Issue 076

June 2011

Sideburn-wearing Strikeforce heavyweight Chad Griggs wants to prove he’s not mutton dressed as lamb

NEED TO KNOW

NAME CHAD GRIGGS

RECORD 10-1

STARTED 2005

HEIGHT 6’ 3”

DIVISION HEAVYWEIGHT

NICKNAME ‘THE GRAVE DIGGER’

FROM TUCSON, ARIZONA

A bodybuilder and a policeman walk into an underground MMA gym in Arizona and they run into UFC old-timer Don Frye. No, that’s not the set-up for a joke. It’s the story of how Chad Griggs began training in mixed martial arts back in 2003.

“I was always real big into weight training and a cop I knew told me, ‘I think I have something you’d really like.’ So he took me into an underground gym at Rincon High School in Tucson, Arizona, and the first guy I run into is Don Frye – the guy I’d been watching on TV,” Griggs recalls. “I was like, ‘Wow!’ I got to train with him a bit that night and he kind of took me under his wing, beat me up a bunch of times and took a liking to me.”

Griggs soon became one of Frye’s main training partners, logging countless hours on the mat with MMA’s version of The Marlboro Man and even traveling with ‘The Predator’ to Japan to corner him for some of his fights. It was on one of these trips to the Land of the Rising Sun that Griggs decided that the time had come for him to take what Frye had taught him in the gym and apply it in the cage.

On August 27, 2005 his short-lived amateur career ended 13 seconds after it began with his opponent sprawled out on the canvas. Four months later he went pro.

In 2007 Frye took his young protégé, who was 4-0 at the time, with him when he took the helm of the Tucson Scorpions International Fight League team. For Griggs, the experience was a both a blessing and a curse.  

The steady paycheck and health benefits made it possible for fighters on the team to train full-time without having to worry how they were going to pay the bills or support their families. The problem, Griggs says wasn’t with the financially struggling league, it was with how Frye would push the fighters to the brink of emotional and physical exhaustion day in and day out. 

“I love Don Frye, but having him as a coach was draining on a lot of us. I’ve always said he’s a great guy, but a terrible coach,” he says with a chuckle. “He wanted to see us kill each other two times a day, seven days a week – mentally and physically – and you just can’t do that.”

One of many examples of Frye’s unorthodox style of coaching reared its head during a Scorpions sparring session four years ago.

“He lost it on us because he didn’t like the fact the guys on the team weren’t hitting each other as hard as we could while we were sparring. He told me, ‘You need to learn how to hit.’ He didn’t have any gloves on or anything. He was just standing there and was like, ‘Hit me in the head!’ I was like, ‘No, that’s not a good idea.’ ‘Do it!’ he yelled at me in his gnarly, mean voice like three or four times,” Griggs recollects. “So finally I did it and he was like, ‘No. Hit me as hard as you can!’ It was very entertaining for all of the guys in the gym and it was very scary for me. 

“I remember hitting him six or seven times pretty good. I had 16-ounce gloves on, but still, I was nailing him pretty hard and he’s just standing there yelling at me, ‘Hit me again harder!’ Finally, I was like, ‘That’s enough. I’m outta here before he loses it and kills me.’ That was a pretty entertaining one we still laugh about and go, ‘What the hell was going through his mind?’”

Frye has since stepped away from the gym to concentrate on other endeavors and Griggs says that in spite of the tough love the UFC 8 and Ultimate Ultimate ‘96 tournament champ showed him over the years, he wishes he could still be a part of his career in some way. “I’ll always credit him as being the forefather that got me into the sport. He taught me so much and I’ve learned an incredible amount from him.”

When he was dropped by the IFL after being dealt the first loss of his career via a nasty kimura by Steve Ott in only his second fight as a Scorpion, Griggs took the news as a blessing in disguise.

“After the IFL I was pretty beat up. I had popped my elbow and I was physically and mentally worn out from training at the intensity we trained at for so long. We got to the point where we just wanted out of it. I nearly packed it in completely. That was part of the reason why I didn’t fight a whole heck of a lot, and also it was because I couldn’t find the right fights. I had a few small fights here and there to try to stay active and to try to get the numbers back up. We’d been talking about me quitting again before I was offered the Bobby Lashley fight,” he recalls. “It had been a year since I’d last fought and the kids were getting older and life was getting busier. When they offered me the fight I thought, ‘I can’t turn this down.’ I’m 32 now and I’m going to get in there and put it all on the line and see if I can stir things up a bit. I’m here, I’m happy and I think I’ve done well so far, but I’m pretty sure I have a little more juice in the tank to startle the fans and make people go, ‘Aaahhh!’ I want to have a little fun before I’m too broke. This is my last hurrah. Let’s see how far we can go with it.”

Griggs took the opportunity Strikeforce gave him and ran with it. Coming in as a considerable underdog, he beat Lashley and subsequently earned a slot as a reserve fighter in Strikeforce’s heavyweight grand prix. Having dispatched of his last opponent, Gianpiero Villante in February in his tournament reserve bout, ‘The Grave Digger’, as he was dubbed early on by his Tucson training partners for his propensity to lay guys out in sparring, is now patiently sitting and waiting to see what’s next.

He was offered his choice of short-notice bouts with either Valentijn Overeem or Daniel Cormier on Strikeforce’s Feijao vs Henderson card in March, but with only two weeks to prepare for and the six-days-on, five-days-off, 24-hour shift schedule he maintains as a full-time firefighter and paramedic, it just wasn’t possible. That would have left him only eight days of actual hard training time to prepare the week prior to the fight at a time in camp when most fighters are tapering off their intensity to allow their bodies to heal before they compete.

There have been whispers that displaced tournament favorite Fedor Emelianenko, who was unceremoniously ousted from the competition by Antonio Silva in February, might be a prospective opponent for Griggs at Strikeforce’s June event in Dallas, Texas. Though Griggs has heard the rumor from more than one source, he says that although he is cognizant of it, he isn’t focusing too much on one opponent just in case Strikeforce decides to shuffle the deck. In the meantime the devout Latter-Day Saints Mormon, devoted husband and father of six-year-old daughter and a ten-year-old son says he’ll continue to work hard in the gym and in the fire station while remaining focused on life’s gifts.

He added: “90% of my happiness comes from being with my family and making sure they’re taken care of and are happy themselves. I don’t know how people do life without kids. There’s no question that it’s a major balancing act to work, train and to make sure you’re spending as much time with your family as possible. If you get one thing out of balance the whole thing comes crashing down.

“I definitely get a lot of support from all angles, which has contributed greatly to my success. My family, the guys I train with, my work, my church – I’ve been really blessed to have such overwhelming encouragement from all of them. Everything has got to be in harmony. When they aren’t, that’s when problems start coming.”

When the problems do start coming Griggs grabs a few guns, a few knives and some camping gear and hikes into the Tucson mountains for some time alone.

“Hunting is something that I really enjoy. That’s my breathing room – when I’m able to get away from everyone and everything. My cell phone doesn’t work [up in the mountains] and that’s the way I like it,” Griggs points out. “When you’re caught up in the fire station, you’re in the public’s eye all the time. When you’re fighting you’re in the public’s eye all the time. Everywhere you go it seems that there are tons of people, so it’s nice to just pack up for four or five days and just be out there under the stars and breathing the fresh air. I do it to reset the button, take a step back and get a better grip on reality. My belief is that you can never have enough guns or knives.”

With a credo like that hanging over the Griggs’ front door, The Grave Digger’s daughter is likely going to have a hard time finding a boyfriend in high school that will be brave enough to date the little girl of an intimidating heavyweight MMA fighter who is a gun and knife fanatic. It might be safer punching an irate and confrontational Don Frye in the head.

Mutton chop masterclass

Aside from his heavy hands and stand-up fight style, Chad Griggs is notorious for the hairy facial appendages he sports every fight night. Otherwise known as sideburns, or mutton chops, these cheek warmers have been seen on some of history’s most prominent characters. Elvis Presley, Charles Darwin, the fuzzy flaps’ namesake Senator Ambrose Burnside and... Lemmy from Motorhead.

MMA’s other Hair Bears

Mr Griggs isn’t the only cage-habiting scrapper to feel the wind through his face. Bahamian slugger Kimbo Slice is well known for his bushy chin brush (which is prohibited in professional boxing). Don Frye is so famed for his moustache that die-hard MMA fans often attempt their own Frye-stache in honor of the man. While there was also a furore when Brock Lesnar adopted a beard before his title defense against Cain Velasquez at UFC 121.