This is number sixty-six in Jack Brown’s series of interviews with MMA fighters and personalities, and for this particular interview, we’re pleased to feature retired UFC middleweight and TUF 1 alum, Nate Rock Quarry. Jack had the opportunity to have a long look back on Nate’s career as he and Nate spoke for nearly two hours on the phone while Nate drove through the great Northwest. Nate, who has recently advanced his television career and other interests, had many fascinating stories to share. Here are just a few highlights from this epic interview:
On training with Randy Couture during the early days of Team Quest:
He was an actual athlete and the first practice I ever did with Randy was just unbelievable. Seeing somebody who could go five minutes without needing a break and having guys rotate in on him every minute was just unbelievable. So I knew that if I stuck with Randy, at the very least, I was going to see a real athlete who was competing at the highest level, and that had to be a good thing.
On his experience on the first TUF:
Even when everyone was making fun of Sam Hoger behind his back, and I didn’t really care for Sam and I didn’t like his attitude and the way that he presented himself and how later he was stealing things and lying and doing all these things, but I wasn’t going to be the kind of guy that sits around with five or six other guys and make fun of somebody who’s not there.
On his infamous fight vs. Kalib Starnes:
I’m going to fight Kalib Starnes. And when I do fight him, I’m going to end his career.” And that was my goal. My whole goal was to end his career. If he was going to disrespect me like that, I was going to change his life forever.
On the last fight of his career vs. Jorge Rivera: .
..then this big, booming voice inside of my head said, “If you quit, if you end this fight on your stool, potentially your career on your stool, you are a fucking coward! And you will be a coward until the day you die. Yes you’re broken and your cheekbone is broken and you’ve got all this damage. They can fix it. It’ll get better. In a year, you won’t know the difference. People won’t be able to tell. But you’ll know inside your soul that you were a coward and that a man broke you. You quit on your stool. Now you’re going to get up and you’re going to fight and you’re either going to knock him out or he’s going to knock you out. One of those two things is going to happen. But you are not going to quit on your f—ing stool!”
On his comic book Zombie Cage Fighter:
The start of the story is me when I fought Pete Sell for my comeback fight, but I lost. I was never really able to get over the hump, and now I’m forty-five years old and still fighting on small shows trying just to make food money. As a fighter I don’t know any other way. And I’m just losing so badly that it’s getting to the point where nobody is going to hire me. So I get introduced to underground Zombie Cage Fighting. It’s a place where somebody like me, who has got nothing left to lose, can really get a shot at making some real money to make sure that my little girl doesn’t have a life like mine. But the flip side of that is, if I lose, then the next week I am on the rotten side of the cage. It’s such a serious undertaking for me as a fighter that this is what I’m choosing to do. I’m going to show up to fight basically to the death with something that wants to kill me, wants to eat me.
Please enjoy the conversation below.
Jack Brown: What was your first experience with martial arts/combat sports, and how did it become more than just a hobby for you?
Nate Quarry: The way that I was raised was that I was a Jehovah’s Witness. That means that I was not allowed to compete in any sport. I didn’t wrestle as a kid, kickbox, nothing like that. But I just had this huge love of martial arts and I would see these movies like Bloodsport on TV. I was a huge fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I just loved those larger than life characters. Like Bloodsport, for example, I recorded it off TV on a VHS tape and I would watch it over and over again.
In my early twenties, I was at a party and a guy comes up to me and says, Hey, there are these two guys beating the hell out of each other in a cage on TV. I was like, That just sounds ridiculous. Who could do that in this day and age? Who would choose to fight? That’s unbelievable. Then I go inside, and see Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock fighting, and it was just eye-opening for me to see the athleticism, the skill, and the respect and honor that they showed one another.
At that age, I was around twenty-four, I said, You know what? I’m miserable. I hate my life. I’m so unhappy with the way that I was raised and what I’ve been told that my whole life has to be. For the first time in my life, I’m going to do what I want to. So I went and I opened up a phonebook and found a local gym that was teaching Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. I tried a free class and just got the crap kicked out of me for three hours. The first hour and a half was kickboxing and the second hour and a half was BJJ. I just got beat so badly, especially in Jiu-jitsu, that as I was leaving I said to myself, I’m going to keep coming back here every day until I can come back here and kick every one of your asses. That’s what I did.
JB: Your first professional MMA fight was a TKO victory over Drew McFedries back in 2001. What do you recall about that win and how prepared do you think you were at the time?
NQ: Part of my learning process was fighting for Team Quest. I was fighting for Team Quest at that time and Randy was there with me. I was the very first non-Olympic athlete, basically, fighting for Team Quest. I think we were at a Sunday practice one day, and after practice I went up to Randy and I said, Hey, Randy, I want to fight for you and your team. And he goes, Well we don’t really have a team. It’s just me, Danny, and Matt. I said, Well, you should form a team and put me on it and have me fight. He said, That’s a good idea. We should do that. And that was kind of the very beginning of the not Randy, Danny, Matt Team Quest fighter team. Then it was a matter of figuring out all of these things, and having Randy and Team Quest management run my career, and there was the kind of trial and error that goes with that.
So I signed to fight Drew McFedries, and I use the term signed metaphorically because I never signed a contract. We arrived at Salt Lake City for the fight, and I went to weigh in, and it was just at catchweight. Basically, it was whatever Drew and I woke up at. We were right about 201,202, something like that. And I’m handed a contract and the amount it said I was fighting for was about half of what I was told that it was supposed to be. I was told that I could fight for this amount or go home. So I said, Well I came out here to fight. So I’m fighting Drew McFedries on Monte Cox’s show. He’s Monte Cox’s fighter. It’s Monte Cox’s referee. Talk about home cooking. It was plain to see that the promoter wanted his guy to win and it was kind of understood.
So I knew nothing about Drew really. We never had any background or research knowledge of any of the fights back then. It was just show up and fight. My game-plan was really just to move forward the whole time, just move forward and grab a hold of him and do whatever I could. It was a combination of PRIDE and UFC rules, meaning that you could knee to the head on the ground and you could elbow on the ground and standing. So every time I grabbed a hold of Drew, I’d grab him and throw him down. I’d strike and knee him to the body, and I’d get him to lower his hands. Then I’d knee him to the head. At one point, I had his back. He was on all fours. I had his back, and my ankles were underneath the rope, and the referee stood us up. The danger, obviously, was going outside of the ring, but I thought to myself, This is just blatant that you want your guy to win. Here I am, with a dominant position on the ground. My ankles are underneath the ropes and you’re going to stand us up? And then I remembered something that Randy had told me beforehand, that If you ever get a bad call or think that the referee doesn’t see something, then that’s your opportunity to prove how good you really are and how tough you are. So when I got stood up by the ref, I remember thinking to myself, Okay. It’s just going to be another opportunity for me to beat you up some more. We go into the second round, and it has just been a war.
That fight, that’s one of my favorite highlights. He’s a southpaw. I’m orthodox. We’re just standing toe-to-toe. He was known as a big slugger, a hard hitter, and he throws a straight left, right down the pipe. It just smashes me and whips my head back. And I counter with a big right hand. But he’s smashing me in the face. I’m smashing him in the face. And I was just going non-stop. But I had such good conditioning because my fear was always that I was going to show up out of shape. I never wanted to lose. I could understand if somebody was a better fighter than me, they were more skilled than me, they’d maybe been a wrestler since they were a little kid, they had better Jiu-jitsu or kickboxing, whatever the case may be. There was nothing I could do about that. I couldn’t go back in time to when I was twelve. I had to play the hand that I was dealt. But I could always show up in shape.
So, fighting in Salt Lake City, I had never really thought about the elevation. I just knew it was going to be a hard fight and I wanted to show up in shape. So in the second round, he started to fade and I just kept going harder and harder. The fight ended with Drew basically falling out of the ring as I’m trying to pull him back in, kneeing him as he was falling out. I turn around because the ref breaks us up, and I’m thinking, Okay. Well I was getting ready to finish him there and you’re going to break it up and have us start again? Cool. You’ll give me another chance to beat on him some more. And I turn around and I see Couture and Follis, who had cornered me, jumping up and down. I was like, What the hell are you guys so happy about? And then I turned back around and saw that the referee had waved off the fight.
It was such a dramatic thing for me that here I had fought one of Monte Cox’s best guys, this up and coming middleweight guy. Cox was the manager of Hughes and Franklin and Pulver and all those guys. Here I was able to fight one of his undefeated guys, to that point, and beat him. I saw Drew years after that, and we were talking about the fight, and he just said to me, Man, I just wanted two seconds to catch my breath and clear my head and you just would not stay off of me. You just kept coming and coming and coming. I was like, Man, you’re too tough for me to give you even two seconds to get your footing and hit me. That’s the last thing I’d want to do.
JB: How did you go from training at your first gym, Straight Blast Gym, to working out at the same gym with the guys who eventually made up Team Quest?
NQ: Well that’s an interesting story. When I first started training, Matt Thornton was the head coach. I had never met anybody like him. At the time, he had a blue belt in Jiu-jitsu. He had just gotten it two weeks before I joined the gym. That’s how long ago it was. There were no black belts in town. So I was training with Thornton at the Straight Blast Gym and most of our focus was really on just being tough, just on sparring hard, and that’s what Matt loved to do. He’s famous for shooting a training video where he takes boxing focus mitts and throws them away. After three months of hitting mitts, all you did was spar. That’s what he said was “the reality of combat.” I didn’t know any better. That’s what my head coach said so obviously it must have been right. It wasn’t for years, until I started reading what other coaches had to say and the Nevada State Athletic Commission’s rules about unarmed combat, boxing, and MMA, talking about the right way to train, that I learned how boxers spar very little. They worked so much on their hand speed and hitting focus mitts and developing those fundamental skills. In sparring, all it does is break down your body. It’s great to a point that is very necessary. But when you’re sparring with guys that are knocking each other out, breaking ribs, getting black eyes and broken noses, that is very detrimental for a fighter. It takes the life, the legs out from underneath them, at a very critical time. Your equipment is your body and if you’re constantly breaking it down sparring in the gym, your career as a fighter is going to be very short.
So I was continuing to fight for Straight Blast Gym and I had a fight with Mike Whitehead. I was fighting for WPKO and lined up with Mike Whitehead. As usual, I had no clue who this guy was. I knew absolutely nothing about him. My coach, Thornton, and manager at the time, did no research whatsoever. It was just like, “Yeah, we’ll fight anybody, anytime.” So I’m fighting for the WPKO, the World Pankration Kickboxing Organization, in a ring, at the Roseland Theater, where Chael Sonnen has the FCFF to this day. But at the time, it was the inner ring, there at the Roseland. There was a dive bar and hardly anybody there. I was the main event, fighting for the light heavyweight title or something like that, and the first round was supposed to be fifteen minutes long. Then we were supposed to have a minute break and come back out for a five minute overtime if it was necessary. The first round started and immediately the timekeeper bumps the clock and stops time. To show you how professional the WPKO was, the referee, the judges, and the timekeeper were chosen out of the crowd. The promoter would take people who came to watch the fights and press them into service. So one of my training partners, who had just showed up to watch the fights, was my ref. He knew me. He didn’t know Mike Whitehead. So I got almost that reverse discrimination type of thing, where he was being tougher on me because he knew me and didn’t know Mike. A week or two before, I had fought one of Mike’s training partners and brutally TKO’d him. I hit him really hard and gave him a compression cut on his forehead and blood was everywhere. So with Whitehead, the last thing he wanted to do was stand with me. Well I had no clue that at the time he was ranked number three Greco-Roman, or freestyle, wrestler in the country.
The referee looks over at him and says, “You ready to go?” Mike says, “Yeah,” and sprints across the ring. Then the referee looks at me and says, “Are you ready?” I’m like, “What? Are you kidding me?” By then, Mike had grabbed a hold of me, and he picks me up and throws me down on the mat. We start going. Somewhere in there, the timekeeper has bumped the time-clock and stopped the time. So Mike and I fight for twenty-seven straight minutes. It was just a brutal war, and several times I would get Mike in a triangle, and Mike would shove me under the ropes and punch me through the ropes. At one point, the referee stopped the fight and had us come back to center. We went to the center and the referee looked at Mike and said, “Get back into the triangle.” Mike said, “No.” The referee said, “No. Get down. Get into the triangle.” Mike said, “No. Make me.” Then the ref looked at me and said, “Well, stand up. Let’s fight.” I was like, “What?” So it would start all over again. Mike would be in his corner, and he would sprint across the ring. He did that three or four times before finally my corner yelled at him that he needs to stay in his corner. You can’t just keep running across the ring before the ref is asking me if I’m ready to go.
At one point, I had Mike’s back and I was punching him in the short ribs for a straight five minutes, just boom, boom, boom. And as I’m hitting him, he’s trying to crawl out of the ring. And his corner is yelling at him, “Crawl out of the ring! Crawl out of the ring!” So he’s got one hand on the edge of the ring, pulling himself out as I’m hitting him in the body and the head, and I hit him and knock him out, knock him clean unconscious. I don’t even realize this, but I know that he has been trying to get out of the ring. So I grab the rope and I grab him and pull him back into the ring. And the referee starts yelling at me for holding onto the rope. And I start yelling at the ref, “Are you kidding me? He’s trying to crawl out of the ring and I’m trying to keep fighting. You yell at him and tell him to quit crawling out of the ring!” I turn around and hit Mike. Mike wakes up and we keep on fighting. His entire corner saw the whole thing. They have it on tape. I found this out years ago and they were laughing about it as they were telling me. They were like, “Yeah, you knocked him out in the first round.”
So the second round starts, and it was more of the same, just a brutal fight. Mike ends up going to the hospital, separated three of his ribs, popped his arm because I armbarred him a couple times. But while I was still in the ring, I had gone back to my corner, and had told Matt Thornton, “I just proved to you that I will fight when I have nothing left. You need to make me a better fighter. You’re not going to make me any tougher. I just proved to you how tough I am.” And Thornton looks at me and goes, “All right. I will.” Before that, it had just been beatings. My first time sparring, I broke my nose, blood everywhere. So here we are a few years later, and I’m telling him, “Enough of that. You need to make me a better fighter.
And so around about this time, in me doing my research, I had realized that sparring with ten, twelve ounce bag gloves is detrimental. So I took it upon myself and I went out and I bought twenty ounce boxing gloves. So I had these gigantic gloves to spar with while everyone else had these ten, twelve ounce, sometimes eight, bag gloves. Bag gloves are designed to protect your hands. They’re very solid. They’re not meant to hit other people with. So just about a week after my fight against Mike Whitehead, I show up for practice and Thornton was the only one there so it’s me and Thornton. And, as usual, I think we did next to no drills whatsoever. We just went straight into sparring. Thornton was like 6’8″ and, at the time, probably around 230 or so. I had my weight up around 210 and I was barely six feet. I knew I needed to work slipping punches. I never was drilling slipping punches and this was the perfect guy to do it against. So I’m staying out of his range and I’m working on trying to slip his punches and he just starts teeing off on me, just throwing bombs. And I threw a big overhand right that connected on him, but here I was wearing twenty ounce boxing gloves and he was wearing eight or ten ounce bag gloves. So I grabbed him and shoved him up against the wall and I said, “What is your problem? I’m actually a fighter. I’m going out and I’m fighting. In front of a crowd is where I’m fighting. I’m actually training to fight. I’m not training to be a gym superstar. Why is all you’re doing is just beating on me? You said that you were going to train me to be a better fighter. I told you. I am not here to be your punching bag.” And he looks at me and he goes, “The problem with you is you’re no good and you never will be. I just use you to make me better.”
At that point, I almost wanted to thank him because if that was what he thought of me, and that was his attitude towards me as a fighter and an athlete, then it was time for me to go someplace else. So I went and started training with Randy where he was at, and though it was a farther drive for me, it was so much more worthwhile to be able to train with somebody like Randy. He was an actual athlete and the first practice I ever did with Randy was just unbelievable. Seeing somebody who could go five minutes without needing a break and having guys rotate in on him every minute was just unbelievable. So I knew that if I stuck with Randy, at the very least, I was going to see a real athlete who was competing at the highest level, and that had to be a good thing.
JB: After starting your professional career with a record of 4-0, you lost a decision to Gustavo Machado in your fifth fight, in 2003. How did that first loss affect you?
NQ: I think that loss just kind of made me want to rethink a little bit about what I was doing and just analyze my fight game. Looking back at that fight, I still don’t think I lost that fight. I guess it was a close decision. He won because he was on top, because he kept getting the takedowns, and the whole day was just a mess. I was fighting for King of the Cage. The rules meeting was supposed to be at one o’clock the day of the fight. So I showed up at one, and I asked, “Where’s the rules meeting?” And they said, “We’re not having it yet. Nobody’s here.” I said, “What are you talking about? I’m here. It’s one o’clock.” “Well most of the guys, they show up late, so we just say one.” So I’m standing there in the desert, outside an Indian casino, in 100 degree temperatures, and I waited about an hour, an hour and a half, and finally I was like, “This is ridiculous. I haven’t had lunch. I got to get out of here.” So originally I was going to go to the rules meeting, then go back to the hotel and catch a nap, but here I am just baking in the sun for an hour and a half or two hours. I knew that when I got back to the hotel I wouldn’t have time now to take a nap or anything or grab any real food. I just had to get my stuff and come back.
So after I went back that night, after exchanging blows a couple times with Gustavo, he didn’t want to stand and trade with me at all. He was shooting takedown after takedown, and ending up on top, but he was doing no damage whatsoever. And I remember Randy’s advice in between the second and the third was, “He’s just getting off first. You got to go hard. You got to go first.” Looking at it in retrospect, that’s terrible advice. If there’s somebody that just wants to take you down, you don’t run across the ring and attack him. You play it safe. You back up and make him come to you and then you hit him. There was one point where Gustavo took me down and I was able to shove his head off to the side. And I was never a really big fan of throwing elbows from the bottom. I don’t throw annoying shots. All my shots are to finish somebody, whether it’s a jab or a right hand or whatever. That’s just my mentality. I want every shot to be a knockout shot, a devastating shot. Well I shoved his head off to the side, and I threw half a dozen backward elbows, rear elbows, as he was bringing his head back to center, and I just shattered the right side of his face. The next time he looked up at me, the whole right side of his face was just completely swollen. And at the end of the fight, I actually reversed him and ended up on top, looking to finish, and the bell rang. I was still pretty confident and thought that I had won the fight. I was running from side to side of the cage, jumping up on it and waving my hands. Then I ran over to Randy and said, “Randy, you’re hugging me because I can’t stand up anymore.” So he hugs me and I just kind of collapse into his arms so I can catch my breath.
I had fought every second of that fight full out, as hard as I could. The way that I always trained was to blow my wad throughout that entire fifteen minutes. You don’t want to train like it’s a twenty minute fight. If you’re fighting for fifteen minutes, you want to sprint that entire time. At the end of the fight, they raised Machado’s hand. I didn’t complain or anything like that and I guess it’s very subjective who won. I went and saw the promoter, Terry Trebilcock, and he just looks at me goes, “Unbelievable fight, you’re getting paid your win bonus.” And so I got my show money and my win bonus, and I thought for a promoter to pay a fighter his win bonus, after the decision goes the other way, was pretty reassuring. Another thing that King of the Cage did that was just amazing was that they would give you a copy of your fight at the end of the night. So you were able to go home and watch your fight. And I went home and watched it and was like, “Oh, I can’t believe I lost the decision.” It was ridiculous, but it made me want to be more aggressive and make sure that nobody could control me on the ground. It made me focus more on getting up off the bottom. That’s where a lot of my energy went to after that. Especially training with Randy and Danny and Chael, I did not want to be on the bottom with those guys. So I developed my ability to get off the bottom and never let anybody settle on top of me. I never did after that really.
JB: You were a competitor on the original season of The Ultimate Fighter. Though your injury prevented you from showcasing your skills as a fighter, you certainly demonstrated your worth as a teammate and leader as part of Team Couture. Looking back, what did your participation on that show mean to you both personally and professionally?
NQ: From day one of being on The Ultimate Fighter, I said to them, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. I’ll do whatever crazy activity. I’ll fight whoever you want me to fight. That doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m here. I will not dishonor myself. I will not disgrace myself. I’ve got a little girl at home. I don’t want her, when she’s sixteen years old, to turn on a rerun of The Ultimate Fighter and see her dad making a fool out of himself, disrespecting himself, disrespecting my family name.” And so from there I think I kind of set my pattern of who I was going to be and how I was going to act. Somebody had told me, and I had never realized this, that the very first thing that I say on The Ultimate Fighter is “I’m a single father. I’m here to fight for my daughter and provide for her.”
The Ultimate Fighter, coming from where I came from, starting training at twenty-four and fighting at twenty-six, with the UFC having seven pay-per-views a year, there was basically zero chance that somebody like me would make it to the UFC. I just wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have the background of the wrestling skills, and I couldn’t afford to even put in the training. When you’re fighting for $500 or $800, once every three months or so, you’ve got to spend a lot of time working on making food money. But being on The Ultimate fighter kind of made it realistic to me that I could do this. I could fulfill my dream. I could choose to fight in the UFC and be a success through The Ultimate Fighter.
Even though I wasn’t able to fight on the show itself, I kind of made myself stand apart because I was always working to try and do what I do every day, just do the right thing. If a friend of mine is getting picked on, I’m going to stand up for that friend. But if a friend of mine is picking on someone I don’t know, then I’m going to stand up for the person I don’t know because to me what’s right is right. And you can see that when Chris Leben, who I’ve known for years and trained with for years, was picking on people, picking on Mike Swick and making fun of him. I said, “Hey. That’s inappropriate and you’re tearing down the team. That’s a rude thing to do. Yeah, you beat Mike Swick. Congratulations. How would you like it if he beat you and he was laughing in your face all the time and making fun of you? Would that make you feel good? Would that make you feel like a good part of the team?” I just don’t stand for things like that.
Even when everyone was making fun of Sam Hoger behind his back, and I didn’t really care for Sam and I didn’t like his attitude and the way that he presented himself and how later he was stealing things and lying and doing all these things, but I wasn’t going to be the kind of guy that sits around with five or six other guys and make fun of somebody who’s not there. I had enough of that when I was a kid and I had people making fun of me because of the clothes I wore, or my religious background, or just who I was as a person. So I won’t do that. I’m not going to sit around and make fun of somebody who’s not around. I’m not going to support that by being a part of that.
And then when it got switched around, and Chris Leben was the guy that was getting picked on and he didn’t like the situation of being made fun of by Bobby Southworth, well then it was my friend being attacked and I stood up for him and wouldn’t let that carry on. So I’ve had people coming up to me and saying they really appreciated how I carried myself on the show. Bob Shamrock, Ken and Frank Shamrock’s father, came up to me at one of The Ultimate Fighter fights, and he said, “I really appreciate the way that you’re representing martial arts by the way you carried yourself on the show.” I was like, “Wow! You’re Bob Shamrock. That means a lot to me.” I had a lot of respect for what he had done for his sons and how he carried himself. To get that feedback, it made me feel like what I was doing was the right thing.
I still make mistakes every day. I have my moments of having a bad attitude or a temper, but I’ve tried to do the right things. I think it’s really that simple. If we all looked at our lives that way and asked, “What is not just in my best interest, but what is in my community’s best interest?” As much as I try to do what is the right thing in my eyes, I think a lot of people see me as that older brother or father figure looking down on people, and that’s never been the case. I don’t judge anyone ever. If someone is doing something that is blatantly wrong, that’s hurting other people, then of course I’m going to say, “That’s wrong.” But if somebody is making personal decisions on how they want to live their life, then I’m the last person to be sitting there judging them. That’s never been the way that I am. I’m very much for people making their own choices and living their own lives.
JB: Once you entered the UFC, you were immediately very successful and went on a 3-0 run at middleweight that led to your becoming the number-one contender. What were the highlights of your quick ascension up the ranks?
NQ: That 3-0 run was just unbelievable for me, especially that first fight against Lodune Sincaid. My goal was to finish him, to knock him out in the first round. I wanted to beat Bobby Southworth’s time against Lodune, and I wanted to show everybody why I was there in the first place, why Randy picked me first to be on his team. I wasn’t just some random guy. I was actually a tough fighter, who had game, and I could hang with the best of them. So beating Lodune, to me, was proof that I deserved to be there in the first place.
And then when I fought Shonie Carter, talk about an honor, fighting somebody that had close to a hundred fights and knowing if I’m really going to make a statement, this is a guy I have to beat. He was such a wily veteran. Going into a fight like that, you never know what the guy is going to do. He just had so many different tools. If I was to clinch with him, well he had a Judo background. If I was to stand with him, he had all these other crazy spinning strikes, spinning elbows. And he had a ground game and all these things. So I went into the fight thinking, You know what? I’ve just got to go fight my fight. I’m going to fight to beat him, and that’s what I’m going to do. I don’t care what he’s going to do. He’s going to have to worry about me.
In that fight, when he finally landed a shot, it was kind of behind my ear. It kind of rattled me, stumbled me for a second. And I was like, That’s it. I’ve had enough of this. I charged at him and just started throwing non-stop shots and backed him against the fence. I know that he was thinking that I was going to go high with another punch, so I kicked him right in the gut, doubled him over. He grabbed my leg and I was just throwing pile-driver elbows non-stop. As the refereed came in to stop the fight, I was getting ready to throw a switch-kick. I was going to give him the old boot in the ribs while he was on all fours. But the referee stopped the fight and I was jumping around. It was such an unreal experience. There I was on my first UFC pay-per-view, which I used to sit on the couch at home and watch with my friends. I’d never even dreamed back then about being in something that grand because it was so far beyond my comprehension. So not only was I there fighting, but I was there winning. It was just such an amazing, amazing thing.
The fight with Pete Sell was as well. He had just fought Phil Baroni. I had watched that fight and thought, Man, if I ever have to fight that guy, he is really tough. He showed up and fought Baroni, a UFC veteran, in his very first fight in the UFC. Not only did he do well against Phil, he finished him in the third round with a choke. So when I was getting ready to fight Pete, and the bell rings, and he keeps jabbing me, I remember thinking to myself, Oh my God. This guy is fast, way faster than I am. How am I going to keep up with this guy? But I followed up one of my shots and hit him with a straight left, right on the jaw, and dropped him. I immediately jumped on him. I landed a big right hand and I could see his eyes roll back in his head. That’s when the ref jumped on top of me. You don’t do that. You knock somebody off and then you can see that the other fighter is dazed, wobbly, or he can’t stand up. He jumped on top of me and sandwiched me between him and Pete. And Pete starts scrambling and yelling, Get off of me. I was like, Dude, I can’t move. I’m just being held here. We finally get stood up and Pete’s like, This is a ridiculous stoppage. But I’m like, Hey man, I’m just doing my job. I think Rogan even asked me that after the fight – What do you think of the stoppage? I said, I’m just here to fight. I don’t make those decisions. If we fight again, so be it. I got the win tonight. It was an interesting fight.
JB: In November, 2005, at UFC 56, you fought Rich Franklin for the UFC middleweight championship. What was your life like just before and after that momentous event?
NQ: Again, it was one of those situations where I never expected it. I couldn’t even imagine fighting for the world title, such an unbelievable thing. Talk about being mentally unprepared. I didn’t grow up training. I didn’t know what was going on. Randy, at that point, had transitioned out of Team Quest, so I didn’t train with him at all going into that fight. Robert Follis was my head coach. He was using Randy’s techniques to get me ready for the fight. What Randy did well just didn’t work for me. Randy’s game, he goes in for the joy of competition. He loves to go in and show his skills, and he’d been doing this since he was a little kid. For me, I go in and I fight best when I’m scared to death. I’ve got the fear of losing and how am I going to feed my little girl. But instead I showed up to Vegas and, I think it was probably Wednesday, and I was starting to hit focus mitts and I was starting to think about the fight. Follis goes, “Stop. What are we here for?” I go, “I’m here to win a world title.” He goes, “No. You’re here to have fun.” I was like, “Oh. Okay. All right, well if my head coach says that I’m here to have fun, then that must be why I’m here.” So all the rest of the practices, I had a smile on my face, and I was joking. And then I was walking out to the cage with my corner, making jokes, laughing. I got into the ring and I was like, “Yeah, I’m just here to have fun. I’m going to fight and see what happens.” Then Rich hits me with a big shot. I remember thinking to myself, “Wait a minute. This isn’t fun. He’s trying to beat me.”
It had been so long since I’d been in a tough fight, with the three fights there in the UFC, that I think that I forgot how hard it was to be in a tough fight. To be hit with that shot, and then to be remembering, “Oh shit, I got to dig down deep because this is going to be a war,” I had to get my mind straight. But I didn’t get a chance to. Rich was just too aggressive, too great of a champion, and was just on top of me, and finished me off really quickly.
That night, I was completely out cold, stiff as a board, as everyone knows. They still show the highlight at the start of every UFC, so it’s nice to be remembered at least somewhat. What I was told was that I woke up and I was like, “All right. I’m done. I’m out of here.” The doctor was like, “No. You need to sit down. We need to check you out.” I was like, “No, I’m fine. I’m leaving.” But he was like, “No. You need to stop.” I was totally glassy-eyed. I didn’t know what was going on. Follis was talking to the doctor and the guys in the cage and he said, “He just got knocked out. He just woke up. He doesn’t know anybody around him. Let me go up to him and talk to him and calm him down.” So they let Follis come over and Follis said, “Look, you need to let the doctor check you out. Sit down and let them take a look at you.” So I sat down and they looked at me. Then I stood back up, and I was like, “All right, let’s get out of here.” And then, I guess Rogan comes over, or somebody comes over, and said, “Okay, we want him to do an interview with Joe.” Follis said, “No way. I’m not letting him talk. He has no clue where he’s at or what’s going on.” And Follis later told me that I looked at him and said, “Robert, no, I need to talk. I have something I want to say.” And Robert went, “What?” He said all of a sudden I was completely conscious and sober and was able to talk very clearly. And Robert said, “Do you know where you’re at? What’s going on?” And I said, “Yeah. I’m in Vegas. I just fought and I just got knocked out.” And he went, “Okay, well I guess if you want to talk, go ahead.”
So Rogan handed me the microphone and asked me if I thought that the fight was too soon or I was unprepared. And I said, “Joe, look, I’m never going to be the guy that sits and wonders if. I’m going to take every opportunity that comes my way. A true man, you find out who that person is, who you really are, when you take a beating. And I came here and I showed what type of a person I am. I’m going to fight until I have nothing left and do all that I can.” And I handed the Mike back to Joe, and said, “Yeah, I’m going to be back. I’m going to keep training. You haven’t seen the last of me.” Then I looked over and said, “Hey, Robert.” And he said, “Yeah?” I said, “Where the hell are we?” And he said, “What?” And I looked at him and said, “What the hell are we doing in Vegas?” He was like, “Oh my God. You got hit really hard.”
For the next few hours after you suffer a severe concussion like I did, it was like snapshots, like Polaroid pictures. All I have for memories of those few hours are just pictures here and there of talking to people or walking. I remember afterwards saying, “Geez, I was really bummed that Randy didn’t come up to me after the fight.” Robert said, “He did. You guys talked for a couple minutes.” I was like, “Oh. I had no idea.” I remember a snapshot of me being in the shower, washing off the blood, and just breaking down crying because I had worked so hard to get the opportunity. I lost. I lost my title shot. I’d seen it so many times with guys. It’s such a big thing. Fighting is such a personal thing in the first place, and then to do it in front of millions of people and really expose everything about yourself, who you are and how you are going to take a loss and how you are going to take a victory. To have such a devastating defeat, I was just crying there in the shower, and after I had my team there around me and supporting me.
I think back to it and what I went through and the beating I took and everything, and I saw Rich when he fought Anderson Silva the first time. I was in the crowd and I went up to him to say hi and to express my condolences for his loss. He was obviously very upset. He had just lost the title to Anderson in devastating fashion. I looked at him and I said, “Rich, you know what man? You held the world title for the greatest organization. If you were to ask me if I would take my shot at the title and get brutally knocked out, or never fight for the title, I would take my beatings every single time.”
Where I came from, to make it all the way up to a title shot in the UFC, it was just so far beyond what I could have ever imagined. I would take that beating every day if it meant that I got to have that poster hanging on my wall at home. Someone like me got up off his couch, came from working in the fields as a kid picking berries and working as a janitor during high school, and I made it all the way up to a title shot in the UFC. If I could do something like that, imagine what’s really possible for anyone out there who just has the desire and isn’t afraid to put in the work and take their beatings.
