Free Iceman by Chuck Liddell Page A

dough in the UFC—and trying to make it in that sport had been something I was thinking about—I wasn’t exactly pursuing it as a lifelong dream. I didn’t know anyone, and I certainly wasn’t the only person fighting—in the ring or in the alley—who thought he was the toughest guy in the world and deserved a shot in the cage. It wasn’t a fantasy. I just didn’t spend time scheming and worrying and planning how to make it happen. I’ve always let things like this come to me. If they work out, great, if not, I don’t worry about what I’m missing. I just wanted to fight—kickboxing, MMA, in the bar, it didn’t matter.
    Nick, however, was thinking more about the rest of my life than I was. And he laid out the scenario in pretty blunt terms. Nick was a great kickboxer, a champion, one of the best in the world at what he did. But he couldn’t make any real money. He had other jobs while he was training and competing. He started his own promotion company to get himself more publicity, only he became so busy trying to put together exciting cards and negotiating for venues and making sure he had the dough to pay out purses, he couldn’t keep up with his fighting career. Pretty soon he wasn’t kickboxing anymore. Instead he was just promoting.
    I thought his life looked pretty good. I was twenty-five, making money fighting, getting some publicity, teaching classes, and training at The Pit. But Nick thought I had potential to be bigger, to do more, to be a champion. That day at the gym in Vegas he told me that no matter how much of a badass I looked like with my Mohawk and the tattoo on the side of my head and a cold, hard stare in the ring, I’d never make any serious money kickboxing. There’d never be more than fifteen hundred people in the stands for my fights. I’d never be able to focus solely on training and not have to bartend or teach. It wasn’t the future. Don’t be like me, he said. Don’t be sitting around one day saying there isn’t enough money in this sport to be beat up this bad. It hurts too much for just $500 a pop. It was time, he said, to make a career move. Either move on with my life, get into accounting, and forget fighting, or make getting into the UFC a priority, improve my combat skills, and take it to the next level.
    Nick had been dispensing advice to me for a few years by this point. One lesson had always been that if I wanted to become a bigger name, I had to show more of a personality. But this was different. It wasn’t about me doing better so he could make more money. It was just about me. He thought I had a huge future in the UFC. “You could be a world champ,” he told me. “When opponents see how easily you get back up, if they are lucky enough to get you down, they will no longer be able to fight. They’ll get weaker. They’ll be worried about keeping you down, not your hands and your kicks. You will break their spirit.”
    That’s what I wanted to do. And Nick was going to help me.

CHAPTER 13
YOU’RE NEVER TOO TOUGH TO SHOW THE LADIES YOUR SENSITIVE SIDE
    I HAD OTHER REASONS I WAS A BIT ANXIOUS TO GET MY career going.
    During the summers my brother Dan and I used to work at the California midstate fair, which was held about half an hour outside San Luis Obispo. Most nights the fair put on a concert at which Dan and I worked security, while girls from groups such as the Future Farmers of America worked as ushers. One of the guys I trained with at The Pit was dating one of those girls, so she and I would carpool together from San Luis Obispo to the fair every day. She always brought along a friend of hers, Casey Noland.
    Casey was a cute blonde who lived in a tiny country house outside town. Since she was seventeen and between her junior and senior years in high school, she still lived with her parents. At first there was nothing between us; we were just two people