Issue 189

April 2020

The veteran heavyweight on having knockout power and his roundabout route into MMA.

What are you looking to do in the fight game right now?

I’m in the fight game in order to do three things-Make money, get myself a belt so I can give it to my children and compete. Wherever the hell that takes me, it takes me. If I put any kind of thought into anyone other than my next opponent, I am setting myself up for a pretty good ass whooping. I’m looking at the top of the heavyweight division. I thought Bader would win the fight and I thought Kongo was a better matchup for me, stylistically. 

Many fans were excited when Bellator reintroduced the Grand Prix format in major MMA. You were vocal in saying that you weren’t a fan due to the fact that you got leapfrogged. Was that the main reason you aren’t a fan of it? 

That was one of the reasons but the primary reason was it just didn’t make sense for me. It was foolish for me. I was 3-0 or 4-0 with three knockouts and I had just finished Fedor in incredible fashion. I had done everything I was asked to do and I did it well. Why in the hell would I take two steps backwards and then go through an entirely different set of fights in order to put myself back in the same situation that I was already in? On top of that, the bracket…why would you bring an All-American light heavyweight wrestler into a heavyweight tournament? It just doesn’t make sense to me. If you did it simply to sell tickets because he is a bigger name, that’s pretty stupid. We are heavyweights. We have big names. I think it would have been fine. I think they shot themselves in the foot. They sabotaged the heavyweight tournament. It was the biggest name Grand Prix.

You are well known for your power. When did you realize you had that game-changing power in your hands?

I don’t know, to be honest. I never knocked anyone out in the streets. I was always afraid that I would get arrested for killing someone if I actually threw a hard punch. As soon as I knocked Marcus [Jones] out with a few jabs I just started winning by knockout. It just ended up working. As ignorant as this is going to sound, in some of my fights it felt like my hands were magnets drawn to my opponent's face. I couldn’t miss their faces. I would see their response and it was ‘I don’t want that again.’ They would get the deer in headlights look and it would just make me throw them more.

You are good friends with former Major League Baseball outfielder, Jayson Werth. Is it true you got your start in MMA due to your relationship with him?

I am in this game strictly because of Werth. Werth and I became good friends – we grew up in the same town but we were four or five years apart. We became friends because when the NFL got done with me in 2005 I developed a sports nutrition company. That product fell into the hands of Werth. He liked it and used it often. He called me up one day and asked if I would jump into his amateur MMA show that he was putting on in our hometown. I said sure, why not? I started training for that with Jake O’Brien and Chris Lytle. The next thing you know, I get hurt and I don’t end up fighting in Werth’s show but I kept training. Six months later I get a phone call from the UFC and they said they heard I was a big dude who played in the NFL and that I was really obnoxious. They heard I never had a fight before. They wanted me to go out and try out for The Ultimate Fighter. My thought was that it would really help me advertise the company. I would never have that money to advertise on national TV like The Ultimate Fighter could offer. So I said yes, strictly in order to get attention for the product. I didn’t go on The Ultimate Fighter in order to be a fighter, I did it in order to advertise my company.

You competed in Toughman Contests back in high school. What do you remember of it?

Unfortunately, I am entirely too smart for my own good most of the time but in high school I was hell-bent on being as dumb as possible. I was bullshitting and just trying to be good at sports instead. Because of that, I was a Prop 48, which meant I did not qualify, academically, for a scholarship to a university. So, I had to go to high school for a fifth year to raise my GPA. I got a high enough ACT score to get into college but I had to raise my GPA up to a 2.0. I had to sit out a year. I was redshirted in high school. I had nothing else to do so I decided to jump into this Toughman competition and do something ignorant and foolish to push myself and compete. That’s it. That really the whole story.