COURAGE IN THE CAGE II: Chael's War Within

“I was tapping when I got tired. I was giving up on myself."

Mixed martial artists fight a war on two fronts.

The first is waged against their opponent under the bright lights of the fight arena. The second front is the battle that rages behind each fighter’s eyes, against their own self-doubt.

Three-time UFC title challenger CHAEL SONNEN is our guide on the battlefield of the mind in this second chapter of “COURAGE IN THE CAGE”...

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Chael Sonnen knew he was underachieving. It was the summer of 2006 and the 29-year-old had been cut by the UFC following two defeats in three bouts with the top MMA promotion.

It was a humid night in Portland, Oregon, and Sonnen found himself scrolling through his MMA record on Sherdog.com. He was torturing himself with the could-haves and should-haves of the eight career losses he had against 16 wins and one draw.

That’s when he noticed the pattern in his defeats.

“I knew it was going to be difficult but I needed to have that talk with myself,” Sonnen began. “Either I wasn’t as good as I felt was or I was getting something wrong. My record made it obvious: I was losing a lot in the second, usually to submissions and always in fights where I’d dominated the opening round.”

In fact, both of his UFC losses - to Renato Sobral and Jeremy Horn - came via submissions in the second minute of the second round.

“I knew this couldn’t be a coincidence,” he said. “Something was happening when I tired. I was giving up on myself.”

The words ‘Fatigue makes cowards of us all’ are often attributed to US football legend Vince Lombardi but, in fact, were coined by General George S Patton. Lombardi almost certainly came across Patton’s mantra while serving as a coach at West Point but, however the saying entered pop culture, there’s no doubt exhaustion is particularly corrosive to courage and willpower.

Sonnen said: “It can be so hard to keep fighting when you know part of you will be okay if you stopped. And MMA has so many easy ways out. No-one blames you for tapping to chokes. It’s not like taking a dive in boxing, where the guy in the back row can see the punch missed. No one can call you a quitter; only you know what happened.

“When you are tired and you’ve still got two rounds to go, that’s when your mind plays tricks on you. Allowing your opponent to take your back or leaving your neck out a second too long is so seductive...”

A desperate Sonnen confided in his Team Quest training partners; he was surprised and encouraged that they knew exactly what he was talking about. George St-Pierre recommended a sports psychologist who’d helped him in the past.

“That was big for me,” Sonnen explained. “I thought it was just me this was happening to, just weird Chael stuff, but the psychologist had heard it all before. He told me the second round was when I was taking “inventory” – I would want an outcome to be reached for a split second more than I cared whether that outcome was a win or a loss.”

The problem thus identified, Sonnen began working on solutions.

He said: “It took a while but I learned thoughts and feelings are bullshit. They don’t matter in a fistfight. The only thing that mattered was what I did physically – punch the guy, take him down, keep his ass down, get up when I needed to. What I did mattered, what I felt while doing it didn’t.

“The judges weren’t going to interview me between rounds and see if I had a positive mental attitude. The judges were scoring the fight based on what I was doing physically; nothing else. So I began ignoring (my emotions) and focused on three physical actions. One: hands up. Two: walk forward. And Three: fight!”

The effect on Sonnen’s results was immediate, if not entirely consistent.

“It gave me what I needed,” he said. “That’s when I went on my run. A lot of nights it was enough to beat the tops guys out there. I beat Paulo Filho, Yushin Okami, Nate Marquardt, Brian Stann, Michael Bisping and Shogun Rua with that.”

Sonnen is especially proud of the mettle he displayed against Bisping in their grueling, fast-paced three rounder on January 28, 2012.

“Bisping is relentless,” Sonnen said. “He doesn’t give you a moment to catch your breath. He’s just on you, on you, on you every second. There were moments in the second round when I was fading. I remember hearing my mom yelling for me to get off the cage and thinking ‘Yeah, yeah, in a minute, mom.’

“In the third I was so tired I was down to one idea – just get on top of him. That’s all I had left in me. And I managed to do that. That was a big win for me.”

Some nights, though, the echoing doubts inside Chael’s head were harder to ignore.

Sonnen used his first round losses to Rashad Evans (TKO, UFC 167, November 16, 2013) and Tito Ortiz (submission, Bellator 170, January 21, 2017) as examples of just not having “it” on the night.

“I never showed up against Rashad and I never showed up against Tito,” Sonnen said. “I lost it – whatever ‘it’ is - in the locker room. It happens. Almost everyone goes through it. I remember sitting next to Phil Davis on the in the bus on the way to UFC on FOX 2. He was fighting Rashad and I was fighting Bisping. And I said to Phil ‘Only other fighters know what’s going on in our heads right now’ and Phil nodded and laughed.

“Phil said: ‘It’s a crazy thing we are volunteering to do tonight’ and he was so right. It’s a crazy thing to do for money, fight in a cage. And sometimes you show up and you can’t get how crazy it is out of your mind.”

For Sonnen, the definition of a real fighter is someone who shows up on the night with this storm of self-doubt raging in their minds, and fights anyway.

He added: “I was lucky – I figured it out and went on a good run. There were nights where I showed up and didn’t have it. There were other nights where I had it and lost it – the big one being against Anderson Silva the first time (where Sonnen dominated until literally the 24th minute of the UFC middleweight title fight).

“But I’ve gone through it a lot more than I got caught going through it. Most of the times I got caught was during practice. And those are the days you raise your hand to the coach and go sit out on the sidelines for a while. There are very talented guys out there who never broke in the gym, but break every time when it matters.

“Once I figured it out, I didn’t break often. But it is very, very rare for any of us to be able to get it right night after night. Only a few can – Anderson, Jon Jones, Fedor - and I wasn’t one of them.

“But, I tell myself, I had my nights where it would have taken a hell of a lot to break me. I did a lot with that.”

Oh, yes he did.

In the next COURAGE IN THE CAGE, Forrest Griffin explains the amazing process known as the acute stress response, which turns fighters’ bodies into war machines.

If you missed Part One of COURAGE IN THE CAGE, with Rashad Evans, click here.

THE ULTIMATE INSIDER will change gears later this week with a Mark Coleman tale guarantee to give you nightmares. You’ve been warned…

And if you need more MMA reading before then, the latest Whizzered column on Jon Jones is well worth your time.