Randy Couture Article

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With a huge title defense up next week...here's a career overview article on Randy Couture.

Courtesy of Inside Fighting.com

Couture reflects on his career and his legacy - 2/14/2006

by Elias Cepeda

Only legends are allowed to have their final chapter written in defeat and still survive with their mythical integrity in tact.

It is accepted that all warriors eventually fall in battle, but those who lived honorably and fought admirably are remembered for much more than just their final defeat. Why?

Legends attain their status by accomplishing what many feel is the impossible, mostly because at first they seem too much like us - ordinary, fallible, vulnerable, old. So when they succeed, they attach themselves to our emotions and memories ever stronger because of their humanness.

Randy Couture is the first true embodiment of such a profile in the young history of mixed martial arts.

Not that he ever has, or yet does, understand the whole legend label. But it’s undeniably befitting of his tremendous career. The only two-time UFC Light Heavyweight Champion. The only two-time UFC Heavyweight Champion. The only two-division UFC champion. And he is also a lock to be the next inductee in the UFC Hall of Fame.

But it goes beyond that. During his nine-year UFC career, Couture endeared himself to MMA fans in such a way that that it even leaves the former champion bewildered at times.

“I’m just me,” Couture told InsideFighting in typical humility when asked about being a legend in the sport. “I was surprised by people’s reaction. I always just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to do, and never really thought too much about it.

“Then, I started getting this reaction, that they were astonished at how old I was, or that I was still able to compete, astonished that I won fights that no one really thought I could win. I was more amazed by their reaction than by the actual act [of defying the odds] itself. I think that is what the fans respond to, that I’m different than they expected me to be. That I’m pretty normal, normal as a fighter can be anyway.”


Couture shown throwing a jab against Vitor Belfort at UFC 49

Couture’s comments bring to mind that despite all the recognition and acclaim these past few years, his start in the sport was as modest as the man himself.

His first exposure to the sport came while Couture was an assistant wrestling coach at Oregon State University. He saw a tape of an old college acquaintance, Don Frye, who just happened to be competing in the UFC.

“He was somebody that I knew very well from college,” Couture explained.
“I saw him compete in the UFC and because I knew him, I was immediately intrigued by the sport. A few months after seeing the tape, I ran into a guy at a wrestling tournament who said he could get an application for the Ultimate Fighting Championships, if I was interested. I said, ‘All right, let’s try it.’ And I sent in a tape of my wrestling.”

But at that time, Couture explains, the UFC was more interested in bringing in fighters from “more exotic martial arts” than bringing in the more traditional wrestlers. And Couture was relegated to an alternate list.

Six months later, however, Couture got a phone call from the UFC asking him to replace an injured fighter in their heavyweight tournament. With only two weeks notice, he accepted the challenge and won the tournament.

“My next fight after that first tournament was against Vitor Belfort,” he remembered. “I knew Belfort was a big step up in competition, and I needed to take three weeks and leave and go train with a boxing coach. And the head coach at Oregon State threw a fit. He said, ‘Oh, are you going to be a coach, or are you going to be a fighter?’ It kinda forced me to make a decision.”

Very tough and important life decisions, indeed.

“I was 33 years old and had been coaching for going on four years,” he continued. “I’d been wrestling, as well, trying to make the national team. I was one of the top ranked Greco-Roman guys. And I was coaching to pay the bills. And on top of all that, and I was still pursuing the Olympic aspirations.

“I eventually made a decision to leave my coaching job to train full time. That allowed me to train full time in both wrestling and fighting and not worry about holding down a regular job. I decided that since they were paying more for this one fight than the coach paid me for a whole year of work, I told him ‘I guess I’ll try my hand at fighting then.’”


Couture is the only man in the sport who owns wins over both Chuck
Liddell and Tito Ortiz

The arithmetic certainly made the decision easier. But Couture insisted that he still struggled with it because he enjoyed coaching and felt he was letting down the young athletes that he was leaving behind.

Nonetheless, he felt compelled, if blindly, to take the opportunity to train and fight full time.

“I felt like I could always come back and coach,” he remembered. “There were other coaching jobs out there if coaching was what I was really supposed to do. I had a good reputation in the wrestling community. So I thought that this was an opportunity that I had to take advantage of. I had no idea where it was going. I had no aspirations or understanding of what was going on. I just jumped into it.”

Of course, hindsight is 20-20 and it’s pretty clear that Couture made the right decision. Yet, it was certainly a risky one, at the time.

It was at that point in his career that the hard work really began. Let’s face it, Couture might be leaving the MMA world as relative royalty, but his journey to the throne was traversed in yeoman-like fashion, as he balanced his burgeoning fighting career and his continued dreams of Olympic wrestling.

“I fought in the UFC in May of 1997,” he described, “and then went to the [amateur wrestling] world team trials in June. I competed as part of the world team in the fall - August September time frame - and then I fought again right after the World Championships against Belfort.”

That’s a hectic back-and-forth focus by anyone’s standards, one that required a delicate balance in training between the two sports.

“It just depended what competition was staring me in the face at the time,” Couture explained of his training routine during that time period. “The conditioning part of it was the same. But the technical part was different. If there was a wrestling event coming up, I’d spend time doing wrestling. And if there was a fight coming up, I’d spend time doing fight training. I juggled it that way.”

It was a routine that remained constant through the 2000 Olympic Trials, after which he retired from amateur wrestling.


Couture might be a wrestler by trade but hard work helped him develop
a well-rounded game that included very effective boxing skills

“After going through that trial process and losing in the final trials a fourth time, I decided to not go another four years for another Olympics,” Couture explained of his decision to end his longtime Olympic dream. “I kinda had enough, and I had done everything else I wanted to do in wrestling. The Olympic team was the one thing that kind of eluded me, so I decided to go ahead and retire from wrestling after the trials and go back to fighting full time.”

So it wasn’t until 2000 that Randy Couture finally began to focus on mixed martial arts full time. By then, he was 37 years old.

That also corresponds to the timeframe when Couture and some friends and training partners, including Dan Henderson, spawned the embryonic stage of what would become one of the most successful fight teams in the sport - Team Quest.

Henderson had just moved up to Oregon from California before the 2000 Olympic Trials to eliminate the traveling that he and Couture had been doing in order to train together.

“We wanted to form a gym, just as a place to train,” Couture recalled. “A friend of ours happened to be partners in a property that had a gym that was being foreclosed on.”

The friend suggested that Couture and Henderson take over the gym. They pair turned the aerobics room into a wrestling room, invested some money and opened up shop. However, the fledgling gym lasted a mere nine months.

“We had a nice little gym but we quickly realized that neither one of us knew crap about running a fitness center,” he said with a laugh.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until Olympic silver medalist and friend Matt Lindland moved back to Oregon from Nebraska to open a car dealership that they group decided to resurrect their project. The three men moved the mats to the rear garage of Lindland’s dealership, hooked up with another friend, Robert Follis, who had some gym managing experience, and that’s when Team Quest began to flourish.

His UFC career, by contrast, was on hold.

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Continued

UFC Heavyweight champion Randy Couture had an interesting experience recently as he visited the training camp of boxing great and current light heavyweight world champion Bernard Hopkins as “The Executioner” prepared to do what Couture had done a few months ago, come out of retirement and get a title bout win. Couture says he was contacted by a producer of the HBO premium cable network and invited to the Los Angeles area to visit with Hopkins and his coach for the fight, Freddie Roach and he happily obliged.

Not only was it an opportunity for a meeting of great fighting minds who have proven that fighters can still get it done in their forties, but Couture also viewed it as a chance to bring the sports of boxing and MMA closer together.

“I got to meet Bernard because we’re both older athletes and people place a lot of scrutiny and a lot of questions have to do with our age and training practices. So I went over there in support of Bernard being a guy in his forties still a champion and fighting for championships, to lend him some support” says Couture.

“This rift created between boxing and MMA, largely by promoters but also by some of the fighters as well, I think [exists] because we [MMA athletes] are constantly measured by boxing standards so they feel threatened. I don’t know that we need to be adversaries. I don’t know a single MMA fighter that does not study, analyze and enjoy boxing. And I think at an athlete level a lot of the boxers also enjoy what we do so I was there to lend some support to a boxer I appreciated” Couture continues.

Couture also says that an open invitation to train at the Roach’s LA area Wild Card gym was extended to him and that its possible that he’ll spend some time there in the future to get in some boxing training. At this moment, Couture is in the midst of some serious training to defend his heavyweight title against Gabriel Gonzaga August 25th on the UFC 74 pay per view card.

Couture says that he is the best fighter he’s ever been right now, and that his training is a big part of that. Though he may be considered relatively “old” in the fight world, Couture’s been able to improve and keep his edge, largely because he trains a lot smarter than he did as a younger man.

“I think it was just one of the things I learned in my transition from wrestling to MMA. In wrestling I was notorious for overtraining. It would be early August and I’d be at the Grand Prix Class A Greco [Roman Wrestling] tournament where all of the country would show up and put up their best teams. I’d win the tournament and beat Olympic medalists, Olympic champions and then seven weeks later I’d roll into the world championships expecting to do the same and just fell flat. I just didn’t have it no matter how I struggled” recounts Couture.

In his desire to achieve perfection, Couture would over train and would soon become burned out. As he made his transition from wrestling to MMA, Couture realized something important about himself that allowed him to change his approach to competition preparation.

“In my transition to fighting I noticed a big difference psychologically. I was way more nervous for wrestling matches than I was for fights. It seemed counter intuitive but I realized that I was putting a bunch of pressure on myself when I wrestled. When I started fighting I was doing it just because I was enjoying the competition. I was there simply because I liked to do it and that was kind of a revelation” says Couture.

Couture began to look at outside models of successful training to help him develop a different approach for himself.

“I’d look at the Russians and in comparison we had a tendency to wrestle and train hard right up to competition. They had time for recovery so they had legs in the competitions. I took that lesson and applied that to fighting. I went to a four day off then a taper of seven to ten days [between the end of hard training and a competition] to allow myself to recover. I was almost feeling guilty but it left you feeling hungry and that’s kind of where you want to be. It took self control to stop when I could have done more sprints and confidence that my training would get me ready” remembers Couture.

In taking on Gonzaga, a powerful and talented fighter that has yet to go five championship rounds in the UFC, Couture is relying heavily on being the better conditioned man. “Certainly with Gonzaga that’s an advantage I am going to have” he says.

Couture seems to respect Gonzaga a great deal(for example, he was one of the few people to pick Gonzaga to upset Mirko “CroCop” Filipovic last April) but he’s also confident that he’ll be ready to work from any position against the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champ, including off of his own back.

“Yeah, I’m prepared to deal with fighting from any of the positions including being on my back. I have a clearer picture of where I want to be and what I want to do. I’m the best fighter I’ve been right now” says Couture.

Couture isn’t too interested in conjecture, however, and insists that he won’t know how good Gonzaga is until he’s in the ring with him. For example, Gonzaga has some devastating KO wins in his UFC record, how does Couture feel his power will compare to that of other fighters “The Natural” has faced like Tim Sylvia and Chuck Liddell?

“I have no idea. There is no way for me to compare because I haven’t been in there. It would be pure speculation” he says.

One gets the feeling, however, that Couture isn’t just being coy. He’s a realist and knows attempting to predict the future isn’t a good foundation for a game plan. He chooses to focus only on what he can count on, himself, and is confident that the training he’s developed with years of trial and error will carry the day for him.

“You can’t control those things [so] why even focus on them? Your conditioning, your technique…You have to concern yourself with things you can control. That doesn’t mean you don’t study tape and be aware were his strengths and weaknesses might be. You have to be aware of it and fashion accordingly. Each athlete is different and poses different problems” says Couture, though he doesn’t believe Gonzaga will show him anything he’s never seen before.

Couture's training is a key to his success and conditioning

“I don’t know if there is anything new. I think he expects to be taken down. So he will try to find ways he can move me and get me out of position and catch me in some sort of submission.

But Couture feels that he will stay out of trouble on the ground and out last Gonzaga. When the irony that a fighter in his forties would rely on his conditioning to beat fighters a decade or more younger is brought up, Couture elaborates on what he feels are usually the biggest factors working against older fighters and how he’s been able to avoid them.

“I don’t know if the difference is in ability cardio wise. The age factor has to do with ability to recover. To recover on a daily basis, weekly basis from the rigors of working out. Once you get your body in shape it will respond but I think some people’s bodies break down. Joints ache and it’s harder to get back in shape” he says.

For Couture it’s been a “combination of lifestyle, genetics, keeping my fitness at a level that’s high over the years-never having had any down time, and never having had major injuries.”