Issue 028
August 2007
That’s what the undefeated 27-year-old MMA fighter will tell you. Winning 10 straight fights and the second series of The Ultimate Fighter (TUF) has given Evans the opportunity to live out his dreams, and like any fighter on the rise, his goal will always be gold.
“It’s my aspiration to be a world champion, and that’s what I want to do. More than anything I just want to compete and enjoy myself, and have a great time doing what I’m doing. I have the best job on the Earth, my dad said to me that if you have a job that you love then you never have to work a day in your life”.
Evans is best known for two things – getting on the wrong side of Matt Hughes during the second series of TUF, and brutally knocking out Sean Salmon with a head kick earlier this year – but the well-spoken Michigan resident will find himself in the spotlight come July as he takes on former Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) light heavyweight champion Tito Ortiz, in something of a grudge match.
Ringside antics saw the two engage in a shoving match, and Evans has made his dislike of the Huntington Beach Bad Boy clear from the off. “I don’t put Tito so much on a pedestal that he is that much better than anyone else in that weight class. The thing about fighting is it’s any man’s game, you step into the Octagon and it’s you versus that man”.
“Anything can happen, I don’t care if you’re not even ranked at all against the guy that is number one, anything can happen in a fighting situation. Any man is good enough to fight another. I believe Tito Ortiz has a name, and he has done well for himself in the past, but I think he is a fighter who has just ‘plateaued’. He’s just content to be where he is now”.
The ringside encounter between the two looked simple enough, with Tito posturing up to Evans and then shoving him in the chest, but Rashad revealed to us exactly what it was he said that riled Ortiz so much and almost brought their impending fight forward by a couple of months. “He was trying to get in my head all night. He was walking around, and he was looking and posturing at me, then when I look at him he’d turn away, real immature childish games”.
“So he comes over to me and he sticks his hand out, and I stand up and shake his hand, and he’s like ‘good luck in your fight, and you better watch what you say’. Now if he had just said good luck in your training or good luck in your fight, that’s a different thing”.
“He was like standing over me like he was trying to intimidate me, so I leaned in and I said in his ear ‘listen, I’m a grown-ass man, and just so you know, I’m going to fucking beat you, I’m going to destroy you, you’re a has-been, you’re washed up and you ain’t shit’, and I flinched at him”.
“He kind of looked around and he gave me a push. The only reason why he did that is cos he’s a little uncertain, and why shouldn’t he be? He just lost to Chuck pretty bad and he almost lost to Forrest, the only person he’s really beat that he’s whooped the last three years is Ken Shamrock, and that’s that”.
Rashad isn’t shy about telling people how unimpressed he is with Tito’s character, and though he isn’t taking him lightly, Evans doesn’t rate him too highly as an opponent either. “I don’t think he brings anything I haven’t seen before, I think my training partners are tougher than he is, and I think they’d be a harder fight than he will”.
“I don’t want to take nothing away from the guy but I think mentally he’s just somewhere else, and he hasn’t really changed his fighting style from Tito Ortiz in ’98 or whatever, he’s still the same fighter, and in this game if you don’t change then you’re falling behind”.
Regarding Tito’s ‘fragile’ mental state, Rashad thinks that it is mostly due to his two losses to Chuck Liddell and inability to recapture the title he once held. “He is just content to be the number two, number three fighter. He got his face beat in twice by Chuck, how do you bounce back from that? What do you literally say to prepare yourself, when you wanted to face the champion and you get destroyed, what do you think? Tomorrow’s going to be a better day?”
If you think that Rashad is going to settle for anything but the top spot, then think again. He will have to prove his worth by taking out one of the division’s top fighters, but he understands his own limits and admits that he has far to go.
“I’m just a fighter who is coming up through the rankings, but I have the hunger to be a champion.”
