Issue 100

April 2013

From crazy street fights to Gilbert Melendez and living his own Rocky Balboa story, ‘The Silent Assassin’ reveals all

One five minute round

If you could choose one fight from your career that every MMA fan should see which fight would it be?

“It would have to be my 2008 fight with Tatsuya Kawajiri at Dream 5 in Japan. It was a fight where I dealt with a whole lot of adversity. It was a war. We emptied everything into that fight. I was knocked down, but I came back and knocked him down. It was just back and forth.”

What was the biggest lesson you learned from that fight?

“That you are never down and out. No matter what goes on in a fight, no matter how bad things are, as long as you are still breathing there is still a chance. And I live by that now, as long as I’m still breathing and still conscious I still have a shot at winning.”

If you could fight anyone in any weight class who would you choose to fight and why?

“It would be Gilbert Melendez because he keeps calling me out in every damn interview he does. He said he wants to fight Eddie Alvarez over and over again – he just won’t shut up. Every time I’ve looked on the internet or seen something about him, he keeps calling me out again and again.”

You have a legendary record of street fights in your past and have been quoted as saying Kimbo ‘wouldn’t have s**t’ on the tapes you could have made. That being said, which one of your street fights would have the most views on YouTube if it was taped back in the day?

“The one that I’m thinking about happened when I was actually fighting (professionally). I got in a fight outside of McFadden’s here in Philadelphia. My buddy, who I train with, is the head bouncer there. Guys were getting crazy and I asked him if he wanted me to remove the guys from the bar. He said, ‘No, no, don’t do it but if they go across the street you can do whatever you want.’ So they went across the street and I asked them to stop being belligerent, they were yelling s**t at the bouncers. 

“One of the guys took his shirt off and yelled out, ‘UFC’ really loud. It was just ironic. He called me a b**ch and tried to get into his cab. I kicked the cab door and his hand got caught in the door. He was punched and knocked out. As soon as I turned around his friend was coming at me and I punched him and knocked him out, too. 

“So I knocked out two people in one fight. All the bouncers from McFadden’s saw it and they thought I was like a superhero so they all came to my next fight. I had a fight like six weeks later and everyone from McFadden’s came to my next fight because they thought I was this tough guy, when really I just got kind of lucky that night because I got two guys that couldn’t fight for s**t.”

With you being an elite fighter, born and raised in the Philadelphia, you naturally get compared to Rocky Balboa. How do you feel about that?

“It’s funny because everywhere I go, even in Japan, at a lot of my fights you hear, ‘It’s like a Rocky movie!’ You hear Bas Rutten yelling that when I’m fighting Kawajiri. When I fight at home I have hundreds of fans in the crowd and they are all yelling, ‘Eddie, Eddie,’ so it sounds like a Rocky movie. I’m always getting associated with the movie. It’s the small-town guy who has the odds stacked against him and he defies the odds through hard work and perseverance. He is an underdog and comes back regardless of all the obstacles and he succeeds. And that is sort of my story. I’m living the modern-day Rocky story.”