The Crippler looks at 40: Former UFC star Chris Leben tries for one last win

When people recognize him out in public these days, it’s the hair they comment on first.

“All the time,” said Chris Leben, the former UFC middleweight turned bare-knuckle boxer. “It happens all the time.”

He’ll be out at the park with his young son and some guy will come up to him with that hey-I-know-you-from-TV energy. Maybe he remembers Leben as the wild man from that first season of “The Ultimate Fighter.” Maybe he recognizes him from any of his 22 UFC fights spread out over the course of eight-and-a-half years with the promotion. In this guy’s memory, Leben is still that brawler with the bright red hair, known as much for his hard-drinking ways outside the cage as he was for slinging leather inside of it.

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“It’s like they’re surprised,” said Leben. “‘Your hair’s not red!’ Sorry, it grows in brown, dude. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m 40 years old now.”

It’s not always easy for people to understand that. This is part of the difficulty of being Chris Leben now. The version of him that the combat sports world first got to know and sometimes love doesn’t exist anymore. It can’t. The way that guy was going, he was headed for an early grave. There’s no doubt in Leben’s mind about that.

Sometimes he thinks about that guy – the one who got blackout drunk and wrecked a casino bathroom a few days before fighting Brian Stann at UFC 125, the one who rampaged through the TUF house breaking down doors with his fists – and he has to conclude that he probably wouldn’t like him much if he met him now.

“I was annoying, man,” Leben said. “I was an asshole. No shortage of self-confidence. It made for great reality TV, but my actual life and my relationships with friends and family were always in turmoil because of the person I was back then.”

Leben fought his last bout for the UFC in 2013. He quit on the stool between rounds at UFC 168, a fact that bothered him for years. Here he’d always been the guy who fought like he needed to see someone’s blood on the mat – yours or his, he wasn’t too picky – and he ended his MMA career sitting down, telling his coaches he couldn’t go anymore.

It gnawed at him so much that, after announcing his retirement in 2014, he signed with Bellator two years later in the hopes of ending on a better note. That comeback only went as far as a medical exam. An EKG revealed a “life-threatening abnormality” in Leben’s heart. Not only could he not get cleared to fight, some doctors were telling him he might need a transplant just to survive for much longer.

Leben managed to reverse the damage on his own, mainly through changes to his diet. He’d quit drinking, switched his whole lifestyle around, and was deemed something of a medical miracle by the heart specialists who monitored his progress. Once he got the go-ahead to return to fighting, it was just in time to try his hand at the newly legalized form of bare-knuckle boxing that had begun to pop up in a select few states.

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But it can be a tricky thing, being still newly sober and walking back through those old doors again. Fighting had been one of the things that saved Leben from his own self-destructive impulses in his early 20s, he said, but the world surrounding it also fed his addictions in some of the worst ways.

“I’m pretty certain that if it hadn’t been for MMA, the drive to compete and the camaraderie in the gym, the having to get in shape for fights, I probably would have been dead a long time ago,” Leben said. “I’m sure of that. The only thing that ever got me sober for even a limited time was fighting, and that was because I didn’t want to get the shit kicked out of me in front of family and friends on live TV.

“That being said, there was an element of partying, everything in excess and nothing in moderation, and I don’t know if that goes hand-in-hand with fighting or just with being twenty-something like I was back then. But you get older. Money and fame and being able to go to the best party and have the hottest chick, you know, those were my motivations. Those were the reasons why I was fighting in my 20s. I was loud. I was obnoxious. I was offensive. I was rude. Now I’m not that person anymore.”

Leben fought three times as a bare-knuckler before announcing another retirement last year. His last fight against Dakota Cochrane in Bare Knuckle FC ended in a decision loss, but he fought hard until the final bell and didn’t give up. That felt like an ending he could live with.

With his fighting days behind him, he planned to focus more on all those other things he wanted to do. Stuff like running his own gym, working as a judge and referee under the California State Athletic Commission – basically all things that were effectively shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s when the guys from Bare Knuckle FC got in his ear, he said. How about one more fight? One last chance to go out on a win. This time he could know going in that, no matter what happened, he was entering that ring for the last time as a fighter.

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So Leben agreed. This Friday, when he takes on Quintin Henry at BKFC’s “Knucklemania” event in Lakeland, Fla., he’s pretty sure that it will be the last time, he said. Admitting that to himself stirred up emotions he wasn’t expecting after all these years. It’s even got him thinking about getting that red hair dye out again.

“There are some negative connotations that go with it for me,” Leben said. “There’s some positive ones as well. I put up a poll and 97 percent of the people who responded said they want to see that red hair again. It got me thinking, could I dye it for one night? Could I dye it back to brown as soon as the fight’s over? I might do it. Maybe I could bring the ‘Crippler’ out for his retirement fight on Friday night, and then put him back in his box.”

It’s an interesting way of phrasing it. Maybe he could do it just this one last time. Even Leben isn’t entirely sure. One thing his recovery has taught him, he said, is that he can’t afford to let his guard down.

“Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic,” he said, adding that he’d seen guys with 20 years of sobriety relapse after getting too careless about their own disease. “It’s sad, but it happens all the time.”

Still, this version of Leben has enough experience to know where that leads, and also too much that he’s not willing to risk losing, he said. Other people may know him as the crazy guy he used to be, but his son has only ever known a sober father. Then there are the friends who’ve supported him through his recovery, even some people who have told him how they got sober themselves with help from his example. As much as he’d like to go out there and win on Friday, he said, what he really wants to do is to show people that it’s never too late to get it together.

“For me, that’s my motivation now,” said Leben. “Because fighting is extreme, and it can be hard to stay sober through fighting. But you can stay sober through anything. It’s possible. That’s the message I want to exude.”

That, and he’d also really like to win this last fight.

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“Real fucking bad,” he said. “And it’s going to be bittersweet when it’s over.”

(Top photo: Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

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