After 14 years as a pro, here’s how former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans finally knew he was finished.
It wasn’t the first-round knockout loss to Anthony Smith at UFC 225. It wasn’t the four consecutive losses that had led up to that point, either.
Instead, it was something much simpler but also much harder for Evans to reason his way around.
“I just didn’t believe the story I was telling myself anymore,” Evans said.
But wait, in order to understand what that means, you first need to understand the role of the “story” in the life of a pro fighter. It’s part mantra, part willful illusion, but it’s also more than that. It’s like having your own personal narrative that allows you to make sense of all the incomprehensible ups and downs of life.
Back in his early days as a fighter, Evans had a story. He was fresh out of college at Michigan State. He was working security in a hospital emergency room. The stuff he saw there was hard to forget. People dying, covered in blood. Corpses on gurneys that he’d occasionally have to wheel down to the morgue. Real-life stuff.
“I was taking that home with me, and it made want to make the most of my life,” Evans said. “I would come home after work, and I had this dog that would run with me. We would race up this hill, and he would blow by me. But then I’d keep running for an hour, hour and a half, until he’d slowly tire out. I wouldn’t let myself stop running until I could beat my dog up that hill at least five times. The whole time I was doing it, I was telling myself, ‘I’m going to be world champion some day.’ I would just keep telling myself that over and over.”
That was the story. But it was also more than that. It was a concept of himself as a special kind of human, a professional warrior unconcerned with a prolonged or comfortable life.
Training at Jackson-Winkeljohn MMA in Albuquerque, Evans said, they used to feed on these self-sustaining myths. They’d tell themselves that they were modern-day samurai. They were out to seek a beautiful death. They believed it, too. Of course they did.
Looking back on those days now, Evans said, it seems crazy to him. But then, it might be the exact kind of crazy you have to embrace in order to make it in a sport like this.
“The way I’ve seen it work in this sport is you have to be insane about it in order to achieve that kind of success,” Evans said. “Conor McGregor’s greatest trait is that he’s just insane about how good he thinks he is. And it works for him. He’s not that good, but sometimes he is. He believes.”
It’s a funny thing, though. You tell people that you’re going to be the best in the world some day, and they give you that look. Like, sure you are. But if you tell them that you don’t think you’ll ever be the world champion, the response is even worse somehow.
Just ask Sean O’Connell. Back before he won the million-dollar prize in the PFL tournament, he was just another UFC light heavyweight trying to make the most of what meager athletic talent he had. He tried to be honest with himself about what he could and couldn’t do, he said, only to find that fans didn’t appreciate his realism any more than they appreciated other fighters’ delusions of grandeur.
“I remember when I first got into the UFC and I did an interview where I was asked what I thought was next for me,” O’Connell said. “I said something about how I just wanted to win some fights and do well, but I knew I probably wasn’t going to be the guy to dethrone (UFC light heavyweight champion) Jon Jones or anything. And people went nuts over that. They’re like, ‘oh my gosh, this guy has no confidence.’ I had to ask them, ‘really, do you have me pegged as the guy who’s going to beat Jon Jones? Is my chubby, 6-foot tall ass going to be the one to knock off the greatest this sport has ever seen?’
“People have such a hard time in the fight world being realistic, or even hearing other people be realistic.”
Maybe it was because of that realism that O’Connell was able to decide when it was worth continuing with MMA and when it wasn’t. He was mostly content to hang up his gloves before he heard about PFL’s tournaments and their seven-figure grand prize, he said. And even when he first heard it, he didn’t totally believe it.
But he did his research, committed himself to the goal, and ended up pocketing the payday in the end – only to immediately retire after winning the whole thing.
“It was a satisfying end to my career,” O’Connell said. “And as much as I feel like I could probably keep going, I have to be honest with myself that that’s about as good as it’s going to get in this sport for a guy like me.”
The problem for many fighters is that so little about this sport encourages or rewards that kind of honest self-reflection.
If you were really honest with yourself, factoring in the likely risks and rewards, you might never pursue this as a career in the first place. And even if you did, an abundance of realism isn’t exactly compatible with the mindset necessary to push through all those hard days in the gym.
That’s something that retired UFC and Strikeforce fighter Julie Kedzie has come to appreciate more and more in the years since she stepped away. Now in the MFA program at the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, she finds herself reflecting on her time in the sport often in her writing.
“I remember when everyone made fun of Ronda Rousey for saying that, under the right circumstances, she thought she could beat Cain Velasquez,” Kedzie said. “But to me, that was one of the truest things I’ve heard a fighter say. You have to believe that on a certain level. You have to believe that you could potentially beat absolutely anyone. It might be a fantasy, but to be a fighter and put yourself through some of these things, sometimes it helps to live in that fantasy.”
For Kedzie, a lot of her own faith in herself came from those around her. While she still has “some bizarre self-esteem spectrum stuff going on,” she said, it was easier to believe in her own abilities when she heard it from others she trusted, like her coaches and teammates.
After all, many of these people have been in the sport for decades. They’ve seen great fighters come and go. If they say you can do it, then maybe you can. The story they tell you about yourself starts to become your own. What they tell you becomes what you tell yourself.
“But when you get to a point where that same story just doesn’t work for you, you feel it,” Kedzie said. “A voice in your head tells you something. Like, this isn’t it anymore. And you can look at those same people you’ve relied on and you can see they’re being dishonest with you. And not because they want to be dishonest with you. They think they’re helping. But you can still feel it.”
And that, in the end, was the problem for Evans. The same story he’d relied on for years simply wasn’t working anymore. After the knockout loss in his last fight, he had to confront that fact.
“If I would have won that last fight, it might have been enough to ignite that spark again so I could tell myself, ‘another one,’” Evans said. “But because I didn’t have that spark, the story that I told myself to bring myself to that fight, it just wasn’t the right one. Because I had a story to get myself through that camp. I must have. You need a good reason to wake up in the morning and put yourself through what we put ourselves through. But it was just the wrong soundtrack in the end.”
What really did it, Evans said, was when he had to admit that he just wasn’t as insane about this sport as he’d once been. It wasn’t just the fights and the training that did it to him, either. It was the years. It was life.
Now sometimes when he’s working as a TV commentator, analyzing other fighters’ performances from behind the desk, he can see that same change come over his colleagues who are still in the cage. The losses pile up. The fire dies down. Life is wearing them down, dulling the edges of their blades.
“Usually when you see a fighter start losing consecutive fights like that, there’s some stuff going on in their lives,” Evans said. “I know, because there was stuff going on in my life. And it’s hard when life is kicking your ass, too. You think your opponent can make you cry, he ain’t got nothing on life. (Former referee) ‘Big’ John (McCarthy) ain’t going to be there to pull life off you. That’s just an ass-whipping you’re going to have to take.”
