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Kevin Randleman may be known as “The Monster”, but for one fan he was a guardian angel.
All it took was one troubling tweet for Kevin Randleman to leap into action and likely save a man’s life years ago.
Marcus Sewell once considered taking his own life. An unlikely direct message, and follow-up phone call from the former UFC Heavyweight champion, changed all that. Sewell initially shared the story in a since-deleted Reddit post in 2017.
He recently shed more light on the encounter in A Fighter’s Legacy podcast about Randleman.
“I had this thought that I should really just end my life. I went onto Twitter like, ‘This is the end of the ropes and stuff like that. I can’t take life anymore. Goodbye’,” Sewell shared. “I was really going to do it. I went somewhere, found rope wherever my dad’s shed was. I get a notification on Twitter. It was from Kevin Randleman. I think it was a private message. He was like, ‘Hey, are you okay? What’s going on?’ I just flat out said, ‘I’m just about to kill myself.’ He was like, ‘what’s your number?’ and I gave it to him. A couple minutes I get a call from a withheld number… He said, ‘Hello, is this Marcus?’ It was Kevin and I broke the f—k down.”
“One minute you’re about to kick the chair out from under you and the next second you’re talking to ‘The Monster’ himself,” Sewell continued. “He talked to me a lot about what happened in his childhood. About 20 minutes goes by and I told him I want to make a change for myself. He told me, ‘You have to do something about it. I don’t want you to get off this phone and not do nothing about it. Do something about it.’ I thanked him and I went and got into counseling. I had never talked about when I was molested when I was younger. If Kevin hadn’t talked to me about it, I wouldn’t have faced that issue. Without Kevin Randleman calling me, I’d probably be dead in the ground.”
Randleman had been open in the past about the abuse he suffered in his early life. The mixed martial arts (MMA) pioneer died on Feb. 11, 2016, from a heart attack.