By Michael Owens
Chris Leben has had some career. From the highest of highs to some pretty abject lows, it has rarely been boring. He was quite the star in the aftermath of TUF 1 and built a legion of admirers. If he was fighting, you’d damn sure turn on Spike TV to see him throw bungalows on a fight night event. When he was performing at his best, his finest moments equal amongst some of the most memorable in MMA history.
However, ‘The Crippler’ has been inconsistent, had various issues with substances and fallen short against some pretty ordinary fighters almost as often as he produced amazing stoppages, performed fantastic comebacks and revitalised his career on more than one occasion.
Leben will remember for many things: the good, the bad and the ugly, and in this series we’ll look back at all of them.
First up: the ugly.
Leben entered the TUF 1 house as a 24-year-old with a 10-1 record, coming of a victory over Benji Radach in which he broke the poor middleweight’s jaw. He came onto the show to win a UFC contract and became infamous on the very first episode.
He quickly got drunk and morphed into a brash, obnoxious douche to the majority of his housemates. Known then as ‘The Cat Smasher’ his first contribution to life in Las Vegas was to urinate on Jason Thacker’s bed, and steal his pillow. Things actually went downhill from this minging episode. After yet another drinking session, Leben got quite upset when Bobby Southworth called him a “fatherless bastard” on account of his father’s absence during his upbringing. Leben had to be restrained by some of the other fighters before he broke down in tears and decided to sleep under the stars for the night. Southworth and his sidekick, Josh Koscheck, couldn’t help but poke at the rattlesnake and sprayed the unconscious Leben with a hose, leading to a short but destructive rampage through two closed doors. If all that wasn’t bad enough, he was eliminated from the competition (for a second time) because of an enormous cut above his eye courtesy of Kenny Florian.
Post TUF, Leben had a good run, but that was halted in one of the worst and most one-sided beatdowns in MMA history. Leben approached his opponent with ill-advised bravado, expecting to send this man back to Japan. Unfortunately Anderson Silva was standing at the opposite side of the Octagon that night, and he proceeded to crush him after 49. Leben walked forward into a rapid-fire series of straight punches that sent him literally rocking onto his back. Silva, a sensible man, assumed this meant the fight was over for a split second, but when this red-haired warrior got back to his feet he decided to land some rather more definitive strikes. A knee to the dome sent Lebin into the foetal position and ended the fight.
Worse was to follow two years later. On April 30, 2008, Leben was arrested in Oregon for a prior DUI charge. He was kept in jail and temporarily held without bond for allegedly violating his probation. He was sentenced to 35 days in jail. His comeback continued the downward trajectory of his career after he tested positive for Stanozolol after his UFC 89 fight with Michael Bisping in Birmingham. He was suspended for nine months and fined a third of his fight purse. His excuse? He had used the substance several months before the fight, but he had assumed it would have been out of his system by then. Oh Chris.
Leben’s return to England several years later brought similar results. This time Mark Muñoz stopped him at the end of the 2nd round due to a nasty, bloody cut on his left eyebrow that left him unable to see. Later that month Zuffa revealed Leben tested positive for oxycodone and oxymorphone following the loss he was banned for a year. He would return, but he would never win another UFC fight.
Admittedly this is a pretty bleak way to begin a career retrospective of a beloved UFC veteran, but it’s well worth remembering all of these ugly moments as a lesson of how a fighter can waste some real talent through a series of indiscretions. Fortunately, Chris Leben seems to have got his life in order and did enough to ensure he will not be primarily remembered as a walking disaster.
The next part of our look back through the years and take a look at the downright bad moments of Leben’s MMA career, but there will be light at the end of the tunnel.
