Author: Ben Fowlkes

Kenny Florian’s MMA career started in a nightclub in Taunton, Mass., in 2002 and ended ten years later, after 12 wins in the UFC and several failed title bids. He never won the big one, never became a champion, though he did come close to starving himself in the pursuit of a belt there at the end. Either the pressure was too much or he just couldn’t get it done against the best in any division. Depends who you ask.

But now that he’s called it quits (or says he has, which is the best you can ask for in a sport riddled with short-lived retirements), what are we supposed to make of Florian’s decade-long career across four different weight classes? Was he a great fighter? Was he just pretty good, or very good, or not quite good enough when it mattered most? Does it even matter?

Thinking about these questions, I keep coming back to the conversation I had with Drew Fickett about the ups and downs of his own crazy career. When I asked about his split decision win over Florian in 2004, Fickett said he wished he’d gotten a chance to fight Florian later on, “when [Florian] was better and had some experience.” The difference between the fighter Florian was and the fighter he would become was so vast, Fickett explained, that it was almost as if he had transformed himself into a brand new person.

The fight with Florian was Fickett’s 25th MMA bout. It was Florian’s fourth. Fickett got his hand raised at the end, but Florian got the spot on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter. Fickett would become known as the fighter with so much talent and so little self-control. Florian would become the guy who squeezed every last ounce of success out of what talent he did have.

That was the perception, at least. Though Florian was obviously a gifted athlete, never did he seem to be coasting on natural ability alone. He never showed up for a fight in poor condition, never seemed unprepared. He made the most of what he had to work with, and it brought him right to the brink of more than one world title but never all the way to the top.

Contrast that with Fickett, whose career is often held up as a sort of cautionary tale about squandered potential. Contrast it even with the career of B.J. Penn, who was brilliant when he was motivated and interested, and merely very good when he wasn’t.

With Florian, there was never any doubt about whether he had trained hard, whether he really wanted it. Inside the cage, you could depend on Florian to be a driven professional at all times. Outside of it, he was the kind of ambassador for the sport that we were all glad to have when MMA detractors painted fighters as brain-dead thugs trading steroid-infused groin kicks. Florian — the bilingual Boston College soccer player who’d dedicated his life to the martial arts after a near-death experience in Brazil — was the guy you could point to and ask, ‘Does he look like some glorified bar bouncer to you?’

All that makes Florian a likable and sympathetic character, but does it make him a great fighter? Can we look back on his career and call it a success? He made some money, had some big wins, and set himself up for a promising future in broadcasting. He’s so far from the stereotype of the broke and broken down ex-fighter that he almost makes professional cagefighting seem like a sound career choice.

He’s also one of the very few people in this business about whom no one seems to have anything bad to say. No salacious gossip about his personal life. No whispered accusations behind his back. He competed at the highest level of his sport for years, made himself into a household name among fight fans, and did it without leaving a trail of envy and resentment in his wake. Surely, any man who can lay claim to all that by his 36th birthday is doing something right. He could never call himself the best in the world, but so what? Didn’t he achieve a certain kind of excellence, even if his career was more of a testament to the power of will than pure athleticism?

But that doesn’t seem to be how we do it in MMA. For better or worse, we think of championship belts as the only metric that matters. After all, how great can you be if there was never a time when you could fairly call yourself the greatest? There’s a certain logic in that, but it still seems a little dumb, or maybe just depressing. Nobody aspires to be the Florian of their division — the guy who’s better than everyone but the very best — but you could still do a whole lot worse. When we look back on the career of a fighter who always handled himself with dignity and professionalism, who avoided so many of the cliched pitfalls that snagged his contemporaries, how can we call him anything other than a smashing success? How can we say that he wasn’t great at what he did?

The Twitter Mailbag was flooded with an impossible number of question across an impossible swath of crazy topics. Sadly, we don’t have time for all of them, so I picked the best ones, which is to say the ones I felt like answering. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

If you’ve got a question of your own, hit me up on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Now on to this week’s queries.

Stealth Lee @stealthlee
@benfowlkesMMA I’ve been watching Dana White dealing with the seemingly insurmountable BS in his job. Is there a worse job than his? #mbag

Well, he’s incredibly wealthy and flies around the world in a private jet, sharing cocktails with Olivia Munn and sitting in the best seat in the house at UFC events, so yes, there are many jobs out there that are worse than his. But okay, I see your point, and I’ve wondered about it myself from time to time. I definitely wondered about it last Saturday night when he stood in front of a bunch of us pesky reporter types just before midnight on a Saturday night and told us, once again, that we have no idea the “bulls—” he deals with on a daily basis. And I think he’s right. We know about a lot of the bulls—, but I’m sure we don’t know about all of it.

It makes you wonder, especially with some of the health problems he’s been dealing with lately, why he doesn’t kick his feet up and take an early retirement, or at least an extended vacation? He’s already rich. And besides, he’s said in the past that the UFC machine is like McDonald’s at this point; it can exist and operate effectively even without him there to sign off on every detail. So why, if the job is such an intolerable headache, does he keep doing it?

The only explanation I come up with is that, deep down, he loves this bulls—. He has to. For the same reason factory workers don’t keep punching a timecard after they hit the lotto, White wouldn’t still be here if this was just a job to him. Maybe it’s the thrill of success or the love of power, but he clearly enjoys some aspect of this more than he hates the others. He might complain about it sometimes. He might even genuinely hate it every now and then. But being UFC president is not a prison sentence. It’s just a really stressful, absurdly lucrative job that consumes your life and becomes your identity. If he expected anything different when he convinced his rich friends to buy this thing, he was kidding himself.

Aaron Daane @aarondaane
@benfowlkesMMA podcast/mailbag question: you touched on this, but I’ve thought of this before. Why do MMA athletes train until they r hurt?

MMA is that rare sport where the amount and type of training is left almost entirely up to the athlete. He has coaches and trainers to guide him, but it’s not as structured as the NFL or the NBA. The fighter can skip practices or add workouts. He can cobble together his training from several different sources. Because the fighter trains so much more than he actually competes, and because each competition is so critical, there’s tremendous pressure on him to get in the gym and try to answer a lot of questions that have yet to be asked of him. That leads to overtraining, which in turn leads to injuries. That’s part of the puzzle right there.

The other part is that, with so much talent packed into relatively few gyms, a lot of fighters end up regularly sparring guys they should be paid to fight. You walk into gyms like AKA and the floor is filled with superstar fighters, all beating the hell out of each other on a daily basis. Fighters say that’s necessary, that “steel sharpens steel.” But do me a favor: take a couple swords from that samurai collection you bought from the late-night infomercial a few months back (you know the one), then go out in the backyard and bang them against one another for an hour. Then come back and tell me if they’re sharper afterwards.

Pedro Figueiredo @pedromfdo
@benfowlkesMMA give me your thoughts on a possible rematch between JDS and Cain?

I think it will happen, and I think it will end more or less the same way the first one did, albeit probably not as quickly. Junior dos Santos has excellent takedown defense, great footwork, and the perfect combination of precision and power punching. Cain Velasquez’s standup has improved over the years, but he can’t win a striking battle with JDS. He has no choice but to try and take the champ down and keep him there, and they both know it. That’s going to make it a lot tougher to do when he finally gets another chance.

Jay Bradley @jmichaelbrad
@benfowlkesMMA KenFlo’s retirement got me thinking. In your opinion, who’s the best UFC fighter to never win a belt? #twittermailbag

That’s a good question, but the use of the word ‘never’ implies that we must limit ourselves to those non-champions who are officially retired. For instance, Josh Koscheck is an excellent fighter who has never been a champion, but that doesn’t mean he never will, even if it seems unlikely at the moment. There’s also the question of whether we should limit ourselves strictly to UFC titles. Nick Diaz and Dan Henderson are both great fighters who have won championships outside the UFC, and surely those have to count for something.

In fact, the more I think about this question within those parameters, the more I wonder if the obvious answer isn’t Florian himself. I can’t think of any other officially retired fighter who won his way to as many UFC title shots without ever actually putting his hands on one. It seems kind of heartbreaking to come so close, so often, and yet keep coming up short. Of course, it’s still better than spending your entire career in the middle of the pack without ever even getting a whiff of the gold.

Steven Crocker @StevenCrocker
@benfowlkesMMA Is Dana White too ‘Dana White’ for the UFC as it becomes more mainstream? Do they need a more professional ‘voice?’

Seems like we’ve heard some version of this off and on for the last five years or so. I know I’ve read enough opinion pieces with this same exact thesis that I no longer bother clicking on the headlines. People were making this argument well before the UFC got a network TV deal with FOX, and somehow they’re still making it afterwards. It’s true that White isn’t your typical sports league figurehead. Then again, MMA isn’t your typical sport. I’m not sure that the act of two men in tight shorts elbowing each other in the face is ever going to be truly mainstream, as least not the way that baseball or basketball is. I’m also not sure that the people who are turned off by professional cagefighting really care whether the president of the organization swears a lot.

Fight promoters have to be a certain type of person. The job is part pro sports commissioner and part carnival barker. One of White’s strengths is his ability to shove a narrative into the news and keeping pounding away at it until it starts to seem true. If that also comes with some f-bombs and the occasional vein-popping tirade, maybe it’s just part of the bargain.

Corey Martinez @NewfieMex
@benfowlkesMMA Hey Ben, why are people surprised about Nick Diaz punishment from NSAC? He tried to sue them!

People are surprised (or maybe just disappointed) because they’re reasonable enough to know that marijuana is not a performance-enhancing substance. It just isn’t. It’s a recreational drug, and a pretty harmless one. Testosterone, on the other hand, which seems to be flowing through the streets these days, often with the Nevada commission’s blessing, is one of the best performance-enhancers out there. The world in which testosterone use is punished less severely than marijuana, and sometimes not punished at all, is a world that seems downright absurd to many people.

But then, that doesn’t address Diaz’s specific case. He knew marijuana wasn’t allowed, and he tried to get away with it anyway. It was only after he was caught (again) that he went looking for a justification. So you’re right, he kind of asked for it with his open, habitual flaunting of the rules and his legal challenge after the fact. But that doesn’t change the fact that, logically, it makes zero sense to crack down on potheads while allowing professional fighters to juice themselves up with testosterone.

Ben Constable @BenConstable
@benfowlkesMMA #TMB How do you report the play-by-play and not miss half the fight, and in many instances, the finish?

The short answer is: you don’t. That’s why writing liveblogs sucks, and why you should reward those who do it by clicking on the link even if you don’t want to read it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been cageside at an event, looked down at my laptop for just a second to make sure I’m not misspelling someone’s name over and over again, then heard the crowd gasp in amazement just before I look up to see one fighter unconscious on the mat. What happened? I ask my colleagues on press row. What did he get hit with? Then I realize that they’re asking me the same thing, and so we all sit quietly and wait for the replay.

Kyle Miller @steampunk22
@benfowlkesMMA What is going on with UFC 147? The card only has 4 fights confirmed and a weak main/co-main. Should UFC consider PPV tiers?

I think we can all agree that UFC 147 is a disaster. Nothing went the way it was supposed to, and there’s very little there that would convince anyone to spend money on it, especially when UFC 148, which might end up being the biggest pay-per-view of the year, is just a couple weeks later. My guess is that most fans will save their money to see Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen, while Brazilian MMA fans are once again expected to eat cold, stale leftovers and be grateful for the chance.

Matt Giesbrecht @MattGiesbrecht
@benfowlkesMMA Is this a make-it-or-break-it fight for @patrick_cote, with it being his third crack at the @ufc?

Sure, but I would have said the same about his last UFC bout against Tom Lawlor. He lost that one and got bounced from the big show, but his willingness to do the UFC a solid and accept a tough fight on short notice has earned him one more shot. If he puts on a good enough show against Cung Le at UFC 148, I’d bet he’ll get at least one more fight whether he wins or loses. What happens after that, however, is the real question. It’s pretty clear that Cote, while a solid all-around middleweight, is not a great one. He may not even be a UFC-caliber fighter, and yet he keeps getting chance after chance to prove otherwise.

Andrew Ballentine @Ballentine
@benfowlkesMMA If you were a pro fighter what camp would you like to train at and why?

Easy. I’d train at Greg Jackson’s gym in Albuquerque. Not only do his fighters tend to be wildly successful, but Jackson himself is just an all-around great guy. Maybe some people need to have a maniac screaming in their faces to get motivated. Me? I like Jackson’s high school guidance counselor approach. If you didn’t die in your first week of sparring there, you almost couldn’t help but get better.

Josh @hurstje1
@benfowlkesMMA Q: Why don’t we see MMA media members confronting Dana White with the ridiculousness he’s been spewing re: TV ratings?

Maybe you don’t see people “confronting” White about it (it’s worth remembering that there’s a difference between an interview and an interrogation), but I have heard plenty of people ask about the FOX ratings. It’s just that White is very good at staying on message when he seizes on one that he likes. That’s why you’ll hear him repeat the same sound bytes over and over. That’s why every reporter has heard his four street corners analogy so many times we can sing along when he gets to the point where he says, “Fighting is in our DNA; we get it and we like it.”

As far as his actual argument on the ratings front, what do you expect him to say? He’s the promoter. It’s his job to spin negatives into positives, or at least to give it a shot. It doesn’t mean any of us have to buy it, and it doesn’t mean that everyone who interviews him is obliged to treat it like the climax of a courtroom drama. He’s not going to break down in tears and admit that a downward-trending ratings line is actually bad news rather than good, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking it.

Graeme Brookes @Mr_Brookes04
@benfowlkesMMA quick & good? Your views on a beard protecting your chin? As stated by Dr Rogan PHD. ZZ Top would be the P4P kings!

If a beard does anything at all to prevent knockouts, it’s probably more visual than physical. You look at Johny Hendricks when he’s at his beardiest, and you can’t even be sure exactly where his chin is in among all that fur. How do you hit a guy on the button when you can’t even see it?

Billy Young @dynamiteBdog
@benfowlkesMMA who do you think moves to 205 easier? Cain or Cormier?

Neither. They’d both have a hard time with it, and neither one really needs to. They might be a tad short for heavyweight, but it doesn’t seem to keep them from winning fights. Besides, they’d be short for light heavyweight, too. I see no reason not to let them stay at heavyweight, where they’ve both proved to be a walking nightmare for bigger, taller fighters.

Another season of The Ultimate Fighter came to an end, the welterweight contender field got reduced by one, and plenty of young up-and-comers got a chance to show us what they’ve got.

So what did we learn at Friday night’s Ultimate Fighter: Live Finale? To answer that, we sort through the biggest winners, losers, and everything in between.

Biggest Winner: Martin Kampmann
That’s two in a row where the “Hitman” was losing pretty clearly right up until he won. He was nearly knocked cold in the first round, and had some valuable facial features smashed in the second, but all it took was one short hook to the crown of Ellenberger’s head to start the turnaround. A couple knee strikes later, the comeback was complete. Maybe that’s the big difference between Kampmann and the people who very nearly beat Kampmann before losing to him: when he has someone on the run, he keeps them there. Now Kampmann’s name gets added to the welterweight sweepstakes, which seems only fitting. If he doesn’t get an eventual title shot out of the deal, at least he’ll guarantee that whoever beats him for it is as good at finishing strong as he is at starting that way.

Biggest Loser: Jake Ellenberger
Sure, he can blame the stoppage. He can wonder aloud why Kampmann was given a chance to recover after getting pasted with that left hand in the first round, and yet he was given no such opportunity after eating a couple knees in the second. He has an argument there, not that it will do him much good now. It won’t change the L on his record to a W. It won’t get him back into the title shot conversation. All it will do is salve his wounds with self-pity, while ignoring the role that he played in his own misfortunes. The fact remains that he had Kampmann hurt in the first round, had him on his back and staring up at the lights. Instead of keeping the pressure on, Ellenberger let him recover. Bad idea. It’s easy to go back after the fight and say who should have done what and when. It’s a lot tougher to actually do it, especially in the few brief moments when the opportunity is there. But weeks or months from now, when Ellenberger looks back on his best chance to date to put himself in the mix for a shot at the welterweight title, my guess is he’ll keep coming back to that first round, and how just a few more punches and little more urgency could have made all the difference.

Best Feel-Good Story: Michael Chiesa
Reality TV loves an inspirational, triumph-over-adversity tale. Chiesa completed the narrative by fighting through his grief to win the Ultimate Fighter: Live title after his father died while Chiesa was locked up in a Vegas mansion with a bunch of strangers. He showed the same brand of determination in his bout with Iaquinta at Friday’s finale. Chiesa clearly isn’t the most technical all-around fighter, and he’s got some holes in his game that he’ll need to close in a hurry if he wants to stick around in the UFC. The good news is, he’s already got a lot of the necessary attributes that nobody can teach. He doesn’t quit, and he isn’t easily discouraged. From what we’ve seen of past TUF winners, a little resiliency often goes a long way. It doesn’t hurt to have one or two good submissions in your bag of tricks, either.

Best TUF-related Cautionary Tale: Jonathan Brookins
Lest we buy into all the hype that comes along with the cut-glass trophy and big money promises, let’s remind ourselves that Brookins was once where Chiesa is now. He won TUF season 12 just under two years ago, and his career seemed to be just beginning. Three fights later, he’s 1-2 in the UFC after getting outpointed by Erik Koch and absolutely outclassed by Charles Oliveira. The best thing you can say about his performance against “Do Bronx” on Friday night was that he made it to the second round and gave back at least a portion of what he got in the striking exchanges, though he still found himself on the wrong end of a guillotine choke in the end. Now we’ll find out what all that TUF hype is worth once the series has moved on and showered its affections on fresh new talent. Yesterday’s winners might find that they’re more disposable than they were led to believe when they were standing in the Octagon, hoisting that trophy over their heads.

Best Prospect: Max Holloway
The 20-year-old featherweight showed off some impressive skills while battering Pat Schilling to the brink of near total collapse. He couldn’t finish it, even though Schilling seemed to be begging him to at times, but considering his youth and inexperience, you still can’t help but be encouraged by the big paws on this puppy. If he keeps developing and adds a little more killer instinct to his attack, he might very well turn into something. Next up, let’s see if he can look as good against an opponent who really matters.

Best Highlight Reel Fodder: Justin Lawrence
His head kick knockout of John Cofer had shades of Rashad Evans-Sean Salmon. One difference is, his came in the third round of a close, exciting fight, during which both men proved that they could take it and dish it out. Lawrence might not have won the reality show, but history tells us that that’s not a kiss of death any more than winning it is a guarantee of future success. He obviously has skills worth cultivating, and now he has a little hype of his own to carry him into the next one. Once you kick a man’s jaw into the balcony of the Pearl at the Palms, people tend to remember you.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” Drew Fickett says of his 13-year career as a professional fighter. “I mean, a lot.”

Coming from the man who once showed up to a fight drunk, who went to jail instead of to the landmark first season of The Ultimate Fighter reality TV series, who left the UFC on a win following a drunken incident at the Palms Casino, somehow even this feels like an understatement.

In a career that’s seen cage fights in both seedy bars and the Mandalay Bay, Fickett hasn’t just made the normal fighter mistakes — he’s invented brand new ones. He’s proved to be as talented with self-sabotage as he is with rear-naked chokes. He’s beaten guys he had no business beating and lost to others who seemed hardly worth training for. He’s been great and he’s been terrible, sometimes all in the same night. He’s done more damage to his own body and his own career than anyone else ever could, and he knows it. Truly, he does. But at 32 years old and with nearly 60 pro fights to his credit, what he doesn’t know is whether there’s still time to be great again, maybe make it last this time, maybe finally get out of his own way and find out how high he can climb if only he’d stop pulling himself back down at the most critical moments.

“I said this before and I still believe it now: a motivated Drew Fickett, training with the right camp and the right people around him, can be a world champion,” says former manager Bryan Hamper. “He has some of the most raw talent in the sport of MMA. It’s just getting all of that to line up in the right way.”

“Drew’s one of those guys who, when he’s in a good gym and he’s focused, he gives everybody a hard time,” says longtime friend and current manager Jason Chambers. “When he’s not on the ball, he’s a completely different fighter.”

It’s a description that Fickett doesn’t argue with. He’s the first to admit that he’s been “inconsistent” over the course of his career. Then again, he never expected this to turn into a career in the first place. He was just a kid who fell in love with the martial arts in the strip mall karate schools of Tucson, Ariz., then carried that same passion onto the high school wrestling mats as soon as he was old enough.

“I loved Steven Seagal movies, loved Van Damme movies. I was just a complete nerd about it,” Fickett says. “I would do katas in my room by myself. While most kids were going to parties and doing normal stuff, I was pretending to be a samurai warrior. I didn’t have a girlfriend. I got good grades, but only because my parents told me that if I didn’t I couldn’t do karate and wrestling.”

In high school, Fickett developed a reputation for his intensity and single-minded focus. He woke up early and ran to school so he could lift weights before class. He freaked out teammates and opponents alike by standing on the edge of the mats before matches, screaming and slapping his own face.

“I was kind of like Clay Guida, if Clay Guida took PCP,” he says. “I didn’t have a girlfriend in high school, didn’t drink, didn’t do anything like that. I just lived, ate, and breathed wrestling and karate.”

Of course, in the late ‘90s there was only so much a young man could do with that skill set. The UFC was still in its infancy, and the local MMA fights in Arizona’s Rage in the Cage circuit seemed more like a fun distraction than a viable career move.

“It wasn’t really a sport then. I mean, we got a couple bucks for it, but people would clown us for doing MMA. Like, you’re doing what? Cage fighting? What are you, Patrick Swayze from Roadhouse?”

*****

The first time it occurred to Fickett that he might actually have a future in fighting was when he won a split decision over Dennis Hallman in 2003. It’s the win he still regards as his “greatest victory,” mostly because he knows now, just as he knew then, that Hallman was, at least technically, the better fighter. Fickett had been watching him on grainy VHS videos for years by that point, and was awestruck by the opportunity to face him.

“I trained so hard for that fight, and then I met him and he was this great dude,” Fickett says. “For three days before we fought, we were just all hanging out. We sat around the pool, drinking, picking up girls, and then we fought. It was great.”

But Fickett has never been one to do anything halfway. Once he started drinking, he did it with the same extreme intensity that he did everything else. He drank between fights. He drank in the days leading up to them. He still racked up an impressive record in his first few years of competition, and he told himself that he had everything together.

In July of 2004, UFC president Dana White came to scout Fickett for an upcoming reality TV show that the organization was putting together. At a small event in Revere, Mass., Fickett fought and beat an inexperienced local kid by the name of Kenny Florian, and it looked like he was a lock for the new show.

But no, things can never be that easy. Not for Fickett.

“While they were filming the show, I was sitting in jail like an idiot. Kenny Florian and Diego [Sanchez] and Chris Leben got the good road. I got to go to jail for a couple months.”

Bizarrely enough, it started over a free pizza. Or rather, it started over what was supposed to be a free pizza, according to a coupon that Fickett and a friend had, but which escalated into a silly and pointless argument over the phone when they called in to redeem it. You can imagine how this goes. Fickett calls and asks for his free pizza, but the guy on the other end isn’t so excited about delivering it. He gives Fickett some attitude. He feels pretty tough over the phone. The next thing he knows, Fickett is promising to come down there and hold the guy accountable for his words.

“I drove down there and kicked the door in, threw a computer on the ground, then I drove off in my truck,” says Fickett. “They ended up arresting me for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for throwing the computer.”

The charge got knocked down to a misdemeanor, but the ensuing legal trouble was enough to keep Fickett off the first season of the reality show, which former manager Hamper thinks might have been the perfect avenue for showcasing his personality to the world.

“He’s perfect for reality TV,” Hamper says. “You don’t get a more real person than Drew. He tells you exactly what he’s thinking.”

Even without the show to funnel him into the UFC, Fickett would make his Octagon debut in 2005, taking on Nick Diaz at UFC 51. By this point, Fickett had been a pro fighter for nearly six years. He had an impressive record of 24-2, and had all the makings of a future UFC star. Yet on the morning of the fight, Fickett woke in absolute terror.

“I was scared s—less, more of the UFC than Nick Diaz. When you have your first big fight and you walk into the Mandalay Bay and see ‘Sugar’ Shane Mosley and Oscar de la Hoya on the rafters, you realize that you’re not fighting in Rage in the Cage in some cowboy bar anymore. I cried the entire day of the fight. I was completely mortified, completely scared.”

Fickett lost a first-round TKO that night, but bounced back to win his next four fights, including a rear-naked choke finish of future welterweight contender Josh Koscheck at Ultimate Fight Night 2. He had his ups and downs in the UFC, but the last straw came after a win over Keita Nakamura in 2007, when he parted ways with the UFC following rumors of a drunken confrontation with a bouncer at the Palms. It wouldn’t be the last time alcohol abuse altered the direction of his career. Two years later Fickett showed up drunk for a Rage in the Cage fight with Shannon Ritch, leading to a last-minute cancellation that only furthered the damage to Fickett’s reputation as the story spread on blogs and messageboards.

“Every problem I ever had was because of drinking,” Fickett says now. “I’ve always had a problem with drinking. I’ve always had a problem with taking everything to the extreme.”

*****

If you want to know what Fickett’s capable of at his best, all you have to do is look at September 10, 2010. That’s when he entered the Shine Fights Lightweight Grand Prix — a one-night, eight-man tournament with a $50,000 grand prize.

At the time, Fickett had just one win in his last six fights. He’d been knocked out four times in eight months during the worst losing streak of his career. If ever there was a fighter who seemed washed-up — a victim of his own vices and self-destructive urges — it was Fickett. The MMA world had written him off and left him for dead. What it didn’t realize was the Fickett still had some life left in him. All he needed was a reason to resurrect his own career, and the chance to make fifty grand in one night was that reason.

But really, it wasn’t the money Fickett was after. It was what the money could get him. If he had that much cash, Fickett thought, he might be able to gain custody of his daughter, who was then in the sole care of her mother.

“I thought, wow, I can go get my daughter back,” Fickett says. “I didn’t think about anything else. I did nothing but train and live mixed martial arts. I didn’t know I was going to win the Shine tournament. I didn’t even think I was that good.”

Three straight fights, three straight wins via choke. Fickett spent a combined eight-and-a-half minutes in the ring that night, beating fighters like Dennis Bermudez and Carlo Prater, both of whom would find their way into the UFC shortly thereafter. Fickett took the tournament title and the grand prize, declaring to the MMA world that he was officially “back.” What he didn’t know was that, when it came to getting custody of his daughter, a little bit of money and one good night in the ring didn’t mean much to the courts.

“When I realized I could make all that money and still not get my daughter back, it crushed me,” he says. Fickett would one more fight after that — a quick armbar win over Matt Veach in which he admits he “kind of got lucky” — and then lost his next four in a row.

When he talks about those losses now, including a TKO defeat against Jamie Varner earlier this year, the enthusiasm drains from his voice. He trained “pretty hard” for that fight he says. He had a “decent” fight camp. What he didn’t have was the same focus and drive he had when he thought that winning might reunite him with his daughter. What he didn’t appreciate right away was that his daughter didn’t need his $50,000 as much as she needed the same thing that he needed from himself.

“It’s not about the money, it’s about being a good, consistent person,” Fickett says. “I thought, put that money in front of me and that’s it. I can get my life back. But it’s not about the money. I realized that. I think I’m ready for that now.”

*****

These days you can find Fickett in Florida, training with American Top Team and seeking treatment for alcoholism at an outpatient rehab center. He’s been sober for roughly four weeks now, according to Chambers, his current manager, who says Ficket needed “a come-to-Jesus moment.”

“I think that’s what happened here a couple weeks ago,” Chambers says. “Drew’s one of those guys that left the UFC on a win, which is very rare. Usually when that happens it’s a red flag that something happened. Usually it’s either you had some problems with Dana or you said something you shouldn’t have. In Drew’s case, it was that his drinking got out of control. He looks back on that now and realizes, this is a situation he needs to address in his life. We had a long talk about it a couple weeks ago. He’s at a point in his career where, he’s 32, he’s on a win now, and he needs to put together a nice streak and show some maturity, not only in his training, but also in his life.”

He’s taken the first steps. He left Tucson, left his family and friends, and is trying to make a new start. After submitting Kevin Knabjian in March, he’s slated to fight Brazilian lightweight Jonata Noveas at a ShoFight event on June 16. If he can win that one, Chambers says, then maybe one or two more after that, who knows?

“I think he will get back in the UFC if he gets his life together and he stays the course,” Chambers says. “If he stays sober and he’s focused like he’s really working hard to do now…absolutely, 100 percent I think he can do it.”

Fickett refuses to spout off the cliche line about how he wouldn’t be in this sport if he didn’t think he could be a UFC champion. At the same time, he admits, he does want back in the UFC. He wants another shot against the best fighters in the world, and one more chance to see what he’s capable of when he’s not his own worst enemy.

“As long as I go out there and give it my best, and as long as I don’t lose because of some vice or some excuse or some failure of my soul, I’m golden,” he says. “I can be happy with that.”

Those who know him best don’t doubt it. Though Hamper hasn’t managed him for years, he still says he “thinks the world of Drew,” and wants to see him get his life back together just as much as anyone.

“I truly believe he can [get back in the UFC], and with the right opportunity he will. That’s just the motivation a guy like Drew needs. You look at some of the big opportunities he’s had, like that Shine tournament and some of the other big fights he’s had, he rises to the occasion every time. I think for him it’s hard to get excited about fighting a journeyman on the small circuit, because there’s really no upside there. That’s hurt him sometimes. But when he gets a chance at something big, he rises to it.”

The way Chambers sees it, those around Fickett have done everything they can. At some point it has to be his decision and his effort that gets him the rest of the way.

“He’s in a really good place in his life right now. You know, we’ve led this horse to water.”

And Fickett? The guy who’s trained in top gyms and warehouses and backyards alike over the course of 13 years in this sport? Yes, he knows he’s made mistakes. More than his share, even. Maybe more than any pro fighter ought to be able to make and still haul himself back from the brink. But now that he’s likely closer to the end of his career than the beginning, what Fickett hopes is that those mistakes weren’t all for nothing, and that there’s still time to put his hard lessons to some good use.

“I’m not proud of the mistakes I’ve made, but I’m happy for them,” he says. “I’ve learned so much from them, and I think I learned more even than some of the fighters who are at the top, all because of those mistakes. I can do this, man. I know I can.”

Better late than never, the MMA Wrap-Up returns to look at the UFC 146 fireworks and ask, in a perfect world, who really deserves the next crack at the UFC heavyweight title after that night of big men producing big finishes? As in, if we could choose anybody at all, without worrying about suspensions or injuries or contracts, who has actually earned it, and who’s most likely to get it? Two different questions, with two different answers.

The heavyweights delivered at UFC 146, and fans got their money’s worth on a quick, but memorable night. Now that the dust has cleared and the blood has been mopped up, time to take a closer look at the biggest winners, losers, and everything in between.

Biggest Winner: Junior dos Santos
The heavyweight champ went all Babe Ruth on us and called his shot, then knocked it out of the park exactly like he said he would. After picking Frank Mir apart with clean, precise punches, he put him away with relative ease early on in the second round. After the fight, even Mir talked about JDS with a sense of awe in his voice. He expected the fast hands, he explained, but the champ’s footwork left him swinging at air after he had the wits punched out of him. Dos Santos’s first title defense is now in the books, and it sure looked like an easy one. Granted, Mir was the UFC’s backup plan, but he’s still a former champion who looked lost in the cage with JDS. You could argue that a better wrestler (like Velasquez or Daniel Cormier) or a better striker (like Alistair Overeem) would give him a tougher test, and you might be right. Then again, you might be terribly, embarrassingly wrong. We won’t know until we see it in the cage. Until then, dos Santos is alone at the top.

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Biggest Loser: Jason “Mayhem” Miller
The fight with Dollaway was one he absolutely could not afford to lose, and he lost it. That’s never good. Causing a ruckus backstage probably wasn’t a great idea either, but, let’s be honest, he was probably getting fired whether he took the defeat like a gentleman or not. Dana White is no “Mayhem” fan to begin with, and Miller had vowed to retire if he lost to Dollaway. If you know it’s your last day of work — and if you’re not angling for a reference — I guess you might as well slash your boss’s tires on the way out. But can this really be the last the MMA world has seen of Miller? Personally, I hope not. He’s not only a fun guy to have around, he’s also a smart guy. Not that most fighters are dumb, but let’s just say there aren’t many who are as intellectually curious as Miller. You can actually sit down with him and talk about something other than fighting, which is refreshing. Because of that, maybe some of us in the media want him to be a better fighter than he is. I can admit it: maybe I want to see him stick around because he makes my job so much easier and more enjoyable. His performance against Michael Bisping might have been awful, but the Dollaway fight could have easily gone his way with just one or two more punches on the right spot at the right time. Still, that isn’t how went down, and it’s no good to make excuses for someone’s job performance just because you like him as a person. I still suspect that Miller is a UFC-caliber fighter, but I can’t say that he’s looked like it recently. I have to think that Bellator — hell, maybe even TNA wrestling — could use a guy like him. After everything that went down on Saturday night, however, it’s safe to assume that they won’t be in a bidding war with the UFC over his services.

Most Impressive in Defeat: Diego Brandao
For one round, Brandao looked like an absolute monster. The TUF 14 winner hit Darren Elkins with everything but a paternity suit, and he nearly decapitated him with a flying knee that had everyone within ear shot wincing at the sound of the impact. I’m still not sure how Elkins survived those first five minutes, but he did, and he found the holes in Brandao’s game over the course of the next two rounds. If you look at Brandao’s record you’ll see a lot of first-round finishes, but not too many late victories. Seems like whoever can survive three rounds with this little buzzsaw stands a pretty good chance of beating him. That’s something he’s got to fix, especially after every other featherweight in the UFC got a free primer on how to go at him. He’s still very young and obviously has a ton of talent, not to mention the kind of murderous aggression you just can’t teach. Maybe this loss will be all the motivation he needs to fix the holes in his game and come back stronger for the experience.

Least Impressive in Victory: C.B. Dollaway
In the post-fight press conference Dana White started to spout off his usual line about every fight on the card being a good one, but then he had to stop himself. “Well, almost every fight,” he said. He didn’t go into any more detail than that, but one assumes he was referring to Dollaway’s decision win via top control. It’s true that he dominated Miller on the mat and roughed him up where he could, but on the feet he looked like a knockout waiting to happen. Whenever he faces an opponent he can’t take down and smother, he struggles. If you look at his record in the UFC, you see a string of victories over fighters who were later deemed not quite Octagon-worthy. He had enough to beat Miller on Saturday night, and the decision was a clear-cut one. But if you get up to the sound boos after your victory — and if your opponent thinks that losing to you is reason enough to retire — how good are you really supposed to feel about that?

One-Punch Wonder: Roy Nelson
You don’t have to like his ZZ Top beard or his monster truck mullet, but you have to respect that man’s punching power. One solid right hand spun Dave Herman like a top and brought him to his knees. Afterwards, according to White, “Big Country” had a few choice words for his employers as he jumped up on the cage. “That was his f— you to us,” White said, before launching into a monologue about Nelson’s image and attitude problems with a mix of frustration and begrudging respect. What are you supposed to do with a guy like Nelson? I’m not sure I know, but as long as he has that sort of fight-finishing force at his disposal, you’ve got to respect him.

Most Surprising: Jamie Varner
Go ahead and act like you expected Varner to beat up on Edson Barboza like that. Unless you’re a member of Varner’s immediate family (and maybe even then), nobody is buying it. Varner was one of the unlucky few to get dropped by Zuffa when the WEC got folded into the UFC, and let’s just say that he was not greatly missed after the merger. Less than a year ago he was talking about retirement, and even then it wasn’t like he had a legion of fans begging him to stay. When he took the fight against Barboza as an injury replacement, it looked as if the UFC 146 menu would include at least one serving of sacrificial lamb. He surprised everyone — including Barboza — by blasting his way to a first-round TKO over the previously unbeaten human highlight reel. Does this mean a career renaissance is in the works for Varner? Maybe. Or maybe Barboza just didn’t take his punching power seriously enough. Either way, Varner accepted an offer to get pounded into a pulp and turned it into his biggest win in years. Now let’s see what he can do for an encore.

Worst Stoppage: Cain Velasquez vs. Antonio Silva
Josh Rosenthal is usually one of the best referees in the biz, but he screwed up big time here. Silva was blinded by and choking on his blood even before the torrent of left hands streamed across his face. As “Bigfoot” lay motionless on his side, neither defending against the strikes nor reacting to them, Rosenthal seemed to be caught in a daydream. What was going through that man’s head as Silva’s blood was being splattered at his feet? Was he imagining the life he might have lived if he’d gone to medical school and pursued his dream of becoming a surgeon? Because, I hate to break it you Josh, with timing and reflexes like that, you’d lose a lot more patients than you’d save. Silva’s night was already bad enough, but Rosenthal’s inaction only made it worse. Usually, he’s better than that. In the future, he needs to be.

Quietest Riot: Stipe Miocic
Don’t look now, but Miocic is 3-0 in the UFC with two impressive knockouts. He doesn’t talk a lot, doesn’t do much chest-thumping or self-promoting. All he does is keep winning fights, beating tougher opposition every time out. He got a chance to show off his full arsenal against Shane del Rosario, who suffered the first loss of his career after Miocic opened his head with elbow strikes. Miocic also showed us he can take a shot as well as he can give one, and he did so with the savvy of a veteran fighter. Watching him in action, it’s easy to forget that he still has fewer than ten pro fights in MMA. It’s almost scary to think about what he might turn into once he has twice that many under his belt.

Most Predictable: Stefan Struve
Like we said before the fight, Lavar Johnson wanted no part of the Dutchman’s ground game, and Struve knew it. So what did he do? No need to waste time trading punches with a slugger like Johnson. He went old school jiu-jitsu and pulled guard. That’s not going to work on most heavyweights, but Johnson’s ground game is rudimentary enough that he was as good as submitted as soon as he hit the mat. That made for a quick night of work for Struve, who’s only getting better as he adds weight and maturity to his nearly seven-foot frame. One wonders if he would have had such an easy time of it against Mark Hunt.

Most Obviously Contrived Rivalry: The JDS-Mir-Big Nog Triumvirate
The UFC tried and tried to sell us on the promise of bad blood stemming from Mir’s bone-breaking victory over Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, at times essentially forcing the words into dos Santos’s mouth. The champ resisted it, even when Joe Rogan gave it one final try in the post-fight interview. At that point, the whole thing come off as a script that the lead actor absolutely refused to follow, and good for him. Hopefully the UFC will learn from that minor public embarrassment and get back to selling the real stories rather than the imagined ones. Since when does the heavyweight championship need to be personal in order to be interesting? Some fights may be grudge matches, and that’s fine, but this wasn’t one of them and it didn’t need to be. When the fights are this big, with this much at stake, they can usually sell themselves. Trying to hammer in a phony sub-plot that clearly doesn’t fit only distracts from what’s really happening.

Phoenix from the Ashes: Dan Hardy
With one left hook he snapped the worst UFC losing streak this side of Tito Ortiz, thus saving his job and possibly his career. Does this mean he’s back for good, or is it just a stay of execution? Only time will tell, but even the coldest, darkest heart has to feel a slight warming glow after seeing him endure his struggles like a man and end them with class and grace. Hardy earned a break in the clouds after everything he’s been through. Now we wait to see what he can do with it.