the UFC in an arena. | ||
| I think the UFC could do that. | ||
| An outdoor arena? | ||
| Yeah, that Raiders arena. | ||
| I think they could do that arena. | ||
| Like what Pride, then K1 did back in the Tokyo Dome. | ||
| Yeah, Saitama Super Arena. | ||
| No, that's enclosed. | ||
| Was it enclosed? | ||
| Yeah, it just stretches. | ||
| They had a big arena. | ||
| I didn't go to it, but they had like 80-some thousand people there. | ||
| I think it was a New Year's Eve show. | ||
| The only problem with that is you have to hope it doesn't rain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think they had people skydive in. | ||
| Oh, look. | ||
| Obsessed with Las Vegas fear. | ||
| I eyes UFC card at venue in 2024. Oh! | ||
| I've heard about it. | ||
| I haven't been in there yet. | ||
| Have you been in there? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| I've seen it in videos and stuff. | ||
| It looks insane. | ||
| When you're inside of it, the entire thing is a screen. | ||
| Like, everything. | ||
| The ceiling, all the... | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| Have you seen the videos of it? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| It's Fucking bananas. | ||
| I've heard that it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Crazy good. | ||
| Crazy good. | ||
| For concerts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| How many is his seat, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
18,000. | |
| 18? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, that'd be perfect for a UFC. Yeah. | ||
| And then you could show the replays on the ceiling. | ||
| You could show the replays everywhere. | ||
| So the guy knocked out could see it too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy, yeah. | |
| As he's on his back, you can see the head kick land. | ||
| When you look at the level of fighting today and think about how it was when you started, are you proud? | ||
| Are you proud that you were part of it in the beginning? | ||
| Well, yeah, I'm definitely proud that I was part of that journey, but I mean... | ||
| I still feel like there's certain things missing on some of these guys. | ||
| They're just not great at any one thing. | ||
| Some of them. | ||
| But they're really good at everything, but not spectacular. | ||
| Not specialists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But you have a few guys that are specialists, like Pejeda. | ||
| There's a few of the elite kickboxers. | ||
| But then you see where the holes are in their game, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know, but yeah, I think it's definitely evolved into some guys that are a lot more skilled and talented than back in the day, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Maybe I think what's missing is just the old school attitude. | ||
| Well, the old school guys did it because they wanted to do it, and there wasn't really much money in it at all. | ||
| You had to be really kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you had to be a wild motherfucker to enter into UFC 1 or UFC 2 or UFC 3. I mean, it was just... | ||
| You had to be fucking crazy. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| I came home from the 92 Olympics and I was in my hometown in Victorville, which is in the middle of nowhere, and I went out to the local bar and some guy was in there talking to me about, hey, we're getting ready to put on this show. | ||
| We're going to see who the toughest guys are. | ||
| We're going to have a wrestler, boxers, and he's describing the UFC. And it happened about three months after that. | ||
| It's like, yeah, we're putting together this show. | ||
| We're about to do it, you know, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Next thing I know, the UFC started. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I have no idea who that guy was. | ||
| Just some guy you met at a bar? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder who it was. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I wonder what his gig was, what role he had in it. | ||
| I found out about it from a local video store. | ||
| I think someone had told me about it, and then I rented UFC 2. It was 94, and I just moved to LA, and I remember watching it and going, holy shit, they did it. | ||
| Because I always remembered thinking back when I was kickboxing and taekwondo, everybody always wondered, what would happen if a judo guy fought a wrestler? | ||
| What would happen if a boxer fought a karate guy? | ||
| But to see it all actually happen, like holy shit, this is nuts. | ||
| And that was back when, you know, Hoist Gracie, it was just kind of getting started, and then jiu-jitsu was everywhere. | ||
| Jiu-jitsu schools just popped up everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it was just like a complete revolution of martial arts, where there had never been anything like that before. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was a John Peretti thing. | ||
| Was it World Extreme Fighting? | ||
| Remember he had that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He had that event. | ||
| With John Lewis, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| John Lewis, Mario Sperry was in that, Maurice Smith, Conan Silvera. | ||
| There's a lot of good fighters that came out of that as well. | ||
| There's a few of these organizations that were emerging. | ||
| And then in Japan, there was rings and K1, and then Pride emerged. | ||
| And at one point in time, Pride was bigger than the UFC. It was fucking huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they just hit—them and K1 got in a pissing match with, you know, with something, and they really kind of crippled each other. | ||
| I can't imagine how they did it. | ||
| It was so big in Japan. | ||
| I can't imagine that it fell off as much as it did. | ||
| Because it was so much bigger in Japan than the UFC ever was. | ||
| And I think they had a bigger audience internationally also. | ||
| Not in the States than the UFC, but internationally, like in Europe. | ||
| Because they would really get a lot of European fighters and Brazilians to fight. | ||
| There was a hardcore base in America that watched it. | ||
| I remember guys from jiu-jitsu school, when they would air it live, they'd come over my house at like 3 o'clock in the morning to watch it. | ||
| I forget when it would air. | ||
| Or sometimes it would air like you would have to stay offline and not find the results for like a while and then try to watch it. | ||
| Yeah, and they delayed it. | ||
| But those events seem so insane. | ||
| Those events seem so incredible. | ||
| What was the biggest crowd that you fought in front of over there? | ||
| I think, I don't know, 65, 70, somewhere in that range at Tokyo Dome. | ||
| Like, it was sold out for New Year's Eve. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't even remember who I was. | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Any other day, but definitely a lot more energy. | ||
| What I liked was, you know... | ||
| As a fighter, they did, like, their opening ceremony was pretty cool to me. | ||
| And, you know, you get up there and they do a big show and then they introduce all the fighters. | ||
| I think that was pretty cool, a way to do it. | ||
| And it's just part of their culture, too, you know, putting those athletes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The pageantry. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I do miss that, as well as other things with the show. | ||
| But they put on, and this is what I always say, everybody used to say, oh, what's better, you know, what's better fighters than UFC or Pride, you know? | ||
| I'm like, I don't know. | ||
| I think they both have great fighters, and they're probably pretty comparable, but... | ||
| There's no comparison to the show they put on. | ||
| Pride just was a show in addition to the fights. | ||
| And also, the walk-in. | ||
| Like, the walk-out was giant. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| Pyrotechnics and fucking giant screens. | ||
| I mean, it was an event. | ||
| It was unbelievable, yeah. | ||
| And I put certain fighters in that era up against anybody. | ||
| I mean, I think Krokop in his prime over there is one of the scariest heavyweights ever. | ||
| Fedor in his prime over there, without a doubt, if not the best heavyweight of all time, definitely there's an argument between him and a couple other guys. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You know, there were so many great fights over there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there was quite a few. | ||
| And, you know, when they started trying to do it, you know, kind of work with UFC a little bit, UFC would send in some of their guys over, Chuck and Rampage would get over there. | ||
| Even though Rampage had fought there before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that 10-minute first round really hurt some of those guys. | ||
| Yeah, it was different. | ||
| They sent Chuck over there. | ||
| I remember he KO'd Alistair at 2.05. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alistair was skinny. | ||
| Yeah, and he fought with, what's his name? | ||
| He's from Dallas, I think, from... | ||
| Guy Metzger. | ||
| Guy Metzger. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And Guy was beating him, knocked him down, and then, you know, I don't know what happened, but he got caught. | ||
| Yeah, Chuck caught him. | ||
| Chuck could bang. | ||
| Chuck had crazy chin, too. | ||
| His ability to absorb shots was nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was willing to, and obviously that cost him in the long run. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he had an iron chin. | ||
| He would just bite down on his mouthpiece and just eat shots. | ||
| Yeah, you try not to be known for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It never really turns out well in the long run. | ||
| Almost every guy that winds up, you know, that has that sort of style eventually winds up getting KO'd. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Eventually the foundation just falls apart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It doesn't take much sometimes when you get it in the right spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, do you have KOs that are like some of your most – like the Hector Lombard one. | ||
| I was just watching that the other night. | ||
| That one was nuts because we never saw you throw a head kick before. | ||
| I threw three head kicks or high kicks. | ||
| They weren't close to the head because I just wasn't that flexible against Rich Franklin in England. | ||
| But I fell to my ass every time I slipped. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I had thrown them before, and I'd throw them in practice, but against lefties I kind of had this thing where I kind of changed levels, like I'm going to kind of look at your legs and my head kick comes up there, and he's short, so I was able to land it. | ||
| That's a guy that I think people miss his prime too. | ||
| Because his prime was in Bellator. | ||
| He was fucking starching people in Bellator. | ||
| Hector Lombard in Bellator was a fucking terror. | ||
| He was a terror. | ||
| He was so athletic. | ||
| He was so fast and powerful. | ||
| And that judo background, you know? | ||
| I remember when he came to the UFC, he had a few fights like that. | ||
| Like the Nate Marquardt fight was a good example of that. | ||
| Where you saw that same sort of Hector Lombard. | ||
| Yeah, he comes in fast and strong, and then, you know, you gotta weather the storm a little bit. | ||
| Well, you caught him with a head kick, and I think, if I remember correctly, you hit him with a back fist. | ||
| Back elbow. | ||
| Back elbow. | ||
| And then you elbow them on the ground. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the elbow on the ground was devastating. | ||
| When he first came here from Australia, he was Cuban, but he went to Australia and lived there. | ||
| When he first came to the States, he came to my gym first for about three months. | ||
| Nobody liked him. | ||
| He was a big bully. | ||
| Just trying to knock people out warming up. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| You know, just when you're supposed to be going easy, just trying to hurt people. | ||
| And it would happen every time I'd be out of town. | ||
| I'd come back. | ||
| I'd hear about it. | ||
| And Sokidu was in there, too. | ||
| And he'd fucking put him in his place once. | ||
| But... | ||
| So when I went to fight, Hector, you know, the media has, like, asked me, you know, Hector's saying how he never – he left your gym because he never felt welcome, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I'm like, well, I never had a problem with him. | ||
| But everyone in my gym thought he was a big bully. | ||
| Yeah, and that's all I said about it. | ||
| And we're in the face-off, like, week of the fight. | ||
| And he asked me – Who says I'm a bully? | ||
| And I'm like, what did you say? | ||
| And yeah, who says I'm a bully? | ||
| And I'm like, everybody. | ||
| Everybody said you're a bully. | ||
| Well, who? | ||
| Everybody at my gym. | ||
| Not me, but everybody at my gym. | ||
| And he just couldn't get over that. | ||
| And I'm like, you motherfucker, this isn't the time or place for that. | ||
| I'm going to fuck you up. | ||
| So those last couple elbows were a little more personal. | ||
| It's probably the only fight I've ever really felt that way that I really wanted to fuck that guy up. | ||
| Not the Bisping fight? | ||
| No, it was just a fight to me. | ||
| I didn't like him, but it wasn't a guy that I'd hang out with, but he was just him, and I knew that I would beat him. | ||
| But that logo that you have, the flying punch, that is the ultimate fuck you. | ||
| That logo is so wild that you put that as your logo. | ||
| But I don't even know why he's upset about that, because he's not even in it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but he knows what it is. | |
| Everybody knows what it is. | ||
| It's not like a chalk line on the ground underneath him. | ||
| I remember when I saw it, when I saw that logo for the first time, I went, oh shit. | ||
| Because that, I mean, you flattened him with that right hand. | ||
| I mean, he was out cold. | ||
| And then you launched yourself through the air and smashed him with that right hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that becoming your logo was one of the wildest things. | ||
| I didn't believe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, that is, that's a crazy logo. | |
| I mean, everyone has to know what that is, because otherwise it wouldn't even make sense. | ||
| Like, what is he doing? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is he about to do a cartwheel? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not like, you know, you're throwing a head kick or you're throwing a punch. | ||
| It's like you're flying and your arm is above you like this. | ||
| Well, what about Air Jordan's logo? | ||
| There's no basket there. | ||
| That's true, but no one winds up with a massive concussion after that, you know? | ||
| It's a great logo, though. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Somebody had photoshopped him on some shoes. | ||
| I think I posted that not too long ago. | ||
| Oh, photoshopped him out? | ||
| No, that logo. | ||
| Oh, like a Michael Jordan? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of guys that make custom sneakers. | ||
| They should make you a pair of those. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| I don't wear shoes that often. | ||
| So, how often are you still training with guys? | ||
| You still work out with guys? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I need to. | |
| I'm getting chubby, so I need to start working out. | ||
| Yeah, well, I don't drink that much beer, but, you know, I'll have... | ||
| Yeah, just everything. | ||
| I like to cook. | ||
| I'm pretty good at it. | ||
| So I just need to start working out a little more. | ||
| I'm not too bad for not doing shit. | ||
| I mean, I might have worked out once in the last six months. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah, no, that's not good. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| The least I've ever worked out in my whole life. | ||
| Just, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe having to do it for so long. | ||
| Well, that does happen to a lot of fighters. | ||
| You know, they get fat after they're done fighting. | ||
| They're just like, fuck, all the weight cutting, all the bullshit. | ||
| You just get so tired of it. | ||
| You just want to enjoy your life now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe I just got lazy or something. | ||
| It's not about... | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| You still look good? | ||
| I'm at my gym almost every day and I coach and stuff, but I feel like I'm still capable of doing a lot of things. | ||
| The last time I have worked out, it always goes well. | ||
| Are you thinking about just training a little bit now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| More grappling stuff, trying not to do the sparring part as much, even though I'd probably get antsy wanting to spar just for fun. | ||
| I'm sure you would. | ||
| When you were training, what did you do for recovery? | ||
| Guys today, they've got massage therapists and saunas and cold plunges and all that jazz. | ||
| Did you have a sophisticated way to recover when you were training? | ||
| Yeah, I would try to sauna, you know, and I would get, during training camp, a massage probably twice a week. | ||
| And they were about three hours long each time. | ||
| You remember my masseuse Mariah? | ||
| I do remember her because she told me that working with you was like working with wood. | ||
| She said you were so dense. | ||
| She said she never massaged anybody who was so dense. | ||
| She said it was crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So she actually owns a business that's in my building where my gym is. | ||
| It's called The Lab. | ||
| But they do like IV therapy and hormone replacement also and peptides and all sorts of different... | ||
| Are you doing all that stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I do some peptides and I do the hormone replacement as well. | ||
| I work with another company, like an online one too, Blokes. | ||
| It's pretty good for... | ||
| It's virtual, so it's super easy for me to... | ||
| I don't even have to go anywhere and just do it all myself. | ||
| I'm so glad you guys are doing that now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because, you know, peptides are a thing that that was one of the sticking points with USADA. They were stopping guys from using BPC-157. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they allowed it for a while and then they stopped using it. | ||
| Like, come on, guys. | ||
| All this is doing is helping people recover. | ||
| That's all it's doing is helping people recover from injuries. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For injuries, not necessarily anything else. | ||
| They got a new one that's pretty good too. | ||
| I forgot what it's called. | ||
| Something 5000 or something. | ||
| I forgot what it's called. | ||
| But yeah, it's for injuries as well. | ||
| But you know, the FDA is trying to stop people from taking that. | ||
| Which doesn't make any fucking sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When they're not stopping people from taking opiates. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| So yeah, she's doing that. | ||
| But yeah, I would do massage therapy for recovery and sometimes an ice bath. | ||
| I'd ice things down. | ||
| Depends on what's hurting. | ||
| And supplements and eating good during training camp. | ||
| But no stretching. | ||
| I would get stretched after the massages. | ||
| I just couldn't imagine how inflexible you are and how powerful you are. | ||
| It was just nuts to see you moving around, trying to touch your toes. | ||
| I feel like because I'm not very flexible, it kept me from getting in bad submission positions sometimes. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| They couldn't move you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've heard guys say that, that being inflexible gives them more power. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know if that's true. | ||
| Well, that I don't know. | ||
| I mean, when I was a high school kid, I was pretty flexible and just slowly over time, I just petrified, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, you got dents. | ||
| My dad was the same way, just the same body type. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was just genetics, you think? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| My sister's that way, too. | ||
| Do you ever wonder, like, what it would have been like if you started today? | ||
| Like, how much further you would have progressed? | ||
| I would have probably made more money. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| A lot more money. | ||
| What's the most you ever made in one fight? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| Well, the most I ever should have made in one fight would have been when I fought Biz Bang, because I had pay-per-view in my deal. | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| The second Bisping fight? | ||
| No, the first one. | ||
| The first one. | ||
| And when we coached on the Ultimate Fighter, we were going to be main or co-main. | ||
| I think GSP fought that night, and then Frank Mir and... | ||
| And Brock Lesnar were supposed to find a different event and somebody got hurt and they pushed him to that event. | ||
| So Dana bumped me down to the third spot and promoted it still as a co-main but didn't pay me pay-per-view. | ||
| So it would have been like three or three and a half million for that one. | ||
| Just pay-per-view. | ||
| Like three hundred grand. | ||
| Oh shit. | ||
| But the most I've ever made, I think, is probably around a million. | ||
| Do you remember what fight that was? | ||
| Well, there was a whole contract of that. | ||
| Like six fights, I think. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Plus certain pay-per-views, depending on the event. | ||
| That one's got to suck. | ||
| That one's got to sting, the three million one. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, you'd always hear stories, not me, but about Dana, you know, giving a bonus or whatever, you know. | ||
| I never saw that, so. | ||
| You never got one of those locker room bonuses? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, I mean, knockout of the night I got, but. | ||
| Yeah, but not one of the big ones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| So, I mean, I didn't take it personal, but I did go to Strikeforce right after that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did you think about Strikeforce? | ||
| Strikeforce had some great fights. | ||
| Yeah, I thought they... | ||
| I mean, I love Scott Coker. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's... | |
| Well, I mean, he just has the fighters in mind all the time also, not just the bank account. | ||
| So, yeah, I feel like Strikeforce had some great fighters. | ||
| They, you know, had certain things that UFC definitely did better. | ||
| You know, they were a little more organized with certain things. | ||
| But overall, Strikeforce was, I liked them quite a bit. | ||
| Well, it was definitely nice having another major organization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there was Elite XC that lasted a little while. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kimbo Slice was their big guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That was pretty fun. | ||
| I think that was on CBS, right? | ||
| Wasn't it? | ||
| I think it was. | ||
| I know Strikeforce had a CBS show. | ||
| I fought on that card against Jake Shields. | ||
| And then the Diaz brothers got in a fight with Mayhem. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I'm like, dude, this is not good. | ||
| And then the announcer said, sometimes these things happen in MMA. We're like, what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the only time it's ever happened. | |
| It almost happened with Johnny Walker this past weekend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a weird one, wasn't it? | ||
| That was the weirdest one. | ||
| That one didn't make any sense at all. | ||
| They asked him where he was and apparently said, I'm in the desert. | ||
| Yeah, which is a good answer. | ||
| He's in the desert. | ||
| He's kind of a funny guy. | ||
| He's kind of eccentric. | ||
| He's eccentric. | ||
| You ask him a question. | ||
| He seemed fine. | ||
| He seemed fine. | ||
| They asked him where he was. | ||
| I'm in the desert. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you know what country? | ||
| But he also looked confused when he's standing there looking at the guy and not saying anything. | ||
| But it was hard to hear what was going on. | ||
| Also, he doesn't speak English as a first language. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's that, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I thought the stoppage was... | ||
| Ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one of those ones where I think, like, why, when a referee calls it off like that, why can't they... | ||
| Restart it. | ||
| Restart it, yeah. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand that either. | ||
| They did it I think Randy might have fought on the card. | ||
| It was a UFC in Japan. | ||
| Sakuraba, I think. | ||
| In Conan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he wouldn't leave, and then they restarted the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No, they fought again. | ||
| They fought again another time. | ||
| No, they started the fight again that night. | ||
| Did they? | ||
| I'm almost positive. | ||
| I think they fought again that night. | ||
| I don't think they fought again immediately. | ||
| No, I think it was immediate. | ||
|
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Was it? | |
| I was there. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Why do I have it in my head that they fought later in the night? | ||
| You're saying the same night? | ||
| Yeah, the same night. | ||
| Maybe they did that. | ||
| That's what I think they did. | ||
| Because Conan hit him with an uppercut and Sakuraba dropped down for a low ankle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they stopped him. | ||
| And they tried to say it was a stoppage. | ||
| Do you remember Matt Lindland and Bustamante? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a crazy one. | ||
| And they restarted that one too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though he did tap. | ||
| He did tap. | ||
| He caught him. | ||
| Matt Lindland got caught in an arm bar. | ||
| Tapped. | ||
| He said, I didn't tap. | ||
| I might have been in the corner. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| He might have been. | ||
| And then they started, and then they went a whole nother round, and then the round after that he caught him in a guillotine. | ||
| So Bustamante tapped him twice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was nuts. | ||
| But that was, you know, I mean, I'd like them to look at replays and say, oh, that's a tap, and that makes sense. | ||
| But in that case, of the one this weekend with Ankalaev, and he started it up again. | ||
| They're both fine. | ||
| Everybody wants to see the fight. | ||
| What's the formality? | ||
| Like, what's the point? | ||
| Didn't make any sense. | ||
| Because he didn't understand what I asked him. | ||
| It's also like, check his eyes. | ||
| Also, when someone gets hit with an illegal shot, don't they have a certain amount of time to recover? | ||
|
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Five minutes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So why is the doctor in there immediately anyway? | ||
| And I didn't... | ||
| They called it a no contest, but it was questionable because it was kind of a – it was definitely illegal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which means – Disqualification. | ||
| Which means disqualification, but he called it an unintentional. | ||
| But he intended – yeah, so I didn't understand that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, but yeah, I don't know if maybe, and I don't know Johnny Walker, but I didn't know if he was kind of playing it off like, I'm going to get the win if I don't. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| That's why he looked like he was confused at the question. | ||
| That was curious to me as to why he was just, you know, looking at him. | ||
| Well, I don't know how well the doctor spoke English either. | ||
| Was the doctor an English-speaking guy? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Johnny isn't. | ||
| Johnny can speak a little bit of English, but when I've interviewed him, he speaks Portuguese. | ||
| So when you're talking to him in English, he has to really pay attention. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong with that answer. | ||
| In the desert, it's true. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
| I'm in the desert. | ||
| He's in the desert. | ||
| He's telling the truth. | ||
| It's not like he said, I'm in Hawaii. | ||
| Maybe you should stop the fight then. | ||
| The fucking guy thinks he's in Hawaii. | ||
| But he said, I'm in the desert. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Weird. | ||
| Yeah, that was kind of a weird... | ||
| And I was wondering, why can't they just restart it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a bummer. | ||
| But, you know, do you enjoy watching fights these days still? | ||
| Yeah, but it's not... | ||
| I mean, I don't pay attention to what's coming up that much. | ||
| So, you know, if I kind of see it that day and I'm not doing anything, I'll definitely watch it. | ||
| But, you know, it's rare that I'm looking forward to certain fights. | ||
| I am going to go to New York for the Stipe John Jones fight. | ||
| Oh, are you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That should be exciting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think about that fight? | ||
| Well, I think I said this, like when Stipe was champ way back when, that, you know, I think John Jones would be a lot, or he would be a lot tougher fight for John Jones than some of the big, hard-hidden guys that can't wrestle very well. | ||
| Because Stipe can wrestle probably not as well as John Jones. | ||
| So it's going to be, I think it's interesting. | ||
| I think it's a tough one to call. | ||
| Stipe has more power than Jones. | ||
| He's not as... | ||
| I don't know what the right word is, but he's not as goofy. | ||
| He doesn't do odd things. | ||
| Creative. | ||
| He's more straight... | ||
| Basics. | ||
| Basics, but good at them. | ||
| Yeah, very good at that. | ||
| I think Jones being a little bit more goofy and doing things that are a little bit different helps him a lot. | ||
| Yeah, he's very unpredictable. | ||
| He always comes in with a pretty good game plan. | ||
| Sometimes when I think he should be shooting the whole time, he doesn't. | ||
| But I think he could do well against Stipe as well. | ||
| He's just got to use that length. | ||
| Yeah, I'm interested to see what happens also because Stipe's had a lot of time to recover. | ||
| You know, it's been a long time. | ||
| What was wrong with him? | ||
| Well, the knockout to Francis was a pretty rough knockout. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, have a good solid two years off, have a lot of time to train. | ||
| He wanted to put more weight on because he felt like he was a little too light in the Francis fight. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm interested to see him fully healthy, like how much he's got left in the tank. | ||
| Because if you go back to the Stipe that knocked out Fabrizio Verdun, the Stipe that knocked out Junior Dos Santos, Stipe was a bad fucking man. | ||
| I think a lot of people are looking past him in this fight. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't think Jon Jones is the same as he was before he tested positive, like for the third time on things. | ||
| You know, maybe he's really not doing anything nowadays, and he's just... | ||
| I don't feel like his body is the same. | ||
| Well, he's heavyweight now, but before he went to heavyweight, he just looked softer. | ||
| He didn't look as good of cardio, wasn't as... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He just didn't fight the same as he did back when he was testing positive, I should say. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I always felt like John just wasn't challenged. | ||
| When he defended the title a bunch of times, first of all, he was partying a lot. | ||
| He wasn't necessarily training that hard. | ||
| He basically said for the Gustafson fight, which is one of his toughest fights, he didn't even train. | ||
| He barely showed up. | ||
| He just kind of thought, no way this guy's going to beat me. | ||
| I'm going to go fuck him up. | ||
| And Gustafson came in real prepared. | ||
| And John had to dig deep. | ||
| And the most impressive thing about that is he pulled that fight out in the later rounds when he wasn't really training. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like he doesn't look how he used to. | ||
| Well, he definitely doesn't have heavy weight. | ||
| Well, when I say look, I don't mean physically. | ||
| Oh, you mean like how he moves? | ||
| A little bit physically, but when he was at 205, he still looked a little soft his last couple times there compared to what he used to look like. | ||
| And you think that might have been from stuff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Picograms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, but he had tested positive before, so it's not like... | ||
| And that's crazy how they just, even during USADA, they just slapped him on the wrist. | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| I never understood that. | ||
| I don't know what the thought of that was. | ||
| I don't know what the explanation for that was. | ||
| I can't really remember. | ||
| But I think that they thought that that was a tainted supplement, which does happen. | ||
| Well, What's-His-Face sued a company for tainted substances and got a ton of money. | ||
| The other Cuban, I think it's Cuban... | ||
| Not Hector Lombard, but... | ||
| Oh, Yoel Romero. | ||
| That's right, he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's right, he did. | ||
| I think Tim Means popped accidentally, too, from a tainted supplement, and Tim doesn't look like he does anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, he looks totally natural. | ||
| The early days when you were fighting, you kind of must have assumed that everybody was on something. | ||
| Yeah, but nothing you could do about it, and it doesn't matter. | ||
| I'm going to beat him anyway. | ||
| It was my attitude. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you did, for the most part. | ||
| Most of the time. | ||
| Tried to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you look back, I mean, you had a fucking amazing career, man. | ||
| Amazing career as a wrestler, and then amazing career as an MMA fighter. | ||
| I mean, it's got to feel good. | ||
| You lived a great life. | ||
| No, for sure. | ||
| And the book that I got coming out, it made me remember a lot of things. | ||
| Not that I forgot, but it just brings a lot more things fresher in your mind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not like I sit around and reflect about what I've done in my life. | ||
| I just keep moving forward. | ||
| But that book kind of made me do that. | ||
| It was kind of fun to kind of look at my life in that way, for sure. | ||
| I'm sure it brought back a ton of memories. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's funny, when we were writing it, I'd always come up with After I'd read it, after it was kind of written down there, I was like, oh, I forgot about this story or that story or that kind of goes with that. | ||
| So we had to kind of add a bunch of shit. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It made it a little tougher because... | ||
| I feel like I've forgotten more things than I remember these days, but you never know. | ||
| Did you do an audio version of it? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was like, it would be cool to actually read it myself in the audio thing with my voice. | ||
| They wanted me to send a sample of that. | ||
| I did like a five minute I played it back to myself. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| So I sent it to him saying, yeah, we might want to think about a professional for doing this. | ||
| I know you can edit it, but yeah, it's not good. | ||
| Then my wife got home from work and I had her listen to it and we just couldn't stop laughing. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| I mean, I'm not the best reader, I guess. | ||
| Well, it's tough to do. | ||
| There's a real skill to reading audiobooks. | ||
| Right, and trying to put the emotion part into what it's supposed to be. | ||
| Like if you're telling a story. | ||
| There will be an audio version, but it won't be my voice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think acting is out of the question for you? | ||
| Acting? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I could do certain things, but I don't know if I... I really don't want to act, like, that much. | ||
| Randy's done it amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I... A little bit like action movies, I'd probably be okay at, for sure. | ||
| But some of these other TV drama type shit, there's no way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I probably couldn't do it with a straight face. | ||
| They do, after this, we kind of did this book, and there's some producers... | ||
| Like Barry Josephson wants to do a biopic on me now. | ||
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my question to that was – and question to you, how do you put your life in a two-hour show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How do you do that without them doctoring it too? | ||
| Like what they did with Mark Schultz and Foxcatcher. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that's hard because they're going to want to tie it up in a nice ribbon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I mean, now they're talking about, you know, a limited series instead type of thing. | ||
| Oh, that would be interesting. | ||
| Like a Netflix type deal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That would probably be better. | ||
| Yeah, if they did your whole life in a two-hour movie. | ||
| I mean, what do they chop out? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Right, what do they chop out? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would you be in your movie if it was only two hours? | ||
| How the fuck would you do it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It'll just be a bullshit version of your life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just to make a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Who would play you? | ||
| I think they have a couple guys in mind. | ||
| But, yeah, nobody that looks really like me exactly, but... | ||
| Do you have anybody that can move right, though? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Walk like a caveman. | ||
| Well, also punch and throw, you know, and have good takedowns. | ||
| Yeah, the one guy that is a possibility, I think he trains sometimes at Boss's Place. | ||
| Oh, that's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you can't have just an actor that doesn't actually know how to fight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It would look terrible. | ||
| Yeah, and I think whoever they do pick should probably come up to my gym for a couple months. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you get to beat up on them a little bit. | ||
| Maybe that'll motivate you to get back into gym. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'll just have him get in shape for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, let me know when that comes out, because I'll definitely want to hear it, and we'll tell everybody about it. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanted you to have the book a little bit ahead of time, but I think I showed you the cover. | ||
| You got a quote on the back of it, I believe, on the back. | ||
| I can't read it without my glasses. | ||
| Dan Henderson, here. | ||
| Well, I got glasses. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I think they just took one of your commentating... | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Dan Henderson is a savage. | ||
| He came from a pure wrestling background. | ||
| Very little striking training. | ||
| And he went and became one of the most dangerous one-punch knockout artists in the history of the sport. | ||
| Facts. | ||
| Facts. | ||
| It's available now. | ||
| You can get it... | ||
| The audio book. | ||
| You get it... | ||
| Oh, for one credit. | ||
| It's on Kindle. | ||
| It's on hardcover. | ||
| Available right now. | ||
| Hendo, the American athlete. | ||
| You know... | ||
| I was trying to figure out what to name it. | ||
| And when I was in Japan, I had all sorts of different nicknames and they would just call me Dan. | ||
| But the media over there called me the American athlete. | ||
| So that's why I kind of came up with that. | ||
| It's a good one. | ||
| Yeah, I didn't know what to say. | ||
| It's perfect. | ||
| Hendo, the American athlete. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Well, listen, Dan, it's a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| You've had a fucking amazing career. | ||
| You're a real legend. | ||
| I know you don't like the term pioneer, but... | ||
| I'm all right with it. | ||
| You know, the funniest thing about that is the guys... | ||
| That look as old as me or they got a big beard. | ||
| They look like they're 40 or 50 years old. | ||
| They come up to me and say, I've been watching since I was a kid. | ||
| I'm like, how? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, it goes with the same feeling when I hear the word pioneer, but it's fine. | ||
| I mean, I do enjoy the fact that I was a pioneer in the sport. | ||
| You definitely were. | ||
| If there's a better word, let me know and I'll start using that one. | ||
| But thanks, brother. | ||
| I appreciate it very much. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| I appreciate you having me, yeah. | ||
| And the book's available right now, folks. | ||
| Go out and get it. | ||
| Support a legend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
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