Outside Source
On a Wednesday episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where he was joined by comedian Ian Edwards, Rogan peeled back the curtain briefly to discuss some of the heaviest moments he has encountered while calling fights. The 58-year-old regaled Edwards the listeners about his own relationships with fighters, and how difficult it can be to watch them compete—and not only call the action objectively, but continue the coverage without missing a beat should the friend suffer a dramatic loss.
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“It’s real hard when you watch your friends get beat up,” an emotional Rogan remarked. “Real hard. It was real hard, me watching [Daniel] Cormier when [Jon] Jones beat him up. That was hard. The Stipe [Miocic] one was hard, especially the one where Stipe KO’ed him against the cage. It’s just hard.”
He continued, “Because you know them. You know them as human beings. You know what that’s going to do them. It’s f—ing devastating. It’s like a loss. It’s like you lost a family member or you lost a dog…It’s hard. I start crying.”
I Think You’d Be Surprised
While it is commonplace to befriend people they work with, those in the promotion have to watch for the additional conflict of interest. Still, longstanding friendships can emerge, and Rogan frequently has those types of people in his life appear on his podcast. The commentator who joined the company at UFC 12 in 1997 has called over 3,000 UFC bouts across more than 300 events, the most for any commentator in the organization’s history.
Despite all of the fights he has consumed and served on the microphone for, it was easy for longtime fight caller to pinpoint the worst he felt when watching a friend unsuccessfully compete: fighter-turned-comedian Brendan Schaub.
“For me, the hardest one was Schaub,” the commentator expressed. “Schaub didn’t want to quit, and I was like, ‘dude.’ The thing about Brendan that most people don’t know about is how many concussions he took outside of the fights. So you see the fights, but he used to spar with Shane Carwin, man. Shane Carwin was the interim heavyweight champion; the biggest fists ever registered in the UFC. He had like 5XL fists. He was so big, it was ridiculous. He looked like in ‘The Avengers,’ he would be like the Hulk. He doesn’t look like a real human. Like all the other people are there and then there’s Shane Carwin. He was a freak.”
Schaub would openly discuss about the multiple slugfests he and Carwin engaged in at Trevor Wittman’s former Grudge Training Center in Colorado. Both heavyweights would allegedly duke it out ferociously and even knock another out at times. Carwin later admitted on since-deleted Reddit AMA posts that some of Schaub’s tales hold some truth to them.
“Brendan Schaub and him used to spar all the time. He would get knocked out all the time. He would get concussions all the time. He got a concussion days before he fought Ben Rothwell. He got a concussion days before he fought [Antonio Rodrigo] Nogueira. He was getting concussions all the time, like in the gym.”
Over a decade ago, Rogan made headlines when breaking down the footage of Schaub when he got knocked out by Travis Browne. As Schaub tried to suggest that his skills were the elite of the elite, including that he had superior wrestling than champ Cain Velasquez. The stand-up comic famously replied, “I think you’d be surprised,” to Schaub’s claims, and went on to posit that Schaub should hang up his gloves to stop taking so much damage. Looking back on that notable episode of JRE, Rogan said what he said with nothing but love and care for his friend.
“So I knew about all that s–t too, and the effects, and I was like, ‘You’ve got to get out now! If you don’t get out now, there’s no happy ending.’ There’s no happy ending to the guy that gets knocked out a lot. It’s terrible,” the podcaster concluded.
This article first appeared at Recent News on Sherdog.com
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