COURAGE IN THE CAGE, Part I: Rashad & the Iceman
"I was half scared to death of Chuck Liddell"
TV commentators applaud “courageous” golf putts. Sportswriters fawn over ‘brave’ performances on the soccer field.
In mixed martial arts — where genuine heroics are an entry level requirement — such words have become taboo. We talk of ‘gritty performances’ and ‘gutsy competitors’ in a sport where life and limb are risked.
For fans, the chance to see real physical bravery is a fundamental attraction of combat sports. For fighters, the ability to summon it for the duration of a fight is as vital as possessing a well-rounded skill set or athletic ability.
And yet, of the three, courage is the least discussed; and so it is the least understood.
In a new ongoing series - COURAGE IN THE CAGE - ANT EVANS explores this important but supposedly off-limits subject.
You’ll hear legendary fighters use words like “afraid” & “scared.” They will reveal fantasies of faking injuries to avoid fights and confess to tapping to holds they could have escaped. They will detail the halting reconstruction of their confidence after knockout defeats and the lies they tell themselves order to climb inside the cage again.
Fighters get afraid. What makes them so special, what makes them our heroes in the first place, is that they seek out and conqueror those fears.
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In mid-2008 Rashad Evans was a promising unbeaten contender in the UFC’s light heavyweight division. But he was a nearly three to one underdog going into his showdown with ex-champion Chuck Liddell.
A lot of people felt “Suga” simply wasn’t ready for what would be coming his way in the main event of the UFC 88 pay-per-view.
You may be surprised to learn that Evans was one of them.
“I was half scared to death of Chuck Liddell,” Evans remembers. “Reporters—actually not just reporters but guys in the gym—were like “Ooooh, you fightin’ The Iceman? Um, yeah, good luck?’”
Evans was a bag of nerves by the time he reached the front desk of the UFC 88 host hotel in Atlanta. It was Tuesday, September 2, four days before his showdown with one of MMA’s most intimidating punchers. After waking in the middle of the night get to the airport for his flight, Rashad just wanted to get into his hotel room and lay down for a few hours.
“But the lady behind the desk couldn’t get a good swipe of my credit card for incidentals,” Evans recalled. “It was taking forever to check in. We’d got there at the same time as maybe nine other fighter camps, we were all checking in at the same time. It’d taken a long time to get to the front of the line and I was tired and getting frustrated as the lady kept trying to run my card.
“Then a big arm reaches past me, hands the lady a credit card and says ‘use this.’ I turned round and it’s Chuck Liddell! He goes ‘I got you, Rashad. You shouldn’t be worrying about this now.’”
Liddell told me he was merely being nice. But he’d achieved by accident what many fighters seek by design: The Iceman had unnerved his opponent.
“I was like, how the hell can this guy be so calm right now,” Evans said. “This guy is so unconcerned about me fighting him that he’s doing me favors helping me relax?”
Evans’s confidence unraveled as fight week sped by. Each day brought new interviews for the UFC’s cameras, for the media in the hotel and on the phone to early AM radio shows in between bites of breakfast. And every question sounded the same: Do you really think you are ready to face the biggest star in the UFC?
Around 9pm the night before the fight, Rashad found himself alone in his hotel room. He’d been taken hostage by his own dark thoughts.
“Mentally, I was breaking,” he said. “I was thinking, yeah, they’re all right - I don’t have a chance. I stood in front of a mirror, one of those long mirrors near the door of the hotel room, and I couldn’t remember why I ever thought I had a chance. I freaked out. I’d lost the fight the night before it even happened.
“I had to get out of my own head. I needed to get out of that room and talk to someone.”
Already embarrassed by his coaches’ tough love intervention to make him eat following the weigh-in (Four more bites, Rashad, four more. C’mon!), the desperate light heavyweight texted mentor and friend Randy Couture, who was in town for the event.
“I’m in room 918,” Couture replied. “Let’s talk.”
Rashad rode the elevator to Randy’s room and dramatically flopped down on Couture’s bed.
“Ohh, Randy, I’m sooooo scaaaaaared!,” Evans bellowed in a comical voice. Couture chuckled at the performance, but understood there was genuine anxiety behind the self-deprecating humor. The five-time UFC champion knew the storm of emotion and doubt the young fighter was going through.
Settling into an armchair by the window, Couture told Evans there were two reasons his nerves were aflame. First, he was scared of getting knocked out and hurt and, second, he was fearful of the public humiliation that would inevitably follow.
“And you should be scared, Rashad,” Couture finished, “because both those things could happen tomorrow night.”
Evans was aghast.
“I’m just looking at Randy like ‘What kinda morbid-ass pep talk is this?’ But Randy goes on and says he guaranteed me—from his own experience—that getting knocked out by Liddell wouldn’t be the end of the world. My family would still love and be proud of me. I’d still get paid. My career wouldn’t be over and, day by day, I’d get over it. Yeah, it would suck for a while, Randy said, but life would be good again.
“Randy said making friends with the worst outcome would stop me from worrying about it and let me focus on the best outcome.”
Forty minutes later, ‘Suga’ flipped on the lights in his own hotel room.
He threw off his shirt and squared up the full length mirror. He was ready to fight, and beat, the opponent he had to conquer before even getting to UFC 88: Himself.
“I don’t give a fuck!” he spat at his own reflection. The words came from somewhere deep inside. “I don’t give a FUCK! You hear? I DON’T GIVE A FUCK!”
Couture, a revered figure even among fellow fighters, had given Rashad permission to stop feeling ashamed of his fear. As we’ll see in this series, ‘Suga’ wasn’t the first or the last fighter to feel the euphoric freedom of looking fear in the face and saying: Do your worst, I’m still going to do my best.
Evans remembers “I swore to myself that, fuck it, if I was getting knocked out I was gonna make damn sure Liddell felt me first. Chuck Liddell was gonna feel me! Every time that MFer threw at me, I was gonna throw back with all I got! Every single time!”
The walk to the octagon 22-hours later was the calmest of Evans’s career.
“I was still scared, but I wasn’t scared that I was scared anymore,” is how Rashad remembers it. “I was going do my thing. This was my show! My anxiety, nerves – all that - were just along for the ride.”
The fighter kept his promise to himself - he fired fastball powershots when Liddell advanced. In the second minute of the second round, Rashad countered with a thunderbolt right hand + left hook combination that knocked Liddell out cold. All these years later, it remains one of the most dramatic finishes in UFC history.
“It may not have gone down like that if I hadn’t talked to Randy,” Evans reflected. “I thought it was just me (who felt overwhelmed) like that before a fight. Now I know any fighter who tells you they never got scared is lying.
“Being a fighter doesn’t mean you never get scared. Being a fighter means maybe you do get scared - but you go in there and fight anyway.”
Mark Twain once wrote “courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”
Rashad Evans mastered his fear.
