What's going on with Chuck Liddell? (Or: Why we aren't ready to have difficult conversations about the long-term costs of a legendary MMA career)
The UFC hall of famer's ex-wife says he's showing signs of brain trauma. So why does it seem like we'd all rather pretend that never happens with our aging heroes?
Sounds like things may not be going so well for the big homie Chuck Liddell. The UFC hall of famer and former champ popped up in the news last year when he was arrested for domestic battery. Liddell later claimed he was the victim and not perpetrator, and no charges were filed. A few days after the incident, he filed for divorce. Now he and his ex-wife Heidi Liddell are in a custody battle for their two children, and during a court-ordered interview and evaluation Ms. Liddell made some very disturbing claims with some pretty major MMA-specific ramifications.
From the court documents, obtained by celebrity news site The Blast: “When asked if she had any specific concerns about Mr. Liddell, with respect to his physical health, Ms. Liddell replied, ‘Yes, he’s been knocked out many times and has CTE. He can’t remember stuff and gets stuck on speech. He’s going to have dementia or Alzheimer’s. He has terrible sleep apnea.’ With regard to Mr. Liddell’s mental health, Ms. Liddell expressed concern regarding Mr. Liddell’s depression, his constantly needing to escape through drugs and alcohol, and his impulsivity.”
Obviously, the accusations of an ex-spouse in the heat of a custody battle are a long, long way from a medical evaluation. In general, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) can only really be diagnosed by dissecting the brain after death – not by someone’s ex-wife saying he’s acting weird.
And yet, can we be real with each other here? If you’re looking at Liddell for hints of signs and symptoms that might suggest he’s suffering some consequences from a career’s worth of head trauma, they’ve been there for a while. I remember doing a phone interview with him back in 2012 – about two years after UFC President Dana White had essentially forced him to retire from fighting and used a do-nothing job with the UFC to keep on the payroll and out of the cage – and I remember being shocked by how bad he sounded. He slurred his words. He repeated himself. He kept searching for words that he couldn’t seem to remember. A lot of the interview was pretty much unintelligible. I remember hanging up and, in some weird attempt to make myself feel better about the whole thing, saying something along the lines of: Well who knows, maybe he’s just drunk at 10 a.m.!
Point is, we can’t really know right now whether or not Liddell is suffering the effects of something like CTE. But if he were, wouldn’t it kind of make sense? Here’s a guy who fought professionally in MMA from 1998-2010. He only stopped because his boss and friend Dana White made him, and White only made him because he’d lost four in a row, all by knockout, the last of which was basically a jab from Rich Franklin that he would have easily walked through five years earlier but which suddenly put him to sleep.
Just the stuff we saw in the fights alone was concerning enough. That doesn’t even factor in all the training, which, especially back then, typically included a ton of full contact sparring with very little regard for long-term brain health. Liddell also had a reputation as a gleeful abuser of multiple substances between fights, which doesn’t exactly lower anyone’s risk levels. In his autobiography, “Iceman: My Fighting Life,” he tells stories about street fights galore, even including one fun little tale where White had him fight some hotel tough guy just to win a bet.
Now Liddell is 52. His last fight was in 2018, when he came out of retirement against the advice of basically everyone to fight his old rival Tito Ortiz, a guy he tooled up easily in his prime but who had zero trouble with this older, slower version of Liddell, knocking him out in the first round. When you combine what we’ve seen (multiple scary knockouts) with what we’ve heard (the slurred speech, the ex-wife allegations), it seems entirely likely that this train is headed nowhere good. There’s no cure for CTE, if that is in fact what this is. Its effects can be mitigated somewhat, but only with medical help. Without that type of intervention, it usually only gets worse.
What’s weird is that, as a community, MMA doesn’t seem to know how to react to this. You didn’t even see very many MMA outlets picking up this story about Liddell this week. Maybe that’s because it’s all essentially based on accusations from his ex-wife, a person with a motive for wanting to portray him as mentally impaired, but then again most of the MMA outlets don’t seem to mind going on pure hearsay when it’s time to whip up a story out of fighters beefing on Twitter. Another possibility is that this is a story the major outlets don’t want to touch until they absolutely have to because the implications of it make us all so comfortable.
If Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, arguably the first major star of the modern UFC, is suffering from CTE in his early fifties? Well, that forces us to question a lot of what we used to tell ourselves about this sport. You youngsters may not even realize it, but there was a time when one of the pro-MMA talking points was the it was safer than boxing, since the grappling and the small gloves and the lack of knockdown rules meant fighters took less total head trauma. Safer than football too, since fighters who got knocked out didn’t fight again for at least a couple months, unlike the dudes in the NFL getting their whole shit rocked and coming back to play in the second half.
This is exactly what we told ourselves we wouldn’t see from MMA fighters, is a bunch of aging heroes showing up brain damaged and spiraling towards despair after their careers had ended. Now maybe we’re about to learn that that was basically just us guessing and hoping, since at the time there was no such thing as a fifty-something fighter who’d put in a solid decade or more of continuous UFC competition.
What’s really wild is that Liddell probably represents one of the better potential outcomes. He’s still one of the most famous fighters in UFC history. The company still seems to care about him. He’s got money and resources and could conceivably get some help to deal with this. That all gives him better odds than probably 95 percent or more of all the people who have ever fought in the UFC. Remember, as bad as some of the stories about retired NFL players have been, those were people with a players association and a pension. MMA fighters have none of that. It stands to reason that there will be more Liddells to come, only without Liddell’s name, money, and resources to help them when they need it.
We don’t seem at all ready to even have this conversation in MMA. Steven Marrocco’s excellent story on former UFC fighter Spencer Fisher’s ongoing struggle with issues related to brain trauma (and the UFC’s attempts to keep it under wraps) hardly even seemed to reach outside the MMA bubble. It was probably the single best and most significant piece of MMA reporting in all of 2021, yet when it came time for things like the “World MMA Awards” it was as if it had never even happened.
No one wants to be the one to bring up bad news. And the UFC certainly doesn’t want to hear it, for obvious financial reasons. We’d all be a lot more comfortable if our MMA heroes just faded away quietly and didn’t force us to think about the ongoing consequences of a life spent in the hurt business.
Seems obvious now that it’s not going to happen that way. And it won’t be just the brain stuff, either. It’ll be guys crowdfunding their hip replacements in middle age. It already has been. But in a sport where a lot of the fans don’t even seem to care whether or not the fighters are paid fairly while they’re still in the spotlight, what hope is there that enough people will care about their problems years after their athletic usefulness has vanished? Seems like we’d rather just not talk about it. Sooner or later, though, we’re going to have to.