Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
—Cecil Beaton
Chael Sonnen is an unusual mixed martial artist and cage fighter who lives in the Pacific Northwest. He represents the other side of dilution: what being seen, combined with hard work and raw talent, can do.
For nearly a decade, Sonnen languished in the middle ranks of mixed martial arts (MMA) while competing in a cluster of small fight organizations. Eventually, MMA’s popularity grew and it became mainstream. In the mid-2000s the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) emerged as the premier MMA promotion company and served as a catalyst for what was becoming one of the fastest-growing sports in the world as MMA gyms popped up by the thousands all over the United States.
A powerful All-American wrestler from the University of Oregon, Sonnen won the Greco-Roman silver medal at the 2000 World University Championships in Tokyo. Despite his college success and physical talent, as an MMA fighter he never seemed to get recognized as an elite world-class talent, perhaps because, as the sport grew, it became hard to stand out. Sonnen pressed forward as a journeyman for nearly a decade.
MMA involves every martial arts discipline—including wrestling, Thai kickboxing, boxing, and jujitsu, a Brazilian variation of Japanese combat techniques—consisting of a highly evolved form of grappling, physical holds, chokes, and submissions that aim to get your opponent to “tap out” in defeat. When the sport reached a new peak of popularity in 2010, Sonnen was thirty-three, an age at which many fighters face the twilight of their careers. But between 2010 and 2012, he reinvented himself, resulting in a resurgence the like of which is rarely, if ever, seen in any professional sport.
In just three years, Sonnen competed in three UFC championship fights in two different weight classes and became one of the premier fighters in the sport, transforming himself into an international superstar. He also became one of the top five income-producing draws for the UFC during televised pay-per-view bouts. Amazingly, at least at the time, he was the only MMA fighter who was not a sitting or former champion to achieve this level of success.
Did you get that? He was always a competitor but never a champion and was one of the top MMA draws of all time. So why were so many people interested in watching him?
The simple answer is, Sonnen started talking. He started using his quick, poetic, and sometimes brutal mind to promote his fights. And when he did, a startling thing happened. He got credit for his athleticism in ways he never had before. His impact was no longer diluted. Despite his failure to achieve a gold UFC championship belt, he became, at age thirty-five, known as the best wrestler in MMA. (He’d later become infamous for other reasons.)
Sonnen’s talent was always there, so how come he never got credit for it? Everything changed for him after he participated in a series of controversial interviews and appearances. He spoke spontaneously and defiantly, breaking from the crowd with his candor about two of the most respected and beloved MMA fighters in Brazil—twin brothers Rogério and Rodrigo Nogueira:
I was in Las Vegas when the Nogueira brothers first touched down in America. There was a bus—this is a true story. There was a bus that pulled up to a red light and the little Nog tried to feed it a carrot while the big Nog was petting it. He thought it was a horse. This really happened. He tried to feed a bus a carrot and now you are telling me this country has computers? I didn’t know that.
He didn’t make any friends in Brazil when the story went viral and became water-cooler fodder for MMA fans worldwide. Sonnen stood out, and people listened. Fans of the fastest-growing sport in the world hung on his every word and, love him or hate him, they wanted to know the next thing that was going to come out of his mouth. His interviews and press conferences became an event. Chael seemed to always have something interesting to deliver.
One of his most memorable quotes took on the taboo subject of religion:
You know people want to talk about God: “Oh, I want to thank God.” Listen, I’m a God-fearing man, go to church every Sunday and have since I was a boy. But if I ever found out that God cared one way or the other about a borderline illegal fist fight on Saturday night [referring to his battles in the UFC Octagon], I would be greatly disappointed and it would make me rethink my entire belief system.
Despite criticism, Sonnen repeated his antics anywhere people or the press were paying attention. He made TV appearances where he carried a fake UFC gold belt and claimed to be the champion of the sport. Yes, his behavior made some hate him, but it also made him a fan favorite because he was a larger-than-life personality, a self-proclaimed “American gangster from West Linn, Oregon.”
Chael rarely, if ever, broke character. He had no problem saying that Anderson Silva, whom many consider to be the greatest MMA fighter of all time, “sucked.” This was at a time when there was an almost spiritual reverence for Silva in the sport, as he never lost and beat his opponents in ways that were often cinematic. Silva beat everyone that was thrown at him for years, and he made it look easy.
Chael’s mischief resulted in a media frenzy where he quickly became one of the most talked-about athletes in the world, especially outside the United States where MMA enjoys tremendous popularity. Chael Sonnen got TV hosting and analyst opportunities outside the cage as a direct result of talking and grabbing attention.
Because Sonnen had the skill and athleticism to back up his taunts, he only narrowly lost the first bout to legendary champion Silva by making a fluke mistake. He eventually had two epic fights with Anderson Silva and, at the time, pulled in record pay-per-view revenue for the UFC. The historic two fights between Anderson and Chael were the subject of a feature-length documentary produced by Anderson Silva himself, where he painted Chael as his nemesis and greatest rival. There was a second short documentary film produced about this rivalry by hip-hop icon and artist Jay Z.
Popular sports host Jim Rome has quipped, “Chael Sonnen is the best trash talker in all of sports,” while UFC president Dana White commented, “I’ve never seen anyone who can talk like this guy can since Muhammad Ali.” Sonnen’s honest, thoughtful, yet outrageous comments eventually resulted in a book deal, Chael Sonnen’s The Voice of Reason: A VIP Pass to Enlightenment.
It is not likely that Chael engaged in any of his antics as cavalierly as he often liked to portray. Chael got a degree in sociology while wrestling at the University of Oregon and, at times, referenced it when interviewers accused him of purely having a big mouth. According to his jujitsu coach for the Anderson fights, Scott McQuary, it should come as no surprise that Chael’s childhood heroes were Muhammad Ali and Mr. T.
“Braggin” is when a person says something and can’t do it. I do what I say.
—Muhammad Ali
YouTube users created dozens of videos dedicated to highlighting Chael’s bold statements and entertaining ways as his celebrity grew. It was easy to see what had happened—he had talked his way into two successive title fights, and in doing so, he had made a lot more money than many others in the sport.
Dan Henderson, one of his closest friends and a former world champion MMA fighter, said in an interview, “I guess I should just quit training to win fights . . . and go to shit talking school.” Fighters and championship contenders Phil Davis and Shane Carwin echoed the sentiment, coming forward to say that they would attend that school.
A few years before Lance Armstrong famously admitted on Oprah Winfrey’s couch that he used performance-enhancing drugs, Sonnen called out the cycling icon for hypocrisy:
Take Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong did a number of things and he gave himself cancer. He cheated, he did drugs, and he gave himself cancer. Well, instead of saying, “Hey listen, I cheated and gave myself cancer—don’t be like me,” he went out and profited something like 15 million from this “Hey, poor me—let’s find a cure for cancer” campaign instead of just coming clean and saying, “Look, here’s what I did. I screwed myself up and hope people learn from my mistakes.”
Sonnen was vilified for attacking an American hero at the time, but he got a lot of attention, particularly from outraged cancer survivors who had been inspired by Armstrong’s Live-strong Foundation. But his comments about Armstrong foreshadowed the fighter’s own mea culpa. In 2014 Sonnen himself tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs three times, earning a two-year ban from fighting and getting fired from a high-profile MMA analyst job with Fox Sports.
So what did he do next? Instead of disappearing from sight, Sonnen went back to the playbook that made him famous to begin with: he started talking, candidly and loudly, and telling the truth about his infractions.
“I wouldn’t shy away from a topic, even if it’s one that brought me shame,” he told reporters, referring to his drug use. And his missteps, just like his trash talk, kept Sonnen in the public eye. Even though he fell from grace, the fall was short-lived. Soon after Fox fired him, the retired fighter joined rival network ESPN as a commentator, a role just as high-profile and lucrative as the one he’d held before his own doping scandal. Incredibly, Chael landed at ESPN a few years before the UFC finally landed its long-coveted ESPN deal, marking their move from Fox Sports. This move launched Chael to the pinnacle of his career as MMA commentator and analyst.
“We know Chael has made some mistakes in the past,” an ESPN exec noted when the hiring was announced. “He’s been honest. He’s been up-front about it. He has paid for the mistakes that he has made, and he’s moving forward . . . The insights that he has on the sport and the ways he sees it, our fans are going to be so much better from watching him on the air.”
The point is not to go out and offend people, even though Sonnen prided himself on being provocative. The point is, when something demands attention, people will study it, stare at it longer, and look at it in more detail. They will also talk about it, and as we know, repetition of your message is critical. And if you have something special to offer, which Chael did despite his flaws, decision makers will take notice and give you more opportunities. Chael Sonnen steered into his problems, admitted his wrongdoing, and is now more popular than ever. Sonnen, having never won an official world title in combat sports, has nonetheless found lasting success in other ways. He lives in Portland, where I live, and I have observed him as a fight analyst, father, husband, son, and giver. Despite his superstardom, he is known for helping others and for his tireless generosity in his mission to give back to the wrestling community that made him. Though he may not have a title belt, one could say Chael is a world champion at life.
Grabbing immediate attention means your audience will take a harder look. If something is authentic, no matter how imperfect, then others will, at the very least, notice it and be able to come to a conclusion about it. An audience will look longer and harder at a message that demands attention. Regardless of whether they’re studying the good or the bad in it, they will notice the details.
A few years later, a young man from a working-class background in Dublin, Ireland, entered the UFC in a hailstorm of publicity. In just a few short years, Conor McGregor went from living on social welfare to being worth well over $100 million. He became the most successful and wealthiest MMA fighter in history, shattering every pay-per-view record the UFC ever had while becoming the promotion company’s first world champion in two weight divisions. Conor has often been compared to Chael as being an even bigger, badder, and better trash-talker. Some say he has even eclipsed the verbal acrobatics of bigger-than-life superstar and humanitarian Ali. Conor may not have taken his career from Chael’s playbook, but he had to notice, as a man struggling to make ends meet back in Dublin, that getting attention means opportunity and money.
In Chael Sonnen’s case, even if people didn’t like him personally, or were offended by his comments, when they scrutinized the man—the source of the message—they discovered that he was a far better athlete than he had previously been given credit for. Sonnen is an excellent example of how you can use iconic thinking to break from the paralysis of the diluted voice, stand out from the crowd, get noticed, and succeed.