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I definitely want to be an inspiration or a role model for all the little girls out there or anyone out there that wants to break stereotypes. I feel like I'm breaking stereotypes with what I'm doing. I'm not the typical fighter, and there's a lot of people out there that won't do something just because they don't fit the stereotype.
People would see a lot of times fighting as a ugly thing, as a thing that denigrates the human being. In reality, you see fighting on everything... Everything's fighting. Doesn't matter what it is. You wake up in the morning, to get out of bed is a fight, believe it. So, fighting is actually the best thing a man can have in his soul.
In the past, I said I didn't want to speak on certain issues because the second I said one thing about race, then 'Tyron's playing the race card.' But if you really think about it, what is the race card? The race card is that the man held me down, I had unfair circumstances, and I wasn't able to be successful because I was held down.
People often say, 'Ah, ultimate fighting is so violent,' but it's rooted in martial arts. Martial arts incarnate respect. You can't walk into a dojo and say to your sensei, 'Hey, salut tabarnac!' After every one of my fights I go and shake the hand of my opponent. I don't need to hate the other fighter to fight him well. It's a sport.
I wasn't allowed to throw big hooks and overhand rights until I'd been striking for three years. It's so you don't rely on those things from the very beginning. If your footwork sucks, and you can only stand in one place and throw your hands all crazy while the other person is running around, you're never going to be able to hit them.
Oh, man - I don't have just one favorite fighter, but I draw from many different aspects of each fighter. But I will say, just going back in the history of the UFC, just kind of trying to learn from each fighter, I've been looking at Brock Lesnar, all the things he did for the UFC back in the day, and his attitude and things like that.
On occasion, it's rough for me to sleep because I have a lot of things on my mind, so I'll need to get a little more sleep sometimes. I'm up late because I've got a lot of energy and a lot of things on my mind all the time, and I'm up early 'cause I've got things to do, so that's the only thing. That's how I like it; I like to be busy.
I challenged Coleman and he accepted, he said he'd fight me. I pointed at Baroni and challenged him too, he looked at me with a bewildered look on his face and asked: "Me?", I said "Thats right, You!!" I also challenged Quinton Jackson and he looked at me and said "Me too?", and I responded. If you want some, there is some for you too!
I captured Tag Team, Intercontinental, Rookie Of The Year, King Of The Ring, everything but the heavyweight title. I would hope that, somewhere down the road all the differences would be put aside and allow me to come back and at least get a shot at the heavyweight title, and I hope Brock Lesnar has it, cause I'd like to come after him.
I had a two-hour VHS tape of Sakuraba and all his crazy stuff. He was doing crazy double flying chops with both hands and undressing the Gracie family one shoulder at a time, and probably my favorite fight of all time was when he fought in Heroes and was rocked and kind of out of it, and they stopped him and kind of shook him in bounds.
I think any type of setback you have, any tough time you've got, getting through it is what makes you who you are. It makes you a tougher person. I think whatever you've been through in your life makes you a tougher person. I'm very grateful for the background I have, every tough situation I've been through because it's made me who I am.
We're fighters. We go out there, and we'll open a window of opportunity, and they're only open for so long, and we have to take advantage of that time right then. When I did it, I was 30-31 years old. Maybe it was a little too late that I should have did it, but I did it right. I was okay with the money that I got, the money that I made.
I'd like to be remembered for being the one responsible for adapting Brazilian jiu-jitsu for modern MMA. For what I've learned from fence work and some ground positions. Lots of details I developed after years and years studying them, testing what worked on the mat, against the fence, what kept opponents on the ground, control situations.
I train twice a day and I make sure I eat right. I'm an avid tea drinker and I enjoy the benefits of drinking MateFit. It gives me energy, speeds up my metabolism and helps me shed excess water weight. I also do everything from MMA sparring to strength and conditioning. I make sure to do a combination of different things with my training.
Back when the UFC first started, I wanted to see what MMA was all about; at the time, I was training with Tank Abbott, and so I went to see him fight. While at the fight, I saw this guy fighting that I just crushed in high school wrestling, and I thought, 'Hey, I'm a street fighter, and I have a wrestling background,' so I gave it a shot.
When I went to Impact, it was me proving myself on a daily basis to a lot of different people. I mean, I had matches with Austin Aries, matches with Jeff Hardy, Bobby Roode, Drew McIntyre. I mean, I wrestled everyone. During that time, I wasn't just sitting back saying, 'Man, I hope WWE picks me up. I hope they see me. I hope to get back.'
A lot of times, professional athletes say, 'I'm not a role model; I'm an athlete.' I don't mind being a role model because I know what I've done in order to make it to where I am right now. It's a lot of hard work; it's a tremendous amount of hard work. But in order to be make it to a certain level, everybody knows it's going to take time.
Life is supposed to be about love and good times, and so I've forgiven myself after paying the consequences of my bad decisions, and I'm ready to move forward and allow my life to be a light to others that it's never over, even for a person like me, who has lost a tremendous amount of respect among my peers, my fans, my friends and family.
I train twice a day, and I make sure I eat right. I'm an avid tea drinker, and I enjoy the benefits of drinking MateFit. It gives me energy, speeds up my metabolism and helps me shed excess water weight. I also do everything from MMA sparring to strength and conditioning. I make sure to do a combination of different things with my training.
I don't like to have a strategy going into a fight. If he has a good right hand or a good kick or good submissions then I'll try to avoid that, but I like to be in a fight and I like to go into the fight. Even in jiu-jitsu I didn't think of pulling this guy into guard or take him down because I like to go into the fight and see what happens.
Because Conor McGregor is so confident - he goes there 'I'll beat this, I will do that' - If I would be his coach I will tell him all the time, behind closed doors, how dangerous [Nate] Diaz is and how much of a war this fight will be and how painful, and long, and uncomfortable it would be, and to get prepared for the worst day of his life.
You see a lot of guys who are told they will be the number one contender if they win the fight in front of them. They have fought a couple of really tough guys to get there, but when the chance is presented to them, something happens in some shape or form, and they aren't able to take it. They end up losing. That was the biggest fear for me.
After I won my first amateur fight, I figured I would do fighting on the side while I was going to school. I got an offer after that amateur fight to take a professional fight. The opponent kind of wanted to have an easy win for her pro debt, and they said they'd pay me $1,500. I was like, 'Yeah, might as well get paid for what I was doing.'
If you're trying to live life, really live it, you should, in my opinion, try to expand all the aspects of your life. Open yourself to new ideas and new things even if you find you don't like them in the end - but at least knowing them has taken you that much further along into being a more experienced, more well-rounded person in this world.
When you want to be a fighter, you have to give it everything you got. MMA just became who I am because of the amount of work I was putting into my training. It all starts in the gym. The hours turn into days, days into weeks, and weeks into months; it's like school - the more time you spend learning, the better you'll be prepared for a test.
Like when I fought Akebono - six foot eight, 490 pounds. Before the fight, everyone's like 'Man, you're crazy. You're out of your mind. How are you going to fight a guy that big, there's no way you can take him down. You cannot punch him out. You're out of your mind.' After the fight, everybody was like 'Oh come on, he's big and fat.' Really?
Humanity's true purpose is not to become stronger physically, it's to become more intelligent-from armies, who increasingly fight with specialized units rather than regiments and tanks, to garage owners, who use a lot more than jacks to fix your engine. As intelligence prevails throughout humanity, maybe there'll be fewer wars and better cars.
There's no question in my mind that the times I was in my prime, I was the most well-rounded fighter out there - or in the world. I was the one who knew how to kickbox. I did kickbox and muay thai, I competed in events in Japan, and I was a submission specialist. Going into the UFC for the first time, I was the most well-rounded fighter there.
It doesn't really even bother me about popularity. I live a spiritual life. I don't live a carnal life. If I was seeking to be big, I would do anything. I would go out there and do something crazy, be flashy, be a showboat, but that's not within my persona. If I did something like that, I would be a hypocrite because that's not part of who I am.
In my career, if you follow my career and watched everything that I've ever done from the time I was in high school to where I'm at now, I've always been able to reach the pinnacle. In football, I was able to win championships and go to bowl games in college, be an All-American linebacker, and there were a lot of things I was able to accomplish.
I was a fan of jujitsu, so that pretty much got me started in fighting. I won a lot of local competitions when I was young and eventually won a ticket to go compete in Rio de Janeiro. In Rio, I struggled a lot in the beginning, living in the gym and not having much to eat, but eventually I joined the Nova Uniao Team and really improved my skills.
I had just graduated from Michigan State and I was working at a hospital. I was a security guard, I worked at night. Part of my job was putting bodies in the morgue and doing that kind of thing. I used to put bodies in the morgue and take them out. When I got done doing that at the hospital, in the morning I would work out before I went to sleep.
I walk around - people know who I am. I've got friends. I can make ends meet. I grew up around people who have been hustling from the start, so I think I've got a bright little future ahead of me - especially if I don't fight. Why would I want to go out there and fight with somebody, get my face punched and kicked. It's not my idea of a good time.
One of my first overseas trips with WWE was to France. I walked out of our hotel, and I see a little kid walking toward me with his mom. He gets a couple of steps past me and he stops in his tracks. I see his mom do a little bit of a double-take, then he runs over and just grabs on and starts hugging my leg as hard as he can, then he starts crying.
I would love to earn another fight with Ronda Rousey again. She's the best in the world, and as a competitor you want to go up against the best. She's demolished everyone and I think I'm the only one that has taken her into the third round. I'm going to keep fighting and try to earn another fight with her. I'd love to become the UFC World Champion.
I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.
I wasn't always the most fashionable, and I would come to school with cauliflower ear and ringworm. I got made fun of a lot. People called me 'Miss Man' and 'Guns,' and people directed a lot of karate jokes at me. I wish that I was at school now that MMA and martial arts is cool, but back when I was in school, people associated it with nerdy stuff.
I guess everybody is doing a movie thing, so I'm doing the 'Scorpion King 4.' My role in the movie is as one of the king's guards, with a very original name: Roykus. Apparently, back in the day, everybody's name was 'us,' so 'Roy' plus 'us,' and put a little 'k' in there: Roykus. I'm one of the royal guards, and I do my own stunts like Jackie Chan.
To do anything to a high level it has to be total obsession. Ask José Mourinho, he wouldn't know a thing about me, my sport - he knows football, and to get to high levels you have to be insane, nothing else means anything. I respect all forms of movement and lifestyles, but I am in a bubble. I wake up, it is in my head; I go to sleep, it's in my head, 24/7.
One of the reasons I got into this game was because I wanted to learn how to get myself comfortable in uncomfortable situations. I grew up in a tough area of Dublin, and fighting was just part of your life. Boys fight, and I won some, but I lost a lot too, and I didn't like that, I didn't like that feeling of not knowing whether I was in danger, in trouble.
It's kind of the period of your career where as a fighter, you need some sort of validation from time to time. I mean, winning matches and going off to the next one, without really having any direction, it's fun, but it's good to have a period where you can say "Ok, I won a title. Ok, I got picked up by a big organization." So every step in there is important.
I found that to build mental toughness, you need to inconvenience yourself. The early morning runs, if you hate early mornings. The late night runs, if you hate late nights. The snowy cold, the worst conditions you can get, put yourself in those and really make it inconvenient and you start to get a genuine expectation of winning for the price you have to pay.
I think there will be some people who think I did a great job, some people who will think, 'Hey, for a guy who did this for his first time, he didn't do too bad,' and some people will be like, 'Rich Franklin sucks.' It doesn't matter what you do, you will always have people on every side of that spectrum, so I would imagine for me it wouldn't be any different.
You must develop a sense of what you can contribute that goes beyond 1 company or organization. A career path today will likely involve moving from organization to organization, creating a picture of rising circles, rather than a vertical ladder. In fact, a vertical rise within one organization will very likely move you away from your strongest areas of competence.
People think athleticism is just physical, but it's not. It's connected to the brain and how the brain can learn to execute and see a movement or not. Especially at high speed. Being athletic is not just jumping and running and being powerful. It's the nervous system that guides the body. The muscles don't decide anything. The brain decides and makes things happen.
My mother is my hero just because, what life becomes about is overcoming adversity, and I watched her overcome so many things in life but still able to smile. See it's one thing to overcome adversity and to be scarred and to carry that with you but when you have somebody overcomes adversity and they're still able to smile that's something else. That's true strength.
You're looking at the reflection of perfection. You're looking at the man who gets all your attention. You're looking at the man with the biggest arm. At the man, with the greatest charm, the man in Chicago who will do harm to the guy three doors down. Whatcha gonna do, when you know who? How ya gonna deal, with the man of steel? How ya gonna react to Sonnen's attack?
The beach in Tel-Aviv I went to, it even looks and feels a little bit like Rio de Janeiro. Some other places are very European and I just like it. I thought it would be fun but it's a lot better than that. It's a lot more relaxed and a lot of fun, and I feel very secure, and I would tell my friends they should come here when they plan a vacation. Not only the history.
I have unemployed my girlfriend. She had a job working for a cardiologist and now she can hang out, put her feet up, buy all the things she wants, have a nice breakfast with you and me in the Four Seasons. Any fights in families like mine come from everyone worrying about money. I'm taking all those worries away. That makes me feel happy, makes me really proud of what I do.
I tried to take every little thing and use it as an advantage. People were asking me how it felt to be in the UFC, and I wasn’t thinking about that. All that mattered was Alessio Sakara. I had to win that fight. Even now I still haven’t got time to sit back. Again, this is a must win, must dominate, fight for me in my eyes, and I won’t be happy unless that’s the way it goes.