Iceman: My Fighting Life

by Chuck Liddell

  I moved out to Vegas in September, just after I had bought a new house. And I wasn’t thrilled about taking off for two full months of being locked down in corporate housing. I was going to miss my kids, my house, my life in San Luis Obispo. I also finally understood why my friends who live in Vegas are always telling me living there sucks. Friends come to visit constantly, and for them, visiting Vegas is usually several days of strip clubs, bars, and not sleeping. But living there is different. I would tell my friends that I’d take them out, get them in where they wanted to go, but then they were on their own. I had to go home and get up in the morning.

  Like everything else in the UFC, we were working without a script. Literally. The first day that we showed up at the training center to start shooting, we had no clue what we were going to do. Same was true for the next day and the next. We were still trying to figure out who these contestants were and whether they really were great fighters. Dana found one guy, Kenny Florian, after he lost an MMA fight in Revere, Massachusetts. This was reality in every sense of the word. Nothing about this show started off looking slick or packaged.

  The rules for the guys in the house were pretty simple: You couldn’t do anything. You want to create some tension in a house real fast? Put sixteen amped-up amateur fighters in there and tell them they can’t watch TV, read books, listen to music, or go out. The only thing they can do is stare at each other, eat, and think about fighting. Otherwise, as Dana once told Playboy, “It’s not good television. You don’t want to tune in and see these idiots sitting around watching TV for eight hours or reading books. It’s not easy. It starts to drive them crazy. Imagine me and you in a house together every day, training against each other and knowing that eventually we have to fight each other. These guys start to get on one another’s nerves. They’ve got fifteen roommates, and the house is a mess because no one does the dishes. All these things build up.”

  Me, Randy, and Dana from season one of The Ultimate Fighter. Team Liddell was strong, but we had some tension in the house. We’re fighters, for God’s sake.

  It didn’t take long either. On the first night in the house—which was stocked with beer and liquor—several of the guys got drunk. One of them, Chris Leben, whose story line of instability dominated the first half of the season, actually pissed on another guy’s bed while the guy was in the bathroom showering. Randy and I woke the guys at five the next morning; they had all slept around three hours, and some of them were still drunk, and we put them through a hellish workout. Guys were puking in buckets on the mat. They were hitting themselves in the side of their stomach to work out cramps rather than stop running. It was pure anguish, but also great television. These guys, like a lot of fighters, lived to the extreme. They pushed themselves to the brink when they were having a good time and past it when they were training. Eventually we had them working out more than four hours a day. In fact, that’s all they were doing, which helped ratchet up the tension in the house.

  Later in the show a light heavyweight named Stephen Bonnar, who was hysterically funny, got mad at a middleweight, Diego Sanchez, who was just plain weird, for cutting off asparagus tips and leaving the stalks behind. Diego’s response: “I don’t know what asparagus is.” (Before one fight Diego practiced yoga in a rainstorm because he thought he could harness the electricity from the clouds.) Another guy walked around in tight shorts that barely covered his ass and slathered himself in baby oil. These guys got bored, fast. So bored that Forrest Griffin had some of his roommates actually punching him in the face…for fun.

  We had them doing some crazy stuff, too. Once they were broken down into two teams—Team Couture and Team Liddell—we’d take them into the Mojave Desert for some challenges. The first pitted my light heavyweights versus Randy’s. They had to carry us through an obstacle course while we were sitting in heavy recliners. They had to paddle a kayak across a dry lake bed, filling their boat with weights as they went along. They had to work as a team to carry a telephone pole from one spot to another, then saw it into four pieces, clamp the pieces back together, and carry it back. For those first few challenges, a person was eliminated from whichever team lost.

  But, as I wrote, we were working without a script. And this was a show about fighting, not about stupid stunts in the middle of the fucking desert. We decided after one of the early challenges that each show should end with a fight between someone from the team that won the challenge and someone from the team that lost. Loser goes home. You’d think these guys would be dying to get into the cage and go at each other. But no one expected they’d actually be fighting until the finals of the show. The truth was, we didn’t even know if they’d be fighting.

  On the day the producers told the contestants they were going to step into the cage, Dana was in meetings with potential sponsors for the show. But Lorenzo Fertitta had stopped by to see what was going on. He listened as a producer explained there would be a fight after the next challenge. Before she could finish, the guys were asking how much they were going to get paid. She said, “You’re not getting paid. You’re fighting for a contract in the UFC. That’s it.” That didn’t sit well. I believe the response from one of the guys was “Screw that. We ain’t fighting. We get paid to fight.” Here was the problem: The Contender, the show starring Sylvester Stallone and Sugar Ray Leonard, had just started airing on NBC right before we put everyone together. The season was three episodes old when our guys moved into the house in Vegas, and by then they knew that the boxers on The Contender were getting paid $25,000 per fight on the show. When they learned they’d be fighting for free on our show, well, they grumbled.

  That made Lorenzo nervous. He called Dana and said, “What’s going on down here?”

  “What’s going on where?” Dana answered.

  “I’m on the set. And all these guys are saying they are not going to fight unless they get paid.”

  “Dude, I am on my way down there. And I guarantee you they are fighting.”

  All the guys had gone back home and were griping about fighting for free. Then, at 10:00 P.M., Dana called me, Randy, and the fighters back to the training center. Dana’s a stocky guy with a shaved head who, even though he’s not a fighter, would challenge any of these guys in a second. He’s perfectly suited for his role as carnival barker of the UFC. That night, he gave a speech that is still written about in the dozens of UFC blogs. It’s called the “Do You Want to Be a Bleeping Fighter?” speech. Here’s how it goes:

  “Gather around, guys, get close over here,” Dana said after walking into the gym. “I’m not happy right now. I haven’t been happy all day. I have the feeling that some guys here don’t want to fight. I don’t know if that’s true or not true or whatever, but I don’t know what the bleep everyone thought they were coming here for. Does anybody here not want to fight? Did anybody come here thinking they were not going to fight? No? Speak up. Anyone who came here thinking they were not going to fight, let me hear it. Let me explain something to everybody. This is a very, and when I say very, I can’t explain to you what a unique opportunity this is. You have nothing to bleeping worry about every day except coming and getting better at what supposedly you want to do for a living. Big deal, the guy sleeping next to you bleeping stinks or is drunk all night making noise and you can’t sleep. You got bleeping roommates. We picked who we believe are the best guys in this country right now. We did. And you guys are it. Bleeping act like it, man. Do you want to be a fighter? That’s the question. It’s not about cutting weight. It’s not about living in a bleeping house. It’s about do you want to be a fighter. It’s not all bleeping signing autographs and banging broads when you get out of here. It’s no bleeping fun. It’s not. It’s a job, just like any other job. So the question is, not did you think you had to make weight. Did you think you had to do this. Do you want to be a bleeping fighter? That is my question. And only you know that. Anybody who says they don’t, I don’t bleeping want you here. I’ll throw you the bleep out of this gym so bleeping fast your ble
eping head will spin. It’s up to you. I don’t care. Cool? I love you all, that’s why you’re here. Have a good night, gentlemen.”

  Then he walked out the door. The next day he promised that any fighter who knocked a guy out or forced him to submit would get a $5,000 prize. And the question of these guys getting paid for fighting wasn’t an issue anymore.

  CHAPTER 37

  WE’RE FIGHTERS. A LOT OF US HAVE ISSUES.

  THIS SHOW WAS JUST LIKE ANY JOB. DANA CALLED us back to the training center for speeches at 10:00 P.M. and meetings at noon. We were training these guys twice a day, and we went for fifty-eight days straight. No one trains that many days in a row. I was responsible for someone else’s schedule, seven days a week, and was on call whenever I wasn’t at the training center. One night during taping, Antonio was fighting in Reno. I had arranged for a plane to take a bunch of us from Vegas to see him fight. But Dana and the producers told me I couldn’t go. I wasn’t allowed to leave lockdown, even to see one of my guys fighting. All for a show no one was sure would air anywhere.

  The only time we saw footage of the show was when Chris, the kid who pissed on a roommate’s bed the first night, was nearly kicked off.

  After the guys had been in the house a few weeks and were going stir-crazy, Dana decided to take everyone out for dinner and to get drunk. Some guys drank more than others. Chris, Josh Koscheck, and Bobby Southworth certainly did. Chris and Koscheck, both middleweights, had been ripping each other the entire show. They clearly hated each other. Southworth, a light heavyweight, and Koscheck were best friends in the house. Late that night Southworth started going at Leben, eventually telling him he was a “fatherless bastard.” Up until that point Chris had never backed down and usually instigated every confrontation in the house. But Bobby crushed him. Chris just put his head down and started crying. He was so upset he couldn’t even sleep in the house. Instead he took his blanket and went to sleep on the front lawn. That’s when Koscheck and Southworth decided to fuck with him some more. While he was sleeping, they turned on the hose and sprayed him.

  Every fighter needs to warm up before a fight—even a champion.

  This sent Leben over the edge. He punched a hole through the glass in the front door, slicing off the skin on his knuckles, then tore down one of the bedroom doors. Blood was all over the wall and splattered on the floor. It was nasty.

  Of course, Dana got a call about the incident around seven in the morning. Then he called Randy and me into the training center. This is what overnight-summer-camp counselors must feel like. We talked about kicking Koscheck off the show, and about kicking Southworth off, too. When we got to Leben, though, I didn’t think he deserved it. He needed a thicker skin for sure. UFC opponents will do worse things than call you a “fatherless bastard” and pour water on you. But, as I told Dana, “Chris has issues. But who doesn’t? We’re fucking fighters. A lot of us have issues.”

  Then we decided to settle it the way we settle everything else: in the cage. Koscheck versus Leben. Too bad for Chris. Koscheck, a former NCAA wrestling champ, got him on the mat and never let him up.

  Despite the workload, which I wasn’t used to at all, working the show had its benefits. It reminded me of one of the things I love about mixed martial arts, which was teaching younger guys. I was their coach, and I started to feel protective of them, which led to some intense screaming matches with producers. Before one fight, the tape guy—the one who wraps up a fighter’s hands before he puts on his gloves—showed up late. By the time he was done, my fighter barely had a chance to warm up before a producer was in the dressing room telling him he had to go out and fight. Now, these fights weren’t live. They could have waited a few more minutes for him to finish preparing. He was the one who was competing for his life, not the producer. So I told her he wasn’t ready, and she lost it on me, as if I were one of the production assistants. I’m a grown man, you can’t talk to me like that. Besides, I told her, I was hired to teach these guys how to fight and to take care of them. I’m going to defend them as if they were fighting for me and Hack at The Pit. When she still wouldn’t back down, I finally said to her, “Okay. Go talk to the guys who pay for the show and ask who they want, you or me.” That ended the fight. And my guy got to finish his warm-up.

  Most of us in the UFC stick up for each other because, except for jackasses such as Tito and Vernon White, we are a collegial group. We help each other when we train, teach each other new moves, explain how to improve various aspects of each other’s game. We respect everyone who is giving it a go, no matter how talented he is. That’s because so many guys who study martial arts do it for reasons other than wanting to kill people with their hands. They’re interested in pushing themselves, taking on a challenge to learn as much as they can in sports that are thousands of years old and constantly evolving. The jujitsu specialists or karate experts in the UFC still have a passion for those disciplines that moves them to teach, even if they’re helping someone who may one day be an opponent.

  It was the same way with these guys. The strikers gave tips to the grapplers. The wrestlers taught kickboxers how to sprawl and avoid takedowns. Submission guys explained how to break out of choke holds. When those guys faced each other in the cage, they wanted to kill each other. But when they were on the mat at the training center, they were as concerned with helping each other as they were with helping themselves. I don’t know that every sport is like that.

  There were two other positive side effects: First, all the downtime allowed me to have my knees examined. I had torn the MCL in one knee before the first Randy fight, and the other one had been nagging me for a long time. The doctor told me that a decade earlier he would probably have put me under the knife to fix them both. Now, he said, I could just ice it aggressively and be fine. By my doing ice baths after every workout, my knees were pain-free for the first time in years.

  Second, halfway through shooting, I started dating the show’s host, Willa Ford. It happened by accident. Willa wanted to go out, but she wasn’t allowed to hang out with any of the fighters. So Dana told me to take her out and show her a good time. Pretty soon we were together all the time. The show wasn’t even picked up yet, but I was already reaping the benefits of being on television. My girlfriend was a pop star whose biggest hit was called “I Wanna Be Bad.” She was one of Maxim’s one hundred hottest chicks and a future Playboy model. When we finally got to go out with the fighters on the show the last night of taping, we all ended up in a strip club. Willa was pretty loaded, and somehow the guys coaxed her onto the stage to do a dance. While she was letting loose to “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” her shirt was ripped off by one of the dancers. A stripper said to her, “Nice tits.” Willa answered, “Thanks, you, too.”

  Really, I didn’t have much to complain about.

  CHAPTER 38

  SOMEONE UP THERE HAS A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOR

  AS SOON AS THEY STARTED EDITING THE SHOW, Dana says he knew it was gold. Now he just had to sell it. Luckily, as much as the UFC lived by an oh-screw-it mentality, so did a TV network geared toward the UFC’s audience: Spike TV.

  Spike was like one of those lad magazines come to life. It branded itself as the “first network for men,” and it launched with a party at the Playboy mansion. In the beginning it aired adult-oriented cartoons and reruns of The A-Team as well as Pamela Anderson classics such as Baywatch and V.I.P. Spike even copied the Maxim and FHM model of the Hot 100 issues and aired an original special called The 100 Most Irresistible Women.

  The network—which began as the Nashville Network in 1983 and then became the forgettable TNN before being renamed Spike in 2003—could afford to take chances. So few people were watching and its programming was so targeted, if one of its shows drew 1.5 million viewers—hit shows such as Grey’s Anatomy pull in between 20 and 30 million—it was considered a huge hit, especially with advertisers. There’s not a more coveted group for the guys selling stuff than men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Luckily for
the UFC, those are our fans.

  Spike had had success airing pro wrestling. And in yet another stroke of good luck, Spike’s contract with the WWE was coming to an end in the middle of 2005. Rumors were that it wasn’t going well. If the network was looking for something to get on the cheap and hope it could pick up where wrestling left off, The Ultimate Fighter was a nice alternative. So when Dana came by with a show that featured roommates peeing in each other’s bed, guys punching out windows and doors, and real fights in which guys were bloodied and then sent home, how could they resist? Especially since Dana and the Fertittas had paid for it all, which meant it would cost Spike nothing. They agreed to put it on the air in January 2005. It was a barter deal, which meant they provided the airtime, but Dana had to find the advertising. For the first two shows, almost no one wanted to buy a piece of it.

  The network had pretty low expectations. It didn’t do any promos for the show. And most of the reviews that came in were filed under the “other new shows” category. Only the papers from towns that had fighters on the show—such as the Boston Globe (Alex Karalexis, Kenny Florian, Chris Sanford) or the Augusta Chronicle (Forrest Griffin)—gave full write-ups. Even then, it was about the fighters defending the sport, explaining that the days of bare-knuckle brawling were over. From the inside it always seemed as if we were making headway into the mainstream, then the media would write stories like that and we’d be reminded that most people still thought of us as nothing more than thugs.