Interviews
MMATorch Exclusive Interview with Frank Trigg (pt. 1 of 2): "Koscheck could be a choice for my first fight back but it could also be somebody else. There are no contracts yet."
Feb 6, 2009 - 9:38:06 PM MMATorch Exclusive Interview with Frank Trigg (pt. 1 of 2): "Koscheck could be a choice for my first fight back but it could also be somebody else. There are no contracts yet."

DISCUSS ALL THIS IN OUR NEW MMATORCH FORUM

...OH, ONE MORE THING - PLEASE BOOKMARK US & VISIT DAILY!

THIS WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 2009

Frank Trigg.

The name alone will cause any MMA fan to declare either their love or hate for him and rarely is anyone on the fence in terms of how they feel.

Trigg holds a career record of 19 wins against 6 losses with 8 of his wins coming by way of KO and 6 by way of submission. Over the course of his career he has beaten the likes of Renato Verissimo, Dennis Hallman, Jason Miller and Edwin Dewees. His losses have come at the hands of such notables as Hayato Sakurai, Matt Hughes (twice), Georges St. Pierre, Carlos Condit and Robbie Lawler. In short, only the very best have beaten Frank Trigg.

Frank has competed in the welterweight division for the majority of his career until recently when he moved up and began campaigning as a middleweight. He is now back to welterweight and back in the UFC.

It has been four years since Trigg has competed inside of the UFC Octagon, with his last UFC bout being a loss to Georges St. Pierre at UFC 54. Since his loss to GSP, Trigg has compiled a 7-2 record outside of the Octagon, and has not only done some time in the broadcasting booth but has also started up and successfully ran his own clothing line called Triggonomics.

Here we are in 2009 and Georges St. Pierre is not only the undisputed UFC Welterweight Champion, but also widely considered the very best pound for pound fighter in the world; and now, Frank Trigg is back and he has his sights set squarely on a rematch and a crack at the Championship belt.

Frank Trigg is back in the UFC and MMATorch's own Jason Bent had the chance to sit down with him on Saturday and here is what the returning veteran had to say.

Jason Bent: First and foremost, how are you doing today and how does it feel to be back in the UFC?

Frank Trigg: It's just another day. You know, nothing's really changed. The earth hasn't opened up and I haven't walked into a mine full of gold. You gotta train and fight like you would anywhere else. So, nothing has really changed until I get the call for my first fight from those guys.

Jason Bent: Recently you made the news because you were contacted by Jose Canseco and asked to train him for his DREAM bout. What was your impression upon first talking with Canseco and were you ever open to the notion of training him?

Frank Trigg: I'm always open to training someone who wants to learn the sport for real. Jose and I had an altercation a long time ago, back at Randy Couture's first poker tournament at the finals table, so it was kind of tongue and cheek what have you but I didn't think he liked me very much. It didn't work out and that's just the way it is. He went out and got destroyed by Hong Man-Choi so it ended up being nothing anyway.

Jason Bent: Did you happen to watch his bout in which he was stomped in a little over a minute by Hong-Man Choi? How do you feel about athletes from other sports who think they can just waltz into a ring or a cage and give it a go?

Frank Trigg: It's fair enough of them to try. That's one of the things about professional athletes. We're all very egotistically driven. If someone tells us we can't do it, we do it. You know, like kids who are told to have a back up plan if you want to be a pro basketball or football player, that you had better have a back up plan because the chances of you making it are slim and none. I mean basically just to make a team as a scout or even the guy at the Triple-A level of baseball has broken most of the odds anyway. You know, how many times has someone told you that you are too small or too slow, or you don't throw just right or you can't play that position and your technique is not right; you have already beaten the odds just to get there.

So, when someone tells the athlete, "hey, you can't do this other sport," like a Michael Jordan who retired from basketball to play baseball. He was basically told don't do it because you aren't that good at it. He wasn't that good at it and he was one of the most athletic guys of his time. So, not being that good when picking up another sport; well, that's just how it works. You know, I have an advantage because I have spent the last twelve years perfecting my technique and you've spent the last twelve days perfecting yours. I mean that's just not going to work.

So, it doesn't bother me so much. I don't particularly care and that just proves my point. A guy like Jose Canseco thinks they can do it and they don't do it. They can't do it.

Jason Bent: Speaking of other lines of work, you recently spent some time in the professional wrestling world and worked a bit for the company TNA. What was that experience like for you and were the wrestlers better athletes than you had even imagined they could be?

Frank Trigg: I kind of thought that they all weren't really that athletic. It definitely opened up my eyes to how pro wrestling really is. It's tough because, pro wrestling is not like an athletic event in the sense where as a fighter I want to stop you from punching me in the head while I'm trying to punch you in the head. You know, while I'm trying to not get strikes called against me and I'm trying to put the ball out of the yard. The pitcher is trying to make sure I ground out or strikes are called against me. It's a whole different game going on.

In pro wrestling, it's really just a live dance. What changes in just seconds of something happening is just, I mean, yeah it's a pre-determined outcome and you know what's going to happen at the end of it but the whole goal of getting there is just like watching this finely tuned dance between two great athletes. You just have to watch what happens and I didn't realize just how intricate it really was when I got in there. Actually, I found out that you might have a full plan put together for a whole match and it has to change in the middle of it if a guy gets hurt in the middle of a match and the match continues but the guy can't do those particular techniques so that has to switch. Or if the crowd isn't feeling what you are doing and you have to make changes so that the crowd gets more into it. You have got to make an adaptation because you thought you only had a six minute match and now because of something going on backstage you now have a twelve minute match it's just how it works.

So, their knowledge base and just how hard they have to work in this huge dance is amazing. Not to mention that this is a live stunt show. A pro wrestling match is like a stunt show. You have a chance that someone is going to hurt in the middle of this and a chance for something to go completely wrong and really do damage to yourself or someone around you. It's pretty dangerous in that aspect as well. Then to watch these guys day in and day out who wrestle six days a week, so they are doing all of this while trying to maintain and go back into this whole dynamic of an extremely dangerous dance all over again the next night. So it's interesting to watch what those guys can put together.

Jason Bent: Brock Lesnar, the UFC Heavyweight Champion, achieved his initial fame by starring in the world of professional wrestling and now Bobby Lashley is looking to follow in the same path; since you have been in both the MMA world and pro wrestling world, was there anyone in the TNA locker room who physically and athletically could have the tools to at least give it a go in MMA?

Frank Trigg: The problem is that you talking about the anomaly of Brock Lesnar. He is really not that technically sound as a professional mixed martial artist. He is hugely athletic, amazingly big and extensively strong. He's three hundred pounds; a natural three hundred pounder. He isn't blown up like some of these other guys like 260 or 270 and they lift weights to put on another forty pounds. Brock is three hundred pounds to begin with. Lesnar had problems in college wrestling in trying to keep his weight down long enough to make weight. He really is a big guy like one of those big, corn-fed Nebraskans. He is that big guy from Minnesota and that's just the way he is. He outweighed Couture by eighty pounds, Herring by forty pounds and he is just so much bigger than these guys plus he is just as athletic as they are and then four times as strong. It makes it very difficult to battle a guy like that.

Bobby Lashley is kind of the same way but he has also put a lot of mass on him through training in order to get as big as he is. He has had to maintain this size for his pro wrestling as well and he is going to want to maintain that size as well in order to be a bigger than average heavyweight.

With that being said, a lot of those other guys in pro wrestling are smaller guys. You have your A. J. Styles, Christian Cage who are small guys. They are six feet tall, 180 or 185 lbs. and they are average sized guys. Of course, A.J. is shorter than that but they are average sized guys. Put those guys up against Georges St. Pierre or Anderson Silva and they're a match.

Lashley and Lesnar are coming into the heavyweight division at a time where the division is pretty torn apart and there really isn't that much depth. You aren't able to look at a guy and say, "oh, he is top twenty or top thirty" but really just that's all you have got. So with the heavyweight division, you can kind of take advantage of it. A guy like Brock took advantage of it because he is athletic and strong and the better guys who are athletic are going to be smaller guys.

Samoa Joe is a good athlete. He maintains and is a solid heavyweight and like I said, Christian Cage could do it. He could pull it off and A.J. Styles could pull it off. Kurt Angle I would say would have been the best bet, but now you are looking at a guy who is 41 or 42 years old and has been sitting on the couch for the last ten years in being in pro wrestling for the past ten years. As opposed to learning how to do a takedown hard or hurt your opponent he has been revamping his competition at how to do moves and techniques that are not going to hurt somebody. Although he is in the right position after ten years that they all look good, but none of them are going to hurt anybody. That is not going to transplant into a real fight because in a real fight you have got to want to hurt them and put a hurting on them to make them stop fighting. To get that tap out or the knockout you have got to put a hurting on them. And Angle hasn't been doing that for the last ten or twelve years so I would to like to say that Kurt could probably be able to do it but now that he is older and his neck is bad. For the rest of these guys to come in, they haven't made that adjustment and they are going to be coming in at the toughest weight classes. Because if you just look at the scope of how fights go, the welterweights at 170 and the middleweights at 185 are pretty much the toughest guys out there and everybody is that size. I mean look how tough the 205 pound division is right now and it's just incredible. So it's really tough and literally anyone can beat any guy. We are in the era of Lyoto Machida right now, and I don't even want to say it's his era because any one of those guys can beat any one of the other guys because they are so competitive and so close to each other. With that being said I don't know.

Looking at the scope of it, I don't even want to guess who could make it because some of these guys might try. You won't know until they step in there and try to make a run at being a mixed martial artist.

Jason Bent: Many fans, and even a fair amount of fighters, have had problems with Brock Lesnar getting such opportunities so early in his career, and it seems that having been a pro wrestler only created a bigger bull's-eye upon him; how do you feel about his meteoric ascension and did you experience some negativity yourself for heading into the world of professional wrestling from fellow fighters or fans?

Frank Trigg: No, not really. It actually increased my fan base. Pro wrestling is the only, I mean, can you give me anything else that's out there where you can have a twelve year old kid arguing intelligently with his 45 year old dad exactly who should win and why and which guy is better than you do in pro wrestling. In pro wrestling, I can argue with my son all day long over who is better like Kevin Nash or Booker T. Like why they are bigger or badder and they go all the way back to and you know, we can back like eight or nine years in their careers and have had this argument over these guys. There is no other sport you can do that in.

Not baseball, basketball or football not lacrosse or hockey or race car driving, I mean none of that stuff can you do that in. I mean this is the only sport you can get a young kid and an adult both grasping what is really going on and wanting to follow it. So, for me it increased my fan base by going over to TNA for that short stint right there.

The negativity towards Brock Lesnar from athletes is because one, they want to do it and cant do it where guys from other sports want to step into the world of mixed martial arts and can't do it. They are jealous because they have been trying to get their title shot and for whatever reason they don't get their title shot and Brock got a title shot and won. They don't get the notoriety he got immediately and most of that he got from pro wrestling anyway and brought over a big transfer or cross of fans watching him. They want to watch him compete, so a lot of the negativity is really jealousy from the fighters. Then you have got the die-hard fans who are going to find anything they can to pick on.

Mixed martial arts fans are very fickle. One minute I'm great and one minute I suck. It literally changes every sixty seconds. I mean I went from being off the wire and off the map and now on Facebook, I think there are three "I Hate Frank Trigg" pages that have started in let's say about 48 hours; they have had such a hatred for me that they have started those "I Hate Frank Trigg" fan pages. This is funny because I haven't done anything differently, I haven't changed anything differently in the last 48 hours other than the announcement that I have went back to the UFC. So, all of a sudden because I'm back with the big show I get this target put on my back and this is the same as Brock having been a pro wrestler and I have the same target now. If people are going to go after me, they are going to go after me.

Brock's success or his lack of success is put firmly on his shoulders. Whether he wants to be successful or not is entirely up to him and if he can do it is entirely up to him. The question becomes when he loses like when he fights Frank Mir again, if he loses by the same submission then people are going to start saying that he was never really that good to start with. If he beats Mir, they will say that he belongs on the top list of pound for pound fighters in the world, so it's literally one loss can make or break your entire career. This sport is very strange in that sense.

Jason Bent: Getting back to your fighting career, it has been rumored that your first fight back will be against Josh Koscheck, can you give us any word on this at all or is another opponent likely?

Frank Trigg: Sure, it could be Josh but it could also be any one of the other thirty-five welterweights that the UFC has. Carlos Condit, Martin Kampmann, Mike Pyle, it could be any one of those guys in my mind except that it won't be, I mean they're not going to give me Georges St. Pierre and they are not going to give me Thiago Alves who are the only two welterweights that they are not going to give me. Of course Josh Koscheck could be a choice for my first fight back but it could also be somebody else. There are no contracts yet. I haven't heard anything yet from the UFC so I don't know what they are telling me as far as a name, date or time frame or anything like that. The only thing that has been expressed to me is to get your ass in four weeks shape and that I have to be ready to compete in four weeks because I could get a call up to a month outside of an event if someone gets hurt and needs a replacement.

I do know that the UFC is booked all the way through 103, to be honest with you I probably won't be back until 104 or 105 at the earliest. Like anything else, you could start a rumor now that my next fight is going to be against Martin Kampmann. Go ahead and run with it and if you can get enough people to believe it to where people will say, "yeah, I can see that happening," it will become the next top story. At this point, I have no idea. I truly don't know who I am going to fight or when I'm coming back. I just know that I have to get myself in shape to where I could compete within four weeks and that's what I'm doing right now.

Jason Bent: Are there any talks surrounding another fight with Matt Hughes and is this something you could be pushing for?

Frank Trigg: I honestly really don't care about that. For me a fight with Hughes does me no good. If I fight a guy like Matt Hughes and I beat him, that would make me 1-2 against him lifetime and he beat me the two most important times in my career in UFC title fights. So, really, no matter what I'd do against him or even if I'd destroy him like if I would walk in there and knock him around the ring making him look silly and knocking him down before submitting him completely unconscious with a triangle choke, it doesn't do me any good. This is because even if he would wake up in the hospital getting his wounds stitched up, he could say that he beat me when it counted the most in a title fight.

And then, if I'd lose to him, it's sort of like so what that I'm 0 and 3 against him and I'm already 0 and 2 so it's not like that's going to help my career and honestly he has fallen off. He is not the fighter he used to be back in the day and it's caught up to him and he just hasn't changed that much. A fight with him is really just uninteresting to me to have to fight this guy again. But, if that's what the fans want to see or if it's what the UFC wants, then of course I'm going to get behind it and fight whoever they tell me to.

Jason Bent: What is your opinion of Matt Hughes’ performance in his victory over Matt Serra at UFC 98 and do you feel that he should retire based on that?

Frank Trigg: I'm not the guy to tell anybody to retire or not. I mean, I have said that a lot of guys should have retired a long time ago and some of them keep fighting and keep winning so who are we to really judge? I mean I thought Anderson Silva should have got out of this sport like four years ago and he was on a horrible run and he looked absolutely pathetic and there was no reason for him to be competing anymore. He wasn't into it, he doesn't like training, he didn't like doing anything and now all of a sudden he is being argued as one of the best pound for pound fighters in the world. So, who the hell am I to say when a guy should or shouldn’t go?

With that being said, if you look at the fight with Chris Lytle that Hughes won, he didn't look very good. He didn't look good against Thiago Alves, he didn't look good at all and really he had a bad knee in that one. Now, he didn't look good against Matt Serra and against a guy Hughes had said might not be a top twenty guy who took him to task and really pushed him and you could make the argument that Serra won that fight, but of course you have the equalizer that Hughes won that fight. So it really depends on what part of your couch that you are sitting on at home or what part of the arena you were in while watching it when the fight went off and you could have an argument for either guy and be legit in your argument.

If Matt stays and he had a hard time beating a guy who he had said is not a top twenty guy; I mean I know that in mixed martial arts that styles can make the fights and that great matches are sometimes won or lost depending on the style of the opponent, but I just really didn't see that fight doing anything to help Matt Hughes' legacy.

He is obviously a Hall of Famer, he is obviously going to be argued as one of the best pound for pound fighters ever in this game and he went on a great winning streak of nine in a row and beat the crap out of myself and tons of other guys. He beat us up and there was nothing we could do about it. With Hughes, you couldn't stop him and you just had to let it happen. He is just one of those guys that when he was in his heyday he was the anomaly that everyone was having problems with. He is not doing anything to help his legacy anymore at this point. He could go on to coach and run the H.I.T. Squad, his gym and keep training other fighters but I don't see any need for him to continue to fight.

Of course, this is from my standpoint and he could go out there and win two or three fights in a row and all of a sudden be right back in the title hunt and then he's the Champ again. It's not that hard at the welterweight division to see him after a couple of good showings to all of a sudden be right back with a title shot.

Jason Bent: Do you see yourself competing beyond four fights or are you strictly taking things on a year by year or rather fight by fight basis?

Frank Trigg: We definitely want to get ourselves back in the title hunt. So, I have got to wait and see what happens in the next couple of fights. I have to win the first two or three fights first and hopefully get myself back into a position to where I can say, "look, it's time for me to contend for the title again." But I have to see what happens after these first couple of fights.

You've got to remember that this sport is so fluid right now that if I lose one of these UFC fights that I'm pretty much out and that'll be pretty much the end of my career. If I lose two fights in a row and the UFC releases me, that'll be pretty much the end of it for me. I will be done as an athlete and move on to something else.

If I can get two wins in my next two fights, that definitely puts me in a position to where I can go "look, one more fight and I want a title shot" or that I want a title shot next depending on who my opponents are. It depends on of the rankings of the guys they give me and I win, well, that will determine just how close I get to the title hunt.

The interview continues with part two on the main page.

NOW FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! Get alerts with direct links to latest features and be the first to know breaking news: CLICK HERE or enter twitter.com/mmatorch in your browser on your phone or PC.