Rich Franklin announces his retirement from MMA

“I didn’t even start for my high school football team”. He picked up 11 stoppage wins in his first 12 fights before making his UFC debut at UFC 42 against Evan Tanner in 2003. Franklin defended the 185-pound title twice before surrendering it to longtime middleweight kingpin Anderson Silva in October 2006.

Franklin hasn’t actually fought since a first round KO loss to Cung Le in November of 2012, but had one fight left in his contract and up until this point he’d refused to rule out the possibility of returning to the Octagon one last time. Franklin’s title reign helped usher in a significant growth period for the sport, and the former teacher was a go-to ambassador when UFC officials needed to make a good impression with sponsors, business partners and regulators. He continues in the sport as a vice-president of One Championship in Asia.

Once he began fighting, however, Franklin quickly found success and didn’t lose a bout until his sixteenth trip to the ring, when he went well above his usual weight to fight Lyoto Machida at 214 pounds in Japan. Franklin mused. “I can close my eyes and picture myself pacing the hallway before I walk out to the arena”. And I wrote in my article that I can tell that I’ve slowed down, and it nearly seems negligible, but it doesn’t take much to actually make the difference between winning and losing in the upper echelon.

In April 2014, Rich signed on as a Vice President in the ONE Championship organization, which is a Singapore-based MMA promotion that was officially launched on 14 July 2011. Would that be accurate in describing Rich Franklin? Yeah, I’ve been an athlete my whole life, but as a young kid, I wasn’t a big kid and strong, and I basically grew vertically a little bit, behind the curve of everybody else. But I didn’t grow horizontally. “You get my approval on it”.

Franklin has still been involved with the sport of MMA since taking the three year hiatus from competing.

“It’s not the glory”, he said. And that’s what you felt like.

“What will I miss the most from this journey?”

Before the executive job, Franklin closed out his MMA/UFC fighting career with a 4-4 mark in his final eight fights, though he faced a murderers’ row of opposition and picked up wins over notables such as Wanderlei Silva and Chuck Liddell.