Issue 133

October 2015

Hanging up the gloves for good and putting a cage career in the rearview mirror is possibly the hardest decision a fighter has to make, but what’s behind a mixed martial artist’s resolution to retire? FO investigates...

Dana White famously begged Chuck Liddell to retire from fighting and found him a job at the UFC. He was done. BJ Penn needed to be protected from himself due to his warrior soul. No one enjoyed the final beating he took at the hands of Frankie Edgar.

They always say the fighter is the last to know – when their speed and timing has left them. But retirement is a subject colored with a hundred shades of gray. Ask any fighter, and like MMA itself, walking away remains an inexact science – a deeply personal moment. So when is the right time to walk away? Why do fighters quit, or retire? Do some carry on competing for too long and need protecting from themselves?

The factors are multiple: injury, age, other careers, fresh challenges, maturity, desire or a change of heart, too many losses, knowing it’s the right time, or simply a case of having nothing left. Or, indeed, nothing left to prove. 

Life beyond the cage

Some fighters’ passage into retirement is less difficult than others. Kenny Florian, UFC commentator and Fox analyst, tells Fighters Only the decision was made easier because of his continuing role in the sport. His ‘new life’ had started when he was still fighting.

“It certainly made it easier to retire knowing you had something else. I was able to transition into commentator and analyst work and still be in the sport,” says Florian, who fought three times for UFC gold. “It really is a personal struggle (to fight, and then stop). 

“It’s the most testing personal journey in a physical, and mental, sense. Physically, I wasn’t able to perform as I once had. I hurt my back. I did my absolute best as a pro fighter. I had a chip on my shoulder that I didn’t want to have any regrets that I hadn’t given it my all.” 

He certainly did that. He even admits that the competitive desire carries into his current role. “Now my challenge is wanting to be the best analyst and commentator. You could spend 10 lifetimes studying martial arts and you’d still not understand it.”

The challenge is the change, says Florian, adding: “It is difficult to walk away when you’ve put so much into it. It becomes your identity – a part of you. It’s like having to say goodbye to a part of you. Switching that up is very difficult for most, if not all fighters.”

A cure for the itch

Kyle Kingsbury retired last year, on the back of four losses. The reasons to fight and then stop fighting, he argues, are deeply personal. One of his was the ‘itch’ to battle, as he calls it, had gone.

“Every fighter fights for a different reason,” Kingsbury tells FO. “At the core, each person has that burning desire to destroy someone, and they don’t mind if they take some damage in the process. For me, over time, that was slowly lifted away and that itch slowly evaporated until my last fight. I was in the cage and I thought I just don’t have it in me anymore.” That was against Patrick Cummins last July. 

“There was a strong sense I’d gotten everything I could get from fighting, even before my last fight. Obviously, make no mistake, the losses and the way I lost played a huge factor in that. If I had kept winning, I might have felt different. But the timing of everything and getting to a place in my life where I really had peace inside, which I hadn’t had before, played a big role. 

“I can’t speak for everyone. I’m not saying every fighter has some type of problem to address. There are plenty of well-educated fighters who’ve come from great homes and fight for their own reasons. But they still have that itch inside. 

“But it was painfully obvious in my last fight that it just wasn’t there anymore. It made it very easy to make a concrete decision afterwards. I knew seconds after walking to the cage, that was my last fight. Building up to that fight, though, I still wasn’t sure. That’s why I wanted to take at least one more stab at it.”

John Danaher – BJJ guru with Georges St Pierre and Chris Weidman on his résumé – says it’s not so easy for other fighters. “It’s contingent on the individual personality of the fighter,” he says. “Some people just can’t walk away. They need the fame, they need the spotlight. They get used to a certain lifestyle and it’s hard for them to take themselves away from that.

“Those desirable elements, those things that pulled you into that lifestyle in the first place, are taken away and the thing that defined you is no longer there. Suddenly you’ve got to reinvent yourself and it’s not easy.”

Firas Zahabi, head coach to GSP at the Tristar gym, adds it’s a delicate conversation between fighter and coach. He explains: “I think it’s up to them. If the guy is healthy, I won’t ask him to retire. If he isn’t healthy, I’ll ask him. That’s the only time I’ll intervene.”

Ergo, Georges St Pierre. “His health wasn’t on the line – not his physical health anyway. It was more about his mental health. Mentally, I believe Georges was living an extreme lifestyle and it was only a matter of time before it caught up with him. He’s always training around the clock and he sacrificed it all to be the best. But there’s a point where he needs to live a life because his life was just military.”

Still got it?

Other fighters have retirement thrust upon them. Dan Hardy discovered he had a heart condition – Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome – and stopped fighting in September 2012. And yet he’d never really felt a manifestation of the condition. It left him wishing he’d announced his retirement after his last fight in the UFC, against Amir Sadollah in his hometown of Nottingham, UK. It may have given him closure on his career. By not doing so, he has left the door slightly ajar for a return.

Some fighters are encouraged to call it a day. Critics have suggested several times that Frank Mir should retire. But the key to his continuance, he explains, is his desire to evolve. Witness his KO of Todd Duffee in July – a day after the 14th anniversary of his first MMA fight.

“It’s about being smart,” he says. “My boxing training is a little more cardio intensive. I’m doing so much boxing and wrestling. I only lift weights about once every two weeks. I really have it figured out now. When people watch me train it looks like an old montage from a 1980s workout. I work out like a military guy. I can do a lot of push-ups now, but bench press? Probably not that great anymore.”

So, too, veteran Jeremy Horn, who’s had 118 fights. In March 2016, he will have been fighting for 20 years. The recipe for longevity, he explains, is training in a smart way. 

“I always stay away from brawling, and getting hurt, in sparring and in fights. The brain is the biggest weapon you will ever have. I work on learning and drilling technique. You don’t need to get your ass kicked when you train or spar, and it’s the same when you fight.”

Horn shows no signs, either, of wanting to lock up his career and throw away the key. “I just enjoy it. Realistically, there’s a level of competition in everyone. And I have a genuine love of fighting. I don’t really know when I’ll stop, but there will come a point when my age, skill, physical ability and the level I want to fight at will flip because of the younger guys coming, but we’re not there yet. The biggest factor for me right now is running a gym, training guys and getting myself ready for a fight. It’s getting harder to train and do all those other things I’m involved in.”

Brad Pickett has lost three fights in a row, most recently when he was brutally knocked out by Thomas Almeida at UFC 189. He was understandably emotional afterwards, and mentioned retirement post-fight, and the fact that he’s soon to become a father. That’s a factor, too. But Pickett left the door ajar for a final fight, potentially in London next year. It would allow him to put a period on a decorated career. Coaching, too, could be his savior, which is what Florian, Horn and others insist can be a way to ease out of fighting.

On their own terms

For Swedish middleweight Tor Troeng, a career in which he had been “testing” himself came to an end after 24 fights in 2014. Though he had never been stopped, he departed the UFC after three consecutive losses. But he wasn’t cut from the roster – he took the decision himself. It was as if his journey had ended, and he recognized it. Familial and financial reasons also lay behind his motivation.

Fatherhood, and a career outside fighting as a university scientific research assistant, suddenly had more appeal.

“I see the advantages now. If I was still fighting, it would be hard to always have your mind on training. It wasn’t the reason I did it, but, in the end, it’s really nice not to have that conflict of being a father and being an athlete,” he says.

Then, the financial concerns. “It’s never a good business. It’s always a lot of work and no money. It’s only if you become a superstar that you can really make money from it. That’s probably only 5% of guys. I’m still coaching, though.”

Kingsbury agrees: “In the end, for the amount of money I was making and considering the damage I was taking, it wasn’t worth it. When I fought Fabio Maldonado I got ‘Fight of the Night’ and it was the only fight I had that year. I made 60 grand before the payout to my coaches, my management and the IRS. I’ve got to have a second job. I’ve been bartending and bouncing my whole career in the UFC.” 

Kingsbury is concerned too, about the physical toll an MMA career can take. “When you take into the account the kind of long-term damage you can suffer, I’d be a fool to think that if somebody breaks a bone in my face that it’s not harming my brain. That all played a part in me wanting to hang it up.

“I won’t name names but I have training partners that are only a few years older than me and I see times where they slur their words or get hung up on the things they’re trying to formulate. It’s almost like when you’re talking to one of your grandparents and they just stop mid-sentence. I want to read to my kid. I don’t want to be the beat-up old dummy who can’t express his feelings and formulate sentences.”

But Kingsbury believes the athletic Commissions could take a stance against those going on too long, and refuse their licences. “It’s sad that guys can keep going as long as they want and certain commissions allow these old timers to keep fighting. Just the other day with Bellator I was saying, ‘What’s Ken (Shamrock) doing here? Ken shouldn’t be fighting. The guy’s in his 50s. Get him out of here.’ But each to their own.”

Finding inner peace

The majority of participants FO spoke to concur, moreover, there’s a high level of masochism in combat sports. “Pretty much every sport has to have some masochistic part,” adds Kingsbury. “You have to have that in you. You push yourself to the limit. If you don’t have that anymore, it’s nice to know you don’t have to push yourself in the same way. 

“There’s a different peace inside me now and that means I don’t have to smash someone or be smashed in order to feel OK. I don’t have that itch to scratch. But I’m still quite physical. I do jiu-jitsu every day. I’m working towards getting my black belt. They call it the gentle art. It’s sustainable. I can do it my whole life.”

Similarly, Troeng didn’t have the same desire to put it all on the line to succeed in the cage. “For me, it was a natural way to end. MMA isn’t a sport you should do for a long time. If you’re healthy, sure. But you shouldn’t fight if you’re not aiming for the top. It’s sad to see people doing that.”

“I don’t feel like I need to prove myself anymore. For me, that’s a very good thing. If you feel that way as an athlete, it’s a bad thing. But, if you feel that way as a person, it’s nice and satisfying to make the decision yourself and feel like you’re in control of every move and what you want to do.”

Final words to Kingsbury, whose transition from the cage to inner calm has been smooth. “What I do now takes me out of the need to compete, the need to test myself against others. Now, when I watch the fights, I can really just appreciate the fight for what it is. 

“It’s different for everyone. Some fighters, no matter how old they get, never lose that itch, they always want to test themselves. They always get their heart rate up when they watch a fight. Then I see other guys who put it in their past. They’re very comfortable with themselves and what they accomplished and they don’t look back.”