Issue 146
October 2016
Rich Franklin’s fighting philosophy explains why he wasn’t even involved in some his career-defining fights.
Rich Franklin
Former UFC middleweight champion
1 Original inspiration
Royce Gracie vs. Ken Shamrock, UFC 1 (11/12/93)
Many of the most important fights to Rich Franklin aren’t even his own. He was inspired by the greatness of others. “Go back to the original UFC fights and just pick any of them with Royce,” he says. “You took a guy who was not that physically imposing and was able to win the fights that he won. It really opened my eyes and changed the way I thought about fighting. At the time, I was training in martial arts just because I wanted to be able to defend myself in case I ever got into a fight on the street. I had no goal of becoming a professional. Those fights showed me there was a different way. I needed to think about fighting from a completely different perspective.
“Then you look at a fighter like Ken Shamrock. He had some freestyle wrestling capabilities, some standup and submissions. Ken really was the pioneer. Instead of being art vs. art, he took a little bit of everything and put it together. That really influenced me.”
2 A fighter’s life
Rich Franklin vs. Jorge Rivera, UFC 50 (10/22/04)
“Another fight that had a lot of impact on me was my Jorge Rivera fight, which was my first down at 185lb. It was probably the first fight in my career I’d won, but I’d got banged up really bad. It was one of those fights where there was this realization. I said, ‘Well, this is what the life of a fighter is really like.’ Fighting isn’t just a bunch of first-round victories where maybe you wake up with a bruise on your leg the next day and that’s about it. It can be much more impactful. That was a big eye-opener for me.”
3 Never give up
Matt Hughes vs. Frank Trigg 2, UFC 52 (04/16/05)
“I was sitting cageside. I remember when Matt got kneed in the groin. He was on the ground and Frank pretty much had the fight all but finished. Then Matt ends up getting off his back, picking up Frank, walking all the way across the cage and then slamming him down and winning the fight. That fight taught me a lot about perseverance and overcoming adversity.”
4 Tactical master
Randy Couture vs. Tim Sylvia, UFC 68 (03/03/07)
“This was another fight that had a lot of impact on my career. I’m friends with both of those guys, but I remember Tim after the fight saying, ‘Every time I thought Randy was going to punch me, he took me down, and every time I thought he was going to take me down, he punched me. He just had me off that entire fight.’ I remember watching that fight and hearing Tim say that and thinking, ‘This is how I want to strategically approach a fight.’”
5 Back from the brink
Rich Franklin vs. Travis Lutter, UFC 83 (04/19/08)
“I had a similar experience (to Matt Hughes against Frank Trigg) when I fought Travis Lutter. That fight was like quicksand. People get into quicksand in the movies and typically the more they struggle, the faster they sink. That’s essentially what happened in this fight. It wasn’t any of those things where something tricky happened. We’d prepped properly for this fight and I’d done all the proper drills, but I just kept messing things up. The more I messed up, the worse it got. The more I tried to correct, I overcorrected and messed up even more. I basically got into the worst possible situation I could get into in that fight.
“I thought I was going to lose for a split second. I ended up taking a risk in that fight and it paid off and I ended up winning, but it was one of those where I mentally broke and I had to ask myself, ‘Do you really want to win this fight?’ The answer, of course, was yes, and I had to work through that and find a way out. It’s easy to look at a fight where I won by knockout and think that’s a great fight. For me, that’s not a great fight. A great fight is when things don’t go your way and you still overcome all that.”
Unselfish selections
Lessons learned from others
Franklin is the first fighter to choose other people’s bouts for his FO Five Fights. He explains why: “How does that saying go? A wise man learns from his mistakes, but an even wiser man learns from another man’s mistakes... Isn’t that what they say?
“You can just say Rich Franklin said that. Man, I just spit out knowledge and it’s crazy. You can apply that to your everyday life and I won’t even charge you for that. There’s Socrates, there’s Aristotle and there’s Rich Franklin – the three great philosophers (laughs).”
