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

by Ben Askren

Muhammad Ali wouldn’t have ended up synonymous with greatness if he conformed to such tripe. Conor McGregor wouldn’t have ended up on Forbes’s annual big earners’ list if he wore blinders and focused on the guy in front of him and nothing else. Jake Paul would never have become the boxing interloper he’s become if he wasn’t out there planting seeds. In prizefighting, the big picture is the only view to take. You should have a bigger plan in mind at all times and execute it in stages—like a crumb trail to where you want to end up. You think it just popped into Nate Diaz’s head to call out McGregor after

ever-so-elegantly said, “Conor McGregor, you’ve taken everything I’ve worked for, motherfucker. You know what’s the real fight, what’s the real money fight? It’s me,” in his live-airing postfight interview with Joe Rogan on Fox, that idea was floating around in his mind long before he traded the first punch with Johnson. Johnson was the hurdle for those words, and those words were worth millions of dollars. A smart fighter is always thinking three steps ahead.

already putting together a three-step plan for 2019, with an option for a fourth. I’d debut in March, hopefully against Till, then I’d fight at the UFC’s big International Fight Week in July, then I’d fight at Madison Square Garden

winning my third title in my third promotion, I’d leave myself one last legacy fight. That would either come against the quasi-retired Georges St-Pierre, to try and topple the king of kings in the welterweight division, or I’d face the unbeaten Khabib Nurmagomedov, the lightweight GOAT who takes people down and pummels them on the ground just like me. In either case, it would be big. And in either case, if all went to plan, I would leave the game after that fight, win or lose. The bone spurs in my hip were a...

knee over my chest to condense myself, something I’d been doing forever in wrestling. I couldn’t get myself into the positions I needed to be in, and my balance was off because I couldn’t shift in my usual instinctive ways. I had to learn to adapt and fight to my body’s new set of rules, and even t...

trainers kept wanting me to do these repetitions of strikes and kicks. They didn’t speak English, and I kept trying to tell them I could only do certain things, that I couldn’t kick with my left leg. I eventually had to have Chatri

overcome my hip issues, at least for another year, and I wasn’t interested in asterisks. I wasn’t going to whine and bitch about my hip.4 After reading so many books on sports psychology, I was well aware of what excuses sounded like, in whatever order they’re presented. I knew better than to make excuses in advance of a fight, or in review. I knew that when you try too hard to sway public sentiment on anything, critics will only dig in further. They will see a whiner, and never see anything other than a whiner.

who still saw the same clumsy striker from the early days beating Dan Hornbuckle to win Bellator’s welterweight tournament in the guy facing Robbie Lawler in his UFC debut a decade later. I could live with that. And I could live with some pain and limitations, too, as it didn’t deter my goals. I wanted to win the UFC title to complete my collection of titles. Even with my limitations, I believed I had it in me to do that. My goal was to become the only fighter in MMA history to win titles in Bellator, ONE Championship, and the UFC—the three biggest promotions of my day. It was

that I’d never fight my friend and teammate Woodley, even though when I came into the fold he was the UFC’s welterweight champion. But guys like Kamaru Usman? Free game. I was the one who introduced him to the world as “Marty,” as he was known back when he wrestled at Nebraska-Kearney. Guys like Colby Covington? I went at him mercilessly. Guys like Till and Masvidal? Easy pickin’s. I had trained with Masvidal years earlier at American Top Team in Florida, and let’s just say that our workouts weren’t competitive (and Jorge knew it). I used

I hadn’t had any direct conversations with the UFC up until the night before the deal was done done, when I spoke to the UFC’s executive vice president and chief business officer, Hunter Campbell. It was weird. They had to create a new contract for me, because when they traded for my ONE Championship contract I only had three months left. That meant if the UFC didn’t create a new contract and give me a fight within three months, they’d be screwed. We had to renegotiate right off the bat, and quickly. My manager, DeWayne Zinkin, took care of the money part and sorted out the numbers. For my first fight in the UFC I’d earn $200,000 to show and an additional $150,000 to win.

professional sports, that might not seem like a lot of money. But in fighting? In the UFC? There were guys who’d been competing in the UFC for years who weren’t making close to that kind of money. There was plenty of resentment about that, for anybody comparing purses. And I soaked it up. I let all the old criticisms about being boring, schlubby, or afraid of legit top-five fighters instantaneously transform into criticisms about being overpaid and overvalued

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for a Darren Till fight right away. He was No. 2 at the time on the UFC’s rankings and popular. I loved the matchup for me, especially as the maiden voyage to my three-step plan, but

Robbie Lawler. I didn’t love that idea, because he had gone 1–1 since he lost the title to Tyron back in 2016. His lone win in that stretch came against Donald Cerrone, who had bounced up from lightweight to challenge Robbie. Then he lost a listless decision to another lightweight, Rafael dos Anjos. I didn’t see Robbie as the best option, but the UFC really wanted him. I was never told exactly

of the tougher matchups for me out of all the possibilities. Till would have been a cakewalk. Lawler would take some doing. He had solid wrestling, he could get back up when down, and he could hit like a truck. Or at least, he could hit like a truck earlier in his career. I agreed to the fight, because ultimately it didn’t matter to me. The fight was scheduled for UFC 235 on March 2, 2019, in Las Vegas.

extent. The UFC PR people loved me right away. I never turned down interviews. I showed up to things on time. I no-sold the shark-eyed Lawler in ways that made everyone believe I was playing with fire. It was

you can dream, and not make dreams your master, and think while not making thoughts your aim...when you come to meet with triumph and disaster, you treat those impostors just the same.

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”

how I began wrestling are a little hazy. One of my true passions in life is disc golf. If you were to ask me how I did at the United States Disc Golf Championship in 2011, I can zoom into the most granular details, especially on the last hole when, down by one, I tried to bomb an anhyzer to tie the leader and ended up sailing it a little right and into the woods.

day and tell you exactly what happened on every single one, even sometimes if the day in question was a year ago. My mind is a reliable replay machine when it comes to the things I’m really into. Yet, if you ask me when the great love of my life began—when I started getting into wrestling—it’s like trying to recall a dream. There

Arrowhead High School in the early days when I was on the kids’ club, recollections of my younger brother Max and me wrestling all over the house, but when did it all actually begin? I believe I was in first grade when I joined the kids’ wrestling club. I only remember

like it because I wasn’t very good at it. I was a rambunctious kid, but it didn’t hook me initially. I played different sports from a young age, and it was baseball that became my first true love. The Oakland A’s were my favorite team. It was 1990, and the A’s had that loaded lineup with Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. I lo...

then that was America’s pastime. As I developed into a decent enough third baseman, my allegiance shifted to the local team in Milwaukee, and I becam...

feeling the magnitude of the feat. Baseball had a lot of charms for me, both as a fan and a player, but I have no real memory of watching wrestling early on, even in person. The first time I can remember going to a meet was in fifth grade, when I attended the high school state tournament. It was a dark sport, for the most part. Obviously there wasn’t any streaming going on, and no highlight packages on SportsCenter; unless you were scouring for it in trade magazines, coverage of the local wrestling circuit was minimal.

couple pairs of boxing gloves, and some other roughhousing equipment for Max and me. Max was two years younger than me, so he took the brunt of the beatings, but that wasn’t what concerned my dad. He was tired of us taking over every room in the house, so he made

been into right away. But I wasn’t, and I’m fascinated (not to mention slightly baffled) that the kid version of me was so slow to catch on. Though I was essentially a fat kid with very few kids my own size to

time through. By the fourth grade, I was getting pretty decent at it. The meaning of wrestling began to make sense to me. There was something about the one-on-one competition that felt tailor-made for me, even if my kid brain couldn’t explain it or fully understand why. I have two vivid memories from my childhood sports teams that led me (somewhat indirectly) to the mats. The first was with the local youth soccer team in the third grade. It was late October, and we were having typical Wisconsin weather for that time of year—rainy, shitty, cold. I wasn’t an all-star soccer player by any means, but I desperately

was cold and wet and miserable, they just wanted to go home, and that attitude was reflected in their play. It infuriated me. I was distressed that nobody else would give an effort, and it bothered me that it was so thoroughly out of my control. Two years later, while playing with the Lake Country Chiefs football team in the fifth grade, I had a similar experience. We had a relatively good football team, but the team we were playing, the Sussex Sabercats, was way better than us. Everybody knew it, and it pissed me off how easily it was accepted as a foregone conclusion that we’d lose the game.

whining. I was like, “Screw this, I came to play football!” I remember being deeply annoyed that I’d be forced to share in a loss with people who were giving up. I didn’t want that to be a reflection of me or, more to the point, what was inside of me. I wasn’t giving up.

In team sports I had a say in things but lacked total control over the outcome. Looking back, that idea is one of the key reasons wrestling appealed to me more and more. In wrestling, you can control your own destiny, for better or worse.

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accountability alone that stands trial. Whether I fail or succeed, I control the switchboard. I liked that idea early on because, for lack of a better way of explaining it, I was the only one I knew who could reliably match my own intensity. If I was going to fail at something, it had to belong to me alone. I had to be in sole possession of the outcome.

more time to the one-on-one sport of wrestling from April through June. By then I felt comfortable rolling around, having wrestled with my brother Max on the mats my dad got

whether my dad might’ve had ulterior motives in bringing those wrestling mats home. Did he sense something in Max and me from those early times, believing he could steer us toward wrestling? That would’ve required some serious foresight. My dad is a blue-collar Midwestern guy who has made a career in submersible pumps. He dabbled in sports during his own childhood—track and field, football, even wrestling a little bit—so he understood a boy’s need to romp around, but the answer is no, probably not. Honestly,

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for me. I began taking wrestling seriously, if somewhat unconsciously at first. Thoughts of wrestling techniques began to take over my daydreams of other sports. In short, I began to give myself over to it. As I mentioned, I was a chubby kid in fifth grade, weighing around 130 pounds. I was having a little success, but I didn’t have many kids my size to wrestle. That meant the whatever weight brackets I found myself in at tournaments were sparsely populated.

in time in America’s Heartland—but they made sure to get me to what few there were. One of the early ones I competed in was the Northern Plains Regionals, a seven-state tournament held in Omaha. I took second place, mostly because there were a grand total of three kids in my bracket. It was bittersweet to come in second in a three-man race. On the one hand, I could truthfully say I came in second, and that would sound pretty cool without the burden of context. On the other hand, I knew. I knew I wasn’t better than,

lighter weight brackets. I was just one of the best out of a small handful in the big-boy bracket. Who

the details a bit more, where it begins to feel like wrestling was a major part of my life. As a big kid I was picked on quite a bit in school. I wanted it to stop, and I had this desperate urge to get better at wrestling at the same time, so I decided to take a drastic measure. At just eleven years old, I decided to lose a bunch of weight so that I could compete with the kids in the lower weight classes. Without any pressure or prompting from my peers, my parents, or my coach, I dropped thirty pounds in sixth grade. I went from 130 pounds to 100 pounds, which, for me, was like reinventing myself. Thirty

discipline for a kid still two years shy of meeting the PG-13 movie rating. It was a pretty prescient move on my part. It’s the first instance that I can pinpoint where I did something like that, where I took a direct action toward meeting a goal. I was getting plenty of exercise with wrestling and other activities, but I recognized that I needed to monitor my diet. I had the wherewithal to tell my parents to buy specific groceries to help me out. It was at that precise moment that I stopped eating desserts. I was in Wisconsin, “the Dairy State,” yet I quit eating pizza at a time when most kids were apeshit for pizza. It was tough. I stopped drinking soda and eating any kind of fast food, a resolve that

I don’t drink soda or eat any kind of fast food. It was in those little omissions that I whittled down to my new one-hundred-pound frame. My parents let me do my thing, and I did it. By enforcing my decision, I learned someth...

weight. It was something I now had control over. At a hundred pounds I was right in the wheelhouse weight of the best competition, and I could find out what I was really made of. At first it didn’t pay off. With all the kids competing at that weight, I wasn’t having as much success as I used to. I lost my share of matches.

which was a big deal for me because I’d worked so hard for that. It was the first time I’d achieved a higher level of success, where I won something kind of big. The next year, as an eighth grader, I repeated the feat—I won the Youth State title again. Now wrestling wasn’t just a sport to me. It was in my blood. Yet none of my sports heroes were wrestlers. Not that

way through middle school, and watching Favre play was an almost ritualist appointment. I had a deep fondness for the late Steve Prefontaine, the long-distance runner who competed in the 1972 Olympics. I had several books about him, and I think some of that might’ve had a bit to do with my mom. She had been a walk-on for the Iowa State gymnastics team, and she was very consistent. She once ran for a thousand days in a row, three miles every day, just because it was what she wanted to do. I think there was a correlation there to Prefontaine when I was young. I became a big fan of Lance Armstrong, too,

The athlete I looked up to the most, though, was Muhammad Ali, who fought his last fight in the boxing ring some three years before I was even born. I was drawn to his outspokenness and audacity as much as I was to his ability to back up his words. I could understand from a pretty young age that he stood for more than just being a famous boxer, that he fit the contours of greatness through a boldness of spirit. Mostly, I loved that he was this larger-than-life figure who understood sports psychology better than anyone. He told you exactly what he was going to do and then did it. He won people over

was fascinating. I had maybe twenty books about Ali, and I learned something about his competitiveness in each of them. I found myself wanting a rival like he had with Joe Frazier, and I wanted to be doubted as he was with George Foreman in the “Rumble in the Jungle.” I wanted to know what it was like to not only be in a big moment, but also to conquer that moment. I recognized the pageantry of it all, too. For whatever reason, I never got that much into pro wrestling, though I have to admit there was something about the showmanship and the theatrics that always spoke to me.

Like many real wrestlers of the 1990s, the more I got into amateur wrestling, the more defiant I was about the fictitious realm of pro wrestling. Real wrestlers would push back on the fake stuff. It was insulting to compare the two, though—if you think about it—both come from the same place if you go far enough back. I can remember defending the sport from

was more into the literal realm of taking people down and pinning them. By my freshman year in high school, I decided to make it my last year of doing anything other than wrestling. I had gotten pretty decent at football by then. I was a 119-pound

leverage my weight enough to push a center back, and I loved tackling people. I just felt ready to give everything I had to wrestling, so ninth grade was the last year I’d put on the cleats. Wrestling was it for me. I wrestled as often as I could. Unfortunately for poor Max, that meant he became my original throw dummy. I kind of big-brothered Max that year when I couldn’t find a training partner. He learned to push back the best he could, but I toughened him up whether or not he was ready for it.

Other times he’d think better of it and decide to wrestle. He was in the sixth grade. He didn’t start enjoying wrestling until a little bit later on, maybe around his freshman or sophomore year in high school, but he was in deep when I’d come calling. He had his head on the swivel, and he was always on the lookout for my takedowns. That year I made the high school state finals, which was a roller coaster of emotion. I got there but lost in overtime to a kid named Joe Henning from Chippewa Falls, 9–7, which was really discouraging. I can recall every detail to this day. I got down 7–2 and cradled him and just about pinned him to tie it 7–7. Boom, I had all the momentum. I felt great. I had him gassed!

believed that I was practicing more than anybody I didn’t know. With no year-round wrestling clubs for other kids to participate in, I saw it as an advantage. I just kept plugging along every single day on my own, forcing myself to train. I wrestled and wrestled, and believed I was working harder than anybody else within a thousand-mile radius—more than anybody anywhere. I was obsessed. A big turning point for me was when I

years, and I’d had my guns trained on it for a long time. This would be my first time stacking myself up against a who’s who of kids my age from all over the country. I was amped to get in there and showcase myself and let all the work I’d put in pay off. I knew this would be my moment to arrive. Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I went 0–2, scoring a goose egg in the biggest tournament of my life! It was a huge letdown. We drove five hundred miles just so I could flop in both matches, which was a serious blow to me. I had gone all-in on wrestling.

am I really this bad?” I fell in love with wrestling because it was up to me to fail or succeed. It turned out that losing stuck around a little longer. It also turned out that the sting of losing was disproportionate to the thrill of winning. You savor a win for as long as you need to. You dwell on losses forever. I can’t say it was a humbling experience, exactly. It was depressing is what it was. The recurring idea that you’re not as good as you think, with the overruling (and unwelcome) idea that you’re not good at all, well...it was a lot to process.