Matt: Your story from there is pretty well publicized. The following six months or a year was pretty much the worst hell for you with a ton of family tragedy...
Mark: It was 10 months. My mother, my father, my brother, the car wreck...another one that happened in Austin. I hate that city. There was just a lot. A lot of not good things that happened there.
Matt: At that point, was there any doubt like "Maybe I don't want to do this anymore?" or was there...
Mark: No, there was never. Honestly Matt, people ask me that and honestly I never did. I talked about this earlier today (note: On Inside MMA), my thought was that I was so focused, tunnel vision to fight again, that that's what got me through everything. It got me through the rehab from the heart surgery. It got me through the deaths. It got me through the rehab from the car wreck and the knee surgery later. The fighting was my focus. There were times when the thought crossed my mind like "is somebody trying to send me a sign? Is the universe trying to tell me not to do this?" Then it became hard to get fights. Being a professional fighter my whole life it was never a problem, now people had a fear. It was a good story but promoters and commissions were worried about it. My problem with the commissions is that they licensed me my whole career with the problem, I don't have the problem anymore, they surgically repaired the problem. But when you have an eight and a half inch scar on your chest, it creates a lot of fear in people. And then you have the people asking "well what about your chest?" If a fighter breaks his arm and then comes back, no one has a problem. They always say, if you break a bone it grows back stronger. Your chest isn't much different. But it's that people can't really conceive of a saw and rib splitters opening you up like an oyster digging your heart out of your body.
Miller goes on later in the interview to talk about the maturation process of Jon Jones and Phil Davis (men Mark has worked with personally in the past). The interview as a whole is one of the most interesting I've read in years and I seriously urge all of you to head over to Head Kick Legend and give it a read.Mark: It was 10 months. My mother, my father, my brother, the car wreck...another one that happened in Austin. I hate that city. There was just a lot. A lot of not good things that happened there.
Matt: At that point, was there any doubt like "Maybe I don't want to do this anymore?" or was there...
Mark: No, there was never. Honestly Matt, people ask me that and honestly I never did. I talked about this earlier today (note: On Inside MMA), my thought was that I was so focused, tunnel vision to fight again, that that's what got me through everything. It got me through the rehab from the heart surgery. It got me through the deaths. It got me through the rehab from the car wreck and the knee surgery later. The fighting was my focus. There were times when the thought crossed my mind like "is somebody trying to send me a sign? Is the universe trying to tell me not to do this?" Then it became hard to get fights. Being a professional fighter my whole life it was never a problem, now people had a fear. It was a good story but promoters and commissions were worried about it. My problem with the commissions is that they licensed me my whole career with the problem, I don't have the problem anymore, they surgically repaired the problem. But when you have an eight and a half inch scar on your chest, it creates a lot of fear in people. And then you have the people asking "well what about your chest?" If a fighter breaks his arm and then comes back, no one has a problem. They always say, if you break a bone it grows back stronger. Your chest isn't much different. But it's that people can't really conceive of a saw and rib splitters opening you up like an oyster digging your heart out of your body.
Read part one here and part two here.