This Is Gonna Hurt (10 page)

While the business side of my life was getting pretty shitty, my personal life was out of control as well.

I was still seeing Heather whenever I could, and once in a while, I was seeing other women too. Being with all those women was a physical thing, an ego boost and nothing else. And my guess was that the women I was with all wanted the same thing from me. They may have been after me for my money, but I really didn't know. I wasn't thinking much beyond just getting mine.

The only woman I really felt any kind of love for was Kristin, and she was the one I was cheating on. But as far as I could tell she didn't have a clue about Heather or anybody else. I was doing a damned good job of hiding it.

Until 2003.

T
hat's when I started getting a little careless. Or maybe just a lot stupid.

I was on the phone with Heather one day and Kristin walked up the stairs. I immediately hung up. She wanted to know who I was talking to. I talked circles and got out of it.

I went out to make an appearance and called Heather on the drive home to tell her that I was going out later and that I would call her in a little while. I came home and jumped in the shower. While I was showering the phone rang. Heather had decided to call me back and when Kristin picked up the phone, Heather hung up.

By this time Kristin was starting to get a little suspicious. So she hit redial and ended up getting Heather's voice mail. Kristin left a message wanting to know who she was. A few minutes later Heather called back and told Kristin that she had been trying to get ahold of me to discuss a sponsorship deal. So thanks to Heather lying her ass off, I got away with it.

But I was starting to feel a bit uneasy about the close call and the relationship with Heather, so I steered clear of her for a couple of months. Then we got together again in Vegas, started hanging out, and, well, one thing led to another. While I was with Heather, Kristin called and asked me what I was doing in Vegas. I made an excuse about being there on UFC business, and then she asked if I was with anyone. Heather was right there in the room with me, but I said no.

But you know something? I think Kristin knew that something was going on. She always had this intuition. She had to know.

What was going on with me at the time was not just limited to my affair with Heather. When you're the champion there are all kinds of temptations thrown in your path. And I have to admit that sometimes things got a little too crazy for me.

There was this time when I was passing through Alabama and this guy comes up to me and says that he wanted to give me his wife for the night. I said, “What the hell?” He said, “Yeah, I want you to fuck my wife.” I said, “You've got to be out of your fucking mind.” And yes, I did turn down his offer. That was just too weird for me. What was even weirder was that guys started offering me their wives and girlfriends all the time.

Fighters like me have never really had groupies the way rock stars do. I had a one-night stand with a ring card girl, and that was the closest thing to a groupie for me. Don't get me wrong, women were always coming on to me. Some of them thought I had money and they wanted to get their hands on it, and some…well, once in a while I would get drunk at a club and, you know, shit happened.

One thing that's interesting about mixed martial arts is that men love us more than women do. Not in a homosexual way or anything—guys just love the fighting and the fighters. They'll come over, slap me on the back, and tell me what a badass I am. (For the record, I have no problem with gay people as long as they don't come on to me. And if they do, I just tell them that I don't swing that way.) But I've never had any really close friends among UFC fighters. I respect them, but I couldn't be their friend because that might, even on a subconscious level, impact how I fight them. About the time that things were starting to go downhill with Kristin, I learned a valuable lesson about being friendly with fighters.

The UFC wanted me to fight Chuck Liddell for my next title defense. I was all for it, but I knew that the UFC was making a shitload of money off the fights, and I wasn't about to agree to the fight for a measly $160,000. I wanted Chuck to band together with me and hold out for more money for the fight.

But Chuck folded. He said that all he cared about was winning the championship and that he would fight for whatever amount the UFC was offering. So the fight didn't happen because I sure as hell wasn't going to settle for less than what I thought I deserved. So instead Liddell fought Randy Couture for what the UFC would claim was a fight to determine the interim champion.

I was pissed off. I felt like I had been betrayed. I felt like everything I had worked so hard for had just been thrown out the window. The UFC had just taken my title away.

Couture beat Liddell and all of a sudden I was being forced to fight Couture to maintain my title. Couture was forty-one years old at the time, and I had it in my heart that I was not going to lose to him. So I put my problems with the UFC and all the drama with Kristin and Heather out of my head, and made a conscious decision not to let any of it impact my performance.

Quite simply, I thought I was going to crush him. He was an older man. I really didn't respect him at all. I thought this was going to be an easy fight.

I went up to Big Bear and began training three months before the fight. Right in the middle of training I began to feel this extreme pain in my back. Doctors examined me and found that I had a bulging disk in my back. I was bedridden for four days and was given pills that would help with the inflammation of the disk. I did boxing, weight training, jujitsu, and running. But because of the disk I could not wrestle, and with somebody like Couture, you've got to wrestle.

The fight with Randy Couture took place September 25, 2003, and was billed as UFC 44: Undisputed. I was in as good shape as I could possibly be considering my back problems. But it wasn't good enough.

Couture dominated every round, and every round I dug a deeper hole for myself. I was trying to knock him out and he simply outwrestled me. He won in a five-round decision.

That was the first time I lost a fight in six years. To me it was like a loved one dying. It was tough trying to swallow that loss. To lose to Couture, well, it just hurt too much.

When I came home, Kristin could tell the difference. I certainly couldn't talk to Heather about it. I was hard on myself for two solid months. I cried all the time. I did a lot of drinking to kill my sorrows. I was very depressed. It was hard to lose a championship that I had held for four years. All of a sudden it seemed like everything was ripped out from under me.

Including my relationship with the UFC.

All of a sudden the UFC and, in particular, its president and my former manager, Dana White, didn't care about me anymore because now I wasn't the champion. They didn't like the fact that I was always asking for a bigger piece of the pay-per-view money and more money in general. I had a contract with the UFC that would end after the next three fights. And I was prepared to honor that contract.

Even though we were at odds, the UFC was smart enough to realize that I was still a major draw and they were quick to schedule another fight with me, the fight everybody had wanted to see. The fight with Chuck Liddell.

I was doing a lot of my training in the Los Angeles area and would only go up to Big Bear for the last six weeks. That was always my normal routine, but things were pretty intense between me and Kristin around the house, and being in Big Bear became a much-needed escape. Those kinds of distractions were the last thing I needed when I was preparing for a fight.

It was like the last bit of love was slowly draining out of my marriage to Kristin. I continued to fool around. There really wasn't much left for us to say. We knew we both loved our son, and that was probably the only thing that was keeping us together.

But I think we both realized that Jacob was getting old enough to sense that his parents weren't happy, and that's no way for a kid to grow up. So I decided to try therapy for a second time. Seeing a psychiatrist while I was training for a fight was probably not the best idea. Being in therapy made me feel very soft. I would come out of the sessions feeling very weak and emotional—not the best way to feel when trying to build up a sufficient level of hostility for a fight.

Prior to the Liddell fight I received another acting offer in the film
The Crow: Wicked Prayer
. It was a step up from what I did in
Cradle 2 the Grave
. I played this real nasty character called Famine. I didn't think much of the script, but I learned a lot from the actors, especially Danny Trejo, who told me that as an actor I would spend more time waiting to act than actually acting. The film was not a huge success on any level, but it taught me a bit more about the craft, and acting was something I could see doing in the future.

The Liddell situation had not changed. He was still a good friend, but he didn't care about holding out for the money we deserved. I felt like he had sold out, but he was going to fight to be the best, and I couldn't look down on him for that. After all, you have to fight the best to be the best.

The fight with Chuck was simply billed as UFC 47: It's On and was held on May 2, 2004. He was dominating me in the first round. I was kind of holding my own, but I couldn't take him down. In the second round, he went to throw a punch just as I was throwing a punch and his thumb got me in the eye. I stepped back, wiped my eye, and couldn't see a thing. I managed to block about six shots and then the next four connected and he dropped me. The referee stepped in and stopped it.

I lost.

In the meantime my relationship with Kristin was just about shot. She had chosen to ignore my affairs for a while, but I wasn't making any attempts to hide Heather from her anymore.

On one occasion I went to Calgary, Canada, with a friend of mine named Damian. I probably told Kristin that it was business related, but I was really just looking for an excuse to get out of town and party a little bit. Damian and I went to a strip club and brought some chicks back to our room. When I got home, Kristin was going through my bags and she found a condom. I told her it wasn't mine. I told her that I had put all my clothes in a drawer and that Damian must have dropped it in there. She didn't believe me for a second.

The arguments became more and more intense between us until the relationship finally came to an end.

Kristin smokes, and I just hate people who smoke. She quit when she got pregnant, but when Jacob was born she started smoking again. One day, I had just gotten home from training and I had my foot in an ice bucket. We were arguing back and forth, and one of the things we were arguing about was her smoking. At one point I said, “Well, at least Heather doesn't fucking smoke!” Kristin wound up and hit me real hard across the face.

I looked up at her and thought,
I should punch this bitch in her fucking face.

But I've never hit a woman in my life. Instead I took my foot out of the ice bucket and tossed the water on her. She was soaked from head to toe. I got up, said I was done, and walked out.

To be honest, I was relieved, and my guess was that Kristin was, too. Our relationship hadn't been working for a long time. She would always be a part of my life, personally and professionally. She was good at handling my business, and I wasn't going to be one of those guys who splits with his woman and leaves her with nothing. Kristin would always be taken care of.

We were not separated at that point, but we were essentially living two separate lives. And I no longer had to make any pretense about cheating.

For the next year and a half I would date a lot of different chicks. I began to pull away from Heather. I know for a fact that she was with other guys when I wasn't with her. When we were together it was only about the sex. I never for a moment saw any kind of real future with Heather.

I went through a lot of shit over the next few months. Even though Kristin and I had for all intents and purposes split up, we were still arguing. Right in the middle of all that, the UFC called to tell me they wanted me to fight Patrick Côté.

This was Côté's first UFC fight, and with all the experience I had it seemed like a pretty easy fight. But with all the personal distractions in my life and the fact that I had suffered back-to-back losses, I actually had more to lose, so this fight was a bit of a risk.