It all makes so much more sense now.
Longtime fans of the sport remember the days where Chuck Liddell ruled the UFC light heavyweight division with an iron fist. They’ll also remember his fall from grace, which was about as sudden and final as Ronda Rousey’s. One moment no one could touch him and then suddenly Quinton “Rampage” Jackson knocked him out in the first and it was all downhill from there.
There were signs that Liddell was taking his eye off the ball. Stories of his hard partying ways were well known, and if you happened to be in Las Vegas the night before an “Iceman” fight there was a chance you might run into the man himself partying on the strip.
Chuck managed to keep it together enough in the public eye for the most part, but there is an infamous clip of him on a WFAA “Good Morning Texas” show where a clearly blitzed and half-conscious Liddell muttered and slurred his way through a 6am interview.
For years Liddell just blamed the situation on Nyquil and pneumonia, while fans passed it off as a case of the Don’t-Give-A-S**ts. And hey … if you don’t want the UFC asking you to do normie breakfast show bulls**t, doing what Chuck did that morning was the perfect way to get out of ever having to do that stuff again again. But now we’re getting a little more context from Chuck Liddell’s new “Icebreakers” podcast.
“That night I didn’t go out,” Liddell insisted. “I hadn’t gone out cause I was sick from going out! I took Ambien. My buddy gave me Ambien. I was having problems sleeping. I don’t know how they woke me up. They got me, they didn’t wake me up mentally, but they got me to that show somehow. I don’t know how.”
The question we have is how much Ambien Liddell took, because the “Iceman” was zonked out the entire day.
“For me, I didn’t even remember getting home,” Liddell said. “I was in Texas. I had to fly to San Diego and somebody drove me from San Diego to [San Luis Obispo], and I don’t remember getting home. That’s how bad that was. It was the weirdest.”