In this episode of Train By Day, Joe Rogan talks about how he broke his neck in the first round of the 2000 Olympic Trials and how he went on to win a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Games with a broken neck. He also talks about his recovery from the injury and what it took to get back on the mat and make it to the Olympics in 2004 and how it affected his career in the WWE. Joe also discusses how he was able to make the Olympic team in 2004 even with his broken neck and the struggles he had to deal with after the injury. He talks about what it was like being on the Olympic Team and how his injuries have affected him ever since. And he talks about why he decided to retire from wrestling after the 2004 Olympics and what he does now in his free time to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional mixed martial arts fighter. This episode is a must-listen episode for anyone who has ever wanted to know what it's like to be a professional MMA fighter in the modern era. If you like what you hear, you won't want to miss this one! -Joe Rogan Experience is a podcast by day, training by night, all day, by night. Check it out! -The Joe Rogans Experience by night! -The J.R. Experience Podcast by Night, by day - The J. R. Experience by Night - The. J. Rogan Podcast by night - The Coach's Podcast by Day - by Night Subscribe to the J-Rogan Experience Podcast on Podcharts Podcast on YouTube - by night we'll talk all things MMA, UFC, and everything in between. -J.Rogan Podcast by day and Night we do in between! . . . , by night J.J. Rogans podcast by night? J.O.RJ.P. by night by Night J.S. Podcast , by day J.C. Podcast, J.A. Podcasts by night... by night by day... . and J.K. P. , J. O R. S. is J. K. is a J. S., J. A.S., by night.... & J. M. is the J. B. is my J.Y. P? by day R. O. & A. RYAN EPISODE by night ...
00:00:38.000What happened was I got thrown on my head the first round of the Olympic trials and I broke my neck and I didn't know it so I kept wrestling.
00:00:45.000My arms were numb and my neck was in excruciating pain and I wrestled through the semis and won and then I had to go on to the finals and wrestle and I won there.
00:00:54.000So I won the first round of the Olympic trials with my neck broken.
00:00:57.000I went home the next day and I went to my doctor and he took an MRI on my neck.
00:01:01.000He said, you have four discs or four broken vertebrae and two discs sticking directly in your spinal cord.
00:01:32.000But it'll be healed enough that you can still go.
00:01:34.000And what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a doctor travel with you.
00:01:37.000And this doctor's going to stick you with 12 shots of Novocain in your neck five minutes before each one of your matches.
00:01:43.000He said, therefore you won't feel the pain, you'll forget your neck is broken, and you'll wrestle more freely.
00:01:49.000But he said, I'm warning you, an hour after your matches are over, you're going to be in excruciating pain from the abuse your neck takes during those matches.
00:04:18.000And I'm afraid it's going to happen again, so I'm going to have to have fusion sooner than later, because if I don't, the damage is going to get worse and worse.
00:04:26.000My arms are going to end up just shrinking to nothing.
00:04:28.000Have you looked into replacement discs?
00:04:33.000I just got an email from a doctor in New York and he told me he was doing it.
00:04:39.000And so I'm going to call him in this next couple of weeks to see if we can set up an appointment.
00:04:45.000Aljamain Sterling, the former UFC bantamweight champion, he injured his neck really badly and then got fouled in a title fight.
00:04:54.000Actually, it was very controversial because Pyotr Jan, the Russian cat who hit him with a knee to the head while he was down, lost his title that way.
00:05:03.000So he lost his title because even though Aljamain's a sensational fighter, Everybody was giving him shit because he won the title because of that.
00:05:11.000So then he goes and gets a disc replaced in his neck, defends the title, and dominates Piotr Jan in the rematch.
00:08:44.000Yeah, and went on and was one, I mean, fought for the title a couple times, was one of the best middleweights in the history of the UFC. He was an animal and just couldn't move his neck.
00:09:10.000You know, we've talked about this on the podcast so many times, but just the physical abuse that wrestlers take, both amateur wrestlers and then maybe even more so in the pro wrestling game.
00:10:23.000That's why they don't care about the health of people.
00:10:26.000They just care about the sound it makes.
00:10:28.000When you're at one live, it doesn't really translate to TV as cool as it is live.
00:10:32.000You hear that pop and they probably, I think they have microphones underneath and stuff that accelerate it through the speakers and like, boom, boom.
00:10:43.000It's one of those things that's a thousand times better live.
00:10:46.000Isn't there a way they can put a layer of wood and a layer of wood and then the foam so the wood slams into the wood but you feel the foam?
00:10:55.000Well, if you do that, then they see your little feet pushing into the foam.
00:11:45.000How many other guys are going to try it?
00:11:48.000When I look at that partnership, I see a lot of fighters crossing over to wrestling, but I don't see many wrestlers crossing over to fighting.
00:11:56.000I mean, that's a completely different beast.
00:11:58.000I don't think there are many wrestlers that could go in there and mix it up with those guys.
00:12:03.000Well, that's what's so sensational about Brock.
00:12:20.000I actually did wrestle him one time for real.
00:12:26.000The thing was, what happened was, when he came up from training from OVW, someone went up to him and asked him how he'd do against Kurt Angle.
00:24:40.000There was one point in my career where my brother called me.
00:24:46.000I was at a house show, an un-televised show for WWE. It was the night before I was going to have the biggest match of my career with Brock Lesnar the next day.
00:24:54.000It was an Iron Man match on SmackDown.
00:24:56.000And my brother calls me and says, hey, your sister just out of a heroin overdose.
00:25:08.000I was in such pain thinking about my sister, who was only 40 years old, dying from a heroin overdose.
00:25:14.000And the thing is, I wasn't able to talk to her because I told her eight months prior, if she doesn't get clean, I'm not going to talk to you.
00:27:55.000And then I switched to TNA, Impact Wrestling, and everybody drank there, so I started drinking alcohol.
00:28:02.000So I'm mixing and having these cocktails, and I'm so out of control that I'm driving from town to town, drinking a 12-pack of beer, and I got four DUIs in five years.
00:28:15.000I lost my reputation, everything I worked for.
00:29:37.000But they were forcing me to get out of bed and conversating with people and trying to go and eat and go to meetings and do all that stuff you do in rehab.
00:29:51.000How long did it take before you felt normal?
00:29:55.000Well, I would say two weeks where I really felt normal.
00:29:59.000But the thing is, the last two weeks, because I spent a month in rehab, the last two weeks I was so nervous that I was going to fuck up again.
00:30:08.000I literally didn't want to leave rehab.
00:30:10.000I was scared that I was going to go back to it right when I got out.
00:31:31.000Hey, this is the best drug since whatever and, you know, this will keep you, you know, keep you moving every day and give you a healthy lifestyle.
00:31:39.000Meanwhile, they didn't tell you that they're opiates and they're addictive and that they could kill you.
00:31:50.000We talked to Peter Burke, who made that show, and he obviously had to do a lot of research on the Sackler family and what they did and how they engineered this and how they knew that People weren't just taking painkillers back then.
00:34:32.000Like, no one knows what they did in this hotel for two days.
00:34:36.000But after the two days, he came out and instead of saying it's non-addictive, For the first time ever, they said, it is believed to not be addictive.
00:35:57.000And then they're in the business a little bit and they realize, well, if you want a vacation or if you want a yacht, if you want this, you got to play the game.
00:37:42.000And immediately, I'm like, this is bad.
00:37:46.000And even though I had never been happier, like my body was just, it was like just an overall orgasm for the entire life.
00:37:55.000You see your fingertips are sweating with excitement and I went and I flushed those other whatever nine and a half or eleven and a half pills down the toilet.
00:38:19.000Well, they weren't around when I got my first knee surgery, but when I got my first knee surgery when I was in the hospital, they had me on a morphine drip, and I remember lying in that hospital bed feeling so good.
00:42:20.000And, you know, back then, when he was a pharmaceutical drug rep, it was all about relationships with the people.
00:42:27.000Like, you would go to the kids' games, you would know all these people, you would know all the doctors and nurses, you had to be on a first name, but you were their friend!
00:42:38.000And so the more they liked you, the more likely they were to prescribe your drugs, the more they would give it out to people.
00:42:46.000And in Painkiller, in the documentary, the Netflix series, they hire these really hot young girls that were the representatives that would go to the doctors and sell this stuff and bring the brochures and they had a little spiel that they would sell.
00:43:17.000But what's interesting now is because of the Netflix series, they were going to sign some sort of a deal where they give $6 billion and they were going to have immunity to prosecution.
00:43:27.000And a judge looked at it after the series and went, hold on.
00:44:09.000Come up with something that I know people are going to get addicted to and lie to them.
00:44:15.000I think it's one of those things where you become accustomed to it because everyone like you is doing it and it becomes part of what you do.
00:44:24.000You know, I think it's just people adapt to whatever environment they're in.
00:44:28.000And if your environment is in getting pills to people, that's your job.
00:45:13.000I didn't even know that most hospitals are privately owned.
00:45:16.000Like, I didn't know that there were for-profit businesses to try to push medicine on people.
00:45:21.000I thought, they're just here to help you.
00:45:23.000Like, wouldn't that be the best thing?
00:45:25.000Like, if hospitals were just places where the doctors get paid well because they're really good at their job, but what they're trying to do is make you better.
00:45:31.000No, those hospitals are trying to make as much money as possible.
00:45:34.000They want to keep you in as much as possible, prescribe as much medication as possible.
00:46:55.000You know, I don't have a lot of, thank God, I don't have a lot of triggers anymore.
00:47:00.000I used to when I had, because I was going through a lot of pain, and I had my knees replaced, I had my back surgery, so I'm actually on the med now.
00:47:09.000When did you have your knees replaced?
00:49:09.000I believe he had a rubber disc put in his neck.
00:49:12.000I'm not so sure that's going to last as long as the other one, the doctor that does yours.
00:49:19.000That's the scary things they'll tell you, like we'll replace something, whether it's a hip or whatever, but in 20 years you're going to need a new one.
00:50:05.000You know, as bad as the pharmaceutical drug companies are in pushing painkillers, thank God the medical, like the technological side of it, of the medical community, is developing these incredible replacements.
00:58:05.000But then he probably also enjoyed the accolades from the movie because a lot of people really respected him after that.
00:58:11.000For a lot of those, like, action guys, they don't, you know, that's, like, the thing they don't get respect for is their actual acting ability.
00:58:24.000Gary Oldman, like, there's, like, a nine-minute video on YouTube of him and all of his different characters that he's done, and you can't You can't even tell it's him, 80% of them.
01:03:06.000There's a part of me when you're, you know, I've been around so many big people for so long where I'm like kind of, if they're with me, I'm like kind of protective.
01:03:13.000Like, come on, give them some air, this and that.
01:04:40.000Well, he and a lot of these guys, they did the small circuit, and then they came up, and then they eventually got to the WWE or the WWF back then.
01:05:10.000When I called the WWE in 1998, they offered me a contract in 1996, right after the Olympics.
01:05:16.000I went up and met with Vince, and he gave me a multi-million dollar deal and threw it on the desk, and he said, hey, 10-year deal, let's do it.
01:05:24.000I said, can I go home and think about it?
01:05:26.000So I went home and went to my agent, and he grabbed the contract he threw in the trash.
01:05:31.000He was a former amateur wrestler, also an NFL football player, former NFL player.
01:07:19.000After the first day, I picked up on it pretty quickly.
01:07:21.000So they gave me a contract and I trained for about seven months.
01:07:25.000And they literally, they had me training.
01:07:28.000The first three months was a week a month where I just went up to WWE. I went into their studio and I would train with a couple of wrestlers.
01:07:37.000And so I'd only do that one week a month for three months.
01:07:41.000Then the following four months, they sent me to Memphis, to a smaller territory down in Memphis.
01:07:47.000And I worked there for four months where I did one TV a week for four months.
01:07:52.000And then Vince brought me up on the TV. I was only work training for seven months.
01:07:57.000I wasn't ready to be on TV. And he wanted me to go on TV at that point in time.
01:08:02.000So I was like, Vince, I... You want me to cut a promo tonight?
01:12:29.000And you hear these things and it's like, God, I, you know, it would have been cool if it would have been cool.
01:12:36.000What I mean by that is like, if I could do it during the day and then take a train to New York City and do stand up, that would have been fine.
01:17:49.000And he's created an entire universe that people, generations and generations, grandfathers, their sons, and their sons all have their favorite people and favorite things that have happened.
01:19:32.000You know what he told me when I came back to WWE? He said, listen, I'm going to have this company for a lot longer than you think, Mr. Angle.
01:24:22.000And with this new union, man, I mean, this is something that I've been talking about for a while, is like the power of and how close the UFC and the WWE can be.
01:24:33.000But yeah, it's mostly going to be, I picture it being a transfer, almost like a retirement transfer.
01:24:39.000Party to go to the WWE. I mean imagine what a, you know, Diaz brothers or something like that could do in pro wrestling, slapping people around.
01:26:19.000Yeah, I mean, that's what's really impressive about some of these guys that go over and do things in the WWE, like Floyd Mayweather went over there, and the Paul brothers.
01:28:31.000And you gotta think, when that leg snaps, it snaps like that, right?
01:28:36.000And then you got all that broken bone that's damaging all that tissue inside of it, and I don't know the extent of, you know, how much damage was done, but it's been two years.
01:29:08.000And then there's a six-month period where USADA has to test him randomly, which I think is a mistake.
01:29:18.000I really think they should do all that in-house.
01:29:20.000Because USADA does stuff like, well, they don't do it anymore, but they were doing stuff like waking guys up at 6.30 in the morning, like the day of the weigh-ins, and testing them.
01:30:17.000I mean, it would be an amazing story and I would love to see someone actually come back from that injury because so far Weidman, you know, came back and not taking anything away from Brad Tavares because Brad Tavares is a fucking beast.
01:31:52.000But everybody, that was, you know, I don't know the extent of that injury.
01:31:55.000I do know that he had, like, real problems with that leg, though, and there was a real touch-and-go moment where they didn't know if he was going to make it.
01:32:02.000I mean, you snap a femur, that's that big bone, and there's some blood flow.
01:32:08.000It's so thick, you know, to snap that thing, you know how hard it is to snap that?
01:32:11.000Yeah, it's just, when you get in a car, you know, it's a different situation.
01:32:23.000Like, you break your arm, they put a pin in it, you're good to go.
01:32:25.000I know a lot of guys who broke their forearms, and they went back, and Paul Felder, a lot of guys, they get their forearms snapped like blocking a kick, and they get back in there, and they're okay.
01:34:26.000With fighting, with football, with a lot of things, those knocks to the head There's a guy named Dr. Mark Gordon who's a friend of mine who specializes in traumatic brain injuries.
01:34:35.000And he says one of the real problems is you get damage to your pituitary gland.
01:34:39.000So the damage to the pituitary gland from getting knocked in the head a bunch of times is your body's just not producing testosterone anymore or other hormones.
01:34:47.000And your body's just like very deficient in hormones, which makes those guys depressed too.
01:37:03.000A lot of people have it in their head that it's cheating, right?
01:37:07.000They think about Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa and all that shit and getting busted.
01:37:12.000You know, they think it's got a negative connotation in a lot of people's minds that testosterone placement is, oh, you're doing steroids, you're cheating.
01:37:20.000But if you're intelligent about it and if you do it with a good doctor and you get your blood work done and you don't abuse it, it's very good for you.
01:38:05.000But it's just hard to regulate, especially you got guys who are, you know, they're in Russia, they're in Thailand, they're trained, you know, you gotta send people over there to test them.
01:38:16.000You see them over in Thailand, they look like a human pit bull.
01:38:22.000But the thing is, if you're on that stuff like that, my god, you could train fucking three times a day.
01:38:28.000If you really go crazy with the test, like Alistair Overeem in his prime, like that guy, he's my favorite example.
01:38:37.000Alistair Overeem when he fought Brock.
01:42:01.000Francis has to cut weight to make 265. Francis is fucking huge and also the absolute scariest fucking guy to ever compete in the heavyweight division.
01:44:19.000And they wheeled me back, and I'm back there.
01:44:22.000And they're getting ready to do a live shot of me.
01:44:26.000They're getting ready to do a live shot of me where I was gonna tell them, Stephanie was gonna say, Kurt, I want you to go out and help Triple H. Do it for me.
01:44:34.000And I was gonna say, all right, I'll do it for you, Steph.
01:44:37.000So they told me to say it, and I forgot.
01:45:56.000That's what's crazy is that they really didn't understand head trauma until, I mean really that movie, Concussion, when that movie came around then people started looking at like what's going on with football players and what's going on with boxers and they really started looking at it more differently.
01:46:12.000You know what, I'm wondering if, you know, they're starting to like, like pro wrestling has this, what's it called, a concussion roll, okay?
01:46:23.000So if you had concussions, they'll take care of it.
01:46:29.000So what I'm saying is, don't you think UFC... That a lot of their fighters are going to end up with some kind of brain damage?
01:47:59.000There's some guys that got knocked out a bunch of times and they're fine.
01:48:02.000There's a thing called, I think it's called APOE4. There's like a gene expression that if you have that, you're more susceptible to CTE than other people.
01:51:31.000But he's another guy who fell victim to pain pills.
01:51:35.000And what's crazy about that documentary, The Smashing Machine, is they caught him in his prime and what they were documenting in that documentary was a guy who was like this unstoppable force.
01:52:24.000And that was when Kerr was in his prime.
01:52:26.000So what they were documenting was this guy from America, this insane wrestler, this gigantic man that they called a smashing machine, going over there and dominating.
01:52:35.000And they caught him right when it was all falling apart.
01:53:16.000I didn't know he was going to end up being 310 pounds.
01:53:19.000Yeah, and then back then, you were either going to go into pro wrestling or you were going to go into MMA. And back then in MMA, Mark was competing in the early days, a bare knuckle.
01:53:30.000You bare knuckle, wearing wrestling shoes, and Coleman as well, with headbutts.
01:58:54.000But I wrestled Coleman quite a bit, man.
01:58:57.000We beat each other quite a few times, but...
01:58:59.000We went at it for a while, but it was really cool to see these guys having success in UFC. I mean, this is when I won the Olympics, and I was kind of bragging rights, you know, I beat these guys to win the UFC title.
01:59:12.000Well, people talked about that, too, because back then you were brought up a lot, like people were saying, because there was some talk, like, would Kurt Angle ever fight in the UFC? In the early days of the UFC, there was a lot of that, because there was quite a few guys that did Royce Alger, Yeah,
01:59:30.000Quite a few real elite wrestlers that competed in the UFC, and that skill set is the best skill set for MMA. When you dictate where the fight takes place, because if that guy wanted to take you down, he's taking you down.
01:59:44.000Back then, the guys just did not have the ability.
01:59:47.000There were so many karate guys and so many jiu-jitsu guys, they just did not have the ability to stop that guy from taking him down.
01:59:52.000I mean, you look at Khabib, how scary.
02:00:30.000They just didn't understand the positions.
02:00:32.000And these guys were so good at submissions.
02:00:36.000kevin jackson yeah kevin jackson monday that's right yeah kevin jackson fought um frank shamrock and he got armbarred they just didn't understand the positions but if they did but if they did if they had real training having that ability the wrestler's ability first of all wrestlers are the very best at controlling bodies they're very the very best at taking people down and then the next step is just understanding those submissions The hardest guys to deal with for sure in jiu-jitsu are guys who are great wrestlers who learn jiu
02:01:23.000They're stand-up fighters and they try to get in there and do it, they get crushed.
02:01:29.000Yeah, there's not a lot of guys who can't wrestle, whoever wind up doing well in the sport.
02:01:34.000Yeah, I saw a funny thing, again, it's all on Instagram, these memes lately, or videos, but I saw a good one of Derek Lewis going, wrestling's not that big of a deal, all you have to do is stand up.
02:01:45.000And then it shows this reel of wrestlers taking him down and he just rolls over and starts planting a foot.
02:03:49.000Yeah, I mean, it's just, there's not that many.
02:03:51.000Those guys go into the NFL. You know, those guys go into the NFL, NBA, pro basketball.
02:03:58.000But I also think that, you know, the average human being is right in the middle, you know, 165, 175. And I think that most of the people, like, I'll tell you this, in amateur wrestling, most of the wrestlers are in the middleweights.
02:04:13.000And then as you go up and down, they become less and less and less and less.
02:04:17.000And then when you're at the very lightest weight, there's very few.
02:04:20.000And at the heaviest weight, there's very few.
02:04:22.000So there's like an average weight of people, of human beings, and when you go higher and lower, it gets lighter.
02:04:29.000There's another guy that everybody wanted to see compete in MMA, and that's Corellin.
02:04:32.000Did you ever get a chance to see Corellin compete?
02:05:47.000But I just had Rulon on my podcast, and he said that, you know, wrestling Corellin, at that point in his career, he knew that Corellin wasn't in the best form of shape.
02:09:05.000It was weird over there, because Japan had such a history of pro wrestling that a lot of their early stars in MMA were also stars in pro wrestling, like Takata.
02:09:19.000When Takata fought in the first UFC. But he fought Hicks and Gracie, and that was a real fight.
02:09:25.000And Hickson was quite a bit smaller than him, but Hickson was the master of jiu-jitsu back then.
02:09:34.000And, you know, he was the guy that when Hoist Gracie won the UFC, everyone said, listen, Hoist is great, but his brother is literally a hundred times better than that.
02:12:18.000You know, like even in boxing, like when Terence Crawford fought Errol Spence, everybody was like, you know, maybe Spence is too big, maybe Spence, I don't know.
02:12:25.000Back then, when it came to fighting, when it came to jiu-jitsu, everyone said it was Hickson.
02:12:31.000But Hickson went over to Japan, and he competed in Vale Tudo, Japan in 1994. And that was, what was it, 96?
02:13:56.000And when he did, he fought Funaki, and Funaki wound up fracturing his orbital bone, but Hickson choked him to sleep in one of the most dramatic finishes ever in MMA. He literally had him asleep out cold in a choke with blood all over the place.
02:17:41.000Yeah, I mean, look, I'm just happy Francis is getting a lot of money.
02:17:46.000Dana White talked about this recently, that there is a possibility that if Francis fights Tyson Fury and after that comes back and fights Jon Jones, that would be the ultimate.
02:19:26.000I mean, that wrestling base is, in my opinion, the best base ever to enter into MMA. And it's also what you were talking about with the training with Dan Gable.
02:25:09.000You know what, not only that, not only is it hard, it takes the fun out of it, and then you don't enjoy what you're doing anymore.
02:25:17.000And not only do you have to worry about the fight, now you have to worry about your weight too, and it's just like, you just have so much shit, so much stress going on at one time.
02:25:25.000The last thing you need to be worrying about is your weight.
02:27:48.000I mean, in boxing, I mean, you've got, it's so much different.
02:27:52.000You've got 135, then you've got 140, and then you've got 147, and then you've got 154, and then you've got 160, and then you've got 168, and then you've got 75. That, to me, makes more sense.
02:28:59.000Yeah, that's 220. And then he went up to light heavyweight and he just beat Jan Bohovic at light heavyweight, who was the former light heavyweight champion.
02:29:52.000That's really nuts, because with MMA, the stark contrast, they also now, they weigh in in the morning, and then what we do is we have an official weigh-in ceremony at 5 p.m.
02:30:06.000So when I announce it, I'll say, you know, like, Robert Whitaker, official weight, 186. But he's not 186 when he's standing there.
02:31:42.000Pride, you know, but Pride has crazy rules.
02:31:45.000Like Pride, they're allowed to do steroids.
02:31:46.000Like when Ensign Inouye was on my podcast, he explained that in Pride they had in the contract, in all capital letters, we do not test for steroids.
02:32:58.000So there was a big dent in my gold medal.
02:33:01.000So I never took it to another event again.
02:33:04.000It's been in my safe because my kids, they were playing Barbie one day and they had the gold medal around the Barbie and I was like, okay, they're just going to get makeup on this.
02:33:15.000So I decided from now on I'm going to keep it in the safe.
02:33:18.000So it's away from my kids and it's away from anybody that's going to do any damage to it.
02:33:24.000Because I already had damage done to my metal and I'm not going to have it again.
02:33:27.000There's a kid out there somewhere listening to this cringing.