Rich Franklin No More Mr. Nice Guy

blah · #1 (**permalink**) 09-19-2007, 09:59 PM

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No More Mr. Nice Guy
Attention world. There's something Rich Franklin wants you to know.
By BRENT DONALDSON

Whether by rotten luck or bitter fate, the first time Rich Franklin’s mother saw her son fight, it turned out to be the worst fight in his career. In fact, Richard Jay Franklin II, the middle of seven children, was about to lose the kind of fight that has earned his profession—a profession that made him an international star—its thuggish and brutal and bloody reputation. Of course, she didn’t know how things would turn out. So she took her seat amid a few friends and family members and 10,000 strangers in the Mandalay Bay Event Center in Las Vegas, about to watch her son fight in a sport banned in 30 states; a sport that Senator John McCain once dubbed “human cockfighting.”

The moments before the fight must have seemed unreal to her. Out of her seven children, Richard was the dutiful son, respectful of his elders; a shy, olive-skinned mophead who, at age 5, walked alone down the aisle of Philippi Baptist Church in Bridgetown, between the long pews with their fluorescent orange padding, and in front of a cheering Sunday morning congregation, accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. He was a boy who would grow up to earn a master’s degree in education from the University of Cincinnati, a degree that he would use to become—for a few years at least—a revered mathematics teacher at Oak Hills High School. But here he was in a modern-day coliseum in October 2006, a combat fighter about to engage in an atavistic throwback to the days of the ancient Roman Republic—a tamer version of the staged gladiatorial battles of the Circus Maximus.

The sport is mixed martial arts (MMA), and Rich Franklin, a winsome, brown-eyed 32-year-old West Chester resident with a passing resemblance to Jim Carrey, is one of its elite champions. On this night, Franklin was defending his title—middleweight champion of the world—against a powerful jujitsu black belt named Anderson Silva. The two men intended to use any means necessary: boxing, taekwondo, jujitsu, wrestling, kickboxing—or, less likely in the professional ranks, crude and artless street fighting—to knock out, choke, or otherwise subdue their opponent. Among the rules: No head butting. No eye gouging. No attacking the groin or throat. No kicking or kneeing the head of a grounded opponent. No throwing in the towel. And no timidity.

Franklin was fighting in the main event of the evening—a championship bout scheduled for five five-minute rounds. The fighters entered “the octagon,” a 38-foot-wide, padded canvas ring enclosed by a four-foot black steel fence. Wearing logo-coated Bermuda shorts and four-ounce, thinly padded, fingerless gloves, the two fighters stared through each other. The referee gave his signal, and Rich’s mom watched her son, a ripped six-foot-one-inch, 200-pound tower of muscle and bone, and Anderson Silva, a lean, sinewy, brown-skinned Brazilian with explosive striking ability, begin to fight.

Franklin threw the first punch, a whipping left hook that missed Silva’s head. Silva countered with a leg kick to Franklin’s left knee, and Franklin shot in and missed with a left-right combination. The two men circled the ring looking for an open shot. When that shot didn’t come they bobbed and weaved and waited for the other to make a mistake.
And then it happened. Franklin threw an awkward left-right hook combination to Silva’s head. The punches missed and Silva locked both hands behind Franklin’s neck and pulled down, forcing his chin to his chest. This is a sanctioned tactic known as a Muy Thai clinch, or “dirty boxing,” as it’s often called—a position that exposes the opponent’s face to upward strikes from the knees. Either unable or bull-headedly unwilling to break free from Silva’s grasp, Franklin attempted to counter the body shots from Silva’s knees. But two minutes and 32 seconds into the first round, Franklin was a beaten man. His chest turned cherry red from the repeated impacts, and weary from a full minute of intense pounding, he made the mistake of dropping his hands and exposing his head. In that split second, Anderson Silva’s right knee launched into Rich Franklin’s nose, pushing his nasal septum into uncharted territory on his face. The shot was followed by two kicks to Franklin’s cheeks and chin, which floored him. The fight was over.

Despite the dispiriting and punishing loss (he’s 23–2 in his career), Rich Franklin remains a force to be reckoned with in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). The league is, essentially, the NFL of mixed martial arts, and it is pounding its way into the mainstream of American sports, earning more pay-per-view revenue than professional boxing in 2006. The story of how this devout, polite, and funny ex-math-teacher who has never tasted a drop of alcohol in his life became the poster boy for a violent, fringe sport is as dramatic as his fights. The old Mr. Franklin taught quadratic equations to high school kids, and was the archetype of bootstrapping Middle America. The new Mr. Franklin fights in a cage on a blood-splattered canvas. They both give Glory to Jesus Christ. But whether He is standing ringside, pumping His fists in the air, cheering for Rich and supporting his decision to give up teaching and fight is anybody’s guess.

“I’M NOT A NICE GUY. I’m a good guy. I’m not a nice guy.”
This is what Rich Franklin wants to believe; the same way he wants to believe that he’s just an average Joe who has a job and loves his wife and lives in the suburbs. And indeed, this sprawling, pastel-colored Chinese buffet in West Chester where Rich is holding court with his business partners and a handful of bruised athletes, is the perfect setting for such a tale.

“At one point I thought I would be able to look forward to life going back to the way it was,” he says, looking down at his plate of plain white chicken and broccoli. “But it never will. I leave for L.A. on Sunday to promote, I come back on Tuesday and then leave for Miami on Thursday to do a show, come back on Sunday, then next Tuesday I’m going to Alaska. That’s my life now. It’s work. I make money doing it. I can’t imagine being that guy who wakes up at five every morning, gets ready, goes to school, teaches and comes home at four o’clock every day, and Thursday night is taco night. But if you would have asked me 10 years ago if I thought I would be where I am now—no way. I thought I would be teaching.”

The UFC was in its infancy, having staged its first event, referred to in Ultimate Fighting parlance as UFC 1, in November 1993. Billed as “no holds barred” fighting, the sport had a mere fraction of the rules it has today. Rich’s younger brother Greg, now a deputy with the Butler County Sheriff’s department and a mixed martial artist himself, says that the first UFC event changed everything for his brother. The two watched UFC 1 together. When the fights were over, Rich turned to his brother and said “I want to do that.”
“You are out of your mind,” Greg said.

It was easy for Greg to disregard his brother. At Harrison High School, Rich was intent on making it to the NFL, when in reality he was a scrawny, six-foot, 150-pound string bean, a bench-warming defensive end. Ten years before that he dreamed of being a superhero.

“After I saw the first two UFCs, I decided that I needed to start taking jujitsu and other forms of martial arts,” he says as we’re finishing up a post-workout lunch at the dark and otherwise empty Soho Japanese restaurant in West Chester. Franklin says that he started taking karate lessons after his senior year in high school, and in college, at the University of Cincinnati, when most kids spent their evenings on Ludlow or Short Vine, he lifted weights and trained every day after classes. He put on 50 pounds of muscle. “If you plan on doing something great with your life, you better plan on making sacrifices to achieve it,” he says. “You cannot become a great athlete without being the guy who skips partying every day after classes and every weekend to go train.”

By age 22 Rich Franklin had metamorphosed. He was a muscled machine who had a reputation as a monster in the gym—a fanatic. But he had never been in a fight. After attending a local amateur MMA fight, his friends teased him. “[They] dared me, like ‘So you’re Mr. Tough Guy. You train all the time. Why don’t you give this a shot?’ ” he says.
“So I did an amateur fight, and I was good.”

The fight was a Roughman contest, an assembly of street brawlers who beat the crap out of each other for $50 bucks or so in a run-down martial arts school in Richmond, Indiana. Rich’s opponent was a Native American who went only by the name “Seymour.” Franklin immediately dominated, throwing Seymour to the ground and straddling his chest, pounding his face with impunity. It was too easy. Franklin let Seymour get up, then grabbed the back of his head with both hands and kneed him in gut and dropped him. Rich looked at the ref in a way that he still does when he is dominating fights that he expects to be stopped; like a kid who just asked his parents if he can go to Kings Island. Then Seymour gave up. “At that time,” Franklin says, “I remember thinking that fighting was a joke.”

THE ROUGHMAN CONTEST WAS followed by a string of amateur victories. The year after graduating from UC in 1998 with a BA in mathematical sciences and a BS in education, Rich had been hired as a freshman math teacher at Oak Hills High School. He hadn’t anticipated having to explain his other life to anyone at Oak Hills, but Rich wore his secret on his skin. “When you come into class one day with a black eye, or on crutches because you twisted your ankle, people start looking at you like, ‘What’s going on?’ And if you don’t have an explanation, they think you got into a fight at a club. You just have to own up to it.” The thought never crossed his mind that he would get any kind of resistance from his students or colleagues or the school board. Or that anybody would think that what he did was barbaric or pass judgment on him and not want children around him.

And he was right. They didn’t pass judgment—at least not to his face. In fact, he found himself being asked by other teachers to bring in tapes of his fights. “We watched him back when it was called ‘cage fighting’ and everybody knew he did it,” says a giddy Judy Davis, the 42-year-old principal secretary at Oak Hills. “We used to joke and laugh and say ‘Why would you want to do that to yourself?’ I thought it was crazy, but he just loved it. It was like he had the gift to fight.”

Raynelle Bauer, now a curly-haired 22-year-old cocktail waitress and UC undergrad, was a student in Rich Franklin’s Algebra II class during her junior year at Oak Hills. Bauer recalls that it wasn’t until the middle of the school year that her class discovered what their teacher did on the side.

“There had been these rumors that he was a fighter, and we thought that was ridiculous,” she says. “He was always eating protein shakes and all this really disgusting food, and we were like, ‘You’re so nasty!’ And then he came in with a broken nose, and one time with a broken foot. So we were like, ‘OK, Mr. Franklin, what’s going on? Did you get into a fight at a bar this weekend?’ And then he offered to show us a tape after class. He didn’t go into depth about it. I was always like ‘Why do you do that? Is it fun getting beaten up?’ That was a question he got every day.”

“I wouldn’t refuse to talk about it,” Franklin says, “because for me that was a great way to connect with my students. Most students think that teachers go home and think about teaching the next day. When I was a teacher I made my students realize, ‘Hey, I’ve got crap to do outside of this job!’ It’s not like I just go home and cut my grass.”
By 2000 he had turned pro, and his fights were taking place all over the country, with greater and greater frequency. Rich would hop on a plane on a Friday after school and fly to California or Nevada or Hawaii, kick somebody’s ass, and be back in class by Monday.

But he still was a teacher first and foremost, and in an effort to increase his salary and job stability, Rich earned his master’s degree in education from UC during summer breaks from Oak Hills. It was during this period that he met his wife, a tall, green-eyed grad student named Beth Fenech. The two had actually attended Harrison High together—she was two years younger—but never really talked. When they ended up in the same graduate education course at UC, Beth says that Rich was nearly unrecognizable from the Harrison days. “When he walked into our master’s course, everything about him looked different. He was super muscular, and I remember he had this tight T-shirt on and some shorts with a little drawstring. He was just gorgeous.

“But it was probably that first day in class,” she continues, “that he told me he was a fighter. And I said ‘Oh, do you have a girlfriend? Because I don’t know any girl that would put up with that fighting stuff.’ I would get nauseous at just the thought of someone hurting someone else or punching someone. But he was a very, very sweet talker. We e-mailed back and forth all the time during class. He’d tell me all of those things I really wanted to hear that just sucked me in, and I started going to watch him train. And after sitting through that and understanding more about the sport, it grew on me.” After seven months of dating they moved into an apartment together. After one week at the apartment Rich proposed, having already asked Beth’s father for his blessing. By the time the couple married in 2002, Beth, herself a high school English teacher at Reading Hills, had convinced herself that her husband’s fights weren’t as dangerous as they seemed; that there were sufficient safety precautions; that the fighters were professional athletes and not bloodthirsty troglodytes out to kill each other.

“And now I’m the biggest fan there is. I follow everybody, not just him. I love the sport. I fill him in on the news. I tell him what’s going on. I check the Web sites every single day and read up on all the fights and see who’s fighting, who’s cutting weight. Now I can’t get enough of it. He’ll come in the house and he’ll say ‘Beth, turn this off. I don’t want to watch the fight stuff.’ I do it all day.”

“THERE IS NO MAGIC IN street fighting,” wrote legendary ringside cutman turned best selling author F.X. Toole. “Street fighting may be lethal, especially when one guy is bigger and stronger than the other. But boxing is designed to be lethal, designed to test lethally the will of both fighters, designed to see who’s boss, who will stake out and control the magic territory of a square piece of enchanted canvas.”

The sentiments behind that passage, compounded by the sense of immediate danger so heightened in mixed martial arts, is partly why the sport draws millions of fans around the world. Its appeal to the primitive mind, to our collective fascination with violence, is unmistakable. While some view the sport as a natural human consequence—a microcosm of aggression, fighting, violence, and wars that occur throughout history—others don’t consider MMA at sport at all. It is a grotesque diversion, _panis et circuses, taking pleasure while watching humans suffer—evidence of a societal madness.

It is the realism of these fights, says Peter Giacobbi Jr., a sport and exercise psychology professor at the University of Florida, that taps into the human psyche. “It resembles actual street fighting a lot more than any other sanctioned sport,” he says. “You see what could happen in the street, and you almost want to prepare for these types of contingencies.”

No matter your moral or intellectual opinion, or what you find entertaining or repulsive, mixed martial arts _is a sport. The fighters who reach the level of the UFC are, almost without exception, lifelong athletes with years of high-level training. They are Olympic hopefuls and former collegiate state champion grapplers; black belts and Greco-Roman wrestlers and clinch fighters who are trained in remote camps in Thailand to kill the nerves over their shins by rolling bottles up and down the bones. When two such fighters enter a modern American arena under a gale of spinning lights and fist-pumping hip-hop, the atmosphere reeks of professional wrestling’s pomp and circumstance. But when they fight, it is real, and someone is going to get hurt. Right?

When Rich Franklin, a devastating southpaw, knocked out Nate Quarry in the first round of Rich’s middle-weight title defense at UFC 54, he did it with an on-the-button punch to Quarry’s lower-left cheekbone. Nate Quarry’s body, smeared with blood, stiffened as he fell. By the time he hit the canvas he was convulsing. But just one minute later, when the ring announcer raised Rich Franklin’s arm in victory, Quarry was heartily lifting Rich Franklin in the air as a sign of respect for the man who just made him go into a seizure.
Exactly how dangerous that particular episode was—or, for that matter, any brain injury suffered in combat sports—is still beyond the grasp of neurological science. Which is not to say being punched in the head is good for you. Almost unbelievably, there have been no fatalities in professional mixed martial art events. The sport of boxing, however, has seen numerous deaths. When 16-year boxing veteran Levander Johnson suffered an 11th round TKO in his title fight with Jesus Chavez, he waved to the crowd from inside the ring and walked back unassisted to the locker room. But as he approached the locker room door he started dragging his left leg, then collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital with bleeding in his brain and died several days later.

“I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to have a death in MMA because we’ve had deaths in every contact sport in the country,” says Gregory Bledsoe, an emergency medicine physician who spent five years on faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He specializes in injury prevention, which encompasses mixed martial arts and combat sports and is the lead author of “Incidence of Injury in Professional Mixed Martial Arts Competitions,” published in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine last year. The article thoroughly documents the injury rates of MMA fighters, finding them to be similar to injury rates in other combat sports, especially boxing. So, in a sport that sometimes features flying knee kicks to the forehead, how can it be that no one has been killed? Bledsoe explains:

“Number one, you have fewer rounds. If you’re fighting a long battle [as in boxing] and receiving multiple shots to the head, it’s an additive effect and it becomes more and more dangerous. Number two, they have no standing eight-count. [In MMA], when someone is knocked down, his opponent can follow him to the mat and continue to throw [punches]. The person’s mind is scrambled and they’re not going to be intelligently defending themselves. It’s probably better if he takes one or two more blows and the referee stops it whereas in other combat sports you get knocked down and you have eight seconds to recover. You might go on to fight 10 more rounds, which I don’t think is a good thing. Thirdly, you have more target areas [in MMA]. A typical MMA bout is five rounds at the most; compare the number of shots taken to the head [in MMA] to a professional boxing match. In Levander Johnson’s case, the total was over 400. There’s no MMA fight that has come close to that.”

When Rich Franklin defeated Jorge Rivera in 2004, the three-round fight ended when Franklin hyperextended Rivera’s shoulder and elbow joints using a common MMA technique called an armlock or armbar. When Franklin used his pelvis as leverage on Rivera’s locked elbow, pushing it in the wrong direction, the pain was sharp and intense and Rivera tapped out immediately. Franklin let go, Rivera shook it off, and he was essentially fine. Choke holds, another common submission technique in MMA, work by cutting off blood flow to one or both of the carotid arteries, located under the neck muscles on either side of the trachea. Efficient chokeholds can render a person unconscious within 10 seconds. “The great thing about it is even though the person goes unconscious, there’s no lasting effect that we know of,” Bledsoe says. “As a matter of fact, it is much safer to be choked out than knocked out. Much, much safer.”

MMA fights are sprints. They often end within two rounds through any number of means. Which, as Bledsoe and many others argue, makes the sport safer than it looks. It also makes it more exciting and fantastical. By pitting contrasting fighting styles against one another, MMA is the conceptual equivalent of Captain America fighting The Incredible Hulk. Which perhaps is why it is the perfect sport for Rich Franklin.

WHEN HE IS PREPARING FOR a fight, which is almost always, Rich Franklin trains two or three times a day in three separate facilities that teach varied components of mixed martial arts: boxing, Muy Thai fighting, and jujitsu. His weight-lifting routine is legendary within the sport. Mike Ferguson, a 59-year-old ex-Marine and former Ohio State Trooper with a bald dome and steel blue eyes, serves as Franklin’s personal trainer and nutritionist. On this day, Franklin warms up by flipping a 400-pound tractor tire for 20 minutes in Ferguson’s gym, the Powerstation in Middletown. He rips through a series of repetitions on more than a dozen free weight machines. He goes for more than an hour without stopping—literally sprinting between stations. On the leg machine he’s lifting 1,000 pounds. The veins in his forehead are as wide as cigars.

“I’ve had a professional football player, a professional baseball player, and a pro wrestler,” Ferguson says, “and the only person I know who can do what Rich does is [his jujitsu trainer] Jorge Gurgel. Rich is amazing. I’ve never heard one cuss word out of Rich. It’s ‘Yes sir. No sir,’ though I’ve never told him to call me sir. He’s just a good person. He never says no. He just does what you say and he never stops.”

Before a fight, Rich Franklin weighs between 210 and 215 pounds, but he fights in the 185-pound weight class. Beginning six to eight weeks out, he will drop most of the weight through training and diet restriction. He drops 15 pounds the week of the fight, losing the final six or seven pounds on the morning of weigh-ins. “I eat the same thing every single time I sit down,” he says. “I’ll eat a measured amount of chicken, a measured amount of broccoli, and a measured amount of oatmeal—one big mash—and I’ll put some salt on it. I eat that every meal. You saw me instruct the chef to scrape the butter off the grill. I had a starchy carbohydrate, I had fiber in my vegetables, and I had protein. I’ve been eating this way for a long time.”

The day of weigh-ins—usually in the late afternoon the day before a fight—Rich puts on a couple of T-shirts, a sweat-suit, sweatpants, pants over the sweatpants, two pairs of socks, and wrestling shoes. He tops this outfit off with a full-body vinyl suit to trap the heat, and a towel wrapped around his neck. Then he hits the sauna. He has done this many times. Two hours in the sauna equals seven pounds of water, draining from his pores like a wrung sponge.

During the evening after the weigh in, he will drink a gallon and a half of water and Pedialyte (a syrupy electrolyte solution designed to prevent dehydration in sick children), eat several peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a full dinner of meat and vegetables, supplements, trail mix, and a little sugar. His body will not feel the need to expel waste, and he will gain back as much as 24 pounds in less than eight hours. This is why Rich Franklin is the biggest middleweight in the sport.

BACK AT THE BUFFET IN West Chester, seated in our deep booth under the sway of Japanese koto music, Rich Franklin holds aloft a forkful of broccoli that never quite makes it to his mouth. “When I was young my mom and dad partied a lot,” he says “They divorced when I was 5. They spent 155 hours in court over a year and a half. I can remember days upon end my brother and I would be sitting outside the courtroom on wooden benches, and my mom straightening our ties as we were getting ready to go in and watch her and my dad fight for custody. Very bad.”

Richard Franklin Sr. was a meat cutter at Kahn’s on Spring Grove Avenue. Before the divorce, Rich’s mom, Vaila, was a casual home decorator who hosted parties at the house, where she would teach clients about flower arrangements and sell home goods. She’d been married before and brought three children into the new family. She and Rich Sr. had two kids, Rich and Greg. (Richard Sr. had two more children after divorcing Vaila). The family moved frequently, from Burlington, Kentucky, to Delhi, living in small mid-century homes with a quarter-acre of land on anonymous residential streets.
When the couple divorced, Vaila took a job working six or seven days a week at The Chili Company on Cheviot Road in White Oak. She was now raising all five children alone. “I wouldn’t want to say that we come from a broken home,” Rich’s brother Greg tells me two or three times, “but it was not easy.”

“Once my parents divorced and that whole middle class [lifestyle] went downhill, I was on the poorer end of things,” Franklin says. “I wasn’t dirt-poor to where I couldn’t afford clothing, but obviously I wasn’t taking ski lessons or things like that. I wasn’t wearing brand new gym shoes, but all my friends were. That’s how life was when I went to junior high and I had to use my free lunch card. I hated using my free lunch card in front of my friends. But I didn’t grow up with anger towards the world, like I had been cheated out of things. I had the mentality that I will not let this be my fate in life. This will change and I will make it change. And I have.”

Franklin earned a reported $42,000 from his fight at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio, on March 3. The event itself earned nearly $3 million at the gate, making it the biggest-selling gate in Ohio history (beating out the Rolling Stones concert). It was the largest crowd in UFC history in North America, with 19,079 in attendance, including Rich’s mom. It was his first fight since his defeat at the hands (and knees) of Anderson Silva. But that night, Rich defeated Canadian grappler Jason MacDonald handily, scoring a TKO with a flurry of shots to MacDonald’s head late in the second round.

Rich Franklin is the face for American Fighter, a popular MMA merchandising brand and sponsorship company run out of the small Maineville home of his business partner, Jeff Adler. The $42,000 purse from UFC 68 is a mere pittance compared to what Franklin earns through sponsorships and appearances, which easily net him $500,000 a year if not much more.

“People look at me now and are like ‘Wow, look at Rich Franklin. Boy, has he made it,’ ” he says. “I haven’t made it. There’s a ton of crap I want to do. I’ve still got money to make, I’ve still got fights to win, and if my current state in life was to last forever, I’d be unhappy. I would be unhappy with this. I think that’s why, when people ask me what I plan on doing after I’m done fighting, I don’t have an answer. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but whatever I decide to do, I will be successful because I have this state of mind. I will be successful. I will make it work.”

http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/ME...&type=gen&mod=

this is relatively recent, obviously after the macdonald fight. i was poking around and found this interesting, it gives some background info on rich. btw his site has a picture of him and his dad that i linked in the pics and vids forum. http://forums.mmanews.com/showthread.php?t=15376