Jan-27-2010

Trigg Frank about the Future

Affliction Randy Couture UFC 109 Walkout T-shirt Related Products UFC 11 x 17 Sign - Chuck Liddell UFC 109: Couture v. Coleman DVD UFC 109 Autographed Poster Forrest Griffin Mouse Pad Related News Charles Oliveira – Just One Man to Beat Munoz’ Winning Mindset Key to His Success Uncovering the mysteries of Igor Pokrajac The Doomsday Doctrine – It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over Steve Steinbeiss - Ready for Redemption Headlines Charles Oliveira – Just One Man to Beat Munoz’ Winning Mindset Key to His Success Fighters confirmed for UFC Fan Expo in Boston Uncovering the mysteries of Igor Pokrajac Jones primed for career-changing fight - Houston Chron

By Mike Russell

Despite all of the pre-fight posturing and trash talk he has engaged in over his nearly 13-year mixed martial arts career, Frank Trigg is surprisingly honest about his place in the grand scheme of MMA.

At 37 years old and heading into his second bout of four on his current contract against Matt Serra at UFC 109 on February 6, Trigg is cognizant that the fight represents an invariable crossroads in his career. Either it will bring him to the end of the road that was his MMA career or it will lead him to start the climb back up the mountain of the UFC’s stacked welterweight class, where he hopes to reach the pinnacle before he runs out of road.

Regardless of the path he ends up on, he says he’s going to enjoy the ride and hopefully land on the giving end of the UFC’s highlight reels this time around.

“All you ever see on SPIKE TV is me getting choked out by Matt Hughes and GSP – that’s all they ever play. To a new fan who only ever sees those clips from four or five years ago of me being beaten that way and because a lot of guys I’ve fought are no longer fighting, they don’t know much about them, so they have no measuring stick of my skill level,” explains Trigg. “I’d love to see myself finishing an opponent end up on one of those highlights and hopefully it will happen in this fight.”

Trigg, whose penchant for losing by rear-naked choke prompted Hughes, who finished him with the basic jiu-jitsu technique twice in as many fights, to refer to the submission from then on as the rear-naked Trigg, points to another issue that he says led to his susceptibility to often being finished in the same way.

“The problem wasn’t the choke, it was the fact that I was getting mounted and I didn’t have any proper mount defense – THAT was the real problem,” he says. “The rear-naked choke was just the resulting finish to me not being able to effectively defend that position.”

Confident that the countless hours spent on his back in the gym in the full-mount of his training partners to shore up the weakness to ensure he wouldn’t give up his back when in trouble, Trigg still says he felt he needed to enlist the help of an expert to help him prepare for a jiu-jitsu black belt with the credentials of Serra.

Enter Marc Laimon, who coincidentally was involved in a much talked about and much heated discussion with Serra during tapings of The Ultimate Fighter Season 4, regarding the effectiveness (or lack thereof according to Laimon) of Gracie jiu-jitsu – which happens to be the lineage of Serra’s BJJ rank through longtime trainer Renzo Gracie.

Though he maintains he had no knowledge of the beef between the two when he approached the Cobra Kai trainer to help him prepare for the fight, Trigg says he doesn’t think seeing Laimon in his corner will have any effect on a fellow veteran like Serra.

“I didn’t even know there was any beef between Mark and Matt when I hired Mark to train me. I didn’t watch that season of The Ultimate Fighter so I really didn’t know about it. Of all the guys in Vegas, Laimon knows Serra the best,” says Trigg. “Matt competed in jiu-jitsu and no-gi grappling and Laimon has kind of followed him his whole career, so it just made sense. Whenever I’m training for a fight I want work with guys who know a lot about the particular individual I’m fighting.”

Having trained at Xtreme Couture for the better part of the past two years, many wondered if the news that he was training with Laimon meant that he had left the Randy Couture-helmed camp. Not so, assures Trigg, who, on top of regular sessions with Couture and company also added University of Nevada, Las Vegas boxing coach Chris Ben to his training staff for the Serra fight.

“I’m very close to Randy and we talked and I asked him what he thought about me training with Marc and Chris for the fight. He told me that at the end of the day, I have to win no matter what everyone else has going on. If we don’t win, everything we do is for nothing – it’s stupid. You do what you have to do to improve your chances of winning,” Trigg recalls. “Randy understands that. At my age, I’m past the point of worrying whether or not I’m going to hurt people’s feelings or upset my friends by training with other guys. I don’t do this to make my friends happy; I do this for me and I do this for my family to support them and that’s what I’m doing.”

Besides keeping his training fresh and not becoming too familiar with his everyday training partners, Trigg says the biggest benefit of training at a new gym, like in a real fight, is overcoming adversity and the fear of the unknown.

“Changing camps for me is about putting myself into absolutely terrifying and unfamiliar situations. Walking into UNLV boxing to spar with a guy who has 35 pro rounds and 500 amateur matches is intimidating when I’m about to step into the ring with him for 15 minutes. I’m thinking to myself, ‘Holy crap! Please don’t let him break all of my teeth.’ Putting myself into situations like that make me a better fighter,” says Trigg. “I do much better when I’m not the king of the room or the guy whose name is on the door. When you’re just one of the regular cats in the room and guys like Gray Maynard and Tyson and Forrest Griffin are kicking and punching you like they would anyone else, you learn really quickly who you are and what kind of athlete you are. It makes you a better fighter as well as a better person.”

Admitting without question that he is in a must-win situation and is likely fighting for his job after dropping his last fight in his UFC return via first-round TKO to Josh Koscheck, Trigg expects Serra to be equally as hungry for the win. Another loss on the 35-year-old Long Islander’s record would make three in a row for him since losing his title to Georges St-Pierre at UFC 83 nearly two years ago – a fact Trigg says will likely be weighing heavily on Serra's mind heading into the fight.

“If I lose two in a row, no matter if it’s against GSP and Koscheck or Koscheck and Serra, at 37 years old I can’t see the UFC keeping me around. If I’m not in the title hunt at my age, there are a lot of guys who are a lot younger than me that they can bring in who can do the exact same thing that I can and can do a lot more. If Matt loses, it will be his third loss in a row so he’s in the same boat as I am,” Trigg says. “He lost to GSP, Matt Hughes and now he loses to Frank Trigg; that doesn’t say a lot about your game plan and where you are in your career when you go from losing to the best [welterweight] guy on the planet, the guy who was formerly the best on the planet and now Frank Trigg. It might be time to re-evaluate things at that point.”

If things don’t go as planned and his last run at UFC gold is derailed somewhere along the way, the Rochester, NY native - who has worn many hats over the years in several roles, including time spent as a commentator, radio host, business owner, pro-wrestler and actor - says he has many options when his fighting days are up.

“I’d love to help promote the sport after I retire. I think I’m a little too hard-headed to be a commissioner, but I’d definitely be up for helping build and promote the sport. I just don’t have the ability to be as politically correct as I would like to be. I wanted to run for politics after college, but it just never happened. I would love to get into the political arena some day if I could.
Every guy who has worked in television wants to be Ryan Seacrest – that’s the goal when you wake up in the morning – you hope to luck out and land a role on a hit show like American Idol and then you’re smashing things and you’re everywhere. That’s kind of where I want to get to – I want to be THAT guy after my athletic career is done. I want to be a good host and I would love to be able to commentate again.”

Not wanting to risk becoming one of “those fighters” who don’t know that their careers have passed them by and continue to fight past their prime, Trigg says he would prefer to walk away from the sport with grace when his time is up. That being said, he feels that some seasoned veterans like himself still have a lot to offer to fans and often surprise even themselves with their longevity in the sport.

“I always said I would know when it was time to hang up the gloves and I still think I will, but who am I to tell someone when to retire. I thought Mark Coleman was holding on too long. I told him years ago that he should retire, that he didn’t belong in the sport any more and that he looked stupid. Right before he fought [Mauricio] Shogun [Rua] I said to him ‘I don’t understand why you’re fighting any more. You’re not only embarrassing yourself, you’re now embarrassing your daughters’. Then he came out and beat Stephan Bonnar and I apologized to him,” Trigg recalls earnestly. “Sure, he wasn’t the Mark Coleman we knew from the PRIDE days when he was winning the [Open Weight] Grand Prix, but he reinvented himself and became a viable threat at 205. I think a lot of us elder statesman have a lot left to show. In a lot of sports, the older guys were always the best. In wrestling, a lot of guys in their 30’s were better than guys in their 20’s. I think in MMA, a lot of wrestlers – like your Coutures, your Colemans, your Koschecks and your Triggs – we’ll be hanging out a lot longer than people think because we evolve and reinvent ourselves to keep up to the changing landscape of the game; we’re survivors.”