The phenomenon of fighters in a gym who can defeat champions is an old one in combat sports. Any maybe winning in the gym doesn’t matter that much. But it’s always a great story.
During a recent video on his YouTube channel, Chael Sonnen described “The toughest man I ever met.”
The toughest guy I ever met in my life was a guy by the name of Les Gutches,” said Sonnen, as transcribed by Jesse Donathan for Boxing Insider. “Les Gutches was a multiple time national champion, a world champion, and he was right up the street, he went to Oregon State University and he would train everyday with Randy Couture, they were training partners.
And when they went to compete, Les would go in Freestyle and Randy in Greco, and they’d come back and work out together all the time. And when we got together with Team Quest, there was Dan Henderson and Randy Couture, they started, boom, I went in when I found out about these workouts, I’m in there and then Matt Lindland comes and joins, so we got a pretty good four, I mean I’m name dropping right now with a lot of other guys, but we had some … this is hard, right? Les Gutches is right up the road and we never even invited him. Not one day was he even invited to come in, as bad as those four guys I just told you, throw myself, Dan, Randy, Matt, we knew there was no point. If Les comes up here we knew we don’t have a spot anymore, that’s how tough this guy was.
And some of his training room stories, so Matt Lindland was a very good practice room guy, just because he was such a competitor, he didn’t want to lose even in the practice room, right. This is a world, this is an Olympic medalist, the number one ranked middleweight of all-time, but he would show up every single day raring to go and he would do great in practice.
He goes and does a workout with Les, and this is according to Matt, Matt told me this story. The way the workout works is there were no coaches there, Les set the workout up, so Les is in charge, whatever he says they’re doing, they’re going to do. And Les goes great, here’s what we are going to do, we are going to set the clock for 60-minutes and we are going to go hard for 60-minutes, one hour later we’re done and we’re going to go home. So, Matt says for like 55-minutes Les just throws him around. And don’t forget, Matt is an Olympic medalist, he says he can’t do anything, Les is throwing him around. And at the very end they body lock each other and Matt steps in and throws him to his back.
So, Les jumps up and just goes again and Matt forces the same position and Les goes right back to it, he wants to solve the problem and Matt steps in, throws him right back on his back. So, they get back to their feet, same position, Les forces it and he wants to work, Matt throws him a third time, boom, clock goes off, out of time. Les sprints to one side of the room, then he sprints back to Matt, and there’s nobody else in the room, it’s the two of them and Matt’s standing there and Les sprints right to him and stops on a dime, puts his hand out and says thanks for the work out.
I’ve always appreciated that story because I didn’t see the workout, but I know I haven’t seen anybody get over on Matt Lindland. Now that’s not a literal statement, but it’s awfully close and the fact Matt admitted somebody got over on him for 55-minutes of a 60-minute workout, I just know it was true.
And whenever you have a guy that is the toughest guy you know, but he has a guy that is the toughest guy he knows, and allow me to insert myself into this. If Les Gutches did to me what he did to me, and I wasn’t a consenting adult and we were not in the practice room, he would have been arrested, for sure. Like, if we were out on the street and we got into it, the cops would pull up, they would pull their guns, they would put him in handcuffs and they would take him away.”
And there are levels to this. Who is the toughest guy Les Gutches ever knew?
He would tell me stories about the baddest guy he knew, and the baddest guy he knew was a guy named Mark Schultz,” said Sonnen. “And Mark Schultz was a three-time NCAA champion, Olympic champion, World champion, Schultz even went on and fought in the UFC, undefeated, 1-0, did one fight and never did it again. You might have seen the movie Foxcatcher, they made it about Mark Schultz.
