Issue 140
April 2016
Forrest Griffin’s MMA career was like a box of chocolates: you never knew what you were going to get. Here, he reveals the five most significant fights of his career.
Dialogue
Forrest Griffin, former UFC light heavyweight champion
1 School legend
vs. ‘Big Fifth Grader’
Monte Sano Elementary School (1988)
Forrest Griffin recalls his youth in Augusta, Georgia: “There was a fight when I was in fourth grade. I can’t remember the kid’s name but he was really big. He might have been a fifth grader actually. I ended up unknowingly in mount – just through chance – just punching him. I guess he hit me a bunch and got tired and I fell on top of him in the struggle. So I won that fight in fourth grade and became like a legend. People left me alone after that.”
2 Game changer
vs. Stephan Bonnar
The Ultimate Fighter Finale (04/09/2005)
“More than anything, that fight with Stephan changed my life. It was the day I realized my job was to get better at fighting and I didn’t have to do anything else to generate income. That was the most important fight in my life. I knew that this was going to be my job as long as I could keep it. I always kept myself clean so I could go back to law enforcement at some point, but I was going to be a mixed martial arts fighter as long as I could.”
3 You can do it!
vs. Tito Ortiz
UFC 59 (04/15/2006)
“To me that was just lack of confidence in that first round. I thought, ‘Forrest you can win these fights, you’ve just got to go out there and do it.’ You can’t be intimidated because you think, ‘Wow, this is the guy I saw when I was a kid.’ I think I did enough to win, but given the fight I couldn’t complain too much because I realized how close I let it be. It’s funny. Dana (White, UFC president) has been around the sport and knows a lot. He said before the fight, ‘You can beat this guy easily.’ I was like, ‘What are you even talking about? Is that just some crazy thing promoters say to guys?’ But then I realized when he offered me the Anderson (Silva) fight, he really thought I could beat these guys.”
4 Beating the best
vs. Mauricio ‘Shogun’ Rua
UFC 76 (09/22/2007)
“That changed things for me. I made the jump from upstart to actually there after that fight. It’s not like I thought I could take out anyone or that I was looking for a challenge at all. My thought was: there’s no shame in losing to this guy, he’s pretty awesome (laughs). That was the thing with Anderson (Silva) too. As long as I put on a decent fight, it’s all good, it doesn’t matter... Although obviously it didn’t work out for me that way. I did give myself a shot (against Shogun). It was fun. You never know how sick or injured the other guy is, but you always know how sick and injured you are.”
5 Hard work pays
vs. Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson
UFC 86 (07/05/2008)
“Because y’know, I won the belt. But because of all that pressure it was the first fight where it kind of stopped being fun and became a job. It was good, but that was just what I had to do. I didn’t really celebrate too much. I was like, ‘You win the belt and that’s just what you have to do.’ It was like going to work for me at that point.
It was weird because there was a very long layoff between that Shogun fight, to that Quinton fight. Then there was the show (TUF 7) and the build-up. I was injured and on the shelf and then we did the show and I was on the shelf some more. There was a lot of pressure.
“I didn’t lose motivation at all, if anything I worked as hard as I physically could – probably harder than I needed to. It’s funny for me that things sort of went from like being a dream to being work before the end – training the fun out of it.”
Graduation
From TUF to the top
Griffin is one of just four fighters to have won The Ultimate Fighter and a UFC world championship. The others were Rashad Evans, Matt Serra and Carla Esparza.
...
