Free Iceman by Chuck Liddell

“What the fuck do you want?”
    He didn’t talk back. Instead we slowly began walking toward each other, all the eyes in the bar watching us, waiting to see how badly I was going to get my ass kicked. It was like the shoot-out at the OK Corral. Then, just as it looked as if neither of us had any more room to walk, when it looked as if the next move we made would have to be one of us throwing a punch, we each threw open our arms and gave each other a huge hug. It was Lorenzo Neal, now a Pro Bowl fullback for the San Diego Chargers. He was also a good friend of mine from our days as college wrestlers, his at Fresno State. When we finally let go of each other, and when the crowd caught its breath, let out a sigh, and started laughing along with Lorenzo and me, I turned around toward the bar, told my boss I was done for the night, and took a seat with Lorenzo. Then we got seriously messed up.
    Lorenzo asked me if I had been watching these Ultimate Fighting Championship shows on pay-per-view. Of course I had, I told him. These fights had been going on for two years, and in the world of combat sports that I lived in, they were impossible to ignore. Not to mention they were getting more and more viewers with every battle. Ken Shamrock, Royce Gracie, Dan Severen, they were revolutionizing the fight game. This seemed to be what boxing had stopped being a long time ago: a tough-guy sport that combined science and form and heart and, most important, pure ferociousness. In the end, that’s all that counted in these fights. They were no different from bare-knuckle brawls in Isla Vista in Santa Barbara—or any other town where kids who liked to fight were going at it. It was all about who was the best fighter—not who could score the most points or who could line up the best deal or who would make their promoter the most money.
    We talked about these fights at The Pit, mimicking their moves, trying to incorporate some of the moves we saw in UFC into what we did in kickboxing, making mixed martial arts training a regular part of our workout regimen. Not only was I watching, but I was wondering, “Should I be doing that instead of kickboxing?” Lorenzo was thinking the same thing and told me I was so right for the sport that he’d sponsor me if I decided to do it. And he wasn’t the only one pushing me. My brother Dan wanted me to do it, too, as did most of my friends who knew my background. They weren’t wrong. I knew more than one style of martial arts, and I had begun studying jujitsu. I had wrestled in college. I loved fighting, wasn’t afraid of getting hurt, and in every fight I had one purpose, and that was to knock people out. Nothing less. In a sport that usually only ended when one of the guys was either knocked unconscious or was forced to tap out because he was in so much agony, nothing mattered more than wanting to lay a guy flat on his back.
    Nick used to constantly tell me that I could thrive as a UFC fighter. He thought the combination of my grappling ability and that I was hard to take down and even harder to keep down would make me nearly impossible to stop. “No one can take you down, and if they try to stand up with you, they will be in trouble,” he used to tell me. Then Nick did something that, considering the way things turned out, was pretty selfless. Not to mention that he wound up looking as if he could see into the future.
    We were at a gym in Las Vegas working out. I was getting ready for my next kickboxing match, which he was promoting. I wasn’t Nick’s meal ticket by any means, but I was a good draw for his fights and didn’t cost much. I would wind up with a 10-2 record as a kickboxer. I’d win two national titles as well as championships in the USMPA (an American Thai boxing association) and the WKA (World Kickboxing Association). Even when I was the main attraction, I still wasn’t making more than $500 a fight. While there was more