MMA journalist Nick Peet travels to Oregon to discover the real Chael Sonnen.

As the rain dances on the streets of Tualatin, the suburban city located a few miles southwest of downtown Portland, the Oregon locals race to their vehicles before disappearing into the crisp winter night. Local stores flash off their lights before a crescendo of shutters roll triumphantly to signal the end of the working day. For all but one of Rose City’s favorite sons, it’s time for home.

Working it

Chael Sonnen’s working day has only just begun. After a rare morning off to complete coaching and press commitments, the self-proclaimed ‘UFC world middleweight champion’ is back where he belongs, the Team Quest gym surrounded by sparring partners and coaches. Welcome to the often-secretive world of Team Sonnen.

It’s eight weeks into fight camp and the news of original opponent Mark Munoz having to pull out of the fight due to injury is fresh in the air. But there is absolutely no sense of panic, nobody is ripping up any gameplans or calling around for last-minute replacement sparring partners. Both Sonnen and his entourage are simply going about their daily grind. It seems whether it’s Mark Munoz, Michael Bisping or even current UFC champion Anderson Silva on the horizon, they all get the same Chael Sonnen.

Tonight is sparring, both MMA and a bit of Muay Thai, and the training partners line up like they’re heading to the gallows. Chael, assisted by his partner, Brittany Smith, who is acting as water girl, gets straight down to work. He wraps his hands, warms up by jumping rope and then pads up for the ring. He effortlessly transitions from one thing to the next, all the time working at 100%. Just like when he fights.

“Over the years my training hasn’t changed a whole lot, I train the same way every day,” he says. “I’ve got a birthday coming up, I’m going to be 35, and I don’t even know how that happened… I’ve got fantasies of perhaps one day doing some yoga and stuff like that, as I hear it may help, but time is a big issue and right now I’ve got just enough to get through the workouts each day. 

“Every day I go home so tired and I think I won't be able to do it the next day, but then I get a good night’s sleep and a meal and sure enough I get through one more day, and one more day. Then by the end of the week, when my day off comes, I sit back and think, ‘Gosh, I don’t know how I am going to get through this next week,’ it’s always so difficult. And I don’t control training either. I just turn up and work. It’s up to the coaches to devise my training. It’s not a democracy. We don’t sit around together and they ask what I think. I show up and they’ve already got it figured out.”

Famed for his wrestling prowess inside the Octagon, built on the back of his days as an acclaimed grappler in school, the Chael Sonnen we celebrate today is a million miles away from the one which won his first pro fight back in Vancouver, Washington, in 1997. The wrestler has grown to become one of the world’s greatest mixed martial artists and it’s an evolution that didn’t happen overnight.

“Wrestling doesn’t work the way it used to in MMA anymore. It used to be that if you were a good wrestler you could take the guy down, pin him on the floor and beat him up. But there’s not a lot of techniques from wrestling that work anymore. The defenses are out there and most guys know how to do them. And out of the thousands of moves I know from wrestling only a few of them now apply to MMA. If you look at it like that then, if you’re not a wrestler, you only need a few defenses to shut down a wrestler. So the moves don’t necessarily carry over – but the training does.

Cracking the code

“The work ethic I had when I was younger still applies today. The getting up and doing what you need to do when you don’t feel like it, I’ve had that my entire life. Even the small things you get from growing up in the country. In terms of getting up when the alarm clock goes off, even if you don’t want to; getting out there and giving your word and following through. When you are taking care of animals it’s like going to practice. You can’t just stop, it’s got to be done every day. Just because you don’t feel good, well that poor guy in the barn is still counting on you to bring him some hay or fill his water trough. So I have learned a lot from my environment. Don’t get me wrong, there are, of course, ways to succeed without that but it certainly helped me.

“In training there are definitely a couple of things I do different to anyone else. There are some areas where I think, ‘I’ve cracked the code here.’ I’ve got a couple of secrets that I feel are just that; they’re secrets. And they’ll stay like that. Like, people often ask me, ‘Why is your MMA wrestling more effective than everyone else's?’ and I believe I know the answer to that. It’s a couple of things, nothing deep-rooted, but it’s a couple of things that I spent a lot of time thinking about. And I wanna share it, I’ve got on to something but I think I have some time before other guys catch on. And I’m certainly not gonna help them to catch on, not yet.

“I’m like everyone else, I have holes in my game. I could tell you what they are right now, but it’s not something I wanna share. I’ve got to leave that to my opponents to figure out. But what I can say is that there’s no spot in MMA where I’ve got it locked in. There’s no spot inside the Octagon where I can get to and think, ‘Phew, here I am in the place I wanted the fight to get to. Now it’s all Chael.’ There is no position that I am done with, that I feel I have conquered.”

It’s that drive to succeed, to be the best man he possibly can that led Sonnen into the cage in the first place. Clearly an educated man, he worked as a realtor in his home state and even briefly ran for a seat in the Oregon congress in 2010. But that desire to compete remains the thing that fuels him more than any other.

“I only ever knew wrestling, it remains my passion and my life’s work, MMA was just the closest thing to it and the only thing I could transition into to keep competing. The major downside to wrestling is that you’re done at 23 years old when you graduate. If you want to go into the military and make the Olympic team you can do that, and you can extend your career, but it’s very hard and it’s a landscape that’s also changed so much. Today is much different from 2000 when I was really making my push on an international level. 

“But the main reason I became a wrestler in the first place was to find out who was toughest. Whoever the best wrestler in the world was, was the toughest guy in the world. But that changed when the UFC came around. It became whoever had the UFC title is the toughest guy. So as soon as that came along I had to move into MMA. If I wanted to keep working, to find out if I was the toughest, then I had to make the transition, there really was no choice.”

And it was a decision made so much easier by the quality of talent which had already set up base just minutes away from his home town of West Linn, just a few miles further south of Team Quest headquarters, which was founded by a handful of the most significant stars in mixed martial arts. “I’ve got three guys that I look up to. I’ve got Matt Lindland, Dan Henderson and Randy Couture,” Chael says. “And the expert of those three, specifically regarding training and preparation, is Randy. Randy is the guy that even Matt and Dan look to. He’s the first guy to really break down the training and to put a lot of focus onto the body and the mind. Everybody looks to Randy when it comes to teaching. And these guys opened my eyes to MMA.”

Opening the mind is another Sonnen facet he believes has been imperative to his rise to the very top of the UFC’s superstar roster. Regular sessions with a sports psychologist go hand-in-hand with daily mental routines Sonnen drills, in a similar fashion to the way he hits pads in the gym.

 “I use visualization practices almost daily. From the moment I sign a contract for an opponent I start zeroing in on that opponent. And every night I go to bed thinking about them, visualizing the fight and thinking about different positions. Working out what happens if he shuts my eye, what happens if he breaks my nose, what happens if I break my hand. What if I’m down by two rounds and there’s one left. What if I’m down by one and there’s two left; every different scenario I play through my head every single day.”

While Chael Sonnen the showman is perhaps more familiar to MMA fans than any other fighter, as his legendary outbursts continue to make headlines every day, to discover an athlete who is so meticulous and dedicated to his craft may come as a surprise to some fans that just see him as the most outrageous wrestler in MMA.

Keeping it fresh

Despite what some may say, it’s taken far more than a few choice words and well-crafted insults to get Sonnen to the top dog spot, a rung below Anderson Silva. You certainly don’t beat up the much-heralded world’s ‘greatest mixed martial artists’ for 23 minutes without being a master craftsman yourself. And so, even when it comes to his nutrition, again, Chael relies on one of the very best around to keep him satisfied.

 “I’m only strict with my diet when I have to be,” he reveals. “I only really have to reign it in around 60 days before a weigh-in. And then I get extremely serious about 30 days before. But the rest of the time I eat what I want. You’ve gotta live life and loosen up and enjoy things now and then or all the hard work just isn’t worth it. The one thing on nutrition that people should know is that you’ll never get two nutritionists to agree. Nobody really knows what good nutrition is. Some people will argue against fast food, but there are also diets out there that say you can eat certain fats, including saturated fat, so nobody really knows 100% what is good food and what is bad food. My personal definition is based on what tastes better. Whichever one tastes better that’s the one I’m going to eat.

“I mostly eat fresh foods. If you can get it from a can, a bag or a box I generally stay away from it. A lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables and a lot of lean meats; generally chicken. It’s like anything else, I don’t have to think about my practice and I don’t have to think about my food. I have Mike Dolce who helps me and tells me what to eat. If he’s with me he just prepares the food and brings it to me. I just do what I’m told.

“When I am in preparation for a weigh-in it’s usually white meats, of course, but when I am in the exact opposite of that I love my red meats, covered in sauce and as much blue cheese as I can get my hands on. I do love pasta and all Italian foods for that matter. But I also love Mongolian beef and noodles. That’s probably my favorite nationality for food.”

When he’s not in camp, Sonnen describes himself as “217lb of muscle, steel and sex appeal,” so, not surprisingly, that leaves him a lot to get rid of during camp in order to make the 185lb middleweight limit. He says: “You have two battles you have to do when you fight. You’ve got to beat and win the scale and then you’ve got your opponent to deal with. But first of all it’s a fight. You’ve got to be dedicated because it’s a physical and mental battle to get to the scales, but you’ve just got to do it. That’s prizefighting.”

Postscript: Chael married Brittany in 2013. After defeating Michael Bisping in a title eliminator, Chael lost again to Anderson Silva in a middleweight title fight in UFC 148.

He then moved up a weight to fight Jon Jones for the light heavyweight title but suffer a TKO in the first round.

In 2018 he fought as a heavyweight, defeating Quinton Jackson in Bellator 192. After losing to Lyoto Machida in Bellator 222 Chael announced his retirement from MMA.