Issue 067
November 2010
‘Original TUF bad boy’ Chris Leben has become a crowd favorite and legit contender. Where did it all go right? Fighters Only experiences redemption with the man who always has a puncher’s chance.
Chris Leben’s in the throes of ecstasy. “You know, this is my first cover. I always wondered if I would get a cover, and I am really delighted that it is with Fighters Only. So thank you so much."
Five years have passed since ‘The Crippler’ first appeared in public view as l’enfant terrible in the opening series of The Ultimate Fighter, veering between drunk, emotional and uber-competitive. Christian Cyrus Leben is a different human specimen today. Home since 2007 has been in Hawaii, in a wooden bungalow soothed by a sea breeze.
Leben opens the pine slats each morning, after the daily rain, to one of the finest beaches in the world. A hammock hangs under a mango tree in the garden. Mountains and greenery present themselves as the view from his backyard. He even sips his wine these days. It’s volte-face to the wild life he once led, given that he teaches a cohort of kids martial arts on the shore. Every Sunday there is a team outing. “We all go to the beach, hold these rocks and run underwater for an anaerobic workout. I’ve got a gym of my own, two blocks from the university, with well over 100 students. It’s beautiful. The gym is 35,000 sq ft of space. It’s pretty expensive, but it’s open for classes seven days a week and I teach three days a week there.”
Leben enjoys la dolce vita. And he has structure. “I live in Kailua, on the windward side of the island. I have a lovely girlfriend. We have two dogs, Ikaika, a real tough Maltese poodle, and Dexter, a lab mongrel, the athlete of the house. They are part of the family.”
It’s been three years of island life, and Leben has found his ledge. In recent months he has also shown a deftness in the Octagon that was always there, but not always on display. When Leben fought twice in a fortnight earlier this summer, beating Aaron Simpson at The Ultimate Fighter 11 Finale, and then Yoshihiro Akiyama at UFC 116, both as an underdog, he crossed a bridge and united many critics in his favor. Where did it all go right, suddenly, for the one-time bad boy of the Ultimate Fighting Championship?
Truth is, it might have all gone so very wrong. Leben is a man whose leanings once turned his attention to thoughts of oblivion, the manner indeed in which he chooses to fight when he is at his most obdurate. In short, it has been some journey for the picaresque character from Portland, Oregon.
Leben turned 30 in July 2010. They say the ages of man go in cycles of seven years. Leben is enjoying his fifth cycle with a maturity he was never certain he would attain in life. The end of the fourth cycle, in his 28th year, contained moments of tumultuous change followed by deep realization. The hubris has left him. What remains is a man more at peace with himself, no longer facing a crossroads on a weekly, or even daily, basis. For now the road is long, straight and halogen-lit. But it was not always thus. Leben has scratched his way down some dark alleys, metaphorically as well as physically. To understand Leben’s meandering, at times wild, existence we need to go back to his early life, through his childhood and his teenage years. He says as he gives time over to Fighters Only that he does not wish to delve into certain things. They are taboo. Like the nine times he was in prison. Or of the criticism he once felt for his mother, who abused alcohol and drugs when he was growing up, but who he has grown close to and loves dearly.
Leben is irascible, open and a compelling figure in a sport littered with plenty of journeymen fighters, yet few journeymen personalities. Once Leben is up and running, expression and openness pour out of him. His is an enthralling life, and there is catharsis for him in honesty. In some men, his life experiences might have created a vulnerability to openness, yet a sharp, questioning mind combined with a burgeoning talent for communication make him wonderful company. He can also laugh at himself. He’s become one of the most recognized stars in the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization, a fighter who entertains, and his personality has won many admirers. The description of his life rushes by like a high-octane road movie, at times full of sound and fury, though it’s parked up peacefully for now in Hawaii. He stayed in school as a kid only for the wrestling, playing truant and getting drunk on more days than he cares to remember. Then joined the army, again to wrestle, and ended up grappling with authority, the bane of his life until he turned onto the right road recently. He sold used cars, worked bars, underwent periods as a painter and decorator and then he found his calling. It was in the Octagon.
What he reveals is an insight into a fascinating character on a journey of self-discovery, made through the discipline of mixed martial arts. He has always been fighting, sometimes for survival, and in the process he’s learned about himself.
Leben takes up his own tale. It begins with his early life. “You know, the two phases of my life were like night and day. My MMA career and my personal life were a long way apart when I first got going.” He started as a kid. It was a wild period. “I was born in Portland, Oregon. I got to the seventh grade in high school, but I was at school really because I loved wrestling. It was the only thing that kept me there. I didn’t do much else. I often didn’t go to school anyway.” Restlessness, and lawlessness, occupied his existence.
He joined the army upon leaving school. It wasn’t the answer. Looking back, he admits he was immature. “I was kicked out. I’d joined to wrestle but became an expert marksman, in the airborne. But when it came down to it a little later, they tried to move me away from wrestling and undermine me, in my eyes. I was young and dumb at the time and I packed my bags and left. I feel bad looking back because I visit troops in different places, as a fighter signed with the UFC these days, and I have nothing but a deep respect for the guys in the army and what they do for all of us. Let me apologize to them now – when I was 19 I really was young and dumb.”
To understand Leben’s mindset you have to know how he thinks. “I had such a free will. Growing up I had an elder brother; I love him now but he was very, very mean. My mom was too wrapped up in her own personal issues [his father isn’t mentioned once] and that’s how it was back then. I knew nothing different. Me and my brother were growing up but I had no structure in my life. Through my teen years, I got in when I wanted to, I went out when I wanted to, I went to school when I wanted to, I figured out a way of getting my own clothes and I had developed this attitude through my teens of doing everything my way.” Hardly the right preparation to be corralled into an ultra-disciplined team career in the US forces. “I’ve changed now, but when I joined the army, I don’t think I was ready to change. Maybe I didn’t even have an awareness of myself, how I behaved.”
Then his self-defense mechanism sets in. There’s a degree of self-loathing combined with soul-searching whenever Leben traces his memory banks. “My main inspiration at school revolved around the wrestling team. Even back then, although I had little or no structure in my life, I’d spend extra time training with the team. I loved working on the mat. But I was getting into trouble outside school. At 19 or 20 I wasn’t the smartest kid. I was drinking with guys who were all about 40 years of age, bouncing around a used car sales lot, getting into fights, getting thrown into jail. I was thoroughly unhappy with life. Then one day my brother Tyler got another job, in Gresham, Oregon, and he called me that day telling me I needed to get over there straight away.”
The words formed a harmony that lit Leben up. “Matt Lindland and Randy Couture are beating the shit out of each other at the back of the car lot,” his brother told him. His older brother had happed across the Team Quest headquarters.
In 1997, Dan Henderson, Lindland and Couture were teammates on the US World Greco-Roman Wrestling Team. Soon afterwards, they had founded Team Quest, with their mixed martial arts careers just beginning. “I was district wrestling champion, and I’d kept my wrestling going. I went down there and it was Randy and Matt. You just couldn’t make this stuff up. So I roll in the gym, try and impress and Robert Follis the head coach of Team Quest invites me back the next day. In my mind, my MMA career started then. I quit selling cars that evening. I starting working in construction, for a painting company, went back to college two days a week, and spent three days a week training. Eventually I quit going to college to be at the gym five nights a week. I was getting serious about it. I moved into my best friend’s basement, and lived there for four years. That period really changed my life, launched my dreams and ambitions. Kim, my friend’s mum, was a mother figure for me, in fact she had been all the way through high school. But I never stopped loving my mother, Karen. Every day in that period, I would go into the gym and ask the head coach Robert Follis to get me a fight. Every day. It was the first thing I would say to him. ‘Keep training, and it will come,’ he’d tell me. Six months later, that day arrived. He even told me it was against his better judgment to get me a fight that soon.”
Nor was it a gentle introduction. “My first fight. I was fighting a Greco-Roman state wrestling champion, he was around 230lb, I was selling cars, was 190lb, had no muscles. He was 6' 2" and shredded. I tried the staredown but my bottom lip was quivering, so I just ended up looking down at the ground. Man, I felt dumb. Real emotion. Of course, before the fight, being me, I’ve told everyone I know to come – so they are all there, ‘You know I’m a fighter?’ I’ve been saying for weeks. So everyone comes. In fact, I think it was one of Chael Sonnen’s productions. This was the thing in town that night, and there are 2,500 people there. So I get in there and he throws me straight on my back, and he’s clubbing me. Somehow, I got out of it. I ended up getting a keylock from the mount position, not the most effective, but I win the fight.”
Leben was beside himself. “I was so happy. I jumped out of the cage and I do an interview with Randy Couture. I’m 22 years old and just so overwhelmed by everything: I’m being interviewed post-fight by Randy! – it was the worst interview you’ve ever seen. I can’t talk. In my mind I am now transformed into a superhero. I had won my first fight, class B, at the local show, everyone is smoking and drinking at the side of the cage and I think I’m King Kong. It really makes me smile looking back on that now. Little did I know then what would follow...”
But he had impressed people. Including Randy Couture, although the legendary figure had already taken note of the dedication and work rate of the young upstart. “At the time, Randy said there at cageside that I might be the next thing for the UFC, and I just said, ‘Um... er… yup… mmm...’ I really didn’t know how to answer him. After years of being a freeloader, Robert and Randy were in my life every single day. Literally, after a year of training, I was starting to teach for them. It was a major turnaround in my life. Within the course of that year, I’d committed my life to the sport. I had no desire to do anything else. By the time I’d won my first fight, life had done a 180-degree turnabout and it had put me on the right track. There were lots of life changes, from a kid with zero structure, from a rebel and an outlaw with no respect for authority, to realizing that there were great things and great goals out there. Real life didn’t suck anymore. I didn’t want to get fat. I wanted the discipline the sport could bring.”
Then came the original Ultimate Fighter series. Leben was a hit on television, magnified in the stark light of the Big Brother 24/7 camera crews. A few of his un-ironed creases re-emerged in front of the cameras, and with, one suspects, a degree of clever editing to promote the show. But it proved a hit with the public. Leben was one of the most controversial, and outspoken, characters on the show. His antics started early on. In the first episode, drunk and playful, he urinated on fellow fighter Jason Thacker's bed. After a heated confrontation, Josh Koscheck and Bobby Southworth sprayed Leben down with a hose while he slept. Leben later punched a hole in a window; Koscheck hid. After the confrontation, UFC president Dana White set up a match between Leben and Koscheck. Leben ended up losing the two-round fight by unanimous decision. Koscheck pinned Leben, controlling him on the ground. Leben was visibly upset, especially since Koscheck made no effort to advance his position.
Leben holds no animosity to anyone on the show. Plenty of water has passed under the bridge since then. “The Ultimate Fighter brought a major change in my character in a way that prior to being on the show, if you were outside my bubble, you were the enemy and I was going to bring you down. I think I learned about compassion, that I was a compassionate person in that series. Prior to that, I didn’t really know how to care about people. The way I acted in The Ultimate Fighter also made me reflect on the way I was as a person. Nobody really knows why they fight for a living. I know the sport is now more of a career, there are sponsors, we love it and you can make a good living from it. But I don’t want to get too far away from the truth. Fighters are like strippers – there’s some reason why they have fallen into it.”
Leben’s last two victories have sent him from gatekeeper to contender. All inside two weeks. “You know, that’s the one thing I hate about our sport. You lose two, you’re finished. You win two, you’re the next great thing and the king of the world. Let’s have some perspective… there are so many variables in this sport, it is easy to lose.”
But he does have that granite chin. “Yes, and I do like to use it for my gain. Plus the disadvantage, even psychologically to the other fighter. I do have a larger head than normal, and if I keep my chin tucked in I can take punches because I tend to get hit on the top of the head and on the temples.” Leben does sport obvious grazes on his temples that could confirm this. “I don’t get hit on the chin or the nose that often. When I’m in trouble my instinct is to fight back, so there are some advantages there and I have to use them.”
As someone who now coaches, he loves it when moves come off. “I must have been a coaches’ nightmare. I was told one thing and I’d go out there and do another thing. But that is changing. Fighting the way I was early in my career, brawling my way through, you can beat 95% of the guys out there, but not the top guys. That’s what I want. I look at it differently; I know I have the will to get in there and fight. That’s a given. I know I’ll never quit in there. I’m just like that. Now it’s about technique and sticking to a game plan for this part of my career.”
But one thing still gnaws at him: a UFC title belt. It remains his dream, filling his thoughts. It fuels his gym sessions. He fought and lost to Anderson Silva, the current UFC middleweight belt holder. “I crave having the UFC middleweight title belt around my waist. I have a picture in my mind of me wearing it. Yet I know I have to have the entire skill set and to do so I’m working harder and harder every day. I have to continue to grow and progress, as a fighter, as a person.” For Leben, the journey will not end until he is universally known as the champion. Some journey. Some character.
From TUF House to ‘Big House’: Leben on his 2008 jail stretch
Chris Leben served a sentence of 33 days at Clackamas County jail for failing to complete his probation period on a DUI misdemeanor, which had occurred several years earlier. Serving his time behind bars came about in a peculiar manner.
Leben, prior to June 2008, was due to fly to the UK for UFC 85 to face Michael Bisping. With the outstanding matters still pending, he could not get his passport to fight abroad – and wiped the slate clean with a jail term.
While in Clackamas, Leben experienced one of the most sobering incidents in his life. He explains what happened: “You’ve got nothing to do but talk to people. Many of them in there are from the worst ghetto neighborhoods in Oregon. More are on methamphetamine.
“The inmates there wanted me to show them submission holds. They kept saying that choke holds don’t work. One day I said I’d show them. I had ten or 12 guys around me, all felons, so I showed them the chokehold on one of them and I told him to tap on my leg, and I got him in the choke, and started squeezing, and at first he didn’t tap, he was pretty tough and then, bang, he goes out.
“Their jaws just dropped because they thought he was dead. These are bad guys: but none of them had even seen mixed martial arts moves before. I looked up and there was a closed-circuit camera on us. I was sh*tting my pants over it.
“I dragged him into a cell block and put him into bed. He was out for about 30 seconds, and in that time I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I came in here for 33 days. I’ve choked out guys so many times in training and nothing has ever happened. Please don’t let the worst thing happen now and I get 15 years in here for the guy dying.’
“That was my instant thought, because when you are in there you are scared something is going to happen and you are going to be in there longer. My heart was beating really fast. It was kind of funny, really, because jail made me realize how much I’d changed, how far I’d gone in my life by this time. The DUI had occurred five years earlier. Really, the problem in there was they have nothing to do, most of them are drug addicts with the same story, no one is ever guilty and so many of them are addicted to methamphetamine. Knock on wood, it is one drug that I never, or will ever go near in my life. I know what it did to my family.
“I did lots of reading in jail, talked to lots of guys about their issues, and it made me realize that I was already on another path. MMA was what put me on a real journey in life.”
