Keith Rocheville, of St Louis, Missouri, went through a brutal divorce, lost his children, moved back in with his parents at 38, lost his license and was jailed for non payment of child support, was beaten by bikers, and suffered years of unemployment. Then with the help of some friends, he started exercising and eating properly, dropped over 70 pounds, and took an MMA Fight, at featherweight. He had been 220.
“Trying to save the marriage and family I had, I used what little I made to pay our bills. We owned a really reasonably nice home, the only I had ever owned,” he said to Valerie Siebert for Daily Mail Online. “Our marriage just couldn’t be saved, and I eventually fell so far behind in support the state charged me with a felony.”
“I was depressed, in the worst ways. I couldn’t leave the house. I basically stayed in a room all day, walked to the corner if I bummed $5 from my mom. I was 38. Pathetic.”
He started dating a woman, and moved in with her.
“I wasn’t feeling it and she knew, but it wasn’t contentious,” he said. “We pretended like proper folk.”
Then he fell asleep at a biker pool party, and the woman found texts on his phone telling a friend he wasn’t sticking around.
“So I woke up to being carried by each limb by a man, floating across the lawn,” he said. “They tossed me in the gravel drive and it was dead quiet. They just started stomping me in silence. All I could do was cover my face.”
Keith suffered multiple broken ribs, a separated shoulder, and a broken collar bone. And he was homeless.
“I had been trying to call my kids and begging to speak to them,” he says. “My attempts were fervent over the first year, but each time I tried and was [unable to speak to them] it ripped the wound open and I would fall apart more. I began to try less and less often.”
Then he ended up in a psych ward.
“I wasn’t crazy,” he explained, adding, “I was broken in every way.”
Then life began to improve. He alternative was dying.
“I ended up coming back to St. Louis and I stayed with some people I had met,’ he said. “That’s when I started to train. I ran in the mornings and I ran at night. I would do push-ups and just body weight exercises at home twice a day, at least once at worst. … Only a small amount of all this because I wasn’t very strong.”
The turn around accelerated when he went gluten free. Now in decent shape, he began training with some boxing and pro wrestling aficionados.
Then a local promoter offered him a fight, at Cage of Champions in Jefferson City, Missouri.
“I had always admired MMA but I never thought I’d get to do it,” he said. “The transformation for me has been surreal, I kinda feel like someone else.”
Half of fighters lose every fight. He was guillotined by Robert Worthington, early in the first.
“I lost,” he said. “I was too eager to prove myself and I just was off my time. I didn’t have any discipline. I had two years worth of emotion bottled up into walking into the cage.”
He has been offered another fight, and life is turning around. He got a job, and the first real paycheck in two years.
“I am just a carpenter, non-Union,” he said. “But it’s a good company. After support though, for which I received the order yesterday, I will make around $350 each week.”
“I still have nothing. I spent six weeks in county jail this summer, I have a court date for felony support on 19th. There is no help for someone like me, I just can’t get back on my feet. I don’t have drug or alcohol problem, I just have life problem.”
“I am emotionally 200% better. My spirit is in a good place, it’s just not the same without my kids to share it with.”
He is in the life of his oldest boys from the first marriage, ages 17 and 16. But he not spoken to his children from the second marriage since August of 2013. His daughter is 11. His son is 8.
If they see that, your daddy is a new man.
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And to anyone reading this that appreciates hard work, tweet something nice to Keith!
