A night club DJ wanted to know what it’s like to be hit by a body shot from Chuck Liddell, and he got his answer.
In his prime, Chuck Liddell was one of the most feared men both inside and outside the UFC Octagon. But for some, getting to experience “The Iceman” in some way is somewhat of a bucket list item.
Liddell recently spoke with MMA Fighting to recount a rather colorful story back in 2009 during a Kentucky Derby weekend.
“We’re out there for the Kentucky Derby and I was out one night at the club. This DJ comes up to me and goes ‘I’ve been training, I think I can take a body shot from you.’ I’m like no you’re not, I’ve been drinking and I don’t want to hit you. We talked for a minute and he’s like ‘can I at least announce you’re at the club, get up on stage with me?’ and I said sure.
“So he gets on stage and announces to the club that ‘I can take a body shot from Chuck Liddell … and Chuck Liddell is here and I’m going to take a body shot from him!’”
As anyone would when put on the spot, Liddell went all in. With that thought alone, you probably already know where this story is going.
“If we were at a party, I used to hit people every now and again if they bugged me long enough to hit them. I’d tap them, not real hard but just enough to hurt them a little bit. Like a body shot just enough so they know they got hit. Not enough to drop them but I’m giving them a liver shot.
“But now he’s putting me on blast in front of everybody saying I can’t knock him down with a body shot. Now I’ve got to hit him with the kitchen sink. I’m going to hit him with everything.
“So I hit him with the hardest shot I could and he goes down to his knees and he’s [moaning] for quite a while.”
Safe to say, it was a learning experience for the DJ, who felt Liddell’s power and lived to tell the tale.
“It’s all over with, we said goodbye to everybody. He catches me the next day and he says ‘hey, you broke two of my ribs, it’s bad,’” Liddell recalled. “And it’s like sorry? My bad. He was cool about it. He was like ‘I’m an idiot, I shouldn’t have done that.’ But it was pretty funny. You get hit with that liver shot, he’s just rolling on the ground. It was pretty funny.
“I told you no. I’ve been drinking and I don’t want to do this right now. You put me on blast in front of everybody, I’m going to hit you hard.”
Liddell is no stranger to such odd moments. A few years prior, he got the same request from ex-pro skater and radio personality Jason Ellis. You can also probably guess how that ended, but here’s the clip.
“Oh my god. After the Jason Ellis thing, I had a lot of people who wanted me to hit them for some reason,” Liddell said. “I hit Jason Ellis in an interview and after that I had so many people asking me to hit them. It was funny.”
These days, the 51-year-old UFC Hall-of-Famer is two and a half years into definite retirement. He did call it quits the first time in 2010 but decided to make a one-time return in late 2018 to fight Tito Ortiz for the third time. He was knocked out in the first round.