Iceman by Chuck Liddell

UFC fight yet. But now my girlfriend, Lori, whom I worked with at the Library, was pregnant. Lori and I had known each other for a long time before we started dating. I first noticed her when I was bouncing and she was a customer. We had a lot of mutual friends and, through them, started hanging out regularly. She told me she was impressed that, despite my rep, I seemed to be a guy who had control at the door. I wasn’t starting fights; I was usually trying to keep things pretty mellow.

    She’ll always be my little girl.
    At first we kept things pretty casual. But I’m a romantic guy, and when her birthday came around early in our relationship, I decided to step it up. I surprised her with a night in a hotel in town. I had called ahead and had music playing in the room when we walked in. Then I took her to a nice dinner and made her think, “Wow, this guy is really sensitive.”
    Lori was five-four, had dark hair, and was a knockout. People always liked her, she was one of those girls who was so sweet, customers just gravitated toward her end of the bar. The truth is, when I found out she was pregnant, part of me was like, “Whoa, this happened fast. What did I do here?” We were together and things were going good. But I was worried, too. Trista was so young, I had barely got used to the idea of being a father. I was a little nervous about money. Now I was going to have two kids just thirteen months apart.
    But you get over that fear fast, at least I did, because I loved being a dad. From my perspective, between Trista, a new kid on the way, and my training, things were going pretty good for me. Then I got the call I had been waiting a year to get: The UFC wanted me to fight.
    Nick had set me up with a couple of managers named Al Davis and Charlie Angelo. He told me that if I signed with them, a fight would come my way sooner rather than later. And he was right. I had sent the UFC a tape of one of my MMA fights, my kickboxing matches, and my training sessions with John Lewis and requested a chance to fight. Plus, because I had been working out at John’s and knew so many of the guys who were already UFC fighters, I figured, naively, it would just be a matter of time before someone tapped me to take on the UFC’s light heavyweight champ. But a few UFC shows went by after my MMA debut and after I had sent in my audition tape, but no one called. Not until I aligned with managers who were connected did I become a legitimate candidate to join the rotation. When Al and Charlie called me in April of 1998, they might as well have told me another girl I knew was going to have my baby. That’s how excited I was.
    In mid-May I flew down to Mobile, Alabama, with Nick, Scott Adams, John Hackleman, and some other friends to make my Ultimate Fighting Championship debut. It may have been the top rung of the mixed martial arts world, but it was still pretty bush-league stuff. Only a few states—such as Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana—would even sanction these fights. And even then they often took place in the middle of nowhere, as far from big cities and the rest of civilization as possible. That is, if they took place in the United States at all. You were just as likely to see a UFC fight happen in Japan or Brazil as you were to catch one in Bay St. Louis. People acted as if just having a UFC fight in a major stadium in the middle of Atlanta or Charlotte would corrupt the entire town. So we fought in such outposts as Dothan and Augusta or, in the case of my first fight, in Mobile, Alabama.
    When Charlie and Al called, it wasn’t exactly the most enticing offer I’ve ever had. I was the sixth fighter invited to square off in a four-man middleweight tourney for UFC 17: Redemption. Essentially, I was an alternate, a part of the undercard, but not a draw for the tournament. The only way I could advance in the tournament was if one of the top four guys won his first-round fight and