Issue 098

This profile of Rich 'Ace' Franklin caught the veteran former UFC middleweight champion in typically ebullient mood, as he talked candidly through the ups and downs of a career that made him one of the most respected and popular fighters in the history of UFC.

Beaming smile, flowing hair, effervescent enthusiasm and shredded to the core – you’d think Rich Franklin’s description was that of a green 22-year-old prospect rather than a fighter steaming into his 40s and with 13 years of cage combat on the clock.

So what is it that keeps ‘Ace’ going? What drives the former UFC middleweight champion to keep returning to the well, pounding his body and then letting it all go inside the Octagon year after year? 

The former math teacher from Cincinnati, Ohio, is not only blessed with youthful good looks, but he also reveals a burning desire to succeed, to continue to improve his craft and to once again claim the title of champion of the world.

After almost a decade of competition in UFC, Franklin’s career résumé reads like a relative who’s who of mixed martial arts greatness: from UFC middleweight supremo Anderson Silva, through to present and future Hall of Famers like Forrest Griffin, Lyoto Machida, Dan Henderson, Ken Shamrock, Chuck Liddell and Wanderlei Silva. Rich Franklin has seemingly become a permanent fixture in the middleweight, and occasionally light heavyweight, divisions.

In a sport where the words 'longevity' and 'career' don't really mix well, Franklin has quickly become one the last remaining pillars that helped build the UFC brand during the early-mid 2000s. At 37 years old, and an increasing number of his peers hanging up their cups daily, Franklin has almost become the last of his breed. Something he's reminded of whenever he speaks to his fans.

“A lot of people talk about me as being one of the guys who really helped build the UFC into what it is. I kind of fall into this category where I don’t feel like I’m quite that old yet, but I run into fans who are like, ‘Oh my gosh Rich Franklin, I’m a huge fan,’” Franklin says, with a smirk on his face that quickly disappears as he finishes his sentence, “and then they’ll say, ‘I grew up watching you.’ You just want to hit them.” 

While Franklin – nicknamed ‘Ace’ for his Jim Carrey-esque looks similar to the actor’s role as Ace Ventura – doesn’t necessarily blame a segment of fight fans for failing to recognize him. Prior to his UFC 147 victory over Wanderlei Silva, a shoulder injury prevented the southpaw from fighting in the Octagon for 16 months, the longest stretch of time off in his career.

But make no mistake, despite his age or inactivity, the former UFC middleweight champion has only one intention left in the sport – and that is to make another run at the 185lb championship that Anderson Silva brutally took from him at UFC 64.

“This is my return, here and now,” says Franklin, whose victory over Silva was the southpaw’s first win since retiring Liddell at UFC 115 two injury-riddled years ago, and improved his overall professional MMA record to 29-6-1.

“Part of me thinks I shouldn’t have to do a ton of work to get there, but the other part says a lot of things have changed so I don’t know how much work they’ll make me do before they actually put me in for a title shot. For my next fight, I really don’t care as long as whoever I fight is pushing me in that direction.”

For a split second against Silva, the only direction Franklin said he felt he was going was down for the count. 'The Axe Murderer' blasted Franklin with a right-handed bomb that floored him in the second round of their bout held in Silva’s native Brazil. While Franklin recovered to hold on for a 49-46 decision on all three judges’ cards — the second time he’s scored a decision win over Silva in his career — he admitted to being on autopilot after the big haymaker in the second stanza.

“That's what happens a lot of times in high adrenaline situations like war, or when somebody is so nervous playing a musical piece in a concert hall that they come off stage and they can’t even remember what happened because they were so soaked in by the moment,” says Franklin, of the fight that marked the 11th time he’s squared off against a current or former UFC or Pride champion.

“That wasn't the case with me, I actually got punched so it's a little different. But you have to train your body to perform the way it’s supposed to perform even if you’re not the one directing it.”

Prior to that grind-it-out performance, Franklin had to direct an injured shoulder through an eight-month rehabilitation process, where, on more than one occasion, he wondered if the injury would signal the end of a stellar career.

“I would say there was probably a few weeks in time where I got a little skeptical because I couldn't redirect my arm real well,” said Franklin, who tore the labrum in his right shoulder during training last fall.

“I couldn't throw an uppercut-hook combination with that arm. I couldn't throw a double hook because the motion was generated in one direction and I had to pull back and regenerate it in the same or different direction. That was really difficult for me for a while and I couldn't do it with any speed at all. I questioned whether I really had taken myself to the point where I can't bounce back from this realistically at 37 years old. It did creep into my head a little bit.”

But a bunch of guys in the various gyms he trains with in Cincinnati kept offering encouragement and Franklin kept on pushing through with strength and mobility exercises that included writing the alphabet with a one-pound dumbbell over his head while lying flat on his back. By the sixth-month point, Franklin had regained “a great deal of movement and strength” in his shoulder, and perhaps, as an added value from the time off, a little perspective on how he wanted to spend his remaining time in the cage.

"I didn’t want to give up on my career, but if somebody came to me and said you could never fight again I think I would be OK with that,” says Franklin, who made his debut with a head-kick knockout some 20 seconds into his first pro fight in West Virginia in 1999.

“I think there was a point in my life where that would have sent me into a depressive state and I don't think I would have known what to do. And I still don't know what I want to do when I'm done fighting, exactly. But at this point I'm old enough, mature enough, and have enough experience having been in sport long enough to know if that happened I would be OK with it. But that time off makes you hungry. Especially at this age when my time is limited. I've got to take advantage of what time I have left.”

But even in the infant stages of his introduction to MMA, when he and his training buddy, Josh Rafferty, (who would later become a contestant on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter) would watch VHS tapes to pick up on moves that they would then try out in a shed in their backyard, Franklin was always focused on becoming the best fighter he could be.

“God has blessed me with the work ethic where if I really become passionate about something, my passion becomes near obsession,” Franklin says. “That’s exactly what happened in fighting. I was going to college, doing martial arts just for fun. But I’m one of those guys where if I do something, I’m all-in or I’m not. I don’t like wasting my time with things.

“It ended up being that MMA was all I was doing during college. I’d go to class, come home and train all day. I didn’t hang out. I didn’t party. So that’s what I did, I took a fight and it kind of snowballed into something from there.”

Franklin – who weighed 155lb and was undersized in high school was quite successful in his first underground bout, winning with a knee to the gut after toying with a lesser opponent for a couple of minutes – but Rafferty quickly realized the two would never reach the next level without increasing their quality of training.

Rafferty traveled to the other side of Cincinnati and met decorated grappling guru Jorge Gurgel and invited Franklin to come with him and check the Brazilian out.

“We had a small group of fighters at the time who had been working out where it was a lot of stuff where one guy would see something on tape and another saw this on tape and bring it in,” Franklin says. “But our jiu-jitsu knowledge was very limited. We were only educated to this level, so we could only think up to that level. You miss little nuances on things, like your wrist being here or here, little stuff like that you don’t see in the moves on tape.

“When I came to Jorge’s, basically I had a decent foundation for somebody at the time who had good athleticism and excellent work ethic, which carried me a long way. Still I had tons of holes in my game. Jorge took a lot of the stuff at the time and made things that I was doing a lot better, a lot crisper, and a lot cleaner. 

“Since then just the amount of jiu-jitsu he’s taught me I can’t even describe … it’s immeasurable. That’s been an ongoing relationship the last 10 years of my life.”

While Franklin’s well-documented backstory of how he was a high school math teacher by day and fighter by night makes for a perfect Hollywood script (currently one is making the rounds in Tinseltown), he says the evolution of both the sport and advanced knowledge and training methods available for up-and-coming fighters would make replicating a similar path as his much more difficult nowadays.

He says: “I don’t have any kind of background. I wasn’t a boxing champion, or kickboxing champion or wrestling champion. I was just one of those guys who started doing mixed martial arts and was doing jiu-jitsu, wrestling, a whole mix of stuff and was able to put it all together and turn it into a career. People that read my story probably thought that they could do the same thing.

“But now there’s such a volume and influx of fighters trying to make it, that it gets really, really difficult to turn somebody’s head. I’m kind of glad I came up when I did. I was still fighting as an amateur and even in some pro fights at a time when weight classes didn’t exist, and he ruling system wasn’t under the unified system that it is today and that kind of stuff. It was a different time. If you and your buddy were sitting in the shed of your house and watching tapes and training like we did, that’s not gonna happen anymore.”

Around the same time as his introduction to Gurgel, Franklin recognized the importance of training with other specialized coaches. He’s trained in Muay Thai with Neal Rowe for a number of years and taken his boxing advice from Rob Radford.

The strategy proved rather successful, as Franklin went undefeated in his first 14 fights. Despite a loss to Lyoto Machida, he bounced back with eight straight wins – including a TKO victory over Evan Tanner, to claim the UFC middleweight belt at UFC 53 in 2005.

But after a second brutal beating at the hands of Anderson Silva in front of his own Ohio fans at UFC 77 in October 2007, Franklin figured he needed to take a new look, if not approach, to his training. 

“After I lost to Silva the second time, I started talking to my manager about getting a fresh perspective on some things. Not that I was unhappy with my coaching staff, just sometimes you want to get an outsider to look in,” says Franklin, who enlisted the help of submission wizard Matt Hume and his team at American Martial Arts Center (AMC) in Kirkland, Washington.

“The first time we worked together he came down to Cincinnati. I was just so impressed. He’s unbelievable. His knowledge base and what he’s capable of doing is unreal. I still believe Matt could possibly be a UFC champion. His technique… he’s just that good.”

And while Franklin hasn’t been as frequent a customer of Hume’s skill-set in the flesh in recent camps because of the distance from Cincy to Seattle, he still manages to touch base with the trainer over the phone. “I learned so much from Matt. Sometimes I’ll just call him up and pick his brain about this and that,” Franklin says. “Just a way to get a fresh perspective. He’s an encyclopedia of fight technique.”

During his time with Hume, Franklin alternated between strength and conditioning methods between hometown coach Mike Ferguson and AMC’s Joel Jamieson. Despite slight differences in each trainer’s approach, the basic foundations and year-round game plan is what has allowed Franklin to take so many fights on short notice.

“They both know their stuff, but one is old school and one is the new age of thought. Joel is very scientific about his training, and he talks about periodization. It’s the same kind of thing with Mike and his own beliefs,” states Franklin, who says his strength training doesn’t differ much whether he’s fighting at 205lb or 185lb.

“When I’m not getting ready for a fight it’s a lot of heavier lifting, a lot of explosive stuff. Resting in between so I maximize the benefits of the lift and all that kind of stuff.

“Then as the fight approaches the heavier lifting starts to subside and you get into the fight specifics, with more endurance-type lifting and speed-lifting. It basically stays the same for both weight classes."

What has changed the most over the years is Franklin’s approach to nutrition. Even as a skinny senior at Harrison High School in Harrison, Ohio, Franklin understood the importance of a solid nutrition plan thanks in part to an in-depth school project that tracked his daily caloric intake.

“I did analysis for all the food I ate for a week and then did a presentation on it during my senior year. Afterwards, I thought to myself, 'My nutrition is terrible,'” says Franklin, recalling the memory.

His food consumption might not have gotten a lot cleaner during college, as Franklin confesses he could have probably been a champion in a number of food-eating challenges, but his body did start to develop as he packed on 30lb to his six-foot-one frame during his freshman year.

Franklin said after turning pro he became more disciplined about his diet, but it wasn’t until the death of his father four years ago from a heart attack, that the true importance of nutrition hit home.

“I talked to my dad all the time until I was blue in the face about living healthier, exercising, being more active, proper nutrition and all those things,” says Franklin, who now runs a website, acesway.com, that focuses on holistic nutrition.

“My dad was just a product of the kind of people who eat fast food all the time, and drink sodas and was overweight and had high blood pressure. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack at the age of 56. Now that my dad has passed away, nutrition has more of a personal meaning to me. I’m one of those guys who could sit here and talk all day about nutrition and stuff. It’s just something I love to talk about and love to read about and everything,” continues Franklin, who says while he’s definitely not a vegetarian, he couldn’t live without his “green drink” every morning — a kale, spinach and fruit smoothie.

After more than a decade in the sport, Franklin seems to have every part of his MMA gameplan figured out except his exit strategy. “Not yet,” he admits. “About the only time I think about it is when I get asked about it. Especially now that I’ve gotten older, I’m a day-by-day kind of guy. I could wake up tomorrow and say I want to retire. 

“Or it could be five years from now. I doubt it will be five years from now because I’ve always said I don’t want to be fighting into my 40s. Who really knows? I just believe that one morning I’m going to wake up and be like, ‘I’m good. I’ve done all that I wanted to do in this sport, now I can do something else.’ But I really can’t think of anything I’d rather do than fighting right now. There’s nothing where I’m like, ‘Oh I want to do this, so it’s time for me to walk away from fighting.’ I still really enjoy what I do.” It looks like Ace Franklin’s own Hall of Fame induction day can wait.

Afterword

Sadly, Ace was only to have one more fight, a first-round loss by TKO to Cung Le. He decided to call it a day with a 29-7 win record, 15 of those wins by knockout. Ace remains involved with UFC, as vice president of MMA company ONE Championship.