Frank Trigg appeared recently on Submission Radio for a wide-ranging interview, from back to fighting Robbie Lawler and forward to the UFC lawsuit. Fans enjoy a fight and when it is over, fall asleep. Later they start thinking about the next fight. But for a fighter, the effects of one fight can last forever.

Ok true story about the Lawler fight,” said Trigg. “It ties into reffing. I went to John McCarthy’s reffing & judging class and I did the course. And I get done with the course and there’s a point in there when we’re talking about effective fighting on a fighter, what happens when his nose breaks, what happens when there’s blood coming out of his eye; like how as a referee, how do you see these things and work for it. Well then I go in. I talk to John afterwards, I’m getting private lessons from John McCarthy still – Like I said, he’s one of my mentors – and he shows me my fight with Lawler.

“He sets it up like this ‘so as this fight goes on these two really high caliber guys. This one guy fought a bunch of times in the last couple of months. He’s trying to make a comeback and retires for a little bit. Retired for like eight or nine months, got out of the sport, comes back in. Decides that he’s going to fight again. Runs into this guy in this really tough fight, this high tier promotion, he’s the champ already. And as you watch the fight, you see him getting weaker and weaker. As you’re watching this fight you see him starting to make mistakes and start to fall apart that are not consistent with this particular fighter.’

“And then he hits play right, and it’s a blank screen. I don’t see it’s my fight. It’s a blank screen. Boom. It’s my fight that comes on, I’m watching it. I’m like ‘very funny John. That’s very funny.’ He says ‘no, watch this fight.’ So now I’m watching it for the first time as a referee. I’m watching it for a first time as somebody that protects the fighters life. I go back and I look at my medical records after, I’m done watching the fight with Big John McCarthy. I go back and see that fight. I had like 500 millilitres of blood in my lungs. I had aspirated that much blood, I swallowed that much blood, inhaled that much blood in that time. Mind you if your lungs get full of blood, you can’t get oxygen to your body, so I’m starting to slow down.

“So you see me, so my thought process in the fight in the fourth round is; I’m extremely tired. I told Randy Couture who’s in my corner and John Louis who was also in my corner, I said ‘;ook guys, if this fight doesn’t end in the fourth, I don’t know if I can make it to the fifth. I’m falling apart out here.’ [They respond] like ‘don’t worry about it. Go get it, go get it. It’s great, it’s great. Go get it.’

“Okay. So in the middle of the round I go ‘I need a break. I need to take a tough 10 to 15 seconds out to catch my breath.’ I put myself in the corner and that’s when Robbie hits me. I am exhausted. In my head I have my hands up, I’m protecting my face, I’m completely fine. I watch the film, my hands are down by my hips, I take three straight shots to the head. When he hit the uppercut at the end, I didn’t even feel it. I’m out. I’m already out.

“He stripped my vision in my left eye for like eight or nine months after that fight because he hit me with my eye open. I couldn’t see it anything. I had no peripheral vision. And the basis of what that fight did – I’ve talked to a couple of people, I’ve talked to Big John, I’ve had my doctors now look at the medical records and do all that stuff – That fight nearly killed me. If I’d gone into the fifth round I probably would have died in the stretcher on the way to the hospital.

“So that fight, when everyone goes ‘what’s your toughest fight?’ The Lawler fight. ‘What’s the one fight that you regret doing?’ The Lawler fight. “What’s the one fight that you wish you could have done differently?” The Lawler fight. ‘Cause that fight changed me for the rest of my career and probably for the rest of my life. It’s fights like that, that cause dementia and concussion problems later in life, and give you Parkinsons, and things like that, that boxers are getting. It’s going through a bunch of fights like that, that causes it. That causes that problem. “

The Lawler fight is a fight that – no, was I mad at Lawler for uppercutting me? No. He’s kind of a jerk anyway. He’s kind of a prick anyway. So it doesn’t really matter. That’s his style, that’s his way. That’s fine. Okay he hit me when I was out. You have to keep going. You guys all saw the Matt Hughes 2 fight. If I fought Hughes, even though he’s knocked out, his eyes are at the back of his head, I’m looking at Mario Yamasaki to stop the fight, I’m just punching away. I look at Mario to stop the fight and I back off. All of a sudden Matt wakes up and comes back into the fight. Lawler took that lesson and took it into our fight [and] said look no matter what, I’ll keep going until the ref stops me. So he kept going until the ref stopped him.

Trigg also discussed the Robbie Lawler of today – welterweight champion of the world.

“Now that GSP is gone, it’s too close,” he said. “Both fights with Hendricks were very, very close. You know he could have won the first one, and Johny could have won the second one. It was that close with those two fights. So it’s going to happen again where it’s going to be that close and that tight, that if they fight again it’s going to happen again. It’s going to be a tight fight. Anything like that will always be a tight fight. So it’s a question of who’s going to be next in line and what’s going to happen next to the guys in line for that title fight. And you know any one of the guys in the top five could kinda sweep their way in there.

GSP a year and half ago and Robbie Lawler now, GSP wins every single time without a doubt. It’s not even a question. Anybody that knows the sport knows that. It’s not even a question. The problem is GSP is out, and him trying to come back after his layoff, he’s crap. He’ll be lucky honestly, ’cause of the way the welterweight division, because of how tightly skewed it is, how tight that division is, GSP would be lucky to break into the top five when he comes back.

The reality of it is, GSP is not that good anymore. Johny Hendricks tested him as far as he wanted to be pushed and almost broke him in half; and personally I think that fight should have been a draw as opposed to GSP winning that fight when him and Hendricks fought. But he realized ‘hey I’m really getting to the end of my rope. I’m really getting to the end of my athletic career. Why go out and have a win/loss, like my last five fights or 3-2. Why not go out on this great record and be the best champion the UFC has ever had’ and he can walk away.

Any interview with a former UFC fighter is going to cover the UFC lawsuit.

I’ve known it’s been coming for a long time,” said Trigg. “I actually knew about it almost over a year ago when it was starting to formulate and started to come together. It makes sense from the fighters stand point. You know I just understand what they’re coming after, and what they’re trying to do, and how they’re trying to approach things. I really understand that, I really get it.

“But at the end of the day it takes so long to get these class action lawsuits certified – at least in America – it takes so long to get these things to actually get to the courts. And of course the UFC is very powerful. They’re going to try put injunctions on everything that comes in, they’re going to delay every court date, they’re going to push things off, they’re going to do what they can do to win, because that’s what lawsuits are about. You know, which side’s going to win as opposed to really which side is going to come to a compromise.

“I understand it, but really, at this point of this game I’m not really sure. A lot of people asked me ‘are you going to join the lawsuit?’ I haven’t made up my mind. I don’t know if I’m going to get inside that lawsuit or not, because it doesn’t really make sense to me. Like what’s the value? Like how much money – if I do the lawsuit how much money am I going to make to be a part of the lawsuit? If I join the lawsuit will I ever have a chance of ever commentating for the UFC ever again? You know? If the money’s enough, I may not need to worry about it, but if the money is not high enough, why would I bother? Like why would I bother cutting that bridge? If I’m having a hard time for the company now to hire me, what would it do if I’m in the lawsuit kind of thing? So it’s one of those things, I have to wait and see and kind of figure out and kind of go through it. But the lawsuit to me makes complete sense, but you know they’re talking about unions, and about things for each fighters, and it isn’t going to happen.

Everybody wants more than they’re getting paid. I’m sure you guys think you’re worth more than what you’re getting paid. … You don’t get paid what your worth, you get paid what you negotiate. And that’s the reality of it. If you can’t negotiate a good rate for yourself, then that’s your own fault, your managers fault. You can’t blame the UFC for that. The UFC is of course going to keep it as low as possible. They’re trying to keep that number as low as possible, because they’re trying to make as much money as possible.”

Trigg also conceded that he is not likely to become UFC Commentator, and why.

I don’t think it’s ever going to happen to be honest with you,” he said. “When they first got their Fox deal I put my name in the hat three or four different times and it was brought back to me from a friend of mine, in fact he was a higher up at Fox, that ‘We love Trigg. We want to bring guys in that are in a contract.’ I’m not in contract. Dan Hardy was in a contract, they brought him in, Stann, Cruz, Cormier. Everyone’s under contract. From a fighting standpoint you want to bring those guys in and have them be commentators, and that’s the model they want to have, and that’s what they wanna do, and that’s how it’s working for them right now; it seems to be doing pretty well as far as viewership goes. I don’t think I’ll ever be part of the UFC commentary team. It just isn’t possible right now. And that’s unfortunate because I would love to.

It is not possible to fight without some moment you look back on and ask yourself, a little wistfully, ‘what if.’ Frank still thinks about his second fight with Matt Hughes.

Of course,” he said. “People go through their lives never knowing if they went left at the fork in the road as opposed to going right in the fork in the road they’d be millionaires. That’s my millionaire fight. If I would have won, I would be a millionaire right now. Because everything that happened shortly after that fight, it changed how the format of the UFC was done, how the money was being paid, and how the UFC is being viewed. So you could get a lot more popular. That fight was my millionaire fight. I’d be a millionaire now if I won that fight. That’s the fork in the road. I went left and I should have went right and that’s just how it works, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

And on the list of regret, there is one figure Trigg wishes he had fought.

I always wanted to fight BJ Penn when he was up at 170,” he said. “Like I always thought it would be a great match up; and BJ and I are friends, and were friends, and we respected each other even back then. Like I just want to fight him in his prime ’cause he was such a great guy, and kind of all over the place, and fought different weight classes, and he fought Machida up at 205, and was just kind of all over it. And he was just a great, amazing competitor. I always wanted to fight BJ Penn, but I wanted to catch him in his heyday. Not in the end as we saw how he fought Frankie Edgar and how he fought [Matt] Hughes the last time, or how he fought GSP. I always wanted to fight BJ Penn. He’s just always been that one fight in the cards that never happened for me.

Trigg closed with what’s next, and it isn’t fighting.

I make so much money acting like I’m getting punched in the head [rather] than getting punched in the head, that It makes no sense,” said Trigg. “It would have to be a significant amount of money for me to come back to fight again. Because I’m the middle zone. You know I was introduced as an MMA legend by you guys, but I’m in that middle space where there really wasn’t that much money being made unless you were the champ of the weight class. And I was never the champ. I fought for the title twice, and I never became the champ, and didn’t really make that much money. I barely made enough money to provide for my family.

“Like it wasn’t like high living, and you know had all these great things going on outside of the fight world. When I was doing it in the heyday, there wasn’t that much going on. When you fought you got paid, and when you weren’t fighting you were maybe doing a couple of seminars, maybe doing some privates, but that was it. There was nothing else going on. And so for me now – and Jay Heiron is the same way. Like he does so much stunt acting, like he kills it.

“And so it’s like there’s no real reason for either one of us to go back into fighting, you know live fighting, because we get paid so much to do these other things and we’re making so much more money doing fight scenes, getting shot in the chest, and getting blown through windows, and getting hit by cars. It’s like, we got so much money, why bother going back in to that lower rate. And really, what do we provide for the fight scene today? What really am I going to provide coming back in and fighting again? You know? What is my actually value, my actual worth? And their isn’t one. It’s so low that there’s no point of me doing it.