Natural Born Gladiator
Ultimate Fighter Randy Couture Tells Us How to Win a Street Fight Without Really Trying
by Rick Cipes
Randy Couture can take you out in the time it took to write this sentence. That’s because the 40-year-old Randy Couture is considered the Ultimate Fighter of the Decade.
He’s also a two-time heavyweight champ and the only fighter – in the ten year history of the UFC – to ever drop down a weight class, to light-heavyweight, and come away with that belt too. The dude is a natural, hence the nickname. And the Natural is one of the main draws in the Mixed Martial Arts field, paid $125 grand just to show up and another 100 grand if he wins. Not quite Russell Crowe Gladiator numbers, but Couture is surely doing fine by ancient Roman gladiator standards. And he’s not faking anything.
SOAK: Tell me about the first time you knew you could fight?
RC: I was in a fight in seventh grade. And you know, everybody picks on the seventh graders. This ninth grade kid decided I was the guy he was gonna pick on and he started harassing me at lunch hour. I hit him with a double-egg and put him on the ground and punched him in the face about five times. Nobody ever really picked on me after that.
SOAK: Hmm. Worst damage you’ve done to somebody?
RC: The cut I put on Pedro Rizzo’s cheek the second time I fought him. It opened up a pretty good gash on his cheek.
SOAK: What’s the worst you’ve been hurt?
RC: An elbow to the eye socket when I fractured my eye. That was the worst one, for sure.
SOAK: Who delivered that blow?
RC: That was Ricco Rodriguez in Connecticut.
SOAK: Is it cooler to knock someone out or tap them out?
RC: In my opinion it’s cooler to tap. It’s more dominating. It’s more technical to put somebody on the ground and put them in a position where you make them tap out. I think there’s certainly an amount of technique involved in setting somebody up and knocking them out as well, but that can also happen by accident.
SOAK: When you tap out you’re basically saying “uncle?”
RC: Yeah. You’re basically in a position where you’re either gonna tap out or you’re gonna go unconscious. Or you’re going to break that particular joint, if it happens to be a submission hold on the arm or leg.
SOAK: Have you knocked anyone out while making them submit?
RC: You mean like choked them out?
SOAK: Yup.
RC: No, most guys are smart enough to know when they’re stuck and they tap out. It’s happened accidentally a couple times in practice. Sometimes in practice you try to find ways out of situations like that without tapping. You kind of see how far you can push things and some guys will get choked out before they have a chance to tap out. But that’s not the norm.
SOAK: Have you ever had to tap out?
RC: I’ve been tapped out twice in fights. Once from a front choke and once from an arm bar. And I’ve been choked out in practice. If you’re not training with guys that are capable of tapping you out, then you’re not challenging yourself.
SOAK: Do you remember the first time you ever saw your own blood?
RC: Yeah. I was play-fighting on the playground in the second grade and my buddy swung me around head first into the cement wall. I cracked my head open and laughed it off at first. Until I reached up and brought my hand down and saw a handful of my own blood. It freaked me out.
SOAK: How do you react now?
RC: I don’t really think about it too much. It happens all the time in practice, it happens in fights. It doesn’t really elicit any kind of response from me.
SOAK: Does it elicit a response when you’re fighting against somebody and you see their blood?
RC: Definitely. I think you instantly make an evaluation on how much damage you did, and if there’s a potential to stop the fight or win the fight through that. And I learned the lesson the hard way, but you gotta be careful not to punch yourself out in those situations.
SOAK: Do you ever feel remorse after crushing somebody?
RC: You never really want to hurt anybody. But as far as beating somebody up to win the fight, within the limits of the rules, I don’t have any remorse about that.
SOAK: Do you ever get scared when you fight?
RC: The first time, yeah. I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into. I was looking across the ring at a 300-pound, white, fat…just a huge man who had stated he wanted to rip my arms and legs off. Thankfully, it didn’t last long. About 50 seconds.
SOAK: And then you pummeled him?
RC: He tapped out from a rear choke.
SOAK: Let’s talk about “the zone.”
RC: The zone is, in my opinion, a bunch of mental skills that you try to practice every day. So, when it comes time to compete, you can put yourself in that same frame of mind. And that’s when you’re relaxed enough to deal with the adversity of competition and allow your physical body to do what it’s trained to do. You can use visualization techniques, framing things in positive fashion, and basically creating a ritual that puts you in that place where everything clicks.
SOAK: Tell me how you deal with negative self-talk.
RC: Everybody has that little voice in their head that goes crazy. “What if…I should have done more of this, I should have done more of that. What if he does this, what if this happens?” And so finding a way to turn that off…Generally, you have to focus on things you can control: your attitude, your conditioning, your warm-up ritual and your first technique in the fight.
SOAK: Do you think you’re as effective at your age because with age, comes wisdom?
RC: I think age is part of that equation, certainly; it’s a sport of experience. And I’ve been competing in combative sports for 30 years, started when I was 10 years old. I had the good fortune to be in a sport [wrestling] where we had access to sports psychologists, the top training methods for peaking physically, and coaches that taught me how to study my opponents. I transferred a lot of things from the wrestling world into fighting. All those things, along with taking care of my body over the years, have allowed me to compete at a late stage, by most people’s standards, and compete at a high level.
SOAK: How long does it take your body to heal after a fight?
RC: A typical fight, a week. But I’ve had some fights take months, you know, with the eye injury and things like that. The leg kicks that Pedro laid on me, the first time we fought, took about three weeks before I felt right again. So it just depends on the fight. With the Tito fight, I think I could’ve fought a whole other fight that night.
SOAK: Describe a typical week in your training regimen?
RC: I like to have about ten weeks to peak for a fight. I generally spend five days a week in the mornings doing conditioning. I do plyometrics two days a week, I do sprint training two days a week, and weight training one, sometimes two, days a week in the mornings. I’ll also rotate some extra technique training, depending on the opponent I’m facing, into those morning routines. The afternoon is usually some form of sparring. Big gloves, little gloves. That’s six days a week. I usually take at least one day and rest. But it just depends on how my body feels and how hard I’ve been going. Ten days out from the fight, I don’t do any more sprinting, I don’t do any more lifting, and I don’t do any more plyometrics. All the workouts become very short, under an hour, and they’re very technique and strategy-oriented. I do some worse-case scenario training. An example would be: what if Tito came out and put me on the bottom? [Didn’t happen in UFC 44.]
SOAK: Describe your typical UFC fan to me.
RC: Well, they vary now. The fans have changed a lot. It’s exploded. I think the typical demographic is the 18-35-year-old male, but I don’t know that you can pigeonhole all the fans into that. It seems like they come from all walks of life. I’ve met doctors and corporate executives that are huge fans. And then I’ve met teenagers that like street fighting and are all tatted up and are huge fans.
SOAK: I know you’re married, but tell me about the groupies.
RC: [laughs] I haven’t run across too many groupies.
SOAK: I read something in one of the fight magazines about that, how there are hordes of groupies.
RC: Really??
SOAK: Yep. You know what they say, believe everything you read in print. Tell me about your next fight?
RC: August, UFC 40, probably at the Mandalay, a rematch with Vitor Belfort. I beat him the first time. We had a rematch a couple of months ago and I sustained a cut in 20 seconds of the fight. I slipped a punch and his glove grazed my eye and sliced my eyelid, of all places. And they wouldn’t let me continue with the cut – not that I wanted to.
SOAK: Which other fighters garner your respect?
RC: I think each and every fighter that’s willing to step in there garners my respect. I think you have to respect all your potential opponents because they’re going to force you to do things, and master skills to defeat them, that you wouldn’t otherwise do.
SOAK: Anyone you really want to rumble with?
RC: I would like to fight Vanderlei Silva. He’s the number one 205-pound fighter for the Pride Championship [different league, much the same, except Pride fights in a ring and UFC fights in a caged Octagon]. It’d be nice to unify the two weight classes.
SOAK: Tell us about abstaining from sex before a fight.
RC: I think it’s a wives’ tale.
SOAK: Best thing about Ultimate Fighting?
RC: The thing that I love about it most are the tactics and the technique involved. That’s what I get into, that’s what I like breaking down. The one-on-on nature, as well. It’s just me out there. I’ve got no one else to blame.
SOAK: When Randy Couture rides into the sunset…
RC: Hopefully I’ll do some commentating, be involved in the sport that way. I’d also like to continue to build on the acting and stunt work I’ve been doing this last year and see where that goes.
SOAK: Who would play you in a movie version of your life?
RC: I guess it depends on which stage of my life you start it at. But probably right now, Ed Harris.
SOAK: Ed Harris?
[Big laugh from Couture.]
SOAK: Favorite movies?
RC: I love all the Sci-Fi stuff and the Action-Adventure stuff. Which my wife hates.
SOAK: Do you ever humor her and watch chick-flicks?
RC: Oh yeah. It’s give and take. We rented one the other night, The Hours, with Nicole Kidman? Have you seen that?
SOAK: I haven’t. I heard it’s pretty damn depressing.
RC: Oh my God…[laughs] I made it half way through. And then I just looked at her like: I’m done, I can’t watch this anymore.
SOAK: Did she want to kick your ass?
RC: No. She felt the same way.
SOAK: So, the next choice is yours?
RC: Yeah [laughing, relishing the thought]. We’re going to Hellboy!
5 Most Effective Ways to Win a Fight
Hey, Street Fighting Man, if you ever have to defend yourself in a brawl, The Natural has a few pointers – not to be used at the local Elk’s Club trying to play Chuck Norris.
1. The Elbow
“The most underused thing to use is your elbow. You punch guys with your hands and you have a tendency to break them very easily. Your elbow is very hard and you will take a guy out very quickly with an elbow.”
2. The Knee
The average guy doesn’t know how to kick. But pretty much anybody can use a knee in the softer part of their bodies – or even their head.
3. Clean Sweep
“I think any time you can take somebody off of their feet…and for me in wrestling, it’s a foot-sweep. I grab a hold of your lapel [thankfully we’re on the phone], or grab a hold of your arm and sweep your feet out from under you. The next thing you know, you’re looking up from the ground. You’re pretty much done fighting.”
4. The Stranglehold
“And the other thing that I’ve seen that’s pretty effective is a choke. You get behind somebody or snap somebody down to a front headlock position. It takes about between about five and seven seconds to choke somebody out. And you just leave em’ laying there and walk away. I’ve seen it done on several occasions.
5. Exit Stage Left
[Couture laughs, because he knows how improbably it would be for him to have to run.] “And I would say, in my opinion, the best way to win a street fight is to find the exit. Because even when you win, you don’t win. The biggest winner is the guy who puts himself in that position and just leaves.
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