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"When you’re the champion there are all kinds of temptations thrown
in your path. And I have to admit sometimes things got a little too
crazy for me.
"There was this time when I was passing through Alabama and this guy
comes up to me and says that he wanted to give me his wife for the
night. I said, ‘What the hell?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I want you to f*** my
wife.
’"I said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your f***ing mind.’ And yes, I did
turn down his offer. That was just too weird for me. What was even
weirder was that guys started offering me their wives and girlfriends
all the time.
"Fighters like me have never really had groupies the way rock stars do. I had a one-night stand with a ring-card girl, and that was the closest thing to a groupie for me.
"Don’t get me wrong, women were always coming on to me. Some of them
thought I had money and they wanted to get their hands on it...well,
once in a while I would get drunk at a club and, you know, s***
happens.
"One thing that’s interesting about mixed martial arts is that men
love us more than women do. Not in a homosexual way or anything – guys
just love the fighting and the fighters.
"They’ll come over, slap me on the back, and tell me what a badass I am.
"But I’ve never had any really close friends among UFC fighters. I
respect them, but I couldn’t be their friend because that might, even
on a subconscious level, impact how I fight them.
"About the time that things were starting to go downhill with
Kristin, I learned a valuable lesson about being friendly with
fighters.
"The UFC wanted me to fight Chuck Liddell for my next title defence.
I was all for it, but I knew that the UFC was making a s***load of
money off the fights, and I wasn’t about to agree to the fight for a
measly $160,000. I wanted Chuck to band together with me and hold out
for more money for the fight.
"But Chuck folded. He said that all he cared about was winning the
championship and that he would fight for whatever amount the UFC was
offering.
"So the fight didn’t happen because I sure as hell wasn’t going to
settle for less than what I thought I deserved. So instead Liddell
fought Randy Couture for what the UFC would claim was a fight to
determine the interim champion.
"I was p***ed off. I felt like I had been betrayed. I felt like
everything I had worked so hard for had just been thrown out the
window. The UFC had just taken my title away.
"Couture beat Liddell and all of a sudden I was being forced to
fight Couture to maintain my title. Couture was 41-years-old at the
time, and I had it in my heart that I was not going to lose to him.
"So I put my problems with the UFC and all the drama with Kristin
and Heather out of my head, and made a conscious decision not to let
any of it impact my performance.
"Quite simply, I thought I was going to crush him. He was an older
man. I really didn’t respect him at all. I thought this was going to be
an easy fight.
"I went up to Big Bear and began training three months before the
fight. Right in the middle of training I began to feel this extreme
pain in my back. Doctors examined me and found that I had a bulging
disk in my back. I was bedridden for four days and was given pills that
would help with the inflammation of the disc.
"I did boxing, weight training, jiu jitsu, and running. But because
of the disk I could not wrestle, and with somebody like Couture, you’ve
got to wrestle.
"The fight with Randy Couture took place September 25, 2003, and was
billed as UFC 44: Undisputed. I was in as good shape as I could
possibly be considering my back problems. But it wasn’t good enough.
"Couture dominated every round, and every round I dug a deeper hole
for myself. I was trying to knock him out and he simply outwrestled me.
He won in a five-round decision.
"That was the first time I lost a fight in six years. To me it was
like a loved one dying. It was tough trying to swallow that loss. To
lose to Couture, well, it just hurt too much.
"When I came home, Kristin could tell the difference. I certainly
couldn’t talk to Heather about it. I was hard on myself for two solid
months. I cried all the time. I did a lot of drinking to kill my
sorrows. I was very depressed.
"It was hard to lose a championship that I had held for four years.
All of a sudden it seemed like everything was ripped out from under me.
"Including my relationship with the UFC.
"All of a sudden the UFC and, in particular, its president and my
former manager, Dana White, didn’t care about me anymore because now I
wasn’t the champion.
"They didn’t like the fact that I was always asking for a bigger
piece of the pay-per-view money and more money in general. I had a
contract with the UFC that would end after the next three fights. And I
was prepared to honour that contract.
"Even though we were at odds, the UFC was smart enough to realise
that I was still a major draw and they were quick to schedule another
fight with me, the fight everybody had wanted to see. The fight with
Chuck Liddell.
"The fight with Chuck was simply billed as UFC 47: It’s On and was
held on May 2, 2004. He was dominating me in the first round. I was
kind of holding my own, but I couldn’t take him down.
"In the second round, he went to throw a punch just as I was
throwing a punch and his thumb got me in the eye. I stepped back, wiped
my eye, and couldn’t see a thing.
"I managed to block about six shots and then the next four connected and he dropped me. The referee stepped in and stopped it.
"I lost.
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