JRE MMA Show #112 with Don Frye
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 55 minutes
Words per Minute
157.70088
Summary
Joe Rogan and Don Fry talk about his early days in the UFC, how he got started in the business, and how he became one of the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time. Joe Rogan is a comedian, actor, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He has been in the entertainment business for a long time and is one of my favorite people in the whole wide world of entertainment. He's funny, smart, and has a great sense of humor. Don's story is a must listen and I hope you enjoy it. Joe is a great friend of mine and I can't wait to have him on the pod again. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. I'll be picking one lucky winner at random to win a FREE place on the next Shreddin8 program! Thanks again for listening and God bless! -Jon Sorrentino - The Joe Rogans Experience Podcast - is a production of Native Creative Podcasts and is produced by Native Creative in partnership with Native Creative and Native Creative. in this episode we are working on a new ad-free version of the podcast called Native Creative, which will be available on all major podcast directories and social media platforms. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast! so we can keep sharing it with your friends, family and family! and share it with them! Thank you for supporting us! Jon Sorrents and supporting us on social media and the Native Creative is a big love and support us on all of our social media! . - Thank you so much love and respect and respect & support us. - Jon and I will be looking out for you, thank you for your support and support you, Jon and all of your support is so much more! -- Thank you, Thank you Jon and his support is much appreciated. -- -- The Rogans Jon is a very much appreciative of the support and appreciation and support is very much appreciated! , and we appreciate it's a lot of love and appreciation is so appreciated! -- thank you, thanks, Jon's appreciation is much more than you can do so much, so much in return, thank you. Thankyou, Jon & his words are so much s
Transcript
00:00:18.000
You know, like I said earlier, first time, first and only time we met, I insulted you.
00:00:29.000
Yeah, number 12. Oh, UFC 12. That was my first one.
00:00:34.000
Well, we were backstage, and, you know, they introduced us, and I says, you know, do you know who this guy is?
00:00:40.000
They said, and I says, yeah, he plays that real dumb guy on the news radio show.
00:00:48.000
You look so hurt, then I find out your character is really actually part of who you are.
00:01:06.000
You know what the hell's going on in a lot of stuff.
00:01:15.000
A lot of folks in Arizona are interested in UFOs.
00:01:25.000
It was built, I guess, the guy who built it, built it so his wife could watch the UFOs over at the mountain there.
00:01:50.000
Half of it's in the ground and then all the block, you know, you got the big 16x8 block and they're all filled with cement.
00:02:14.000
I mean, he believes that shit, you know, who he is.
00:02:17.000
I don't know what he believes and what he's just bullshitting.
00:02:27.000
How the hell can you pretend to be that, you know?
00:02:32.000
His hustle is that he's this, like, martial arts guy.
00:02:43.000
You know, if I get a couple pro wrestlers to be my ookies, you know, they make me look like a million dollars.
00:03:05.000
You fought boxing and kickboxing before that, right?
00:03:10.000
I think I had eight fights, and I think I was 2-6 or 2-5-1.
00:03:21.000
I fought my first two, Don Frye, and I won those.
00:03:24.000
And then I had an argument with my trainer, and so we split.
00:03:38.000
I was a junior, so J.R. And that's how I was in, you know, junior high, high school.
00:03:44.000
And then, you know, when my dad and mom called me, and then I think I changed my name because of contractual, you know.
00:04:03.000
And, you know, I don't know if that was, because they were really good guys.
00:04:07.000
Art Martori was my money guy who, you know, the two Munos, Mike Munos and his father Al brought me to Art.
00:04:17.000
Art wrestled at ASU back in the late 60s, and Art...
00:04:22.000
He's a billionaire, you know, and so he was interested in, I mean, he basically funds ASU Wrestling.
00:04:33.000
And he's done so much for amateur wrestling in the U.S. I mean, he's like the top dog, because he used to have what's called Sunkist Wrestling Team, and so that was his baby, and he steamrolled that.
00:04:52.000
Then, like I said, the Munoz brothers, or Mike and his dad, took me to Art.
00:05:01.000
After he called, geez, the coach at Okie State, Jose, to double check on me, you know.
00:05:29.000
Oh, so most of it was, you know, that's fairly late in life to box, right?
00:05:39.000
So when did you hear about the UFC? I was a fireman, you know.
00:05:45.000
I did the boxing and then got out and started doing odd jobs for, you know, a year, year and a half.
00:05:53.000
And then my wife at that time, we had a couple of horses.
00:05:59.000
You know, and being a college wrestler, you got a bit of an ego on you.
00:06:06.000
So, uh, still going around with a farrier named Stoney Newfang.
00:06:19.000
Wasn't really making any good money, but you know, for the time, he's giving me five bucks a horse, you know, teach me, you know, pull the shoes, shape the shoe, you know, and all that good stuff.
00:06:36.000
I said, you know, somebody told me about being a fireman, about, you know, working 10 days a month, you know, at a restaurant.
00:06:54.000
Yeah, so I got on the phone, called up all the cities in the state of Arizona.
00:07:05.000
And so I went over there and tested and passed the test.
00:07:14.000
He's got me into wrestling when I was in high school.
00:07:33.000
So then I went and stayed at Jerry's house in Santa Fe, and I went through their, I think it was like a six-month or more academy.
00:08:00.000
From there, we were there a year, year and a half.
00:08:06.000
In Santa Fe, you're either real rich or real poor.
00:08:09.000
This was 30 years ago, so I don't know how it is now.
00:08:25.000
I don't even think I've been to New Mexico except driving through once.
00:08:33.000
Obviously, you haven't gotten to see John Jones yet, right?
00:08:40.000
I want to go down there and check out the gym, though.
00:09:06.000
Shit, after I had my first neck surgery back in 2000, A buddy, me and a couple buddies went and did the Amsterdam thing, you know?
00:09:22.000
Yeah, I had broken it doing pro wrestling and worked on it for a year and a half not knowing, you know.
00:09:30.000
Yeah, but I'd lost so much muscle in the right arm, you know.
00:09:39.000
They fixed it, and I had a really nice, I can't remember her name, and I'm talking a lot.
00:09:57.000
Must have got the right combination of pain pills today, in a way.
00:10:03.000
So, out of all the injuries that you ever got in your fighting career, was the pro wrestling injuries the worst?
00:10:10.000
Yeah, pro wrestling is probably one of the hardest things that a guy can do athletically.
00:10:19.000
All the guys that I've had in here, you know, The Undertaker, Diamond Dallas Page, all these guys, like, every one of them, when they tell you their stories, you go, Jesus Christ, Jake the Snake.
00:10:42.000
So, when you first heard about the UFC, so you were a firefighter then, or...
00:10:50.000
You know, like I said, we were in Santa Fe for a year, year and a half, and then couldn't afford to live there.
00:11:03.000
You know, we still had horses and still paying farriers.
00:11:08.000
So I found Oklahoma Horseshoeing School in Okie City.
00:11:12.000
And so I moved my wife back home to my parents' house, you know.
00:11:18.000
And I went to Oklahoma Horseshoeing School for their 12-week program.
00:11:24.000
And so I did that and then when I came back to Arizona, Sierra Vista, I hooked up with a guy named...
00:11:45.000
And he paid me $5 a horse, you know, and fed me lunch.
00:11:50.000
And, you know, so I was learning how to shoe horses from him, you know, doing an apprenticeship.
00:11:59.000
I got on as a firefighter reserve, you know, in a place called Fry Fire Department.
00:12:09.000
The old man had an outpost store outside of Fort Huachuca, you know, 150 years ago.
00:12:27.000
Sometime I worked at a psych facility, too, you know?
00:12:37.000
What'd you do there, like restraining patients?
00:12:41.000
What's harder, horseshoeing or restraining patients?
00:12:45.000
Horseshoeing, I broke a kid's arm, so, you know, just a headlock.
00:12:51.000
They did a breakout where, you know, 20 or 30 of them run off, and then you got to herd them back in.
00:12:58.000
A couple of them act out, and one of the guys had the kid restrained.
00:13:06.000
The kid started slamming his head into his face.
00:13:09.000
So I just walked up to the headlock, and we landed, snapped his arm.
00:13:26.000
So how does it make its way to the UFC? Do you remember when you found out about the UFC? Yeah, I think that was still a year or two before.
00:13:38.000
Yeah, and then I started doing judo, you know, because...
00:13:43.000
I needed, you know, I needed something to do, you know.
00:13:55.000
You know, you still walk around with an erection, you know.
00:13:59.000
And so I started doing judo and advanced really quickly in that.
00:14:09.000
Yeah, so then I got on the Bisbee Fire Department in 94. Bisbee, Arizona?
00:14:39.000
So you were talking about when you first heard about the UFC. Yeah, in 92 I got on with the Bisbee Fire.
00:14:45.000
And then we were sitting there watching something on TV and saw Dan, clip of Dan.
00:14:53.000
And then he was doing some kind of bodyguard work with that gal who works with...
00:15:39.000
Everybody's in suits, and Dan's in his gray t-shirt.
00:15:41.000
And so, you know, then we saw Dan fight, and I called him up.
00:15:51.000
I said, playing fireman, playing horseshoe, you know.
00:15:54.000
I said, this UFC stuff, can you get me in on it?
00:15:59.000
So he ended up getting me some fights, probably about five or six fights, you know, around the country.
00:16:14.000
Oh, so you fought MMA before the UFC? Oh, it was warehouse fighting.
00:16:19.000
MMA, it was NHP. Right, NHP is what they called it back then.
00:16:29.000
In your day, and even in the UFC 8, you were still allowed to fight bare knuckle.
00:16:44.000
Who's the first guy to wear gloves in the UFC? Tank.
00:16:59.000
And it didn't make top ten of the one-round fights.
00:17:04.000
Well, it's because there's so many great fights.
00:17:06.000
It's arbitrary who makes top ten, but I think it should have been in there.
00:17:11.000
Nobody knows anything about UFC 100 and be a war.
00:17:21.000
Yeah, they should go back because that's the history of the sport.
00:17:25.000
I always tell people we knew more about martial arts after four years of the UFC than had been done in 400 years.
00:17:39.000
By the time 97 rolled around, they had figured out, first of all, they realized wrestling is the most important thing.
00:17:48.000
It's like a street fight, two and a half hours every day.
00:18:04.000
He posted the amount of champions per discipline.
00:18:08.000
You know, it showed like jujitsu, kickboxing, all the different, and then wrestling.
00:18:14.000
Number one out of all the different disciplines.
00:18:22.000
I mean, you're doing it every day in high school, every day in college, and there's no excuses, you know?
00:18:37.000
And wrestlers, amongst all athletes that I've ever met, take pride in being miserable.
00:19:05.000
How many of those champions were in the first few years?
00:19:14.000
But I still think that base is the most important base.
00:19:19.000
Because a dominant wrestler, a guy like a Daniel Cormier, a guy like a John Jones, a guy who's an elite wrestler, they have that advantage over everybody.
00:19:27.000
If shit gets weird, they can take the guy down at any time.
00:19:30.000
Or if they just decide to impose their will, they can take the guy down.
00:19:32.000
Or if you want to take them down because they're striking, they're outstriking you, you can't because they're wrestling so good.
00:19:43.000
But you were one of the first guys to enter the UFC that looked like real polished skills.
00:19:50.000
When you came out, guns blazing, you won your first fight by first round knockout.
00:19:55.000
And I remember watching on TV, I'm like, that motherfucker can fight.
00:19:58.000
Like, cause you're seeing people that, a lot of times you're seeing folks that probably shouldn't have been there.
00:20:04.000
Like, there was, back in the day, like, you remember the early days there was guys that were like, they trained in ninjitsu and they were practicing like karate chopping people on the top of the heads and all kinds of wacky shit.
00:20:15.000
But when I saw you, I was like, okay, that guy's an actual fighter.
00:20:19.000
And when you see the way you were throwing punches, and your wrestling ability, and you were a good size, too.
00:20:27.000
You probably weighed like, what, 210, something like that?
00:20:29.000
Yeah, I was 05, 205, but I said 210, because...
00:20:34.000
Well, I knew I was going to gain weight through that year, you know, because...
00:20:39.000
Yeah, I was a fireman, and I was shooing horses in Arizona.
00:20:43.000
You know, you're working six, seven days a week.
00:20:47.000
And I knew as soon as I gave it up, you know, 10 pounds was going to come on real fast.
00:20:54.000
That was when Mark Coleman in UFC 12 was when Mark Coleman became the champion when he beat Dan Severn.
00:21:12.000
Everybody gained weight when they saw the hammer.
00:21:20.000
When Mark would get on top of you and get control of you and start smashing his head into your face, those were quick nights.
00:21:27.000
Because Dan started that, and then I did it, and then Mark did it.
00:21:32.000
You know, and somehow Mark became the grandfather of it, so I guess I'm a great-grandfather and Dan's great-great-grandfather.
00:21:41.000
It was a real wake-up call for a lot of people.
00:21:46.000
When Hoist Gracie tapped Dan Severin, that was a wake-up call for a lot of people.
00:21:55.000
The Gracies, they changed martial arts the world over.
00:22:01.000
I think they're the most important family in the history of all martial arts.
00:22:08.000
The whole thing, what was brilliant about it, it was like...
00:22:24.000
But, you know, you paid $20 to sit there and watch an infomercial.
00:22:32.000
When you had your first fight, you had your first fight in the UFC, once it was over, once you won, were you like, okay, this is what I'm doing now?
00:22:49.000
Because my athletic career was like this, you know.
00:22:57.000
You know, I'd get burnt out and walk away, you know.
00:23:02.000
And I got a real short attention span, I guess, you know.
00:23:05.000
But when you saw what the UFC was, where you could take guys down or you could stand up with them, strike, it was such a unique thing.
00:23:13.000
Yeah, because I wasn't afraid to get punched in the face.
00:23:21.000
Because there's a lot of wrestlers, they go in there and bam, you get hit in the bridge of the nose, it changes your opinion real fast and everything, don't it?
00:23:35.000
Now, did you think at that point in time that this was going to be a real sport?
00:23:40.000
Because a lot of people weren't sure if it was going to last back then.
00:23:43.000
Like UFC 8, when you entered, it was still kind of crazy.
00:23:47.000
When I came around, it was UFC 12, and they were banned from pay-per-view on everything except DirecTV.
00:23:56.000
You couldn't get it on cable anymore because boxing was in cahoots with John McCain and Budweiser and all that stuff.
00:24:13.000
You know, he was a paid boxing advisor to Don King.
00:24:21.000
You know, so when this came around, it was beating boxing, like you said.
00:24:26.000
And so Don King said, hey, put the boots to this, you know.
00:24:31.000
I mean, his wife, you know, was the head of Henley Distributing, you know.
00:24:40.000
But I knew he did something with Budweiser and that had a big impact on...
00:24:50.000
whether or not it was legal because they started banning it from everywhere.
00:24:54.000
Yeah, that was the big joke is after the fights you can go to the hospital...
00:25:07.000
We didn't know if we were going to come out and get slapped in cuffs and hauled away.
00:25:11.000
Or they're going to let us finish the event and then arrest everybody.
00:25:20.000
And they told him they couldn't punch in the face and close fists?
00:25:25.000
There was some kind of crazy law where they couldn't punch...
00:25:33.000
And everybody was going, what the fuck is going on?
00:25:36.000
Like, they were told before the event that they can't punch with closed fists.
00:25:42.000
The first event I did was supposed to be in New York.
00:25:45.000
It was supposed to be, I think it was supposed to be in Albany.
00:25:52.000
But it was upstate New York somewhere, and then it got moved last minute to Dothan, Alabama, and that's where I met you.
00:25:58.000
Yeah, that was UFC 12. That's when Vitor made his debut, fought Trey Tellegman, and that was when Mark Coleman fought Dan.
00:26:30.000
You believe he's going to fight Oscar De La Hoya?
00:26:33.000
Yeah, he's going to have a boxing match September 11th with Oscar De La Hoya.
00:26:36.000
You've got to think, that guy was fighting, I mean, well, so was Oscar.
00:26:41.000
I mean, Oscar was a world champion in 97. And here it is, 97, and Vitor makes his octagon debut.
00:26:57.000
So Oscar's a little older than Vitor, I believe.
00:26:59.000
I believe Oscar's like 48 or something like that.
00:27:04.000
It's crazy seeing these guys still getting after it.
00:27:13.000
I'm gonna go down there to Columbia and do the bio-accelerator, you know, and the plan on that is do that and hopefully, you know, make a comeback.
00:27:37.000
Wouldn't it be better to fight someone your age?
00:27:42.000
No, so you'd want to fight someone with the belt, even at your age.
00:27:49.000
If I can get my back fixed up, I'm there, baby.
00:28:00.000
Probably five or six major back surgeries, and then probably related, 15 to 20 related, you know, because infections and things like that.
00:28:12.000
And the infections tried to get me a couple of times.
00:28:31.000
Jesus Christ, Don, that looks like a rollercoaster ride.
00:29:08.000
So they just went in and did the whole back all at once.
00:29:20.000
Yeah, they're draining it and they had to leave it open for a week so that the plastic surgeon could figure out how to connect it because I was out of connective tissue.
00:29:36.000
He had to cut it, pull, cut it, pull, cut it, pull.
00:29:45.000
So, is this mostly from pro wrestling, or is it from everything?
00:29:51.000
I mean, you know, as a fireman, as a horseshoer, you know?
00:30:00.000
So, you've got a few that are just hanging in there, and then you've got your neck fused.
00:30:07.000
Well, that goes all the way down the crack of my ass.
00:30:10.000
My ass crack goes from my balls up to my shoulder blades.
00:30:16.000
So it's just all scar tissue in there and bolts and screws and plates and...
00:30:21.000
Yeah, so if I can go down there to Columbia and get, you know, the stem cell...
00:30:35.000
I know a lot of guys have gone to that bioaccelerator thing, that facility down there, and had a really good result.
00:30:49.000
They can do amazing stuff, but that's a lot going on there.
00:30:54.000
Yeah, they're going to do my shoulders too, because I have partial replacements in my shoulders.
00:31:12.000
Just, you know, cut the end off, you know, and then stuck the one thing and just with the knob and the other side is all natural bone.
00:31:23.000
Because they said if they do a full replacement, You can't use them.
00:31:47.000
December 17. This one just got done last December.
00:31:51.000
When did you get your first surgery after fighting?
00:32:10.000
But most fighters that I know have had something blowout.
00:32:27.000
I did the UFC in 96, and then in 97 I was hired by Antonio Inoki and Masa Saito to do New Japan Pro Wrestling.
00:32:39.000
And Brad Reagans, he's a cousin of Brock Lesnar, second cousin.
00:32:45.000
So he called up Jeff, you know, because Brad took fourth in the Olympics in 76 in Greco-Roman.
00:32:53.000
And then he was on the team in 80. And he was going to be the gold medal winner.
00:33:00.000
He had beaten the gold medal winner in 76, but they were doing the point system then.
00:33:12.000
You get so many points for advancing, so many points for a pin, so many points for a point win.
00:33:24.000
I mean, amateur wrestling fucks around so much with the rules, and so does judo.
00:33:36.000
I was watching it in the gym while I was working out.
00:33:42.000
But they have some wacky thing that they do where you get a certain amount of points for a submission, a certain amount of points for a knockout, and then you move ahead.
00:33:56.000
And then you're moving towards this eventual million-dollar tournament that they put together.
00:34:02.000
That's how they were doing it with judo and with amateur wrestling.
00:34:08.000
The way they have it set up, like if you win, but if you win in the first round, you get extra points.
00:34:19.000
Even for someone like me who's a big fan of the sport, I can't follow their system.
00:34:23.000
I'm like, you've got great fighters, but you're confusing the shit out of people with this wacky system.
00:34:33.000
I think you should not be able to fight or I think there should be some major penalty because a lot of these guys are choosing to miss weight.
00:34:43.000
They're like, I don't want to do this, fuck it.
00:34:45.000
But you could, but you know it's going to drain you.
00:34:47.000
And so they choose to come in a pound or two heavy and then they feel a lot better the next day.
00:34:53.000
Because, you know, you know better than anybody.
00:34:56.000
Yeah, a better chance of winning because they're not as drained.
00:35:03.000
I wish you got down to a healthy weight and you fought at whatever weight you're at and they just figured out what the weight classes could be to make it so that there's more options, make it every 10 pounds.
00:35:14.000
Something like that, like boxing has it, but I think with MMA, I think the weight classes are too wide.
00:35:20.000
You know, you got 85 and then you got 205. That's crazy.
00:35:25.000
To have two weight classes separated by 20 pounds is just fucking nuts to me.
00:35:31.000
I would love it if it was 5 pounds, but I think 10 pounds is fine.
00:35:37.000
You could adjust your diet, adjust your training habits, do a little extra running, whatever you gotta do.
00:35:44.000
But then you get into what happened in pro boxing.
00:35:51.000
But the thing about pro boxing is, you know, you have all these different organizations.
00:35:54.000
You got the WBC, WBA, IBO, you know, all that shit.
00:35:59.000
With the UFC, if they just kept it in the UFC, just with the UFC and made all these different weight classes, one every 10 pounds, I think is very doable.
00:36:11.000
It'd be a lot more opportunities for guys to go up in weight or down in weight and fight, you know, have champion versus champion fights.
00:36:21.000
You know, you got your middleweight champion fighting your light heavyweight champion.
00:36:27.000
Well, that's why they need a super heavyweight.
00:36:37.000
You have so many good fighters that are heavier.
00:36:49.000
When in his prime, people forgot about Tom Erickson.
00:36:55.000
Elite wrestler who could knock you the fuck out, and he was huge.
00:37:01.000
In his prime, Tom Erickson was one of the scariest specimens to ever compete in MMA. He was a fucking gigantic man who moved so good.
00:37:10.000
But he's another one that doesn't like getting punched in the face, though.
00:37:21.000
So when you first fought and you decided, okay, this is what I'm going to do.
00:37:26.000
When the UFC was taken off, you stayed in the UFC for a few years and then went over to Pride.
00:37:43.000
So all your fights in the UFC were only one year?
00:37:53.000
And then from New Japan Pro Wrestling, so how'd you find out about that?
00:38:07.000
God bless Ken Shamrock, you know, he had the deal.
00:38:16.000
They offered him a deal to go over there and be a bad guy American shooter style, you know.
00:38:24.000
And so he took that contract, rented WWE, and showed them, and they matched it or bettered it, you know.
00:38:33.000
And then that left New Japan Pro Wrestling hanging.
00:38:38.000
So that's when Masa Saito called Brad Reagans, Brad Reagans called Jeff Blatnick, What a great guy Jeff Black was.
00:38:52.000
He gave me some great advice when I first started working for the UFC. Just such a sweetheart of a guy.
00:39:12.000
And fantastic doing commentary because of that experience.
00:39:15.000
He was, like you, he was a student of the sport.
00:39:18.000
He got hired and studied it and, you know, he was amazing.
00:39:25.000
And when, so, you go over to New Japan Pro Wrestling and that's when you were getting most of your injuries, you think?
00:39:33.000
Because I was trying to be Ric Flair and Terry Funk, you know.
00:39:43.000
They wanted more of a Bruiser Brody type thing, you know.
00:39:54.000
I ended up taking bumps that I shouldn't have taken.
00:40:05.000
Those picking guys up over your head, slamming them down, them picking you up, all the different collisions that you guys would have with each other night after night after night.
00:40:14.000
And is their circuit over there similar to the circuit here?
00:40:18.000
Would you do a lot of different shows or are they mostly televised?
00:40:27.000
I mean, that's how they keep the money coming in.
00:40:33.000
Yeah, people don't know, if you're not a fan of pro wrestling, those guys are working hundreds of nights a week, or a year, rather.
00:40:40.000
They're working, you know, Dallas Page was telling me that he, you know, sometimes did 200 plus shows a year.
00:40:58.000
Yeah, you're working more days than you're not working.
00:41:04.000
So you're exhausted all the time, you're jet-lagged, and you're getting slammed.
00:41:08.000
Yeah, and you gotta stay in shape, and you gotta eat, you know.
00:41:15.000
It's a real, you know, it's a real living thing.
00:41:18.000
You know, when you went over there, did you have to go to pro wrestling school?
00:41:31.000
And like I said, he took fourth in the 76 Olympics in Montreal when he should have won.
00:41:39.000
And then he would have won the 80 Olympics, you know.
00:41:43.000
And then he ended up, he got out, you know, and he trained Jeff Blatnick, you know, because they were tight.
00:41:50.000
And since Brad stepped away, you know, All the concentration was on Jeff.
00:41:58.000
And how did you go from New Japan Pro Wrestling to Pride?
00:42:43.000
I told my parents, find me a flag, you know, give it to the guys when they come over.
00:42:56.000
You know, I'm going in with the national anthem.
00:43:02.000
You know, walking at the flag, having a national anthem, it was cool.
00:43:19.000
That fight in the lower corner, that Takayama fight, that was one of the craziest fucking moments in the history of mixed martial arts when you and Takayama were just slamming each other in the head over and over and over again.
00:43:38.000
See if you can just pull up that exchange, because in all the history of the sport, that is one of the most iconic exchanges of any two, because you couldn't believe it was happening, and you couldn't believe you guys kept doing it.
00:43:59.000
I mean, you just walk towards each other, and this fucking exchange is like a movie exchange.
00:44:04.000
In the tie-up, you're both hitting each other with right hands.
00:44:20.000
And so he just stayed there and I stayed there.
00:44:25.000
I mean, I've never seen anything like that before or since.
00:44:29.000
While that was happening, and you just slamming right hands into each other like that, what was going through your head?
00:44:36.000
I was like, what the hell's keeping this guy up?
00:44:39.000
He was probably thinking the same thing about you.
00:45:07.000
Because they did some Saitama Super Arena shows where it was just insanity.
00:45:22.000
So they sold that out, and then they sold 5,000 standing tickets, you know?
00:45:28.000
They got permission from the fire department to do that.
00:45:30.000
So I did that, and then they did the National Soccer Arena, you know, for probably K-1 New Year's Eve.
00:45:41.000
That's when Jerome Labano knocked me on my ass.
00:45:48.000
Yeah, you had that one kickboxing fight against him.
00:45:51.000
That's a crazy deal to take, to take a kickboxing fight against one of the great kickboxers of all time.
00:46:04.000
Well, the thing is, the deal was we were supposed to do an MMA fight, yeah.
00:46:10.000
I don't know what happened, but there's a lot of things that happened, Joe, that I'm finding out now, you know, 20 years later, that, you know, the two scumbags that were my agent at the time.
00:46:41.000
I'm watching the Kings documentary on Showtime.
00:46:55.000
It's all about Roberta Duran, Sugar Ray Lennon, Thomas Hearns, and Marvin Hagler.
00:47:04.000
And it makes you remember, like, man, those days were wild.
00:47:08.000
Well, they had the one Once We Were Kings, you know, about the heavyweight guys.
00:47:13.000
Yeah, this is just about those four guys in the matches that they had with each other.
00:47:20.000
Well, the Once We Were Kings were about Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Norton, and Holmes.
00:47:43.000
It broke my heart when I finally freaking passed.
00:47:53.000
Because he was just like this guy that didn't have any hype behind him.
00:47:56.000
A hardworking guy from Brockton, Massachusetts.
00:48:05.000
And then when he got to the pinnacle, when he knocked out Thomas Hearns, that fight was just like, that was the fight that made him.
00:48:11.000
And people really understood what kind of greatness that man had in him.
00:48:14.000
I mean, people knew how good he was before that, but you had to see him against another superstar and see him just wade right into the fire to see what, you know, Thomas Hearns was a murderous puncher.
00:48:27.000
And to see Marvin Hagler just take it and keep coming forward.
00:49:03.000
I'm going to Italy and make martial arts movies.
00:49:21.000
They were like, you know, like you'd punch people, they'd go flying through the air, that kind of shit.
00:49:30.000
But he decided he didn't want to fight anymore and went out at the very top of his game, which is kind of incredible.
00:49:38.000
There's only a few guys that have ever done that.
00:49:57.000
I mean, very few guys have ever gotten to the point where Khabib is and decided...
00:50:13.000
I don't know what he was doing, but these are terrible movies.
00:50:50.000
But someone has to do something like that on the early days of Pride.
00:50:59.000
The fans that were watching it at home, all the fans, it wasn't known.
00:51:06.000
It wasn't like everybody, like the UFC today, say if Francis Ngannou's fighting or if Stylebender's fighting, everybody knows.
00:51:18.000
Hundreds of thousands, if not a million, pay-per-view buys.
00:51:28.000
But we knew that we were seeing something special.
00:51:31.000
Well, it was like a Super Bowl every three months.
00:51:39.000
You know, people say, you know, the Noguera brothers came over here and got whooped.
00:51:51.000
You get in top shape every three months to fight, you know, a top guy.
00:51:59.000
It's so hard on the body to do something like that.
00:52:02.000
Yeah, everybody who came over to America had already been past their prime in pride.
00:52:11.000
Like, think of Noguera's wars, the wars that he had, the war with Fedor, with Crow Cop, with, I mean, so many guys.
00:52:25.000
Apparently, Minotaur's neck was fucked up for the rest of his life after that fight.
00:52:32.000
I mean, Bob was 375 with a six-pack, which, what in the fuck was he taking?
00:52:42.000
He was so big, it seemed like a boss character in a video game.
00:53:01.000
And then, somebody told me not to say that to you.
00:53:19.000
But I think that time, that period of time from like 2001 to whenever it was that Pride went away, was it like 2006 or something like that?
00:53:47.000
So they're going to let him get back on the secret sauce.
00:53:54.000
Listen, test all the fighters you have to test.
00:53:56.000
But when a guy's been saucy all throughout the best parts of his career, and then you make him come over here and be natural.
00:54:02.000
I mean, we got a chance to see him against Brock Lesnar when he was saucy.
00:54:12.000
But then, you know, all these pesky USADA tests.
00:54:18.000
If every athlete on the planet would tell you something to kiss their fucking ass, you know, they'd go away.
00:54:27.000
You know, to bang on somebody's door at 5 o'clock in the morning.
00:54:31.000
Like, fight day, they did it to Alexander Volkanovski.
00:54:40.000
These motherfuckers wake him up at 6 o'clock in the morning and tell him to take a piss.
00:54:49.000
It's insanity that they would even think that would be okay.
00:54:52.000
And it's a huge disadvantage if they don't test his opponent.
00:54:57.000
First of all, they should leave him the fuck alone.
00:55:02.000
I mean, the psychological fuck that is, you know?
00:55:06.000
I mean, he was like, are you fucking kidding me?
00:55:11.000
I mean, he's just trying to stay calm and get ready for a fight.
00:55:16.000
When you were fighting in pride, did they test it all?
00:55:29.000
Ensign told me that they had in the contract, in all capital letters, we do not test for steroids.
00:55:42.000
UFC 9. When McCarthy came in and said, you can't punch, you know, close fist.
00:55:50.000
Or you will be fined somewhere, sometime, some amount down the road, you know?
00:56:02.000
You will be fined eventually somewhere, some amount, you know?
00:56:09.000
So, I mean, we're going to enforce this stupid rule, you know, that, you know.
00:56:24.000
Until I found out that I had been robbed a couple of times and they were supposed to have paid your taxes.
00:56:34.000
And then I went and did the last show as a favor.
00:56:40.000
I took a tremendous cut, and, you know, then the next day I go in to get paid, and President of Pride's not there.
00:56:56.000
I'm not going to say his name because it's still questionable, everything.
00:57:05.000
He says, Don's on yesterday, Japanese IRS. Come to our office looking for you.
00:57:12.000
He said, they're downstairs right now waiting on you.
00:57:16.000
Yeah, so I had to go down there and pay my way out of Japan.
00:57:24.000
Yeah, there was a lot of weird shenanigans with money over there, right?
00:57:28.000
They told him they wanted him to fight and he didn't have a contract.
00:57:31.000
And the day of the fight, there's still no contract.
00:57:34.000
It's like, look, if I don't have a contract, I'm not going out there.
00:57:37.000
And then they effectively kind of blackballed him and he never really reached those same heights again.
00:57:43.000
They stopped promoting him, stopped, you know...
00:57:45.000
Well, some asswipe over there made the announcement that the Yakuza was involved with Pride.
00:57:59.000
And that killed the business over there, right?
00:58:01.000
Was that like the media did that or a journalist did that or something?
00:58:09.000
Publicly announce it because then advertisers don't want to be involved in it.
00:58:15.000
And is that what killed the business over there?
00:58:19.000
So how many years did it run for in its heyday?
00:58:30.000
So it was like a good solid seven or eight years.
00:58:48.000
19 or 21. I remember the first one was Hickson.
00:59:01.000
Because I think the way they launched Pride, I do remember that Hickson was the first one.
00:59:06.000
Because the way they launched Pride was by having pro wrestling stars compete in MMA. Right.
00:59:13.000
And that was one of the big attractions to Pride.
00:59:17.000
Because pro wrestling in Japan back then was gigantic, right?
00:59:24.000
That was like the first creation of Pride, I guess.
00:59:33.000
Well, you know, they had their guys shooting on each other sometimes.
00:59:44.000
What that means, for people that don't understand what that means, some of the fights were a work, meaning, like, you knew who was going to win, you'd worked it out in advance, and some of the fights just turned out to be real fights.
00:59:54.000
And that was a thing that would happen sometimes in Japan with pro wrestling, right?
00:59:58.000
It would just decide that, and sometimes the opponent didn't know.
01:00:03.000
And the guy would go out and start throwing haymakers at them and kick them and take them down, stomp them, and you're like, whoa!
01:00:19.000
You know, and then Roddy Piper was the muscle for a while.
01:00:23.000
Well, it's a lot of guys who were in pro wrestling were legit combat sports athletes.
01:00:39.000
And over in Japan, Takata was kind of, you know, he was a huge superstar over there.
01:00:46.000
But Hickson would not agree to anything other than a real fight.
01:00:56.000
And you kind of had to look at it with a discerning eye.
01:00:59.000
Like you'd see a guy get caught in a heel hook, and you're like, hmm.
01:01:05.000
Well, I remember after Ken Shamrock and I fought, I went to a WWE show here in Tucson, and the Undertaker, he asked me if that was a work.
01:01:19.000
He says, because you both end up in a heel hook.
01:01:22.000
I'm like, oh fuck yeah, we both ended up being a heel hook.
01:01:26.000
He had my foot and that was the only thing I grabbed.
01:01:37.000
Well, Ken was one of the very first guys to really master heel hooks and use those in the UFC early on.
01:01:46.000
Well, he, you know, had a hairline fracture on both my freaking ankles.
01:01:54.000
You know, my ex-wife and I, we would usually go from Japan to L.A., you know, but that time we stopped in Hawaii, and my ankles were this big, you know.
01:02:08.000
Just going, if I didn't went the whole way, you know, I could barely walk off that plane.
01:02:20.000
How many fights did you have over there in Pride?
01:02:31.000
Who do you think was your toughest fight over there?
01:02:52.000
I mean, physically and psychologically, I mean, you just, you just, you go, what the hell is going on here?
01:03:08.000
You said something to me once, I'll never forget this, about the Ken Shamrock fight.
01:03:11.000
You said that if you want to be honest, both of you left a little bit of yourself in that ring and you were never the same afterwards.
01:03:25.000
There's some of those fights that you think back, and you think back how you were before the fight and how you were after the fight, and they were just so crazy.
01:03:39.000
I mean, the psychological preparation sometimes is harder than the physical preparation.
01:03:51.000
You have to separate yourself not only from your family, you know, your wife and your kids and your friends, but the whole world.
01:04:03.000
You know, I mean, I completely understand what it's like to come out of prison, you know?
01:04:11.000
I mean, prison, not jail, but prison for a long time.
01:04:18.000
Like I said, not to be redundant, but I am, but you completely separate yourself from everything.
01:04:30.000
When you would prepare for these fights, where were you training at the time?
01:04:37.000
There in Tucson, a couple of times I had to leave, you know, for the second Mark Coleman fight, you know, I went over and...
01:04:56.000
I was so beat up, you know, at that point in my career.
01:05:01.000
You know, we'd get up, you know, go have breakfast, go get a massage, go to the chiropractor, you know, go get stretched, go to that.
01:05:17.000
Just watch the fight on TV. Mostly just trying to keep your body healthy.
01:05:26.000
So what kind of physical training were you able to do when you were that banged up?
01:05:34.000
Like I said, we would just do stretching and just technique.
01:05:49.000
Because Shamrock, Frank in particular, was always a stickler for conditioning.
01:05:55.000
I mean, that was one of his big weapons, is he would put a pace on guys.
01:05:59.000
That's what he did to John Loeber in the rematch.
01:06:01.000
Just put a pace on guys they couldn't keep up with.
01:06:16.000
Yeah, that's one of the things that I use as an example.
01:06:23.000
He was a gold medalist in the hardest discipline.
01:06:28.000
And Frank caught him, what, 30 seconds in the first round?
01:06:43.000
I mean, all those elite wrestlers, the kind of strength those guys have.
01:06:46.000
Remember when Royce Alger came over to the UFC? Ensign.
01:06:55.000
But so many wrestlers, they just didn't understand what they were getting into.
01:07:03.000
They leave those arms out there, and boom, they're snatched real fast.
01:07:08.000
So when you were training with Frank, how did you hook up with Frank?
01:07:11.000
How did that take place, and where were you guys training?
01:07:21.000
So you went up there and just trained with him?
01:07:32.000
So, you know, I needed to get the hell out of town, you know, because...
01:07:43.000
So how did you make that connection with Frank?
01:07:55.000
If that was the second Coleman fight, so that was after...
01:08:05.000
But, you know, I don't know how the hell that happened.
01:08:16.000
I think because I had fought the French guy, the first French guy, New Year's Eve.
01:09:16.000
So, back then, when you trained with Frank, the Lion's Den was probably the first real mixed martial arts team, where they were, like, really prepared.
01:09:33.000
They were two of the very first guys that were really putting together a real, legit MMA team, where they had, like, real, like, for the time, scientific training, real technique training.
01:09:48.000
Well, you know, like you said, they had a team.
01:10:03.000
All my guys are Mexican except for a couple of white boys.
01:10:22.000
And what discipline would those guys have martial arts wise?
01:10:30.000
So, when you would prepare for a fight back then, did you have a head trainer?
01:10:37.000
And he would prepare your camps and the whole deal?
01:10:58.000
And he can look at a fight, five minutes of a fight, and boom, have the game plan drawn up.
01:11:09.000
So he was one of the first guys that was in your camp?
01:11:56.000
A kid's, um, judo club down there on Fort Wachuca.
01:12:02.000
And, um, so I started going there on Saturday mornings, and Steve would come down, you know, he would work, he'd up at Tucson, it'd be Monday, Tuesday, Thursday nights, and then he'd come down Saturday morning for the kids,
01:12:19.000
you know, but The rest is up in Tucson, so I would drive up there, you know.
01:12:28.000
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday night, I'd go up there and train and jump in the truck and drive home, you know.
01:12:37.000
Get home at midnight, 1 o'clock in the morning, you know.
01:12:44.000
After we worked out, I'd take them out for dinner, you know.
01:13:08.000
I lost to a fucking idiot I shouldn't have lost to because my...
01:13:18.000
My wife at the time decided I was drinking too much and taking too many pills.
01:13:23.000
So her and a couple of guys took my booze and my pills the night before the fight.
01:13:31.000
And I was just circling through withdrawals during the fucking fight.
01:13:38.000
That was something someone told me the other day that I could not believe.
01:13:42.000
They were telling me, and I don't want to name any names, but big time fighters, particularly kickboxers, that fought on heroin.
01:14:15.000
Frank had trained Cyril for a fight me, and then I called Frank to train me for the Coleman fight.
01:14:29.000
You rolled that motherfucker till the wheels fell off.
01:14:49.000
It was five months after my fifth back surgery.
01:14:56.000
Five months after your fifth back surgery, you had a fight.
01:15:05.000
The thing about guys like you, it's like you never lose the itch.
01:15:11.000
And the tougher the guy, the more the body starts to fall apart because you're willing to train through pain.
01:15:16.000
You look at guys like, I mean, Cain Velasquez is a great example.
01:15:22.000
One of the greatest of all times, but his body just couldn't hang in there.
01:15:24.000
His knees blew out, his back blew out, his neck blew out, his shoulders blew out.
01:15:28.000
He had all these surgeries and eventually just stopped being the guy that everybody knew was Kane, you know?
01:15:35.000
His body just wouldn't do what his mind could do.
01:15:48.000
I think I first broke my neck when I was in college and didn't know it.
01:16:08.000
What happened was Dan Severn's little baby brother Rod and I, we were roommates, and we went down to my parents' house for Thanksgiving or something.
01:16:23.000
Anyways, we were out on those fucking three-wheelers.
01:16:29.000
Drinking and going over and, you know, last jump of the day.
01:16:39.000
You know, we've been there for a couple hours, gone through a few cases of beer, and the truck pulls up.
01:16:48.000
And they get out, you know, look at the little sissies, you know, because they had the shoulder pads, the knee pads, the gloves, you know, all that, and, you know, laughing at them.
01:16:59.000
And so then I go off, jump, front tire first, boom, boom, boom.
01:17:05.000
Yeah, so I thought I tore up my shoulder, but 20 years later, when they...
01:17:13.000
I said, when did you break your first time you broke your neck, you know?
01:17:23.000
I kept, that was in 88, 87. 86, 87. And then...
01:17:32.000
I sat out a year in amateur wrestling because of the injury.
01:17:42.000
I thought it was the shoulder, but it was the neck.
01:17:45.000
And then I rehabbed it, you know, because they redid the shoulder.
01:17:52.000
They cut off the end of my clavicle bone back then.
01:18:02.000
Because it was just destroyed, so you just lob it off and throw it away.
01:18:20.000
Kurt Angle wrestled in the Olympics with a broken neck, didn't he?
01:18:49.000
Bobby Douglas put me on a medical scholarship...
01:18:54.000
So it would open up a scholarship for the team, which is what needed to be done.
01:19:11.000
I went up to the Las Vegas Southwestern Regional Qualifying Tournament for the Olympics.
01:19:29.000
And then I went to, which qualified you for the national finals, you know.
01:19:37.000
And so then I went up there for the Greco and got my ass handed to me.
01:19:43.000
You know, I thought, you know, you get lucky every once in a while and you think you're good at it.
01:19:53.000
And like a dumbass, I picked the wrong one, you know.
01:20:02.000
Fifth or sixth in the national freestyle tournament, you know.
01:20:08.000
Must have been six, because they took the first five.
01:20:17.000
But yeah, Art Martori was a money guy back then for the Olympic team, almost.
01:20:29.000
So with all the injuries, when did you first start taking pain medication?
01:21:06.000
Do you remember when you started fighting on them?
01:21:10.000
No, that was a fucking mistake when that was...
01:21:17.000
I heard something in the UFC. I broke my hand, right?
01:21:26.000
Remember when Coleman beat the hell out of me in UFC 10?
01:21:33.000
You know, he broke my ocular, I think it is, or occipital, I don't know.
01:22:00.000
I was offered a fight against him in Japan in November, right before, you know, November 96. And Bob Meyerowitz found out that I was going to do that and that Dan was going to do that,
01:22:21.000
And he was pissed because of the opportunity of ruining the Ultimate Ultimate 2. Right.
01:22:47.000
You'd want to slap him upside the head if you did.
01:22:51.000
The fucking guy's going around saying that, you know, he took a dive.
01:22:57.000
Yeah, against me at the ultimate ultimate, you know?
01:23:07.000
You know, he would be the last person in there wanting to take a dive.
01:23:15.000
So I beat Gary Goodridge, you know, in the first round, ultimate, ultimate.
01:23:21.000
And a buddy of mine, Dave Nortz, he had gone with me for the fire department.
01:23:32.000
We put two bags, two or three bags, after the Goodridge fight.
01:23:40.000
Probably right back fresh as a daisy, you know.
01:24:32.000
It was a crazy war, then you got his back and finished him.
01:24:38.000
I walk out, lumber out there, and step sideways, heel, heel.
01:24:49.000
And stupid ass, I don't know what the hell I was thinking, you know, heel, heel.
01:24:53.000
But as soon as that second heel landed, he hit me, you know, with a jab.
01:25:08.000
I made a mistake of drinking with him one night.
01:25:14.000
I remember one time I was there for, I forget which event it was, but there was a giant brawl that broke out right after I went to bed.
01:25:24.000
Everybody was downstairs in the after-fight area, hanging out, drinking.
01:25:28.000
And it was getting late, so I was like, well, I'm going to go to bed.
01:25:31.000
So I went upstairs to go to bed, and then I heard, like, you just missed it.
01:25:36.000
Apparently, Valid Ishmael and Tank got into a brawl, and there was just chairs flying and all kinds of crazy shit, and I missed it by like 20 minutes.
01:25:47.000
Fucking Brazilians here, they'd fight at the drop of a hat.
01:25:51.000
I remember over here in Pride having breakfast, you know, a couple of times they almost got right next to my table.
01:26:02.000
Well, there were so many brawls back then, right?
01:26:04.000
Charles Crazy Horse Bennett and Vandley Silva brawled backstage.
01:26:17.000
Because it was just a fucking crazy time in martial arts history.
01:26:21.000
And it was also a time when Fedor was in his prime.
01:26:25.000
And I think it's arguable that Fedor in his prime was the greatest heavyweight of all time.
01:26:37.000
But I think he caught Fedor when Fedor was battle-worn and was pretty deep into his career.
01:26:51.000
When Fabricio caught Kane, Kane had already gone through...
01:26:59.000
But it's arguable that when he fought Krokop, when he fought Noguera, when he fought all those guys over there, it was arguable that Fedor was the greatest.
01:27:11.000
There's no reason to even fucking talk about it, you know?
01:27:17.000
If you ever watched the man fight live, it was something you'll never forget, you know?
01:27:30.000
I mean, those things over there, they were events.
01:27:33.000
They weren't just a fight, you know, you go to, you know, on a Saturday night, hey, let's go watch the fight, you know.
01:27:43.000
The women would get dressed up, the men would, you know, I mean, you plan your whole fucking week around it, you know.
01:27:51.000
They'd go and have their dinner, steak dinner, you know, not beer on the back of the pickup, you know.
01:28:01.000
We used to get up in the morning and watch them because they were live from Japan.
01:28:05.000
So they'd be on here, like, I forget what it was.
01:28:18.000
They offered me a gig commentating at one point.
01:28:26.000
One of the UFC events, back when I was doing the interviews.
01:28:29.000
And they offered me a gig to commentate in Pride.
01:28:42.000
Bob was such a good guy, but he did not like you going anywhere or doing anything else, you know.
01:28:50.000
He was a good man, but he was solid on loyalty, you know.
01:29:07.000
The UFC was the big thing in America, but Pride was way bigger than the UFC back then in terms of size.
01:29:15.000
The UFC was doing small places in comparison to what Pride was doing.
01:29:24.000
And then when Zufa bought the UFC, when the Fertittas and Dana White came along, then they had the business plan, and then they had the money.
01:29:32.000
And even then, I mean, they were real close to bailing.
01:29:35.000
At one point in time, they were $40 million in debt.
01:29:40.000
That was right when the Ultimate Fighter came along.
01:29:42.000
And they had actually talked to Dana on the phone and said, let's try to sell it.
01:29:49.000
They were going to start putting out offers and try to see, you know, who wanted to buy the UFC. And then, I guess, Fertitta changed his mind.
01:30:03.000
And then they did the Ultimate Fighter, and then, boom, it takes off.
01:30:11.000
They were thinking about putting out the offers, and he actually made the phone call and decided to, Lorenzo did, to Dana.
01:30:21.000
And then they changed their mind last minute, and then boom!
01:30:25.000
It's kind of wild because if they sold it, who the fuck knows what would have happened?
01:30:33.000
They probably would have, you know, they would have had to have somebody that had a lot of media savvy that knew how to market the company.
01:30:45.000
And they probably would have sold it, and they probably would have lost a lot of money, too.
01:30:47.000
Because before The Ultimate Fighter in 2005, it wasn't really worth that much money.
01:30:53.000
But then when The Ultimate Fighter happened, and Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffin fought live on TV, and they had that crazy fucking brawl, and then it became popular.
01:31:07.000
Didn't make the sport, but it was a defining moment for the sport in America.
01:31:13.000
But meanwhile, in Japan, at the same time, they were doing the Saitama Super Arena.
01:31:25.000
The walk-ins and that crazy pride lady that would introduce everybody.
01:31:55.000
When you think back, I mean, what a crazy life you've lived.
01:32:07.000
For you to go from being a guy who's shooing horses and working in a fire department, all of a sudden you decide, ah, I could do that, and you take a fight.
01:32:17.000
The next thing you know, well, I guess I'm fighting now.
01:32:20.000
All the way to Japan to kickboxing Jerome LeBanner and fighting in these giant arenas and doing New Japan Pro Wrestling.
01:32:41.000
I got my bulldog, Quinn, and if it wasn't for her, I'd have died and went, you know?
01:33:06.000
When you think back on all the damage that it did to your body, if you had to go back and do it all again, would you do it again?
01:33:27.000
When you see the fighters today and you know that you're a gigantic part of the evolution of the sport, I mean, you're a pioneer.
01:33:37.000
When you see what it's like now, it's got to be pretty crazy to see and know that you were a vital part of the beginning of this thing.
01:33:46.000
You know, I really don't understand what you're saying about being a vital part.
01:33:54.000
If you go back and look at the legends of the sport, Don Frye, you're one of the legends, man.
01:34:05.000
When I told my friends that I was having you on the podcast today, people were like, oh shit!
01:34:32.000
What you've done in your life, there's not a lot of humans that would have followed your path.
01:34:40.000
I'm not very smart enough to take the easy route.
01:34:44.000
How many of those fights do you think you fought when you were on the pain pills?
01:35:08.000
And then, you know, being a dumbass, you think, okay, I live on these things.
01:35:19.000
I think there was a lot of people doing that, though.
01:35:21.000
That's what my friend was telling me the other night.
01:35:23.000
He was telling me, look, man, you don't know, but I'm telling you, a lot of those guys were fighting on heroin.
01:35:51.000
That movie was a wake-up call for a lot of people, huh?
01:36:03.000
You know, that wasn't the purpose of that film.
01:36:05.000
The purpose of that film, when they started making that documentary, was when Mark Kerr was in his prime, and what a fucking specimen that guy was, right?
01:36:12.000
And they wanted to document this guy who was this fucking elite super athlete wrestler who was the Smashing Machine.
01:36:21.000
That's what they nicknamed him over there, and he was just killing everybody.
01:36:24.000
And during the process of filming it, they realized, like, wow, this guy's addicted to pain medication.
01:36:36.000
They caught him during the filming right when the wheels were falling off.
01:36:42.000
So it was just complete dumb luck that that documentary became sort of a cautionary tale.
01:36:50.000
Yeah, I know that back then around that time...
01:36:56.000
Some Hollywood producer came out to the house and he wanted to do one of those shows, you know?
01:37:12.000
But I was just, my body was starting to fall apart so bad.
01:37:16.000
And I'm like, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to keep this going.
01:37:21.000
And I, you know, the kids, kids were little, you know, one or two or less than that.
01:37:28.000
And I didn't want, I didn't want these people in my house.
01:37:32.000
You know, because, you know, I just had the kids.
01:37:35.000
And then, like you said, the wheels were falling off, man.
01:37:39.000
And And I knew things were about to go to shit, you know, but I didn't want to tell anybody that.
01:37:55.000
Were you thinking you weren't going to be able to do this much longer?
01:37:58.000
Were you trying to figure out something else to do with your life?
01:38:02.000
It's hard for fighters, especially when you're making that much money, right?
01:38:11.000
You know, fireman, horseshoer, you know, or farrier, you know, fighter.
01:38:19.000
Everything was physical and, you know, you're about to lose it all.
01:38:27.000
That's the untold story of fighters before and after their careers.
01:38:36.000
Everybody sees the fights and the fights are amazing.
01:38:38.000
But most people have no idea the kind of pain and injury guys are going through just with almost every camp.
01:38:50.000
You know, I wake up at six in the morning now, and it takes me six hours to get beyond the kitchen, you know?
01:39:06.000
I've been outside a couple of times, you know, before noon.
01:39:14.000
And what kind of medications do they have you on to deal with all this stuff?
01:39:44.000
And I ain't gonna lie to you, I'd like to have one.
01:39:48.000
So what was the problem with the drinking with the pills?
01:39:51.000
Well, you know, that's what my ex-wife claimed.
01:39:58.000
But yeah, shit, I didn't think it was that bad, but you know...
01:40:10.000
When you get to taking the pills and the alcohol...
01:40:30.000
I was like repeating shit I had heard, you know?
01:40:48.000
But, you know, when you're peeled up and you're drunk, you spew a lot of hatred.
01:40:55.000
Especially when you're constantly in pain, too.
01:41:13.000
So even sitting here, like this thing that you have on your chest, is this like a back support?
01:41:29.000
It looks like Ric Flair's championship belt, you know?
01:41:35.000
Yeah, support it, you know, give it strength, yeah.
01:41:41.000
But even with all the pills, you're still in pain.
01:41:48.000
They talk the edge off so that you can get going.
01:41:56.000
Like I said, first surgery was May 2010. You know, things went really bad in 08, you know, when my father passed away.
01:42:13.000
It would take me half an hour to get out to the barn to feed the horses.
01:42:23.000
The crazy thing is, how many times did you fight after that?
01:42:36.000
You fought when you had been in that condition.
01:43:40.000
No, I think 4. 4 or 5. I came in 8. I think that was...
01:43:52.000
Alright, this thing started in 93, but actually 94, because there's only one event in 93. Right.
01:44:03.000
I think there's something going on with the rights to it.
01:44:05.000
So the first one I saw was in 94. I watched a videotape of it.
01:44:11.000
Back in the days when you have like Blockbuster video and shit like that.
01:44:20.000
I think I might have one or two that's not even opened yet.
01:44:30.000
I bet you could eBay the shit out of them, especially if you sign it.
01:44:55.000
What was funny was the program from Ultimate Ultimate 2. You know, I mean, back then it was...
01:45:08.000
And they just take down the Xerox machine, you know?
01:45:20.000
Going back to Ultimate Ultimate 2. See, I didn't want to fight Mark Kerr or Mark Hall, you know, because I had already beaten twice and I knew there would be bullshit involved.
01:45:40.000
And I guess, why fighting three times in a fucking row?
01:45:45.000
I wanted to fight, there's a black guy whose name was Ty Bowden.
01:45:53.000
Yeah, I don't know if that was really Ty Bo, but Ty Bowden, you know?
01:45:57.000
I don't know if that's his real name or not, but he had a, for his photo, he had a karate gi guy with his head cut out and taped on.
01:46:14.000
You already beat a black guy if you beat two black people who live crazy.
01:46:28.000
It's one of those stupid fucking things that you believe now, but not 20 years ago.
01:46:33.000
I wish someone was filming all those events back then.
01:46:37.000
Because they were in these weird little rickety arenas.
01:46:42.000
I remember the first one I did, which was in Dothan.
01:46:46.000
I remember even being there while it was happening, I'm like, the fact that I'm even here, this is the craziest thing ever.
01:46:52.000
You had to fly in in propeller planes, you had to do one of these weird towns where they let it happen because it was mostly illegal in most of the states in the country.
01:47:09.000
I mean, how dirty is an arena have to be that you fall on pipes?
01:47:15.000
Yeah, he slipped on a pipe and fell and banged the back of his head off the ground and couldn't fight.
01:47:24.000
And you know how hard it was to knock out Ramon?
01:47:29.000
The most athletic competitor ever began in the UFC. He was a tremendous athlete.
01:47:41.000
I mean, Krokop was one of the most elite strikers of all time.
01:47:45.000
And Randleman was such a powerful wrestler that he was worried about the shot.
01:47:48.000
He faked the shot and came in with a left hook.
01:47:56.000
The greatest athlete to ever be in the UFC. Do you ever see the holes, the staph infections that guy had?
01:48:09.000
He had holes in his armpit area where you could see all the muscle tissue.
01:48:17.000
The staph had gotten through his skin and left these big abscesses.
01:48:25.000
Like, Jamie, see if you can find it, because it's one of the most fucked up things.
01:48:29.000
A lot of folks don't know how bad staph infections can get.
01:48:40.000
Yeah, they closed up, but, I mean, he died young.
01:49:04.000
I don't know which surgery it was, but I... The back.
01:49:14.000
I know that it had gotten in the surgeon that did my first replacement.
01:49:28.000
He was a Harvard graduate, you know, put himself through college, you know, going to Harvard.
01:49:43.000
And then that was in 10 or 11. No, that was 12 or 13. And then the one that was in my spinal cord the second time,
01:50:03.000
That's one of the biggest problems with surgeries, right?
01:50:07.000
And they were like, yeah, we got you just in time.
01:50:12.000
You know what's fucked up about the whole thing was that they had put me in...
01:50:26.000
So they put me in an old folks' home, you know, where you go to die, basically.
01:50:40.000
I would wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning just screaming because the pain medication would wear off.
01:50:50.000
I'd wake up screaming, you know, so I need some pain medication.
01:50:54.000
And they go, you're not due for another two hours.
01:50:57.000
Turn off the light, close the door, go down the hall.
01:51:16.000
I'm screaming, this is the infection in my spinal cord.
01:51:36.000
I says, well, the fire department, we put up with all kinds of fucking custody and all that.
01:51:47.000
I mean, and I was this close to buying the farm.
01:51:57.000
They got in there, and they said, my spinal cord was all lumpy and swollen and all that.
01:52:03.000
And then they just kind of poked it, and all the stuff come out.
01:52:08.000
So this jackass fucking paramedic, you know, didn't want to take me because I was cussing.
01:52:26.000
If I had the money, I'd get a lawyer to go after him.
01:52:33.000
Just give me five minutes in the ring with me, that's all.
01:52:36.000
So how often are you doing this podcast with Dan now?
01:53:04.000
Yeah, one of the lakes there, you know, so he went back there to redo his cabin.
01:53:12.000
So he's got a small island that you have to row your boat out to?
01:53:25.000
Yeah, I'm envious of him, but I'm happy for him.
01:53:34.000
And the thing is, he's got him and there's three guys had over 100 fights.
01:53:52.000
Well, listen, Don, we got some barbecue for you.
01:53:55.000
I'm tired of talking to me, am I? No, you're great, man.
01:54:10.000
I wanted to bring Rich because, you know, when we go to a fight, I get tunnel vision, you know?
01:54:22.000
You know, concentrate on 25-30% of what's going on.
01:54:26.000
You know, Rich is taking care of the other 70%, you know, Rich or Steve or somebody, you know.
01:54:39.000
I'm telling you, though, Rich has got some good shit.
01:54:44.000
You're going to have to come out to my house, man.
01:54:52.000
Yeah, I'm in North Tucson, only like an hour away from Phoenix.