Issue 077

July 2011

"But I’ve never said anything in my life I didn't mean or couldn’t back up," insists Chael Sonnen.

The label ‘King of Trash Talk’ does not rest easily with Chael Patrick Sonnen. Like an unwanted scar. It doesn’t bother him, but mud sticks. He does refute it, however. In fairness, there is seemingly not a great deal that does trouble the tough guy from Oregon, who reveals a brain like no other fighter in an extensive, exclusive interview with Fighters Only. Sonnen’s denial of the ‘trash talk’ moniker is not excused by a simple rebuff. Instead, every utterance comes supported by argumentation a politician would be proud of, clear and detailed in the same breath and tinged with the type of humor and the sense of timing with which a theatrical performer might carve a career out of. 

The complex character has been through six months of trial and tribulations, his license as a real estate agent removed away from combat, on an admission of fraud, while his physical force has been in abeyance over the results from a post-fight test after he had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a thrilling UFC middleweight championship contest against Anderson Silva at UFC 117 in Oakland. His body showed higher than normal testosterone to epitestosterone ratios in a post-fight screening test. Sonnen’s explanation was that he was on a treatment for ‘hypogonadism’ and that the California State Athletic Commission was aware of the medication he was taking, which involved injections of synthetic testosterone. “It is all documented on emails,” he informed me.

Trash-talking is another thing altogether. “Nothing bothers me that makes a headline. It didn’t bother me when they said I failed a steroid test. Even though I never took a steroid test,” explains the 34-year-old, who has become one of the most compelling fighters in the UFC in the last two years.

The last six months have been a personally challenging time for Sonnen. But he insists it was not as tough as some may imagine. “I don’t want to dismiss the last six months. I learned a lot. There’s things I’ll never do again. But it wasn’t overly aggressive on me. I learned how the MMA media works. They say I did a test, which does not exist, and that I tested positive. I could sue people for it. I just took it on the chin, and changed the channel.

“I’ve never done anything intentionally unethical in my life; from childhood. That’s not how I am. I got one detention in school and it was for squirting grape juice on a girl called Brittany who I was flirting with. I have no reprimands in my file. I make choices and do the right thing. I never chose wrong. I’m not a selfish guy. I’m very proud of a lot of things I’ve done. I’m a statesman, I’ve testified in front of sub-committees, I’ve met with Congress. My neighbor is the Governor of Oregon. They [the media] have thrown dirt on me, but I’ll keep shaking it off. Look, I’m not entitled to be a pro athlete, to travel the world. They are privileges, not entitlements. If I no longer fought, I’d still get up healthy and happy to be healthy. I’m not abused, I’m not hanging my head. I’m a member of my community, I still volunteer 15 hours a week for my community as I have for a decade. I still have the same friends.”

Trash talk, he insists, is not actually a part of his mindset. “I don’t like trash talk, for example. If I don’t mean it, I wouldn’t say it. If I couldn’t bite, I wouldn’t growl.” There are many forms of ‘trash talk’. Sonnen’s just happens to be highly intelligent, and extremely developed. We are in conversation two hours and he really gets going… “I will fight anyone in the company [the UFC] and I’m the only who will do it. The other guys won’t do it. They win a belt, then they hum and they haa about who they will fight next. They are fake, phony, paper champions. There are guys out there who want you to believe they are the best in the world. But some of them are not even the best guy in their own practice room… They say they can’t fight their training partners. Why would you not go and compete with the cameras on? I don’t want to fool the world into anything.”

Bear in mind Sonnen barely breaks breath when he says these things. But as he does on the dais pre-fight, he leaves time for the one-liners to sink in, and for the laughter he generates. “A lot of time when I hear the words ‘trash talk’, it doesn’t apply to me. Have you ever heard me say one word that could not be said, broadcast or written because it is a profanity? I don’t swear. If you are the best, it should be a compliment that people want you to fight everyone. I would like to push back on the liars in this sport. They are lying when they say we are ‘mixed martial artists’. Come on… we step into a steel cage on a Saturday night for a fight against another guy for 25 minutes, to get paid, and to win a title.

“When the bell rings, I’m a fist fighter. I know how to look after myself in there, and I know how to use it against my opponent. It’s not about bowing and what my grand master says.”

There are certain people who gain admission to the Sonnen Hall of Fame. “I’m never going to miss one of Randy Couture’s fights. Whoever he is matched up with. There are very few guys who you can call the top champions, and about whom you can also say they fought everyone. Like Randy, Chuck Liddell is one of those top champions. I wasn’t a great fan of his, but Chuck Liddell fought everyone. He fought the best twice, even three times. For me, you get the belt, but then you have to clean out the division. Liddell fought them all, and that is extremely admirable. Beside him and Randy there has not been any other fighter in any division in the history of the sport who has done what they did.”

He then casts his eye over his other stand-out fighters. “Look, generally, champions are not the most exciting fighters. GSP can’t go out there and explode because he’s got to be out there for 25 minutes. As they say in boxing, you can’t go out there and get a KO if you want the decision. I’m happy to pay 50 bucks to see the likes of Jon Jones. He’s doing a great job. I like the guys he is fighting, too, as he’ll go in against the best. Matt Hamill is a very tough guy; Clay Guida brings something interesting. BJ Penn is a lot of fun. Josh Koscheck has developed a pretty interesting style and shows something new each match. There’s Diego Sanchez. I don’t need to see another Diego interview. He is dog tough, his skills are great and his heart is second to none. Dan Henderson is always awesome to watch. I think he’s a great fighter. The lighter guys are real fun, and the lighter they get the more exciting it gets.” Then a mental itch triggers him. 

“Jose Aldo may be good – or not. But it is beyond ridiculous to hear he is rated in the top three, pound-for-pound. We [the fighters] all know who the best pound-for-pound fighters are. Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard are the best two lightweights in the world. Aldo has shown some skills, but that is all. Kenny Florian would whip him. The way the UFC gave Aldo that belt is as ridiculous as waking up Matt Hughes and giving him the belt. Hughes fought only two guys in the top 10 in his career in GSP and BJ Penn, and you tell me Hughes is in the Hall of Fame. He won the belt over the ‘always dangerous’ Carlos ‘The Dragon’ Newton. I’d beat Hayato Sakurai and Newton on my way to the ring.”

And another thing, Sonnen would like to see shorter rounds in MMA, though it “will never happen.” “Less is more,” he says, “and people should quit complaining about the judging system. It is perfect as it is. You don’t have a fair system in rodeo, gymnastics or diving. We have as perfect a system as it will ever be. Give me and [Vincent] Van Gogh all the same tools and we’ll come out with a different project on the canvas. As for judging, change the painters, but I don’t want to criticize MMA officials.”    

Sonnen’s background is fascinating. He grew up in farming country, on the outskirts of West Linn, Oregon. His childhood holds many clues to the man. Male role models loom large. He started wrestling at seven, the same age he started heavy-duty chores. His father, Patrick, drilled a work ethic into him. Sonnen’s life as a child, he admits, was geared towards one thing, “winning the world championship.”

 He went on to become an NCAA Division 1 All-American wrestler at the University of Oregon, a two-time national champion as well as the 85kg silver medalist at the 2000 Greco-Roman World University Championships in Tokyo, Japan. “It was your very typical nuclear family, I had a great mom and a great dad, Claudia and Patrick, and they had a great relationship. We grew up in the country.” His ancestors were German, Scottish and Irish. 

 “I had a sister, we had pets, cats, dogs, the whole bit. My sister Regan is very smart. She’s an attorney. She was a state champion dancer in high school as well as a member of the soccer team. Her interest was education and learning. She was top of her class at a private Catholic college in San Diego, and went onto get a law degree at the University of Oregon. My dad was a horse breeder. We had lots of horses; he was a cattleman at times. You worked hard, you had to take care of that land. I had chores. Taking care of animals and cleaning stalls, and I worked a lot.”

 “There are child labor laws in this country and you can’t work until you’re a certain age, but that doesn’t pertain if you’re working for your parents, so we did everything from being out picking berries in the summer to working the ground. My main job was as a digger. I would dig ditches for pipes, even though I only weighed about 90lb’s. I’d leave the house real early every day and I got home when it was dark out and real late. Work, school, wrestling. I didn’t have a tremendous social life. I didn’t know any different. All of my friends were in the practice room, but that’s the same as it is now. That’s the life I choose and I don’t regret it. I didn’t know until I got to college that you didn’t have to live life exhausted. There was never a day where I wasn’t exhausted. We lay in on a Saturday till 7am, got up, worked, wrestled and then we’d do it all again, every day.”

Three people had a major influence on him when he was growing up. Coaches Roy Pitman and Dave Sanville, and his father. “Roy became my coach when I was nine and Roy is probably the top wrestling coach in America. He only coaches kids. That said he’s had an Olympian on every team since the 1980’s. Dan Henderson trained there, Travis West, Matt Linland did, even Randy ‘The Natural.’ He was a great man but I didn’t know how awesome he was at the time. At high school my coach was a man named Dave Sanville. He’s awesome, too. I didn’t understand that every other kid didn’t have a Roy Pitman and Dave Sanville in their lives. I just happened to have a community that had these guys. I thought these guys were in every community. I didn’t understand how special they were and now as an adult those men have been inducted to the Hall of Fame.”

Today, Sonnen’s regime is overseen by Quinton Hyers, his trainer, and Matt Lindland, who has “been with me forever.” Sonnen calls himself “lucky.” He lost his father, aged 56, to colon cancer. Sonnen was an adult by then, but it hit hard. “Please, think about colonoscopy. So many people’s lives could be saved by it. I wish my Dad had had it.”

So what were Sonnen’s formative years as a teenager like? “I was into Chuck Norris and into Steven Segal. I was a big Hulk Hogan fan. There was a tag team called Demolition and my buddy Justin and I were Demolition for Halloween. Lots of face paint. We spent the whole day as Demolition and we were the greatest at school. That was the late 80s when pro-wrestling was at its height, and Hulk Hogan was still the savior of the world. I still remember watching it on the little black-and-white television. My dad said we couldn’t get cable where we lived. But my neighbors all had it. We only had three channels but we could pick up wrestling with our tiny TV. You had to sit like five feet away from it.” 

Had pro wrestling in the late 80s influenced Sonnen, given him a feel for the drama and theatre of pre-fight hype? It’s so clear he has an instinctive feel for it. “I was influenced by everything, everything you see, everything you read. I’ve read more books than can fit into a library, magazines, internet, influential people. I’m influenced by a lot of different things but I never felt that I was greatly influenced by pro wrestling.”

Today, he is ranked by many as the number two middleweight in the world (he disagrees, of course, insisting that he and Yushin Okami are the world’s top two middleweights. And since he beat Okami, that makes him the number one). This is Sonnen’s second coming in the UFC. He came back to the organization having earned the WEC middleweight belt. Under that banner, he fought Paulo Filho twice, losing by submission yet controversy in the first after he insisted he was not asking for a verbal submission. When they met again in November 2008, Sonnen defeated Filho, who had weighed in 7lbs over the limit, by unanimous decision.

After losing via triangle choke to Demian Maia on his return at UFC 95, Sonnen went on a spree, defeating Dan Miller at UFC 98, out-wrestling Okami at UFC 104 and then, in spite of being seen as a heavy underdog, dominating Nate Marquardt at UFC 109. It put him in line to fight Silva for the belt. Sonnen’s trash talk reached new levels in the build-up to fighting the Brazilian. He said he would retire the champion and, in many ways, performed as he promised he would, dominating Silva and scoring takedowns in all five rounds. Yet he lost by armbar triangle with less than two minutes remaining in the contest.

“One thing that’s always bothered me was that something called ‘hype’, reflects Sonnen. “I feel that hype is fraudulent. Take boxing. Mike Tyson is going to fight Lennox Lewis and Mike’s got this big beef and he’s going to do all these horrible things to him and when the fight’s over Mike takes the microphone and tells everybody that it was just for hype and he actually thinks Lewis is a really great guy. Well, that’s fraudulent then.

“It’s a lot like what Koscheck did against GSP. Koscheck stirred up a little bit of interest, he’s not good at it, but did his level best and we all tuned in to see it. Then he takes the mic and says, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean any of that stuff.’ I tuned in to see him fight because of the things he told me he felt towards him and things he told me he wanted to do. More than saying that I believe in the theatrical side I want to show you that I really don’t. I find that very irritating. I guess what I’m saying is, if I don’t mean it I won’t say it. And that’s where my frustration comes in with these guys who believe they have a job of doing something called ‘the hype’. Hype is fraud. If you want to go out and lie to people, lie to people. But I’m not signing up for that. If I don’t mean it, I won’t say it.

“What happened in the last six months was made very public, but this isn’t the first turmoil, or the first frustrations or the first time I’ve had to deal with red tape. That’s the environment I’m in. Don’t forget I’m dealing with laws but I’m also a Statesman who helps to influence laws. I’ve helped to create and write bills that are now signed and are laws, so this is just a process I’ve been involved in for over a decade now. The last six months were made public, but listen I’m going through stuff right now and as soon as I get through it I’ll jump into another battle, and I will get through that too. You know they accuse me of taking an illegal substance in California and I never even had one drop of alcohol in my life, not one pinch of tobacco, not one puff of a cigarette of any kind in my life, not as a boy, not in high school.

“My school was known as a great party school, but in all of those parties I never touched a drop and there’s not a person out there that’ll tell you different. I’m not different to any other statesman or any other politician, that’s what we look for, we’re looking for a fight, looking to help, looking to change things, and if you end up in the mix, then well that’s just what you signed up for.”

A fighter through and through.

Chael Sonnen on... trash talking 

“It’s dishonest when fighters say positive things. ‘I hope he brings his ‘A’ game,’ ‘I hope he’s ready’, or ‘It’s an honor to fight’. Why would you hope that? Why is it an honor? I’ve never hoped a guy was ready, I’ve never hoped a guy was training hard. Why would I hope such a thing? I’m going in there for me, I’m going in there selfishly, to get my hand raised by any means necessary. Why would I want Anderson Silva, for example, to show up at his best? What do I care? That’s the worst answer. That’s one step away from saying ‘I hope I show up with a broken hand so it’s a close fight.’ It’s disingenuous, and it’s dishonest. The guys that speak their mind, the guys that read the page out of my playbook, those are the guys that are being honest. The guys out there trying to wear the white hats and the ‘oh shucks’ attitude; they’re the liars. They don’t mean what they say.” 

Chael Sonnen on... Tito Ortiz

“Tito Ortiz strikes me as a pretty honest guy, complimentary when it’s due, but he’s not afraid to say, ‘Listen, we’re gonna fight and here’s what I’m gonna do in that fight.’ It’s just as disingenuous to say it’s an honor to fight. ‘Oh I’m gonna fight you and we’re gonna go test each other.’ At least he doesn’t do that.

Chael Sonnen on... Brock Lesnar

“Lesnar goes out there and does his job. He’s different now. He came over with a different attitude, and he had a different motivation. Lesnar is one of the few guys who is in on the pay-per-views, he is a partner with the UFC and he gets a cut of the gate. He uses some of those skills he learned in the wrestling world to try to drive up the PPV sales. I’m not a part of PPV. I get a flat fee when I fight. 

“Brock’s a different guy now though. He went through the battle for his life and he looks at things differently and he’s come through pretty humble. You see a different side of him now, frankly an enjoyable side from my personal opinion. I’ve felt for him and I think we all cheered for Brock, nobody wanted him to be sick, his career to be over or heavens forbid, nobody wanted him to pass away. 

“I’m on board with Brock. He’s a lot of show, and not a lot of go. He’s a pretty effective guy, he’s not very good, but with that size he gets the job done.”

Chael Sonnen on... Anderson Silva

“If you make it to the top of the pile you get a lot of leeway, a lot of favors from the UFC. The UFC gave Silva a major incentive to go out there and sell our fight as part of PPV, to get involved in PR and marketing and not just help himself, but sell the brand and the industry. What Anderson did – not to do that – is his decision. I can only speculate as to why. He is one of very few to be handed that opportunity, and the only one to decline it.

Look at Anderson. He’s a phoney. He’s as phoney as they come. Look at boxing. Mike Tyson, we were all led to believe, was the best of an era. No he wasn’t. Evander Holyfield was there the entire time. Tyson made sure he stayed away from Holyfield. We all knew Holyfield could beat him, and eventually he did beat him. But they stuck the belt on Tyson and they paraded him around like he was the world champion. He was never the best. Then Holyfield beat him. So he was the best. Or was he? No, Lennox Lewis was the best. Holyfield avoided Lewis. Then he got destroyed – twice. Anderson is very smart. He can’t beat Paulo Filho. He worked out with him. They both said it. Anderson’s manager said it. So Anderson just stays away. Anderson can’t beat me. Of course, they say no rematch. Any type of true champion would want to show for sure with a rematch. He goes out and he gets beaten by Yushin Okami. If he was a true champion, he would fix the blemish. He does not want to fight. That belt is a piece of tin around his waist.”