Issue 111

February 2014

The former MMA world champion, and current TV personality and movie star tells FO why he wants to be a stand-up comedian

Q. If you could pick one fight from your career that every combat sports fan should see, which one would you choose?

A. “The rematch against (Masakatsu) Funaki. He beat me the first time (Pancrase: Pancrash! 1) in 1994, but when I fought him again two years later in Japan my ground game was much improved. I knocked him down like five times, but every time he got back up and the home crowd was cheering his name. It was amazing. My knees were bruised from kneeing him in the head so much. But I finally finished him.” 

Q. That’s the fight where he gave you the throat slashing sign at the beginning, right? Did that make you angry?

A. “Yes, but I was really good at saving the anger. I always tell people not to get angry because you start loading up and telegraphing your shots. I knew that once I hit him he would be dazed and that’s when I planned to release the anger, so to speak. I actually wanted the fight to last longer than 15 minutes because he had never fought that long. I wanted to wait until that point and then turn it on. But he kicked me illegally in the head when I was down and that p**sed me off. It was all downhill for him then.”

Q. Is there one fighter you never faced off against, but wished you had?

A. “Rickson Gracie. At the time everyone was saying he was the greatest so I actually challenged him. People twisted the whole thing and tried to say it was because I didn’t like him. But I had nothing against him, I just wanted to find out who was the best. And I would have loved another rematch against Ken (Shamrock), after improving my ground skills. It almost happened in Pride, and I would have come out of retirement, but he declined. He said we’d already done it twice and didn’t need a third.”

Q. It’s well known you were bullied as a small child, but can you tell us about the time you first stood up to them after learning taekwondo?

A. “Yeah. I had really bad eczema when I was little and I was always getting picked on. But I remember one day, after I’d been training for several months, I got into a street fight with the biggest bully in town. Usually I’d avoid this guy but this day I was out riding my bike and he was out with six or seven of his friends, shouting at me, calling me a leper. So that day I decided to shout back. At first they just laughed at me and turned around to chase me. I put my bike down and just waited for them. I wasn’t going to run away that time. They surrounded me, just like you see in the movies. But I hit this bully with just one punch, that was it. But that punch really changed my life. Everybody started being nice to me after that.”

Q. Bruce Lee was one of your boyhood heroes, so how does it feel now you’ve become a movie star like him?

A. “When you say it like that, it’s cool. I never thought of it like that. I just saw Bruce Lee kicking people’s asses and thought that was my answer to beating the bullies. Since then I’ve been blessed in my life with my career choices. I’ve worked as a commentator for Pride. Then the clips on YouTube became a success. I got so much work from that! I got Cartoon Network. I started doing more and more acting. Then I got a movie part with Kevin James in Here Comes the Boom. In fact, he kind of wrote the role of Niko for me after I began training him for another film.”

Q. World champion martial artist, TV personality, movie actor, entrepreneur and author – is there anything you haven’t been able to accomplish over this amazing run?

A. “I really want to try stand-up comedy one time. I don’t think most people have any idea how hard it is and that’s why I want to do it. If you mess up it’s hard to come back from. That’s why I want to do it, to see if I could deal with failure if it happened.”