No one bullies Cormier anymore
Dave Meltzer, Yahoo! Sports
Sep 24, 4:36 pm EDT
Daniel Cormier has the same success in his new passion, mixed martial arts, as he did in his old one, amateur wrestling, he’ll once again think of a fourth-grade bully in Lafayette, La.
Cormier vividly remembers having an egg smashed on his face at school, where he was constantly being picked on as a kid. That was the last straw. One day he decided that he was going to make sure that never happened to him again, and he started wrestling, a career that ended with him being tabbed as possibly the greatest wrestler ever to come out of the state of Louisiana.
“I was bullied so bad until fourth grade,” he remembered. “Every day, kids bullied you. Once I got punched in the face with an egg. Then my mom went to the school to complain. She was doing what she thought was right by complaining, but you know how that goes. That just made it get worse.
“So I had to stop telling her. I had to get tough and I had to be able to defend myself so I started wrestling.”
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That success – which took him all the way to the Olympics – opened doors for him in mixed martial arts, as he signed a contract with Strikeforce a month ago with virtually no prior training in his new sport.
You could make a strong case that when Cormier steps into the cage against Gary Frazier on Friday night in Tulsa, Okla., in the Strikeforce Challengers event, that he’ll be the best of this generation of American freestyle wrestlers to compete in mixed martial arts.
“A month ago, I started to do MMA and now I’m already fighting on Showtime,” said Cormier, a two-time Olympian and five-time national heavyweight champion.
“He’s probably the greenest guy we’ve ever had going into a fight,” admitted trainer/manager Bob Cook about Cormier’s debut against Frazier, a former two-time state wrestling champion in Oklahoma who is similarly inexperienced, with one amateur fight under his belt.
Cormier has taken a crash course at the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, Calif., where he roomed for the past month with UFC star Josh Koscheck, tried to gather the basics of striking, and studied jiu-jitsu under Dave Camarillo. His training has been mainly defensive at this point, largely on what to avoid on the ground as he heads into his debut. The offensive aspect will come later.
Cormier is fighting so soon largely because he wanted to be on a show near Stillwater, Okla., where he’s lived since going to Oklahoma State University in 2000.
But coming from an Olympic background is not a guarantee of success in a new sport.
Just Wednesday night in Japan, Hiroshi Izumi, a 2004 Olympic silver medalist in judo debuted to much national fanfare in that country, and was knocked down five times in the first round and finished by Antz Nansen, a Muay Thai specialist, in 2:56. And that’s just the latest of numerous examples of world champions in kickboxing, wrestling and judo who have gone on to unimpressive MMA careers.
Cormier isn’t a Brock Lesnar-type monster – he’s just 5-foot-11 and 245 pounds – but he’s the more accomplished wrestler of the two. With the exception of two injury defaults, he went unbeaten his last three years in high school, winning three state titles in 1995-97 and placing in national age group competition since the age of 16.
At Colby College in Kansas, he won two junior college national titles in 1998 and 1999. At Oklahoma State, at 184 pounds, he finished second in the nation in 2001, losing the finals to Cael Sanderson, one of the great college wrestlers of all time. From 2003-07, he went undefeated in U.S. national competition, winning five national titles and a gold medal in the Pan American games.
But he’s starting fresh. “I started boxing two-and-a-half, or three months ago in Tulsa,” he said. “I’ve been at AKA for four weeks. I’m training with (Mike) Swick, (Josh) Thomson, Koscheck and Cain (Velasquez) since I’ve come down here. It’s a work in progress. It’ll take time. Wrestling is always going to be the key part of my game. Takedowns and ground and pound. I’ll be okay.”
“I see great, great things from him,” said Koscheck. “He’s an amazing wrestler, great work ethic and he’s got good stand-up already for how long he’s trained.”
While Cormier points to the kid who smashed the egg on his face as the catalyst for everything that has happened in sports, he has disappointing memories of his two Olympics.
In 2004, he was an emotional wreck from the death of his 3 ½-month-old daughter, Kaedyn, who died when the car driven by her mother was rear ended. Somehow he won the national championship within weeks of her death, and credits the work of a psychiatrist and his ability to focus so much on wrestling to help him get through it. He ended up with a fourth place finish at the Olympics, losing 3-2 in sudden death overtime in the bronze medal match to Iran’s Ali Reza Heydari.
“It was tough,” he said. “I was hurting everywhere. I needed to go to a sports psychiatrist. I was in that state where you feel you can’t go on.”
After winning a bronze in the 2007 world championships, he was named captain of the U.S. wrestling team and was considered a contender for a medal. After a lifetime of training, the day before the competition, after cutting down to 211.5 pounds, his body shut down. The cut wasn’t any different from usual, but when rehydrating, his body rejected everything that was he was putting into it. He was hospitalized and unable to compete.
“I didn’t do anything wrong cutting the weight,” he said. “I had learned to cut weight the right way. What happened was I had cut weight the wrong way for so many years that it was at that moment that it caught up to my body. I was second or third in the world going into the Olympics. It really crippled me.”
He went into a funk before going back to wrestling, but gave it up because he felt like he no longer was mentally into it.
“I did nothing after the Olympics. I mean nothing. I mean, I sat on my couch. I didn’t even leave the house.”
He considers his weight cutting days over, since he’s fighting as a heavyweight. Unlike most fighters in the days before a match, weight isn’t an issue.
“I don’t even know what I weigh,” he said. “Bob Cook told me not to even worry about it. I know I’m not 265.”
He had considered MMA dating back to 2001, when he first heard from DeWayne Zinkin, manager for Chuck Liddell, Forrest Griffin and many of the AKA fighters, who recruited him at the time. Zinkin recruited him again this year, after Lawal had success at the sport. After talking with Lawal about the sport, Cormier decided to follow suit.
And he’s realistic about the sport, noting that everyone loses.
“You win, you lose, nobody goes undefeated in this sport,” he said. “Anderson Silva’s the best in the world and he has four losses. Of course the object is to be undefeated. Me and Josh (Koscheck) have talked and he said he was embarrassed after the (Paulo) Thiago fight. I’ve been embarrassed many times. We will all be embarrassed at some point.”
