THE CANADIAN PRESS
Chris (The Crippler) Leben used to be the UFC’s class clown, thanks to his drunken, emotional turn on Season 1 of “The Ultimate Fighter.”
But the boozy bad boy, no stranger to being behind bars, is now a clean and sober fighter who steps into the mixed martial arts limelight Oct. 18 when he takes on English star middleweight Michael (The Count) Bisping in the main event of UFC 89 in Birmingham, England.
The dyed hair is long gone. So is the alcohol. At 28, Leben has grown up.
“They say as we get older, we get smarter. I guess I’ve kind of got to agree a little bit,” Leben said in an interview from his adopted home of Hawaii.
“I still like to have fun, I still like to get my heart rate up, do exciting things. After my last little stint in jail, a lot of things that have happened to me in my life, I’ve realized there’s a lot of situations that are good fun, safe fun, beneficial fun — and then there’s other kinds of fun and situations that I now choose to abstain from.”
The two sides of Chris Leben are on display on YouTube.
There’s “Chris Leben Pukes on My Truck” in which he bites into a full plastic soft drink bottle and then pays the consequences.
“That was a while ago,” Leben says with a chuckle.
Then there’s today’s Leben, eloquent in his own way, still feeling the buzz of jumping out of a plane on an afternoon off.
“If I had to rate skydiving on a scale from one to 10, as far as fun things that I’ve ever done, I’d put it at 600,” says an enthusiastic Leben, captured on video after landing successfully. “It’s crazy. It’s such a high, such a rush. You go through such an emotional roller-coaster from being nervous, then the real intensity of being in the plane all the way up to plummeting to the ground scared for your life.
“Then the chute opens, all the endorphins are rushing. You’re floating through the sky. Then you’re on the land with everybody else, everybody’s just on that same rush as you. They all jumped out of a plane, just like you did. I mean, I felt like a drunk kid at a college kegger but I was completely sober.
“I was high on life, that’s the bottom line. High on life.”
When “The Ultimate Fighter” debuted on Spike TV in early 2005, Leben was quickly shown feeling another kind of buzz. After the 16 fighters were introduced to the house that was going to be their home while trying to battle their way to a UFC contract, Leben was the first to the bar.
“Come on, let’s get to know each other,” he said enthusiastically as he cracked open a bottle.
“A few drinks turned into a lot of drinks,” he reminisces on the DVD “The Ultimate Fighter: The Tuffest 25 Moments.”
Canadian Jason Thacker ending up bearing the brunt of that drunkenness. While he showered, Leben — with cameras rolling — urinated on Thacker’s bed.
“I didn’t take a leak on his bed,” Leben later clarified. “I spritzed. There’s a difference.”
A drunken Leben ended up all but slicing off a knuckle in the house after putting his fist through two doors when fellow fighters Josh Koscheck and Bobby Southworth turned a hose on him while he slept outdoors.
Leben has somehow turned that wild man image into a positive, which is good considering he can’t escape it.
“There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t hear a spritz joke,” he said. “So constantly being reminded of that constantly reminds me of who I am and who I was and who I want to be.”
Today the Portland native is an instructor at the Icon Fitness and MMA Centre in Honolulu.
“Believe or not, moving to Hawaii definitely is not a difficult move. For me or for anybody for that matter,” he said dryly. “I had just an awesome opportunity. (Icon’s) T.J. Thompson offered me a job out here, being the head coach at Icon Sport. I came out to check it out. Everything clicked great and just things started falling into place and I tell you what I couldn’t be happier.
“I can’t tell you the future but I can tell you I’m definitely happy right now.”
Leben (18-4) can’t point to an epiphany in his life.
“More than anything, a gradual progress. I think obviously maturing as a person and again as a fighter and being a coach, now I can’t tell the guys I’m training with, do this, don’t do that — when I’m doing something different. To some extent, I’ve got to walk the line.”
His drinking days are over. “It’s amazing how much easier it is to train in the morning,” he says with a chuckle.
And that meant turning himself in to Oregon authorities after his move to Hawaii. “Apparently it’s illegal to move to Hawaii when you’re on probation,” Leben explained.
He spent “a couple of weeks” behind bars earlier this year, as a result of the probation violation for a drunk driving charge.
Asked if he had been in jail before that, Leben laughs. “Yes, I had. Yes.”
Quizzed on what it was like, he is matter of fact.
“Jail’s no fun. … It happens to a lot of people, You go in and you do your time. What else can I say?”
Leben had been slated to meet Bisping at UFC 85 in June in London but had to give way to Canadian Jason (Dooms) Day because the most recent jail time cut into his training camp.
“Hindsight is 20-20, water under the bridge,” Leben said. “I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to take care of it, you know, and now moving on. I’m really ecstatic that I still get the opportunity to bang with Michael Bisping.”
Like his life, Leben’s fight career has been filled with ups and downs.
The former Team Quest fighter was 10-1 when he joined the TUF cast. And he went on to win his first five UFC fights — beating poor Thacker first time out — until Anderson Silva introduced himself to the UFC by rocking and then knocking out the iron-jawed Leben in just 49 seconds in June 2006.
Leben lost two of his next three fights — to Canadians Jason MacDonald and Kalib Starnes — but has since rebounded to win his last two in spectacular fashion.
In September 2007, he was on the verge of being knocked out himself when he felled Terry Martin with a hammer-like blow. And then in March, he stopped Alessio Sakara at UFC 84, picking up a US$50,000 bonus for knockout of the night along the way.
Like the man himself, Leben’s fights are rarely boring.
“I think he’s grown as a fighter and a human being,” said UFC president Dana White. “Obviously when you get older you don’t act like he acted on Season 1 of The Ultimate Fighter.’ He’s a kid who had a troubled past, he’s made a lot of mistakes. But his move to Hawaii and taking the sport seriously now, training seriously, laying off the booze, I think he’s a different guy.
“This is a very, very big test for Michael Bisping. Chris Leben, everybody knows he’s got a chin from hell. And he can knock you out with either hand. Much like (UFC lightweight champion) B.J. Penn, there’s nothing scarier than a guy who’s got a little talent and is now focused and doing the right things.”
For some reason, Leben has had his problems with Canadians. Apart from Silva, the only fighters to beat him have been from north of the border: MacDonald, Starnes and Joe Doerksen. On the other side of the coin, he has defeated Canucks Thacker and Patrick Cote. Leben still thinks he won the Starnes fight, but he’s moved on.
Also left in the past is his once trademark pre-fight dye job.
“The bottom line is I’m tired of it. I started doing it six years ago, maybe longer, so that people would remember me when I fought. And it worked. It worked so well that everybody else started doing it too. And now it’s like everybody’s coming in with bright red hair. What’s the point if I’m not different, not I’m just the same?”
“I think I’m just going to get covered in tattoos,” added Leben, who has a giant Samurai warrior holding a severed head on his back among other ink. “And if they (other fighters) want to get covered in cool tattoos, then you know that’s a lot more pain and a lot more dedication than just dying your hair.”
Leben has always stood out. The reasons today are just a little better.
