Don't know Rashad Evans? You should
You know he’s famous. He’s gotta be famous. Look at the way he struts into Imperial Athletics, his training gym in this ritzy Florida city a mile from the beach. Heads turn. The dude’s all swagger, ballcap sideways, with baggy jeans and Vans sneakers and a Hollywood grin stretching ear to ear.
Cuba Gooding, Jr., perhaps? Or at least Cuba’s stunt man? No, not quite, though Rashad Evans gets that all the time. Rashad met the Hollywood star once, and the UFC light heavyweight posed for a picture with Gooding. He swears they don’t really look all that similar in person, though this reporter, for one, remains skeptical.
Even though he’s one of the top mixed-martial artists in the world — who burst onto the scene in 2005 when he won the heavyweight division in “The Ultimate Fighter 2” reality show, who shocked the world by beating UFC legend Chuck Liddell, who captured the light heavyweight belt from Forrest Griffin in 2008 before losing it in his next fight — Rashad Evans is used to mix-ups with other famous people.
Sometimes it’s the 32-year-old upstate New York native’s own fault. He’s a master impersonator. Close your eyes and you think you’re with Mike Tyson (who was Evans’ favorite fighter growing up, and when Evans impersonates Iron Mike you swear you’re watching “The Hangover”). Or UFC president Dana White: “Rashad, you gotta be (freaking) kidding me!”, Rashad says, nailing the Southie Boston accent. Or his classic Muhammad Ali.
Some of it, however, isn’t his own doing. Like the mix-ups with NBA player Rashard Lewis. Who looks nothing like Rashad, but who happens to share a similar name.
“You know how many people call me Rashard Lewis?” he says on a recent morning after training for his upcoming UFC on FOX fight (8 p.m. ET, Saturday). “I get it all the time. I was with Jamie Foxx, we were hanging out one night. He was hosting a party at Tao in Vegas. We were having a good time. And he gets on the mic, he says, ‘I wanna send a shout out to my boy, Rashad ... LEWIS!’”
Rashad pauses, puts on a sad puppy dog look, and pretends to wipe a tear.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, man, I’m going home,’ ” he says. “But I couldn’t do nothing but laugh, because my friends always tease me and call me Rashard Lewis. I wish I would have recorded it. Jamie Foxx called me Rashard Lewis, and meant it!”
After Saturday’s fight, in which Rashad is carrying the main card against up-and-coming UFC fighter and former NCAA wrestling champion Phil Davis, everyone will have heard of Rashad. Dana White is counting on him to supply a top-notch performance on the biggest stage the sport has seen. If he wins, Rashad could be next up to battle light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones in one of the UFC’s most clamored-for fights in years. Beat Jones — knock out the 24-year-old many see as the future of the UFC, beat the fighting prodigy Rashad’s made no bones about intensely disliking — and Rashad will be on top of the world, one of the most famous names in the UFC, a near-equal to his famous friends Jeremy Piven and Mickey Rourke and Ray Lewis.
Win Saturday in his adopted hometown of Chicago and even more people will be asking him for his autograph. And his three-year-old son, Rashad Jr., will keep stomping his feet and getting angry, confused why everyone’s calling his dad Rashad Evans, and saying, “Hey, I’m Rashad Evans!”
But lose?
Lose and there’s little chance of making a high-profile fight against Jones. And then Rashad’s back to where he started: that famous dude whose name you can’t quite place, and who has to fight for his job every single time he steps into the Octagon.
Look into Rashad’s eyes. There’s anger there. Not just a flash of anger, but a boiling, deep-seated anger that betrays something important about this man. He doesn’t let it flash too often, but when he does, you can tell it means something.
It’s weird, because anger is about the last thing that comes to mind when you think of Rashad Evans. You think of his smile; you think of the showmanship that got him chewed out by UFC legend Matt Hughes on “The Ultimate Fighter 2;” you think of him laughing it off when UFC fans boo him.
But then he wraps his hands, he tugs on his gloves, he jogs in place, his ripped muscles start jiggling and shaking, he sings along to the 3 Doors Down song “Kryptonite,” and he dives in and starts pounding the pads held by his stand-up coach. That’s when, all the sudden, it appears out of nowhere: An inner rage that tells anyone who wants to fight that they should stay far, far away.
It’s that inner rage that fuels him. All his life, Rashad’s been the little guy trying to beat up a lot of bigger guys. It’s no different now as one of the smallest guys in his UFC division than when he was a kid, a runt who relied on mouth and moxie.
“Any time you got a guy like this, a guy that people don’t respect,” says Mike Van Arsdale, a former UFC fighter and Rashad’s coach. “A guy who people say he’s not that good. That he’s really not that good a wrestler. Who say he’s really not that good a boxer. Who say he’s really not good, he shouldn’t have a black belt in jiu-jitsu. But he keeps winning. (So) there’s something inside, something he keeps to himself ... and he taps into those hidden emotions. He can turn it on when he needs it.”
Behind those angry eyes, there’s a story of life not always being fair, of a boy jealous of what other people had that he didn’t, of a boy who knew nobody else was going to help him so he had to help himself.
He grew up the fifth of eight kids in a three-bedroom house not far from Niagara Falls. His single mother was a nurse’s aide, a tough lady who worked nights and didn’t take crap from nobody. But his dad, a factory worker, disappeared by the time Rashad was seven. It stuck with Rashad, how his parents’ rough relationship transferred into no relationship with his father.
“We had a lot of hard times, a lot,” Rashad says. “Sometimes the heat would get cut off. Sometimes the electric would get cut off. Sometimes my mom had a car, sometimes she didn’t. It was just part of life.”
It’s hard to believe now, but growing up Rashad was a runt. Always the underdog. Always feeling he had to prove himself. His older brother and close friend, Lance, used to beat him up. He made Rashad cry, and he made him tough.
“My first fight was in kindergarten,” Rashad says. “I was walking home from school and my brother made me fight this kid. And I end up losing this book I got from the library. I didn’t know what happened to it. I remember going to school being so afraid to tell the teacher I lost the library book because I thought I’d go to jail. So for like three weeks I went around just nervous and afraid, trying to avoid the teacher as much as possible because I didn’t want to tell her I was fighting somebody and lost the book. ‘Curious George,’ my favorite book.”
He won the fight, of course, but never found the book.
By eighth grade, Rashad wanted to be an NFL player: The next Thurman Thomas. His football coach, an old guy with an Italian accent named Armand Cacciatore, told Rashad wrestling was the ultimate conditioning for football. He wrestled at 119 pounds in ninth grade, 145 by his junior year, one of the smallest guys on the wrestling team and always getting picked on.
“The only way (another runt friend and I) would get out of it was we’d run our mouths,” Rashad says. “But we’d run our mouths so much that sometimes, when coach went away from us, they’d double-team us and try to give us swirlies. Every day was initiation for us ... Those guys were brutal, ruthless. They gave us swirlies, they duct-taped me up. I had a mouth, man. Those guys used to beat the hell out of us, man. They did some torturous stuff. It was early training for UFC.”
All of this made Rashad Evans a tough little dude. He was always the guy who’d surprise you, the guy who’s tougher than you think, the guy you could never break.
And then, just before Rashad went off to wrestle at Michigan State to study psychology and become a cop, came the moment that nearly broke him: His father died, a heart attack at age 43.
“I was mad for a really long time, had a really hard time dealing with it,” Rashad says. “I wanted at least to get a chance to say, ‘Man, you weren’t here.’ I wanted to let it out. When I didn’t get a chance to let it out, I felt like I was robbed.”
And from this childhood of deprivation, from being looked at as the underdog, from feeling cheated out of a relationship with his father, a giant chip forged from anger formed on his shoulder. It filled his whole being. Part of him thinks he should go to a counselor, work out his animosity, find forgiveness and resolution and peace.
But not now. Now, he needs that anger.
“It’s my fuel,” he says. “Any time I can close my eyes and tap into those feelings, those thoughts and those emotions, I have a reservoir of energy, this kind of drive, and I can force myself to do anything. I don’t want to (mess) with my fuel. If I get help, I might become normal or something, and I might not wanna fight any more.”
He thinks for a moment, this cerebral fighter who loves to study his opponents. And for once he turns the psychoanalysis on himself.
“That’s one thing I gotta keep,” he says. “I gotta keep that fire inside of me. I gotta keep that little bit of pissed-off-ness. I don’t want to have resolution, not now. (Resolution is) true forgiveness: my dad, my mom, my life, a lot of those things I hold that anger for, that flame. And I like to be able to draw on it whenever I can.”
Rashad climbs into his tricked-out Lexus SUV, the vehicle that says loud and clear that he’s made it out of his life of deprivation: its huge subwoofers and its tinted windows and his nickname, “Suga,” embroidered into the seats. He pulls out his iPhone and dials back home in Chicago.
Soon, his 5-year-old daughter, Nia, the middle of his three kids, is chattering away. He asks about their dogs, tells her he saw the video of her making snow angels, talks about what DJ Lance Rock did on her favorite television show, “Yo Gabba Gabba.” In a gentle voice, Rashad asks why she is staying home from school today: “Did your stomach hurt or did you have a cough this morning?” Pause. “A cough? That’s why you stayed home from school? Let me hear it!” Pause. “It’s a loud cough. Oh my goodness!”
It’s the hardest part about the 12-week pre-fight training camp, being away from his kids. Through his gentle voice, you can tell he’s a great dad: He loves taking his kids to bookstores, to make pottery, to play around at Monkey Joe’s, to see a live “Yo Gabba Gabba” show downtown. He uses that gentle voice to lecture his son that he can’t get in fights at school, even though kids pick on him because his name is Rashad Evans, Jr.
But the hardest part of being a UFC star is about to get harder. Rashad and his wife, who he’s been with since college, are filing for divorce. All the travel from his mounting fame took a toll on their marriage, Rashad says. They tried to stay together for the kids — do what Rashad’s own father didn’t — but it didn’t work out.
All this scares him: His kids growing up with Rashad only sometimes around. The possibility that the fractured relationship with his wife will fracture his relationship with his kids. The chance he could become his father.
“I’m worried about it,” he says, steering his SUV with one finger. “I grew up without my father in the house. Never thought I’d be in this situation that I am right now, you know? But that’s just how the last couple years have been for me. Been rough.”
And this is another of the tough parts of being a UFC fighter: You have to tune out the noise and focus on the next fight. Rashad is good at compartmentalizing. He takes the struggles with his wife, the yearning for his kids, the fact that the past two years have been derailed by a thumb injury and cancelled fights and personal problems, and he puts those thoughts away. He’s not thinking of his brother, Lance, an Army infantryman who leaves for Afghanistan the day before Rashad’s UFC on FOX fight. He’s not thinking about Jon Jones, the former-friend-turned-mortal-enemy who Rashad feels betrayed him by telling an interviewer he wanted to fight his former training partner — yet didn’t tell Rashad first. Yes, Rashad calls Jones “snakish,” and you can tell there’s no love lost between the two, but right now his whole focus is on Phil Davis. Davis, he knows, isn’t some stepping stone to Jon Jones but a dangerous opponent, a young underdog with nothing to lose.
Sometimes, though, his mind does wander back to when he lived in Michigan, working as a hospital security guard in his college town. When the pathologist left the morgue at 5 p.m. it was up to Rashad to take dead bodies to the morgue. He’d be wheeling these bodies in, imagining the story behind their lives and their deaths, wondering if they had regrets: “Every time I put somebody in the morgue, I thought: ‘Did they do what they wanted to do in life? Did they die satisfied?’”
It’s a sobering thought, and something that keeps Rashad focused on what matters right now: not fame, not the noise surrounding a professional athlete, but simply winning this next fight. Beat Phil Davis and he’ll visit his kids as a winner. Beat Phil Davis and Jon Jones should be the next up.
Beat Phil Davis and every single one of us will know who Rashad Evans is.
But right now, as he pulls his Lexus SUV into a strip mall parking lot and puts it into park, he’s still that famous guy you can’t quite place. Rashad walks into a South American restaurant to meet some training partners for lunch. And inside, nobody recognizes him, Rashad Evans, one of the best fighters on earth.
You can follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave, become a fan on Facebook or email him at reidforgrave@gmail.com.
