Gladiator Man Axed, UFC Unveils the ‘Evolution’

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Ken Pishna

Gladiator got the axe… welcome to the Evolution!

Fans in the arena will still warm up to The Who’s Baba O’Riley and the fighters will still Face the Pain, but the gladiator man is gone, an entirely new UFC intro making its debut at UFC 143: Diaz vs. Condit on Saturday night.

It’s like the passing of an old friend, or the cranky old lady down the street finally moving away, depending on your perspective, but the UFC has finally taken the leap to change its longtime pay-per-view introduction.

“I knew it was time to change the gladiator, but I wasn’t gonna do that until something new and something big happened like this Fox deal came up,” said UFC president Dana White, unveiling the new intro to a flock of media that maybe looked like a bunch of wide-eyed eight-year-olds on Christmas morning more than journalists.

White could barely contain himself when he informed a small group of us in the media that he had a surprise following the UFC 143 Pre-Fight Press Conference. Leading us off to a small, but elegantly catered, room inside the posh Aureole restaurant at Mandalay Bay.

Giddy doesn’t even begin to describe White.

“My staff hasn’t even seen this yet. You guys are the first people to see this. Tell me I don’t love you (expletives),” he said in true Dana White fashion.

I know, I know, you’re saying, “what’s the big deal? It’s just an intro to a sporting event.”

But to White, it is much more than that. It is part of the essence of what engrains UFC fans some of the most rabid fans in the entire sports world.

As with the gladiator intro, the new Evolution intro will reverberate through the arenas, and now stadiums, wherever the UFC goes, not just on the pay-per-view broadcast for fans at home. White wouldn’t have it any other way.

“That is our deal. This place is rocking; it’s so loud here, you can barely even hear yourself think. That’s part of the energy. That’s part of the excitement about being at a UFC event.”

Longtime UFC fans will surely gather more from the new intro than most casual fans. It’s like a timeline of the growth of the company, thus the moniker Evolution.

White & Co. took this project extremely seriously.

Opening with Royce Gracie’s submission of Ken Shamrock, winding it’s way past Chuck Liddell’s throttling of Tito Ortiz into the Georges St-Pierre era, and blowing apart with Anderson Silva’s knockout of Vitor Belfort, Evolution required six months from concept to completion.

It’s difficult to describe Evolution, which starts in a small gym, the floor of which begins crumbling away as actual fight footage shows Shamrock’s hand smacking the floor, cracking it apart, as he taps out to Gracie.

Liddell rushes forth, punishing Ortiz, blasting him through a wall that crumbles to the ground… all the while the Octagon starts to take shape, rising up through the rubble.

As the fights wear on – St-Pierre, Hughes, Rampage, Velasquez, Jones – the building tumbles away, the Octagon emerges, and Silva’s face-crunching kick explodes into the 55,000-seat Rogers Centre in Toronto.

This is more than just a new video intro for White, it’s a memorial of sorts, paying tribute to many of the fighters that have helped build the UFC into the juggernaut it is today.

“Probably the most important thing about this new piece is it pays tribute to all the guys who have helped build this company and helped build this sport over the last 10 years during the Zuffa era.”

He even incurred extra expenses and a further delay in taking the intro live because he realized at the last minute that he had forgotten to include Rich Franklin.

“We were so into this, I left Rich Franklin out. So it cost us a (ton) of money and a bunch of time to fix it and get Rich in there. There was no way I was gonna air this thing without Franklin in there, too.”

The UFC obviously spared no expense. Aside from paying extra to be sure Franklin was included, they hired visual effects giant Digital Domain to create the footage and famed composer Hans Zimmer to score the 60-second spot.

Digital Domain has produced effects for Titanic, Apollo 13, Armageddon, and many, many more films. Zimmer has scored such movies as Gladiator, Inception, The Lion King, and numerous others.

“This cost us some money, but I’m really happy with the end result,” said White.

The devil is in the details, which is a large part of the expense, not just the names that are attached to its creation. All the fights in the footage are cut from actual fight footage; they are not animations.

“These guys had to cut everyone of those images out frame-by-frame and do little things like the shadowing underneath the feet,” he continued. “You can’t imagine the amount of detail and the amount of work that went into this thing.”

Hardcore and longtime fans in particular will want to be sure and save the intro on your DVRs. You’ll be watching and pausing and rewinding, over and over again, to catch all the details, to name the 18 fighters featured in the footage, to identify all seven current champions and six Hall of Famers, to marvel as the old world crumbles into the new.

Yes, many of you will dismiss it as just a new intro, and put into proper perspective, that’s probably all that it is. But to White, it’s homage to those fighters that lay their blood, sweat, and tears out on the mat to be able to call themselves “world champion.”

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After Surgery, ‘Company Man’ Rich Franklin Struggles to Figure Where He Belongs

MMA Writer
Rich FranklinFormer UFC middleweight champion Rich Franklin is just coming off successful shoulder surgery, but now comes the hard part, as he told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s episode of The MMA Hour.
Franklin, who said he was told that he wouldn’t even be able to run for three more weeks, is now wondering how he’s going to cope with the limited physical activity.
“I had surgery six days ago, and it’s already driving me crazy,” he said, adding that, at least for the moment, “rehab is my job.”
But Franklin, who said he’s hoping to return in late May or June of 2012, seems a tad unsure about where he fits in with the current UFC. The organization hasn’t seemed anxious to see him return to middleweight, and yet at 205 pounds he finds himself undersized on fight night, he told Helwani.
“If you look at the pictures of Forrest [Griffin] and I squaring off at the weigh-ins, we look almost the same size. And then if you look at the two of us squaring off in the middle of the Octagon, pre-fight, he outweighed me by probably about 25 pounds, and I’m going to run into this type of problem in the weight class. It’s just, the weight class is full of big guys.”
And yet, Franklin has continued to fight wherever the UFC wants him because, as he explained, “I’ve been quote-unquote the company man. There have been magazine articles written about me calling me that. …I’ve always been the guy that has taken whatever fight they’ve asked me to take.”
Which is why, Franklin said, he was none too pleased about hearing UFC president Dana White suggest in an interview with Helwani that he had purposely avoided a fight with Alexander Gustafsson as a replacement opponent for Antonio Rogerio Nogueira at UFC 133.
According to Franklin, he found out exactly three weeks before his scheduled fight with Nogueira that the Brazilian was injured and the UFC wanted to move Gustafsson up to replace him.
“At the time I was like, well who is this guy? I don’t know. So my manager, Monte Cox, said Joe Silva’s going to send you over some tapes so you can at least see this guy and check it out. I said all right.”
The following afternoon, Franklin said, he told his manager he’d take the fight, even though “there was nothing really appealing about the fight, and I basically told my manager that.”
But, due to what Franklin described as a “communication breakdown” brought on by the stress of an injury-riddled fight card, the UFC opted instead to pull Franklin from the event altogether. By itself, it might not have been so bad, but Franklin was irked by the implication that he’d ducked a fighter like Gustafsson, he said.
“I listened to the interview that you did with Dana, and was a bit disappointed…I’ll be honest with you, I was a bit disappointed listening to that, because the tone of the interview between you and Dana almost sounded like that. I thought, first of all, I’ve never ducked any other opponent in my life.”
In fact, Franklin said, the only time he’s ever said no to the UFC was when he was asked to fight Reese Andy, who had recently been a training partner of his. Aside from that, he said, he always agreed to whatever the UFC offered, and at whatever weight, which is why “for that kind of stuff to come out and to question, I guess, my motives or my character or whatever, it was very upsetting to me.”
Following the UFC 133 incident, Franklin said he sat down with UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta to discuss the fallout from the situation and his feelings on White’s comments.
“That feeling of family, it’s dissipated a little bit,” Franklin said. “It’s not the same as it used to be when I first starting fighting for the UFC, and I basically told Lorenzo that. I said, ‘Hey, I feel like sometimes you guys don’t really have my back,’ and he told me that they’d been really busy with the FOX deal and all that kind of stuff.”
After that conversation, Franklin said, he and the UFC “were all on the same page,” and there was even talk of a bout with Tito Ortiz in November, which Franklin said he was “definitely open to and interested in.”
Unfortunately, his shoulder surgery scuttled those hopes, leaving him focused only on rehab and getting back to fighting shape for now. As for the weight class he’ll compete in and the opponent he might face when he returns, Franklin said he’s content to leave that up to the UFC.
“If the UFC said something to me about fighting at middleweight again, I’d be great with that,” he said, though he clarified that he’s not about to request anything specific along those lines. “…If they’re not going to let me work toward a title, in the meantime as long as I can just work at putting on exciting fights and that stuff, then I’m good with doing that.”

My First Fight: Rich Franklin

My First Fight: Rich Franklin

By Ben Fowlkes

MMA Writer

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Rich FranklinBy the time most fight fans so much as heard his name, Rich Franklin was already somebody. He had a successful UFC debut with a first-round TKO of Evan Tanner, then went on to shine at the very first Ultimate Fighter Finale, where he knocked out Ken Shamrock on Spike TV before claiming the UFC middleweight title in his next fight.

But if you hopped in a time machine and told the Rich Franklin of 1993 — then a senior at William Henry Harrison High School in Ohio — that this UFC stuff he was watching with his friends would eventually become his career, he probably would have laughed in your time-traveling face.

“I had no aspirations of becoming a pro fighter or anything like that,” Franklin says now. “But I saw the first UFC and I was immediately hooked.”

Sure, he did a little karate. He was even his sensei’s star pupil, and he felt pretty good about it. But in Franklin’s mind, that was as far as it went. He liked sports, and he also felt like he should know how to defend himself. That’s why, when he saw the UFC for the first time in November of 1993, it was an eye-opener.

I was like really? They were going to put me against this big guy? He was at least 50 pounds heavier than me.
– Rich Franklin”I remember thinking, if I ever get into a fight on the street I’d better know how to fight on the ground, because clearly some people know a lot more about it than others. So I started doing jiu-jitsu.”

Fortunately, there was a Gracie Jiu-Jitsu chapter in Cincinnati. As a college student studying to be a high school math teacher, Franklin began learning the finer points of the ground game. One thing led to another, and soon he added some kickboxing into his regimen. It was fun, and that was enough. At least for a little while. Then his friend, Josh Rafferty (later a contestant on the first season of The Ultimate Fighter, put a simple question to Franklin.

“He said to me, ‘Look man, all you do is train, go to school, come home, and train some more. You train all day, so why don’t you try one of these fights and see if the training you’re doing is actually paying off?’ That’s why I took my first fight.”

But this was still Ohio in 1998, so it’s not as if there were major MMA events taking place every weekend. What few there were in the region weren’t exactly advertised on TV, either. Franklin and his friends had to ask around, but eventually they heard a rumor that there were regular fights at a gym in Muncie, Indiana. Franklin and Rafferty made the drive and sat through the entire event, which ended with a 6’2″, 260-pound self-described “Meat Truck” by the name of Kerry Schall putting a beating on some football player.

“I looked at Josh at the end of the night and said, ‘You know what? I think I could do this. Let’s give it a shot.’ We saw a flyer as we were leaving for another show about three months later and we decided, okay, this is the one we’ll train for.”

The good news was that training for an unregulated amateur fight in a gym in Indiana in 1998 was that you did not need to worry about cutting weight. You also didn’t need to worry about seeing a doctor or passing medicals. You simply called up the promoter and told him you wanted a fight, and then you called him up two weeks before the fight to reassure him that you weren’t going to back out. Then you showed up on fight night and waited your turn.

The bad news, Franklin soon realized, is that you had no idea who you’d be fighting. This hit home as he was sitting in the audience watching the night’s first few fights and talking with Schall, who he recognized from the previous event he’d attended.

“We introduced ourselves and Kerry said, ‘Oh, you’re the guy I was supposed to fight tonight, but I had to pull out because I’m sick,’” Franklin recalls. “I was like, really? They were going to put me against this big guy? He was at least 50 pounds heavier than me.”

But before he had too much of a chance to dwell on the implications of this revelation, the announcer called his name and summoned him to the cage. As Schall would delight in telling people years later, after he and Franklin had become good friends, when Franklin heard his own name he simply stood up, pulled off his tearaway warm-up pants like a male stripper, and strolled into the cage, ready to fight.

So I just let it go, and the crowd — all 200 of them or whatever it was — went from screaming and yelling to completely speechless.
– Rich FranklinThe other guy, as Franklin remembers it, was not quite as excited about the whole deal.

“He looked uneasy. As soon as we stepped in the cage, he looked like he didn’t really want to be there. I looked at his demeanor and his posture and I was like, I got this one in the bag. He was in something that he did not want to be in.”

As soon as the action started, Franklin realized why. His opponent that night — Franklin swears he was known only by the name ‘Seymour’ (“I guess he was like Madonna or something. He just had the one name. He was Seymour.”) — didn’t seem like he was quite ready for an amateur fight against a man who had five years of experience in both grappling and striking at a time when most fighters still specialized in one at the expense of the other.

But even though he quickly saw that his skills were ahead of Seymour’s, Franklin wasn’t totally sure what to do about it.

“This is how dumb I was: we come out and we’re mixing it up, and I end up taking him down. I’m kind of cross-mounted on him and I have a submission, but I let it go and go to another submission, and I have a shoulder lock almost completely locked out, but then I thought, you know, I trained all these months, all these years, for a 30-second fight? I’m going to let him up. So I just let it go, and the crowd — all 200 of them or whatever it was — went from screaming and yelling to completely speechless.”

Franklin released the submission and stood up. He indicated to Seymour that he, too, should get up. This seemed to confuse everyone — especially Seymour — and even Franklin soon had second thoughts.

“He got up and we mixed it up on our feet some more, but it was clear to me that I was just a step above this level of competition. At that point, I started to feel a little bad. Like, why didn’t I just finish him when I knew I had him beat? This is kind of a jerk thing to do.”

So Franklin handed out a tough dose of mercy in the form of a knee to the gut. Seymour collapsed on the mat. The ref stepped in and waved it off. A little over two minutes after it had started, his first MMA fight was over. After the way it had gone, he wasn’t quite sure what to think about it.

“I thought it would just be that one fight. Then a couple months later somebody asked me about doing another one and I thought, why not?”

Part of his enthusiasm was just a consequence of being an ignorant youth, he says. “Early in my fight career, I really thought I was the baddest man on the planet. I was young and stupid.”

I was like, whoa, you can actually make money fighting? That’s where it first clicked.
– Rich FranklinBut it was also the fact that, for one reason or another, the high school math teacher didn’t fully appreciate the risks he was taking.

“It wasn’t until my third amateur fight, where I kicked this guy in the jaw and broke his jaw in like three places — hurt him pretty bad, actually — that I finally took a step back and realized, hey, that could have been me. These are the consequences of fighting, and you never know who you’re getting in the cage with. From that point on, you start thinking about it a little more. The reality of things starts weighing on you a little more.”

Shortly thereafter the local promoter pulled Franklin aside and politely suggested he find a bigger organization to compete in, one with fighters who might give him more resistance. That’s when a different promoter offered him a couple hundred dollars to fight in his event, and a light bulb went off in Franklin’s head.

“I was like, whoa, you can actually make money fighting? That’s where it first clicked.”

Gradually the purses and the events got bigger, and in his fourth year of teaching Franklin decided to give up his full-time job at an Ohio high school in order to pursue fighting as a career.

“Before that I’d make a thousand bucks here or there and have a little extra money to buy Christmas gifts or something. But to do this and really make money at it? That was a pretty wild idea. The sport was only just then evolving to the point where people were starting to make real money at it,” he says now. “That fourth year I took like three fights and I won and ended up quitting my job. Seems like it all panned out pretty well.”

RICH “ACE” FRANKLIN’S SHOULDER SURGERY A SUCCESS

For Immediate Release:

October 13, 2011

RICH “ACE” FRANKLIN’S SHOULDER SURGERY A SUCCESS

Cincinnati, Ohio – Former UFC Middleweight
Champion Rich “Ace” Franklin underwent shoulder surgery yesterday to
repair his torn labrum, an injury that occurred during a grappling practice last
month. Franklin’s manager, JT Stewart, announced today the surgery was a
complete success and that he is expected to make a full recovery.
“I spoke with Rich, he’s feeling great and as soon
as the doctor gives him the go-ahead, he’s ready to start training again,” said
Stewart. “If everything goes as expected, UFC fans could see Rich Franklin back
in the Octagon in late summer.”

The surgery took place yesterday morning in
Franklin’s hometown of Cincinnati. He will require several months of rehabilitation
before returning to a full mixed martial arts training schedule.
Franklin was scheduled to fight Antonio Rogerio
Nogueira as the co-main event of UFC 133, but the fight was pulled from the
card when it was announced that Nogueira was injured and unable to compete.
Franklin last fought at UFC 126 on February 5,
2011 in a light heavyweight bout against former 205-pound champion Forrest
Griffin.  Overall, he holds a record of 28-6-0, 1NC and has battled the
who’s who of fighting legends in the UFC including Chuck Liddell, Anderson
Silva, Vitor Belfort, Dan Henderson, Wanderlei Silva, Yushin Okami and Matt
Hamill.

Holding a Master’s Degree in Education, Franklin
was a high school Math teacher when he first started training in mixed martial
arts. After finding success as professional fighter, he eventually left his
career in education to pursue the sport full-time.  In 2005, he reached
the pinnacle in mixed martial arts when he defeated the late Evan Tanner to win
the UFC middleweight title.
Since then, Franklin has risen as one of the
most popular fighters in the world and a UFC fan favorite.  He serves as a
spokesperson for Disabled American Veterans, runs the successful lifestyle
brand of clothing “American Fighter” and has recently entered the
world of acting with roles in “Cyborg Soldier” and “The
Hammer.”
In July, it was announced that Eric Eisner’s
Double E Pictures will produce a film chronicling the story of Franklin’s life
titled, “American Fighter.”
For more information about Rich “Ace”
Franklin, please visit www.richfranklin.com, and Facebook.com/pages/RichFranklin and follow
on Twitter @followace.
Press Contact:

Jen Wenk, APR
jen@starprlasvegas.com
702.635.0995
@jenwenk

My Daily Diet Plan

I get asked all the time what my “Diet” looks like. So I figure I would post a day in the life of my nutrition plan. Here is what my nutrition looked like yesterday. Granted, I spent the day on the water wake boarding, so if threw things off a bit. Fortunately I packed my meals, so it wasn’t a complete loss.
24 oz. of water
Morning green drink (spinach, celery, romaine lettuce, apple, banana, pear, parsley)
TBSP fish oil
Protein Shake (egg whites, oats, blueberries, protein powder, fish oil)
Meal 2 (mix of ground chicken breast, broccoli, oats, extra virgin olive oil, hot sauce)
Coconut Water (excellent because I was in the sun all day)
Protein Shake (very similar to the first one)
Meal 4 (same as meal 2)
Protein bar (I am not a fan of bars, but was in a pinch)
Meal 6 (eggs, egg whites, spinach, broccoli sprouts)
On the last meal, I mix eggs and extra whites because the yolks have so much goodness in them, but don’t want to 15 or 16 yolks, so I mix in some egg whites. Water is the most important part of my nutrition, so I make sure I am always hydrated…Drink Plenty!

UFC Champ Rich Franklin’s Story Headed to the Big Screen (Exclusive)

David Hollander is penning the script for “American Fighter,” with Eric Eisner and Sean Sorensen producing.

The story of Rich Franklin’s remarkable rise from math teacher to mixed martial artist and UFC champion is headed for the big screen.

Eric Eisner’s Double E Pictures and Motion Theory have optioned the life rights to Franklin’s story, and set David Hollander (The Cleaner, The Guardian) to pen the script.

Eisner will produce American Fighter with Motion Theory’s Sean Sorensen.

“I’m excited to see the story of my career as a fighter brought to the screen, and I feel confident that the team assembled will do a great job in telling this story,” Franklin said.

A family man and high school math teacher, Franklin taught himself mixed martial arts, and quickly emerged as one of the most dominant figures in the sport.

American Fighter also will chronicle the transformation of mixed martial arts into a billion-dollar industry.

Eisner’s previous producing credits include Hamlet 2. Other current projects include Havana Nocturne, Greenhat Enterprises, Garcia and Just Cause, based on Eidos’ video game franchise.

Motion Theory, a commercial and music video production house, launched its feature film division in 2008, with producer Sorenson at the helm. Motion Theory also controls the rights to film projects Command and Conquer, Berzerk and One Red Paperclip.

Mathew Cullen of Motion Theory is executive producing American Fighter.

“I’m happy to be in business with Sean and Motion Theory, and look forward to working with David to capture the story of Rich’s remarkable life,” Eisner said. “This is a truly inspirational story that we are excited to tell.”

Eisner, Sorensen and Hollander are repped by CAA.

Sports Illustrated Interview w/ Tim Marchman

I’m a big believer that Rich Franklin deserves more credit than he gets for the way he helped fighting establish itself as a sport in 2005.

He was never quite as popular as peers like Randy Couture, Matt Hughes and Chuck Liddell, but as a coach on the second season of The Ultimate Fighter, he did something important for public perception of MMA: He made it seem normal, and maybe even a little bit boring.

The very things that kept him from connecting with the public the way some others have, his reserve and patent decency, also did a lot to counter perceived notions about what sort of person might want to fight in a cage for money. It’s easy to hold up a guy with a Mohawk and a tattooed skull as an atavism, less so to do it to a quiet former math teacher from Ohio.

For the past several years, Franklin, working both at 205 and 195 pounds, has been exclusively fighting icons like Liddell and Wanderlei Silva in bouts that nearly always stay standing and are always intense. In his way, he defines what UFC wants in a fighter, a reliable man who takes the matches he’s offered and goes for a finish every time out. Whatever else they have to worry about going into their Aug. 6 card in Philadelphia, which has now run through about 84 different main events, UFC toppers can be quite sure that Franklin will deliver in his bout with Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, and you can’t ask much more of a fighter than that.

Recently I talked to Franklin, who is in training in Cincinnati, about his upcoming fight, the future of coaching, his views on retirement and various other subjects. What follows is a transcription of that conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

SI.com: What do you make of the matchup with Nogueira?

Rich Franklin: He’s an exciting fighter, he’s a mentally tough guy. Great ground game, really good boxing skills, so this is the kind of fight that could be a really exciting fight. He’s not a slow-paced, boring fighter, necessarily, either. He likes to get things done in the Octagon, as do I, so it could make for a really good fight.

SI.com: Where are you in your training?

Franklin: We’re four weeks out. I usually do an eight-week camp, but this time I started a week early. I’m not really sure why I did that, but I did. This is probably, just for peaking reasons, my most rigorous week, and then we’ll start to back it off this week. Two weeks more of prep, and then we have fight week. As far as my camp goes, everything is good. I’m in good shape. I haven’t had any injuries or dings or major bruises or any of that kind of stuff as of now, so I’m feeling good.

SI.com: Do you feel you have your camp down to a science at this point?

Franklin: Here’s what I’ll say. When you take sports that have been around for ages, like professional football or professional basketball or something like that, they have camp down to a science. This is a new sport, relatively speaking. And I think that it’s our generation of fighters that are basically figuring out how to get these camps down to a science, so that the later generation of fighters are going to know how to go do this kind of stuff.

For me, for example, I’m doing a camp and I deal with probably — well, I have five different coaches that I deal with. I have a jiu jitsu coach, a boxing coach, a kickboxing coach, a wrestling coach and a strength and conditioning coach. And I think that it hasn’t been until maybe the last fight or two of my career that I’ve really, really gotten everybody, all these coaches on the same page.

When you look at coaches for a football team or something like that, even though you have head coaches and offensive coordinators and defensive coordinators, your D-line coach, your O-line coach and all this kind of stuff, these guys, they’re always on the same page because they’re all under one organization. And I think that’s how this sport will end up developing.

SI.com: Does that take a lot of your energy being the guy who has to bring those guys together?

Franklin: Normally it does, but for this camp I hired a new wrestling coach, and he is basically taking on the spot of my head coaching position. He takes care of a ton of stuff like that for me, so he’s the one who’s calling all the coaches, making sure everybody’s on the same page. If there are any kind of issues with somebody showing up late to a practice or something by chance, he takes care of all that middle stuff, and it alleviates a lot of the stress that I have dealt with in the past. This is the first time I’ve really, really had someone like this in my camp, and it makes a big difference.

SI.com: What have you learned that you wish you’d known when you were younger?

Franklin: One thing that you deal with is overtraining. I was just at a meeting with Randy Couture. We were out at this meeting with Affliction, because Affliction handles both his brand and my brand, Extreme Couture and American Fighter, and I was talking to Randy and we just started talking about how you — one of the things we deal with practically is overtraining.

Whether or not you’re overtraining, undertraining, getting enough training. Because often times, as the athlete, you’re the one making the call. And it’s difficult to, a lot of times, make the calls on certain things, whether you should do another round or not, because you’re the one doing this stuff. And that’s why these professional sports organization have coaches.

The coaches come in, and they have a plan as to what’s going to happen for the day before the day even begins. They know what they’re going to work, how much of it they’re going to do and so on and so forth. And so athletes across the board, I know they struggle with this, and it will get to the point where camps start to develop that way, but I can guarantee you that that kind of stuff is across the board.

There are some camps that have standout head coaches, like when I was up at AMC with Matt Hume, he’s one that oversees all the training and all that kind of stuff. And you’ve got other guys like a Greg Jackson or a Mark DellaGrotte, and I’m sure that these guys run their camps all the same. But these head coaching jobs for MMA is something that’s going to have to — will, it will — develop in the future for these athletes.

SI.com: Do you think part of that is athletes from your generation moving on to the next stage of their career where they pass down the knowledge?

Franklin: I think that, one, it’s a learning process. Two, with my generation, I’ve been referred to when I’m fighting as one of the first true mixed martial artists, one of the first fighters that’s capable of putting basically everything together. [Joe] Rogan has said that a few times. It’s my generation of fighters.

The generation of fighters that were before me were the jiu jitsu guys versus the kickboxers and so on and so forth. It was one art versus another, basically. And then you had a couple of shootfighters, but it was my generation of fighters where you really started seeing mixed martial arts become mixed martial arts. Perhaps my generation of fighters will produce the first true mixed martial arts coaches.

SI.com: One impressive thing about watching your career evolve has been the way you’ve been able to stay as basically a stand up guy. When you look over your fights, you’ve never gone to the ground a lot, never tried a lot of submissions. There’s obviously a lot of wrestling and jiu jitsu training that goes into not getting put into a position you don’t want to get put into, but how do you think you’ve been able to keep that style working?

Franklin: In mixed martial arts, a lot of the most effective stand up fighters are the guys who really aren’t afraid to be on the ground. I’m confident in my jiu jitsu game, so it doesn’t bother me to end up on my back in a fight.

You take my last fight, even though I lost, the Forrest Griffin fight. Forrest was on top of me for the entire first round, and at no point in time was I in any kind of bad situation. As a matter of fact, I just tied him up looking for the stand up, because I didn’t want to waste a whole bunch of energy since I have a guy that’s probably 25 pounds heavier on top of me.

The ref didn’t stand things up, and as things go, I ended up losing that first round, but the point is that that gives me the ability to throw punches and kicks and do whatever I want to do and not even have to worry about hitting the ground, necessarily, because I’m going to be in trouble with a good jiu jitsu guy. So it makes my stand up effective.

SI.com: What are your goals right now?

Franklin: I don’t know. I think I’m at a point where I need to look at what my long terms goals are, because losing the last fight with Forrest knocked me down a couple of notches, so I have to figure out where I need to be and all that kind of stuff. My immediate goal right now, my attention is focused on Nog.

SI.com: Longer term, you have anything in particular you’re keying in on right now?

Franklin: Other than looking at your next fight — the long term goal is always that I would love to get to the 205-pound belt. But to make statements like that after losing my last fight, it’s too cliché and not even something that I would even really want to talk about. I have to worry about winning my next fight, and then I’ll see where that leaves me in the 205-pound class, and then formulate a game plan.

SI.com: Do you actually like fighting at this point? Because there are guys I’ve talked to who are pretty upfront that they don’t. It’s something they do and something they love in a big sense, but fighting…

Franklin: I do. I’ll say it like this. Almost every fight, when I’m sitting there in my locker room, I’m asking myself, “Why did I put myself in this situation. Why am I doing this again, and again and again?” But for whatever reason, as soon as the fight’s over, there’s this part of me that’s like, “All right, man, let’s go do this again.” And so, yeah, I do. I love competing.

Sometimes — I’m getting older — sometimes that daily grind gets old. Yesterday is a perfect example. It was 99 degrees outside and we did our strength and conditioning outside. We were running some sprints with a weighted sled, and there were a couple of sprints where my heart rate went up into the 180s. And it was so hot, and it’s humid here in Cincinnati, it was so hot and humid that when I was trying to get my breath back, there were a couple of times where it felt like I was going to pass out because the air wasn’t there to breathe.

And sometimes when I’m driving to these workouts, I’m like, “Why do I do this to myself every day?” Because I love training, but training to that level, you know, it gets harder and harder to motivate yourself for that. But it’s what I love doing. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do. So I do it.

SI.com: You were talking about overtraining before, and then you were talking about your heart rate going into the 180s. What do you think the key is to not overtraining?

Franklin: The best way to avoid it is for you not to monitor –you should have a coach monitoring your training, so that they’re the one that says, “You’ve done enough today.” There have been a couple of days where we’ve gone into the gym and perhaps we planned on doing seven rounds of sparring, and we cut it off at four just because my previous workout ran me down into the ground and we didn’t realize it. Those days happen. The thing is that I’m the kind of person that if I planned on going into the gym and sparring seven rounds, regardless of how I felt I would go into the gym and spar seven rounds, when I’m probably going to do myself more damage than good.

SI.com: So it’s just taking the decision out of your own hands?

Franklin: Mm hmm. That’s how life is in every aspect. If you get sick, you don’t monitor your own sickness. If you’re truly sick, you go to a doctor and find out what’s wrong with you. You have physicians to oversee your health. This is across the board in many facets of life, and then when it comes to your job, at work, whatever it is that you do — you’re a writer for Sports Illustrated, but there are people that oversee what you do. Maybe you have an editor that’s looking at your writing, because you can’t do everything. It’s much the same in this job. You’ve got to have somebody that will oversee the things that you’re doing, because you can’t make all the decisions. It’s impossible.

SI.com: It kind of freaks me out that there are guys in 2011 who just run everything themselves.

Franklin: There are a lot of guys. I just started working with Matt Mitrione for the camp. He’s been coming down and helping me get ready. He just started. Some of those guys from that camp in Indianapolis may end up coming down here to do some training with some of the coaches we have. He was telling us that they still don’t have a good MMA facility, that they do some of their workouts and hop from gym to gym, and I’m like, “Man, that’s crazy.” He said, “We have five UFC fighters out of our camp that have either been in the UFC or have been in The Ultimate Fighter.”

SI.com: So, you’ve fought everyone. Who are some of the guys you’ve fought who don’t get enough credit for how tough they are?

Franklin: It’s probably the guys that I’ve had convincing wins against. You take a guy like David Loiseau. I don’t think people give him credit for how tough he is. For five rounds, that guy stood in there and fought a fight, and he was losing in the fight, and at no point in time was there quit in his system, or in his corner’s system, to say, “Listen, dude, you’re just getting worked. We’re going to have to call this fight.”

SI.com: I’m not going to ask you to name any names, but have you fought guys where you just felt them quitting on the fight?

Franklin: Not necessarily, but you can see, not quitting on the fight, but you can see when you take somebody’s heart. When you take the fight out of them, you can see it in their facial expression. You can see it in my facial expression, like when I was fighting Anderson Silva the first time and he clinched me up and threw a couple of knees and caught me in the face and then we step back and back away and you can see me take this deep breath and exhale. The look on my face, that’s a fighter going, “What did I just get myself into?” And I’ve seen it before, when I’m fighting and I’m winning, I’ve seen other fighters do it.

SI.com: So another tough guy you’ve fought is Dan Henderson, and that was obviously a pretty controversial decision. He’s back under the Zuffa banner, so would you be looking to rematch?

Franklin: I would definitely be up for talking about that to UFC, for sure. I know that in the past I’ve talked about wanting to rematch Dan, and I’m kind of at a point where I’m like, “Eh, whatever.” I really don’t care about that loss anymore. I’m not losing any sleep over the fact that I lost a decision that I didn’t feel like I lost. So if the UFC wanted to put that fight on, great. If it never came around, I’m going to die happy, still.

SI.com: What do you think of him and Fedor Emelianenko, who do you like there?

Franklin: Well, I’ll say this. My mind immediately goes to Fedor, just because of the weight class difference and all that kind of stuff, but Dan has historically fought men that are bigger than him and proven that he can handle himself in those kind of fights, so really I don’t know. I don’t think Dan’s ever been knocked out in his career, so it’s certainly an interesting fight.

SI.com: In the past, you’ve said that at 36, 37, that might be the time when you would start thinking about retirement. So I’m wondering if that still holds, or if you’ve changed your mind.

Franklin: I’ll say this, I’m not ready to retire yet, but I can definitely tell that I’m closer to the end of the road than I was when I was 29 years old, or 30 years old, making those statements. Fortunately, my body is in pretty good shape. Everybody has their bumps and bruises and stuff like that, but overall I feel good, especially for a 36-year-old athlete, and I feel I’m capable of performing at the top level. So retirement isn’t something that’s at the forefront of my mind, but it’s something I think about from time to time, and I know that it’s in the future. I will not be one of those people that fight until I’m 40, I know that much.

SI.com: A lot of guys — and not just fighters, obviously, but all athletes — seem to have trouble letting go, and it sounds like something you’re more analytical about.

Franklin: God has blessed me with the ability to do this still at this age, and I love doing what I do. But I’ve had a 12-year career. So if I knew in the next two years of my life that that would be pretty much all that I was going to do, it would be something I would be okay with. I’m in the situation where I’m fortunate that probably mentally I’ll be ready to hang up the gloves, so to speak, before I’m physically incapable of competing.

SI.com: That’s a good situation to be in. So what do you want to do after your career is over?

Franklin: I’m not 100 percent sure. We’ve done some film work, and I really enjoy doing film. And that’s something that I’d like to dive into a little bit, see where that would take me, perhaps. I’ve done some stuff as a commentator, an analyst, and those are okay. I don’t enjoy doing them as much as film.

I have a group of friends that are really pushing me and encouraging me to do public speaking. I’ve never been much of a public speaker, and that’s not something that I have ever wanted to pursue, for sure, but it seems that I’m probably not going to get through my lifetime without at least doing a little bit of some public speaking. So we’ll see.

Fortunately for me, I have a college degree and that helps me with my communication skills. I do fairly well in front of a camera, so I have some options for sure. I haven’t really given thought as to if — if, for example, if today I found out that I could never ever fight again, I’m not sure what I would do. I’m not sure what I would do tomorrow for a job.

SI.com: Are there any outside projects that you have right now?

Franklin: I just did a cameo appearance in Here Comes the Boom, the Kevin James film that’s coming out next year. He plays a schoolteacher that ends up doing some MMA fighting and raising money to save a program at his school. It’s a comedy. I did a little cameo appearance in that. There are some possible films on the horizon for the future, but it’s a tricky situation for me planning a film schedule and all that PR with my lifestyle the way that it is, with what I do, you know.

Going to fan expos and going to fights and preparing for fights and all that kind of stuff and then building in time to film in between that, it can be very tricky to manage all that kind of stuff. We’ve had some opportunities in the past on things that we’ve had to basically pass up on due to some conflicts, schedules and all those kind of things, but yeah, there are possibilities for things that we have in the future.

SI.com: Finally, if you’re going to call it, how do you think the Nogueira fight is going to go?

Franklin: I don’t know, I’ve never wanted to call fights or anything like that. I’ll say this much — I’m preparing for a stand up battle with him, but it really wouldn’t surprise me if for this camp he decided to take it to the ground. So really I’m kind of on my toes as to how this is going to end up being for this fight, I really don’t know. It’s going to be a tough fight for sure. The Nogueira brothers, these guys are definitely difficult to knock out for sure, so I don’t see this being something that’s going to end in the first round. This has potential war written all over it.

Tim Marchman can be reached at tlmarchman@gmail.com.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/tim_marchman/07/13/rich-franklin/index.html#ixzz1SHB8H0ur

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