You have to be both physically and mentally tough to survive in the UFC, but sometimes, the toughest blows a fighter ever had to endure took place outside of the octagon.
In this article, we’ll take a look at 10 past and present UFC stars who went through hell and back as the result of heartbreaking tragedies in their personal lives.
Daniel Cormier
On Thanksgiving Day in 1986, seven-year-old Daniel Cormier was watching ‘The Color Purple’ on TV when his mom answered a phone call and soon after started screaming.
She’d just been told that Cormier’s father had been shot and killed by his second wife’s father at his home after an argument.
Too young to fully comprehend what had happened, Cormier rebounded from that tragedy, helped along by having a strong bond with his stepfather.
In his teenage years, one of Cormier’s friends and a cousin died in separate car crashes, while his best friend was one of 10 people killed when the Oklahoma State Basketball team’s plane crashed in 2001.
However, the most heart-breaking moment in Cormier’s life was still to come in 2003 when his three-and-a-half-month-old daughter Kaedyn Imri Cormier was killed instantly after a tractor-trailer crashed into the vehicle she was traveling in.
”You can either let it crush you, or actually let it elevate you and motivate you,” Cormier once said on ESPN’s ‘Highly Questionable’ show, noting that his daughter’s death drove him to succeed in both in his wrestling and fighting careers in order to honor her memory.
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