Joe Rogan has called hundreds of fights in the UFC and admits the toughest moments for him personally are witnessing close friends suffer heartbreaking defeats.
While part of his job as a color commentator involves showing as little bias as possible when addressing the action in the cage, the 58-year-old comedian and podcaster was brought to tears recounting some of the toughest moments he’s watched from cageside. In particular, Rogan struggled watching future UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier suffer through some of the worst losses in his career.
“It’s real hard when you watch your friends get beat up,” Rogan said on his podcast. “Real hard. It was real hard watching Cormier when [Jon] Jones beat him up. That was hard. The Stipe [Miocic] one was hard, especially the one where Stipe KO’d him against the cage. It’s just hard.
“Because you know them. You know them as human beings. You know what that’s going to do to them. It’s f*cking devastating. It’s like a loss. It’s like you lost a family member or you lost a dog. It’s hard. I start crying.”
Rogan and Cormier regularly serve as part of the three-man team alongside Jon Anik that call the vast majority of the UFC’s biggest events each year on pay-per-view. As close as Rogan is to Cormier, he revealed the toughest situation he ever watched happen in real time was the final few fights of Brendan Schaub’s career in the UFC.
A former Ultimate Fighter finalist and heavyweight contender, Schaub spent five years competing in the UFC while going up against some of the toughest competition the promotion could throw at him. After Schaub suffered a brutal knockout to Travis Browne back in 2014, Rogan famously confronted him during a podcast appearance when he told his friend “where you’re at now, I don’t see you beating the elite guys.”
At the time, Schaub was angry over Rogan’s criticism but he appreciated the brutal honesty and the loss to Browne ultimately served as the final fight of his career.
“For me the hardest one was [Brendan] Schaub,” Rogan said. “Schaub didn’t want to quit and I was like, dude. The thing about Brendan that most people don’t know is how many concussions he took outside of the fights. You see the fights but he used to spar with Shane Carwin. Shane Carwin was the interim heavyweight champion, the biggest fists ever registered in the UFC. He had like 5XL fists. He was so big, it was ridiculous. He looked like in The Avengers, he looked like the Hulk. He doesn’t look like a real human. Like all the other people there and then there’s Shane Carwin. He was a freak.
“Brendan Schaub and him used to spar all the time. He would get knocked out all the time. He would get concussions all the time. He got a concussion days before he fought Ben Rothwell. He got a concussion days before he fought [Antonio Rodrigo] Nogueira. He was getting concussions all the time like in the gym.”
The damage done during training sessions bled over into Schaub’s performances in the UFC and Rogan says it became tough to watch Schaub during those final fights in his career.
Schaub went 2-4 in his last six fights, with three of those losses coming via knockout, and he eventually took Rogan’s advice to walk away. Now he’s built his own career outside the cage, which includes a successful podcast as well as doing standup comedy.
“I knew about all that shit, too, and I was seeing the effects and I was like you’ve got to get out now!” Rogan said about Schaub. “If you don’t get out now, there’s no happy ending. There’s no happy ending to the guy that gets knocked out a lot. It’s terrible.”
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