Issue 086
March 2012
Love him or loathe him Rashad Evans isn’t going away any time soon. FO catches up with the former light heavyweight champion and discovers a man fueled by redemption
How do you feel about the current state of the 205lb division?
“I’m feeling good. I’m in south Florida training with the Blackzilians. The division is still pretty stacked. Now you’ve got ‘Hendo’ in the mix, Hendo is a beast. Jon Jones is the top boss right now. He looked really good beating Machida and ‘Rampage,’ and he looked phenomenal beating ‘Shogun,’ so he’s the guy to beat right now. Every once in a while there comes a fighter that nobody can figure out right away, he’s got that aura about him. I actually thought Machida may have been the one who found that chink in his armor, but I know I will, for sure.”
Do you think Chael Sonnen showed the way to beat Jon Jones in the way he almost beat Anderson Silva?
“The big difference between Anderson Silva and Jon Jones is that Jon Jones is a pretty damn good wrestler himself. Chael has definitely got the right idea. If you give those guys any kind of space then they will make you look stupid. Don’t give them any kind of space then you put them in the hot seat.”
You are now settled into your new team, the Blackzilians. What’s the set-up over there?
“We’ve got Mike Van Arsdale, master Henri Hooft from Holland, Flavius Silva the jiu-jitsu coach who used to train with the Nogueira brothers, Mark Cohen who does the judo and Master Cha’ who does Muay Thai. We’ve got a pretty good setup and besides that we’ve got great teammates with ‘JZ’ (Gesias Cavalcante), Jorge Santiago, Anthony Johnson, Michael Johnson, the list goes on. We’ve got a really good team and we’ve got a lot of up-and-coming guys that are going to be tough to beat too.”
Do you think if you took Jon Jones out of the equation then you’d still be at Greg Jackson’s, or have you always wanted to set up your own team?
“Before I left, because of the Jon Jones thing, I did my last two camps at Grudge in Denver anyway. When the whole Jon Jones situation blew up I felt the tension was there, so I left, but the main reason I left the Greg Jackson camp was because it became like a factory. You weren’t getting that one-on-one attention. Greg completely got away from the way we used to be. The one thing that made us great was the fact that Greg put a lot of time into us, but Greg is such a caring person that he does not know how to say, ‘No’ to people. He just kept saying, ‘Yes’ to everyone who wanted to come and train. The team got so big and out of control that it lost that connection.”
We saw a similar thing almost happen with the mooted Condit vs St Pierre matchup. Do you think that’s going to become a more common problem at Jackson’s with so many good guys there?
“At some point you have to understand that you can’t take so many people from the same weight class. You’ve got to choose a side, and Greg is an expert at being impartial and trying to stay in the middle, but at some point you do have to choose a side.”
Which other fighters out there really excite you?
“I love to watch Dominick Cruz. I call him ‘The Gingerbread Man’ because you cannot catch him. I like his style. Frankie Edgar has looked pretty good, I call him ‘The Iron Man.’ He’s just so tough. There’s a lot of guys out there that look pretty good. There’s a lot of talent out there these days.”
Dominick Cruz vs José Aldo looks like it could be a good superfight. What are your thoughts on that possible matchup?
“Dominick Cruz is one of those fighters that’s tough to figure out because he doesn’t stop. I get tired just watching him. I’m like, ‘Damn!’ It’s just perpetual motion the whole time. It looks like it would be a tough fight. José looks like he gets tired as the fight goes on. He’s very explosive so I don’t know if he’d be able to handle somebody going at Dominick’s pace the whole time.”
You mentioned Frankie Edgar too, but as Gray Maynard’s former college roommate it must have been tough watching your friend lose the trilogy?
“It was because Gray’s my brother. I’m cool with Frankie, but to see Gray lose, it broke my heart. The first [title] fight was close, it’s hard to say who won. My heart went out to him because I know the kind of competitor he is.”
You get a lot of love from the international fans, but back in the US you always get tagged as a bad guy. How does that make you feel?
“I’m the black sheep, that’s for sure. I don’t know how I got that title. It is what it is. I accept it. I don’t worry about it. The funny thing is that Americans boo so much, yet whenever we do an Expo I always have the longest lines! But, no matter what, they still boo me. I don’t mind it. It fuels me. I like it when people boo me, because I’m so far from that character. That’s what makes it easy to walk away when I’m done at the end of the day. When you start believing that you’re the character that people say you are, when they take it away you feel like you’ve lost a piece of yourself. They can never take anything away from me because they haven’t given me anything that I’m comfortable with being. They can say whatever and boo me for whatever. It doesn’t matter to me because I know who I am in my life.”
Do you think a victory over Jon Jones would transform you from a bad guy into a good guy?
“I don’t want to be a good guy. I like to root for the bad guys in the movies. It doesn’t really matter to me if [the fans] want me to be a good guy or if they cheer for me, they’re always going to pay to see me.”
There are some big fights coming up in the heavyweight division. How do you think Overeem is going to do in the UFC?
“Overeem’s going to do pretty good. He didn’t have those first time UFC jitters like I thought. If Brock got on top of him then it was going to be pretty tough, and as great a striker as he is, he didn’t look so good against [Fabricio] Werdum. I thought if he came with striking like that against Brock then I was sure Brock could withstand those blows and close the distance and get him down. If he got him down then I didn’t think Overeem would get back up. Even though Overeem is big and strong, Brock has a different kind of strength. He’s like a bear.”
What were your highlight moments of 2011?
“One of the best things last year was the Cheick Kongo and Pat Barry fight. That fight was bananas. I loved that fight. I watched it on TV. I couldn’t believe it, Cheick was gone. He looked crazy going into the cage too. I was like, ‘Man, he looks crazy, he’d better win this fight,’ because he had that big grizzly beard. He did his thing, I was happy to see him get that win. I heard he doesn’t like me. I was surprised. Somebody asked me the other day, ‘Do you get along with Cheick?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t really like him.’ Then the person said, ‘Oh, well he doesn’t like you either.’ And I was like, ‘Damn, I was just joking around.’ So now I want to fight Cheick too (laughs).”
What about the Anderson Silva front kick that won ‘Knockout of the Year’?
“Oh, man, that was bananas too. I thought Anderson would get ‘Fighter of the Year’ too, because he had some performances where he just looked phenomenal, either him or Jones I knew would get it. But Anderson, last year he came on strong. He just showed that he’s so much better than everyone else in the division.”
Do you ever get inspired by other fighters?
“Oh yeah, I get inspired a lot. I even get inspired watching Jones fight. He’s a great fighter, I love to watch some of the things that he does because I’m a fight fan. I can appreciate great technique.”
Given your wrestling background, do you believe that wrestling is the best base for MMA?
“I think it depends on the practitioner. Each individual implements it differently. There are some great wrestlers who came into MMA but it never really panned out. I can’t rank one martial art over the other.”
