“You are not an elite fighter. You are predictable. The reality is, I don’t see you beating elite guys. Werdum, Cain is another level than you.”
As if Brendan Schaub‘s first round TKO loss at the hands of Travis Browne last weekend wasn’t bad enough, the verbal shellacking he received on The Joe Rogan Experience last night might’ve been even more devastating.
Sitting in with The Fighter and the Kid co-host Bryan Callen, Schaub tried to explain what went wrong against Browne at UFC 181, and when his words fell short, the always honest Rogan stepped in to dole out some brutally honest advice for a guy he considers his friend, all but demanding that he retire from the sport before he receives anymore brain damage.
“This is the reality of it: I worry about your commitment to fighting,” said Rogan, “and I worry about where you stand… not your commitment to training, not your commitment to give it your all. I think you have one foot out the door. I think you’re looking at where the future is going to take you and that you can’t do this forever. I think that’s a very dangerous place to be in fighting.”
When Schaub disagreed with Rogan’s assessment, things only took a turn for the worse…
The reality of your skill-set and where you’re at now, I don’t see you beating the elite guys. I don’t see you beating Cain Velasquez, I don’t see you beating Junior dos Santos, I don’t see you beating Fabricio Werdum.
You came into fighting fairly late in life. You’re a good athlete, you’re a strong guy, you’re a big guy and you can do a lot of things because of that. You’re very dedicated and you’re very disciplined and you get s**t done. But there’s a reality of fluidity, of movement, of mechanical efficiency of movement that happens when you get a guy who’s trained his whole life at a certain aspect of MMA; whether it’s wrestling, kickboxing, jiu-jitsu… there’s a fluidity to their movement that you don’t really have. It’s not that you don’t try hard, it’s not that you’re not dedicated, it’s not that you’re not disciplined, it’s not that you’re not intelligent. There’s s**t that other people can do that you can’t do.
As I’m watching that fight there’s a lot of things that concern me. You were lunging with your punches instead of getting there with your footwork and then launching things from the proper distance. You were reaching and loading up, you looked very stiff, you didn’t look fluid. It didn’t look good, it’s didn’t look like you were well-prepared. Your movement just didn’t look like an elite fighter’s movement.
Rogan then asked Schaub how he think he would fair against Cain Velasquez in a straight up wrestling match.
“I think people would be surprised,” answered Schaub.
“Really? You think so?” answered Rogan. “I think you’d be surprised. I really do. I think he’d fuck you up, and I say that as a friend and a guy who loves you.”
Rogan further criticized “Big Brown’s” performance against Andrei Arlovski, stating that Schaub “couldn’t pull the trigger” and that his “attacks were really obvious.”
It may seem like a harsh and downright spiteful thing to say to a friend on a live show, but the reality is that Rogan said what he said out of an earnest concern for Schaub’s health. The TUF 10 runner-up has suffered 4 (T)KO losses in the octagon, some more particularly vicious than others, and who knows how much more damage in training. He is on a two-fight losing streak and has never beat a top 10 ranked fighter in his division. The end of the road is rapidly approaching for Schaub, young as he may seem, and it’s no longer a question of whether or not he can become a champion (he cannot), but rather how much damage he is willing to take in his attempt to achieve that impossible dream.
“The reality of brain damage is that it doesn’t heal” Rogan continued. “It was very hard for me to stop fighting, but I stopped fighting when I was 21, and one of the reasons why I stopped fighting when I was 21 was because I was starting to get headaches, man. I was starting to get headaches and I know I did some damage to my head; I know I did”
Schaub remained silent for the most part, only attempting to defend his need to continue fighting for the most basic of reasons: Money.
Joe, I think it’s easy for you to sit there, with whatever, $12 million in the bank and say, ‘Oh, you need to stop doing this.’ It’s easier when you’re set and you don’t come from that background and you’re going home to your wife and kid in your f***ing $6 million mansion. It’s like, ‘Bro, you shouldn’t fight. Brain trauma. It’s bad.’ ‘OK, I’ll just stop doing it. I’ll just do a podcast for the next 40 years.
When Schaub declared that he would fight again “100 percent,” Rogan somberly questioned how long he would continue commentating due to the internal conflict of watching people he considers friends suffer repeated head damage. Friends like Schaub.
“If you fight again, I might just take the day off.”