ICEMAN: My Fighting Life
Chuck Liddell with Chad Millman
(Dutton, 2008, 305 pgs, $25.95)
The first line reads, “What’s it like to walk down the street and have no fear?”
Well, Chuck Liddell is going to tell us.
Liddell may not look it, but he’s college-educated. And pretty well, as it turns out - after scoring a 1280 on his SAT (720 in Math!), he could have gone to Cal-Berkeley, but instead chose to go Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, where we wrestled and obtained an accounting degree. That was a smart exercise on his part.
This book is a smart exercise too. Certainly many of the MMA autobiographies are about image-building. We’re not saying this is a glaring exception to that. But it does bring quite a bit more to the table.
Maybe the quality of the writing doesn’t jump out at you, but it is frank and entertaining, and is packaged better - by far - than any of the other MMA-related bios we’ve seen.
He answers a few questions, if they hadn’t been answered already. No, his dislike of Tito Ortiz isn’t just an act: “Tito Ortiz was worse than a punk.
He was a coward.”
And I like the use of sidebars throughout the book. This is where you can find out Liddell’s favorite drinks, which are, in order, 1. Patron, 2. Wild Turkey, 3. Jameson’s, 4. Cactus Cooler, and 5. Grey Goose. And his favorite toenail polish colors (yes, he does that) are blue, white, pink and black.
As he addresses “Choosing a Tattoo That’s Right for You,” Liddell says “Make sure it means something to you.” Sage advice. And for more great advice, “If you’re buddy is starting to stalk a chick, don’t help him beat up the guys that she’s dating. You’ve got to know where to draw the line.”
Words to live by.
Liddell does something in his book that I haven’t seen before (but then again, I haven’t seen all the MMA bios), which is that he has a list of all his fights, right from the beginning, and summarizes all of them for the reader. And he’ll admit actual defeat from time to time too. In describing his loss to Keith Jardine: “I wanted to take my shot but couldn’t pull the trigger. I can’t complain about the decision, it was close all the way through.”
I liked the anecdote about his initial entry into MMA. After his college wrestling days, Liddell eventually became a kick-boxer, engaging in a dozen or so fights but frankly getting tired of making upwards (or downwards, as it were) of $500 a fight. He didn’t want to apply his college degree in the workplace and become an accountant, and guess what - it wasn’t because of his Mohawk, either (though that might have made me a confident client).
So he was a bar bouncer, a decent enough alternative vocation. One night at work, he met up with Lorenzo Neal, a college wrestler at Fresno State who plays fullback for the San Diego Chargers. Neal advised him that it might be a good idea for him to get into mixed martial arts.
And the rest is history, which has now apparently become Liddell’s major in life.
Making it, that is.
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