Funky: My Defiant Path Through the Wild World of Combat Sports

by Ben Askren

Missouri. What we needed to get to the next level was a game changer—the recruit that would make that giant leap to become our first NCAA Champion. Who would that be?

and the belief he had in himself were extraordinary, and I loved it. Growing up as a coach’s son, my dad would mention that the great ones possess a confidence that is rare, and it elevates the people around them to believe in themselves and makes others better. Ben was his own person and I sold him on a vision to be the first NCAA Champion at Mizzou. I told him what coaches were saying about

doubted could accomplish things at a high level. He’s also a big Muhammad Ali fan, which was something I learned along the way. I ended all personal notes to him with a quote from Ali. I’m fortunate to say my approach worked. Ben made the decision to come to Mizzou and the rest is history—or Funky! I thoroughly enjoyed reading Funky because Ben is—and always was—so honest about where he was as an athlete. He never made excuses or blamed others. He always had a plan for what he needed to do to get better.

you on a journey through his entire career—how he developed physically, which was not easy, and how he developed mentally. He is the most advanced athlete I’ve ever coached on the mental side. Funky details the why and how he evolved into his funky style of wrestling.

improve. His “beginner mindset” from the start of his wrestling career, through his MMA success, to his current passion of running the Askren Wrestling Academy, is a big factor—if not the biggest—of why he’s had enormous success

teammates, and now the young boys and girls he coaches at the Askren Wrestling Academy. The success he and his brother and all of the AWA coaches are having is not a surprise to me, and won’t be to anyone who reads Funky. Lastly, I called him honest, but he wasn’t completely honest in the book...I did make the call to him before the Junior Nationals.

“If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it passes.”

When I retired from mixed martial arts (MMA) in late 2017, I actually meant it. I wasn’t playing a game. I was thirty-three years old, undefeated, and a reigning champion, but I was fresh out of real challenges at ONE Championship, the Singapore-based promotion I was fighting with. Before MMA I was a two-time national champion at the University of Missouri, twice winning the Hodge Trophy as the country’s best collegiate wrestler. Under the circumstances, walking away felt like the right thing to do. It was something I could control.

belonged to the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). For a decade the UFC had been, for me, an exclusive club with velvet ropes, and my name—in spite of my accomplishments, and for reasons that remain mysterious to this day—was just never on the guest list. So I retired after defeating Shinya Aoki in Singapore, but I added a caveat: I would remain retired, unless I get the opportunity to prove I’m the

Was I subtweeting the UFC by appending my retirement like that? Of course I was. But it was a justified subtweet. UFC president Dana White had planted the seed years before that I wasn’t interested in fighting the best guys in the world, which meant plenty of fans in his echo chamber held this notion to be true.

Dana made it part of a running narrative that I was ducking real challenges and taking the easy path by fighting no-names in other promotions.

with the 2008 US Olympic team, understood just what kind of competitor I was. I am obsessively competitive and always have been. You can’t be the best unless you beat the best, and honestly, to me that meant the perceived best having to beat me. I’d been playing out fights with longtime UFC welterweight Georges St-Pierre in my head for years. I contemplated on an endless loop just what a great foil I would make for then-champion Johny Hendricks, a rival whom I actively disliked since wrestling against him in high school.

could make a Johny Hendricks fight interesting.

welterweights I had ragdolled in training sessions during my early years in MMA—back when I was just starting out in 2008–09—who were being coron...

knew damn well what I was capable of, but the problem was I knew that they knew, too. The other problem was, well, Dana simply didn’t like me, and public demand to get me into the UFC only served to make him more stubborn about it.

was an open challenge: bring me on, or I’ll call it a career. In truth, I was fairly content to leave the competition of the fight game if it came down to it, and I could do so with my head held high. I’d won titles in every promotion I’d fought in and had compiled a perfect 18–0 record in MMA. The only blemish was a bullshit “no contest” against an opponent who faked an eye injury out in the Philippines. In the year 2017, I was never hit once—not cleanly, at least—in three fights. My accomplishments spoke for themselves. But it was more than just that. I’ve always felt like athletes, particularly in combat sports, hang on too long.

Askren Wrestling Academy (AWA), the wrestling schools my brother Max and I run in our home state of Wisconsin. By the early fall

too much, I was filling out. I wasn’t monitoring anything, and I hadn’t touched the surface of a scale in nine months. When I weighed myself in September, I came in at a whopping 208 pounds, which is massive for a welterweight (170 pounds). I was working out, doing yoga and other exercises, but I was fat as shit. I wasn’t doing any striking, any jiu-jitsu—really, nothing in the way of actual fight training.

through public demand, or in an epiphanic moment where Dana the businessman would come to the realization that I could make him money—I’d end up in the UFC. Accordingly, I continued to stoke those flames. You know, just in case. To get my weight back under control during that plumping season, I decided to do an end-of-the-year wrestling tournament, the Midlands Championships, which is a big college tournament hosted by Northwestern University that’s open for decorated wrestlers from the outside.

other reason than to gain back a little discipline. Going from 208 pounds to 174 would be a daunting task, but as a goal-oriented athlete, it made sense for my mental approach. It gave me something to center on. It was a damn good thing I did. Fairly early on in my training for that, the CEO of ONE Championship, Chatri Sityodtong, got in touch and tossed out the word “trade” for the first time.

That day, he saw me training with Rich Franklin, and he had an early idea of what I might be able to do if I came over to ONE. Throughout my seven fights under the ONE Championship banner, we kept in regular touch. He knew my situation as well as anybody. He understood that I still had the desire to prove I was the best in the world and it bothered me that I’d never had the opportunity to do so. So, after I retired, I reiterated to him that I’d only come back if I had the opportunity to prove I was the best. He knew exactly

somewhere else if I had the chance and/or desire? Maybe they would sign a big name? There were a few scenarios in play, some of them just wild ideas, others semiplausible possibilities—all of them completely hypothetical. I knew he was genuinely trying to figure something out, because one idea would dovetail into the next. Maybe I could hop into that welterweight tournament Bellator was planning, a kind of poetic homecoming tour for me, the original king of tournaments? The name Rory MacDonald, the popular former UFC fighter who was fighting in Bellator, kept popping up, too.

Why would it? To even suggest such a thing was foolish, if for no other reason than swapping assets in MMA just doesn’t happen. Too many egos involved. Too much binding language in the contracts. Too many legal entanglements. Too much dissension in determining fighter value. It didn’t help that the UFC was notoriously stingy with its roster, either. All contracts were constructed to work entirely in the UFC’s favor, and they didn’t have to bend where they didn’t want to. Back in the day, when people were dying to see a heavyweight fight between M-1 Global’s Fedor Emelianenko and the UFC’s Brock Lesnar, Dana and Zuffa

avail. When Fedor made it clear it would have to be a co-promotion with M-1 Global, Dana treated the idea as preposterous. Even the mention of M-1 Global had him flushing red, as the UFC was light-years more accomplished. Fedor, like me, was on Dana’s shit list for a long, long time. It was pretty obvious that Dana didn’t much like competition, and he certainly wasn’t looking to work with competition. He used to call Bjorn Rebney, my old boss at Bellator, “Bjork,”

blurted out the word “cocaine” like it was a Tourette’s tic. As far as I knew, if he thought of ONE Championship at all he never really mentioned them. So to construct a trade with the UFC was too far-fetched to spend much time contemplating.

Yet...here was Chatri, tossing out the word “trade” like we were in the NBA or MLB and about to switch cities. When he first mentioned it, I’d just moved into my new house outside Milwaukee, and he said, somewhat provocatively, “What if we trade you?” I didn’t know how to respond. I said, “What do

opportunity to outwardly prove how good I was, and, even back then, the guys I fought were close to the best but not the best. When I fought Douglas Lima in Bellator, I think he was ranked in the sixth-to-eighth range in the pan-promotion welterweight class. When I fought Jay Hieron, he was around tenth or twelfth, and Andrey Koreshkov—whom I outstruck officially 248–3—was in the range of tenth to fifteenth. I’d never gotten to fight a legitimate top-five guy.

doubtful and optimistic, but he’d piqued my imagination. It was an awesome feeling. When he got back to me again late one night, he conveyed that progress was being made and that he’d soon have news. What an adrenaline rush. I couldn’t go to sleep that night thinking about it. I just lay there in a state of guarded excitement, thinking about the possibilities. Still, I wasn’t completely

champion to test myself as a free agent, the UFC said they wanted me. I even went out to Vegas to meet with UFC brass and get a deal done. And then, just as suddenly, they didn’t. They gave me the old bait-and-switch without explanation, and that’s why I ended up with ONE Championship, “dodging,” as Dana liked to say, the “real challenges.” This time felt different.

prove I’m the best—was on the cusp of finally coming through. A couple of weeks later, while attending my Mizzou teammate Mark Bader’s wedding in Austin, Texas, I saw a message come through from Chatri stating

to get over before I could be considered a UFC fighter. It was at that point that he revealed to me that I’d be traded straight up for the UFC’s longtime flyweight champion, Demetrious Johnson, whom many—myself included—considered the GOAT in MMA. Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson? Talk about surreal. Johnson was the flyweight king who’d recently lost his title to my former teammate on the 2008 Olympic team, Henry Cejudo. He was never the draw the UFC wanted him to be, but he’d authored all the important chapters of the UFC’s record books.

than Anderson Silva. He had more finishes than any flyweight in UFC history. He had the record for scoring ten-plus takedowns in three separate fights, which was a personal favorite of mine. That was a lot to part with to acquire a guy Dana didn’t particularly care for. Even if the UFC never learned how to market Johnson properly—and even if the UFC was so disenchanted by his curiously hard-to-market title reign that it was in the process of shuttering the flyweight division altogether—the optics were that they were shipping

Championship, meaning they could be reunited in Asia. Demetrious was always chirping about his pay (or lack thereof) in the media, which didn’t do him any favors with the UFC. At some point, what should have been a mutually celebrated dynasty turned into an acrimonious, faltering relationship. He was a burden the UFC no longer wanted to deal with. So he was sent packing, and a new burden was being welcomed in. That new burden was me. And the new burden was thrilled.

glorified welterweights on the UFC’s roster. For a guy who never likes to be wrong, this was an admission that Dana saw the value in bringing me aboard—a very public admission.

it was that we could both say “Fuck yeah, Dana” and “Fuck you, Dana” and mean it either way. If he really believed that “when Ambien can’t sleep, it takes Ben Askren,” as he famously tweeted in 2012 when I was the dominant Bellator champion, he was about to get a super-heavy dose. That alone gave the air in the fight world a charge. And I knew immediately that I would make

himself, and thus make us both some money. Only...I had to wait to say anything. I was told I was to sit on the news until the paperwork was finalized and the UFC could make it official, which was going to take a bit. I am not a patient person, so not being able to put it out there was excruciating. Here I am, knowing

news. I don’t like things being out of my control. Most fighters don’t, which is why they prefer one-on-one competition to team-oriented sports where blame can be evenly distributed.

And in the age of constant interaction and social media, do you know how hard it is for an already impatient person to see people talking the same shit about you, or discussing fight hypotheticals they believe can never happen, when you know all that’s about to change? It’s murder. Holding a revelation for a period is a tremendous burden. As a week of waiting

who tweeted about disc golf and cryptocurrency and Mike Cernovich—niche shit that I was into and knew annoyed a lot of people—I experienced a sudden surge in popularity pretty much overnight. The Tuesday it was announced I went to my oldest daughter’s school to do my usual book reading to her first-grade class. In the half hour or so I read to the kids I’d gained more than five thousand new followers on Twitter. I had friends sending me screenshots of the notification they received of the news on the ESPN app, and my phone was blowing up.

all the preceding years I was nothing more than another league nonentity. That whole week, everybody in the combat space was talking about the trade. To make it all official I traveled to New York that weekend, where the UFC 230 pay-per-view was about to take place at Madison Square Garden featuring a heavyweight title fight between Derrick Lewis and my former Olympic teammate Daniel Cormier. Long before I landed

flourish in a new (and perhaps more appreciative) market, and I was coming at long last to the

butting heads with Dana over the years.2 The guy who called Dana a liar for proclaiming that the UFC couldn’t drug test its entire roster3—thus incurring his eternal wrath—had stayed the course.

Everybody knows Dana’s vendettas are active obstacles and very difficult to overcome. In the end, somehow, I had overcome them, and now Dana would have to do something he never dreamed of having to do: promote a Ben Askren fight. This made me a sentimental figure in MMA circles.

UFC. I wanted to be in the UFC going back to when I was a free agent in 2013, but I was just never given the chance. I’d only ended up at ONE Championship because that offer from Zuffa never materialized. I arrived the same smart-ass I’d always been, the same in-your-face wrestler, the same “Curly-Headed Fuck,” as the British fans would soon call me.

that could never be asked before. Namely: Who did I want to face in my first fight? The answer to that was pretty simple: Darren Till. He was the British fighter coming off a one-sided title fight loss against my friend and former Mizzou teammate Tyron Woodley, but he had plenty of juice to steal. He was open to social media volleys back and forth. He’d play along with me to build a big fight. Not only that, I knew I could take him down at will and do as I pleased, which would both piss a lot of people off and set me up nicely for an even bigger fight.

was fun to find myself the center of attention at an actual UFC event. It was a perfect situation for everyone. Except, it wasn’t totally perfect. At least not for me.

about—and realistically, it wasn’t something people wanted to hear about—but I had a lingering hip issue stemming back to my college wrestling days that was getting worse by the day. At first I thought I was just getting old, which I was. But it wasn’t that. Shortly after the UFC pulled the trigger on the trade for me and I started training in earnest again, the hip became an immediate issue.

December 2018, I went to see my doctors back in Columbia, Missouri, and told them it was bad, hoping there might a microscopic procedure they could do, something minor that could temporarily fix things up. They took some X-rays, gave me some PRP (plasma) shots, and then told me pretty matter-of-factly, “Yeah, it’s pretty jacked up.” They gave me

that hip replacement surgery was in my not-so-distant future. There would be no easy scope, and there was no way to tweak a few things to extend my shelf life. I had severe loss of cartilage, labral tears, and bone spurs to contend with, which meant my new opportunity would come with a shot clock. And that clock was loudly ticking down

wouldn’t be afforded the luxury of a slow build. The year 2019 had to be my year. There is an old cliché in sports that you should never look past an opponent, because doing that looks (and feels) like you’re taking something for granted (and therefore inviting