Any would-be thief should think long and hard before attempting to cross Momma Sonnen, who has a gangster for a son and a shotgun at her bedside.
Claudia Sonnen, mother of UFC fighter Chael Sonnen, has constantly warned her son’s friends never to scare her at night.
Anyone who has ever lived in the country can vouch for a general feeling of uneasiness one can sometimes experience when being secluded. Claudia lives alone far out of reach from the rest of society, which is the primary reason she keeps a gun close by.
“In high school before I lived alone, [Chael‘s friends] used to joke about don’t ever sneak into Chael‘s house at night because you might get shot. But I used to tell people, ‘Don’t try to scare me during the night. It won’t be funny,'” Claudia told Spencer Lazara of MMAInterviews.TV.
Chael‘s training partner, Yushin Okami, unfortunately never received that memo.
Instead of staying in a hotel, the UFC middleweight contender usually stays with Claudia when he’s training in Oregon. As fate would have it, he passed on the offer during this particular training camp, and Chael never phoned his mom to expect company.
As nightfall crept into existence, Claudia climbed into bed completely unaware Okami would soon have a change of heart:
I just was not at all expecting Yushin. So I’m sound asleep and my alarm is beeping, which means somebody is in my house, and my first plan of escape is always to just go out my window, but when I went to get out of that side of the bed, my foot caught in a basket and I fell. So then it was like, ‘I don’t have time.’ So I grabbed my gun.
After telling Chael he would be staying at a hotel, Okami changed his mind at the last minute and decided to take Claudia up on her hospitality.
The alarm, which is located next to Claudia’s door, immediately sounded as soon as he entered the Sonnen household. Chael had given him the code to shut off the alarm during previous visits, and his first reaction was to dig out his phone and start looking through old messages to find the numbers.
Whenever he checked his phone, his backpack would inadvertently bang against Claudia’s door every time he turned away from the alarm.
While Okami fumbled with the alarm, he was completely unaware of the situation unfolding in the room next to him. Things were quickly escalating into a potential segment for the early morning news. After falling on the ground, a completely terrified Claudia had to make the innate choice of fight or flight.
When things go bump in the night, most people run in the opposite direction, but Claudia felt like her only choice was taking matters into her own hands:
I said, ‘I have a gun.’ I don’t know if that’s the smartest thing to say…I again said, ‘I have a gun,’ and I closed [my door] and it does that kind of [sound when door closes], and I don’t know if at that point he heard that or if he just thought tell her who it is. So then he goes, ‘Yushin, Yushin Okami, thank you.’
It was like thank God I’m not going to die tonight you know? So I put the gun down, went out and hugged him and I don’t know if Yushin even knew.
If you think being in a cage with the best fighters in the world is scary, try having a gun pointed at you by a seven-time state shooting champion.
We can all pretty much agree that Okami will be calling first from now on.
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