Filed under: UFC, FanHouse Exclusive
When Randy Couture said his goodbyes and walked out of the cage for what he would have us believe is the last time in his pro fighting career, Mark Coleman stood there with the 55,000 fans in the Rogers Centre, and just like them he felt a range of emotions swirling inside him.
“I felt a lot of different things,” Coleman said. “Randy’s somebody who I don’t have a bad word to say about, who helped me a lot in my career, who opened his gym to me. I don’t know if you want to use the word hero, but yeah, he was sort of a personal hero of mine.”
He was also a contemporary of Coleman’s from the early days of MMA, and a fellow UFC hall of famer. And now here he was, just a little over a year removed from a win over Coleman at UFC 109, and he was calling it quits. When you’re a 46-year-old pro fighting legend watching one of your peers hang up the gloves, it’s the kind of thing that makes you think.