Exclusive Brian Stann Interview

UFC middleweight talks new book

Brian Stann is more than just a mixed martial artist, but you probably already know the story. Though he tends to deflect such attention away from himself and towards the soldiers who served under him, Stann is a bonafide American hero for his actions serving under fire as a platoon commander in Afghanistan.

That story (and many others) are detailed for the first time in Stann’s upcoming book, Heart For The Fight, which is available September 15 from Zenith Press. I recently sat down for an interview with Stann to discuss some of the stories from the book, his progression under the tutelage of Greg Jackson and more.

Heavy.com: The first thing I wanted to ask you about is one of the more dramatic things from the book. A fellow female soldier accused you of sexual assault, and you had to go through a months-long ordeal that couldn’t have been easy. How did you deal with the situation and with people who probably believed you were guilty, especially when you knew that you were innocent the entire time?

Stann: Great question. I was wondering when this was going to come up. When you know the truth, you go and you look yourself in the mirror. And that made things easy on me. So I never walked with my head hung low. I have an amazing core of friends from that time in my life that were with me from long before who where there that night. And we all knew the truth and we stood by the truth, and we knew in the end that no matter what, I was right. So that made moving forward much easier.

Heavy.com: Did you have any friends going into that experience that weren’t your friends when it was over?

Stann: None. I had none. It didn’t happen whatsoever. In fact, I made new friends.

Heavy.com: You noted in the book that the whole experience changed the way you dealt with women, that you were much more cautious afterwards and always took care to leave a door open if you were in the room with another woman or to never allow yourself into those situations. Was that a conscious decision that you made after going through that ordeal?

Stann: Oh, absolutely. It was one of those things where you get caught off guard. I think I had — and continue to have — trust issues to this day with people in general. Any time you’re going to be a person of any kind of stature who is going to aim high for things, there are going to be people out there who are going to look to bring you down.

Heavy.com: What led to the decision to weave the stories of your Cantwell fights into the narrative of the book? Was it to show how much you’d improved since the beginning of your career?

Stann: Well, I think it was partly that. It was entertaining to do that. But you also kind of bounce around between my fights and my fight progressions, and I think it’s that the same qualities that helped me in my Marine Corps career also helped me get to where I am in my martial arts career.

I think it was important to intertwine them so that people could see those qualities and those common themes in multiple realms as you go through the book. I didn’t want them to be chunked together in themes in the book where I would focus one part the Marines and then the second part of the book is on fighting.

Heavy.com: You went to the Naval Academy to play football, and the book details how that was a pretty tough experience for you in not being able to play as much as you’d like and in how much difficulty you had in making the team. How much of that experience helped mold you into what you are today?

Stann: I think athletically and professionally, it helped me in both realms. I quickly realized that the real world is very cutthroat. And when you start playing college football, especially Division 1, it’s very cutthroat. For those coaches, it’s their job. They make money to field the best teams and the best programs and to win for years on end. They can lose their job very quickly.

And if you’re not going to bring immediate value to something for them, then you’re going to be utilized, no matter how much someone likes you or how much you deserve it. It’s not always fair. If you’re at the same level or maybe just a bit better than another guy, but he’s younger than you, they’re going to go with him.

It’s a lot like life. I mean, there are a lot of UFC fighters out there that everybody loves who work harder than anybody else, but they’re let go by the organization. It’s no different than any other job. Especially in this economy, where companies are downsizing and people who have been with a company for a long time. The people with the highest salaries are the first ones to be let go.

That experience playing college football taught me a lesson that sticks with me to this day: that I have to immediately and resoundingly show the value that I bring in my professional life. Whether it be with my job with Hire Heroes or my job with the UFC, I need to consistently perform at my highest level every single day. I cannot take either of those things for granted.

Heavy.com: You mentioned Hire Heroes. A lot of fighters claim to be full time fighters, where they simply train but don’t do anything else with their lives. But yet you manage to do this charity work full time while still training to fight on the highest level this sport has to offer. How do you juggle those priorities?

Stann: It’s not easy. In the last year it’s gotten very difficult. But even in the weekends when I’m not working, I have to stay busy. It’s just the person I am. I’m very accustomed to doing something, and if my mind isn’t engaged, then I will look to find something that will engage it.

But there are a lot of hours in the day, and even when I’m in full-blown training camp for a fight where I’m training at least two to four times a day, there is only so long that you can physically train your body before your brain is going to shut down and you’re not going to retain any more of that information. And in between those physical exertion periods, there are a couple of hours where you can be working. You can be answering emails. You can be on conference calls. You can be thinking and developing new procedures for your organization.

And that’s what I do. It’s actually easier when I’m in full training camp because most of the time I’m actually away from my family. So I’m not thinking to myself “well, I need to get out of the office and get done with training because I need to get home to my kids.”

Heavy.com: Speaking of training — how is your relationship with Greg Jackson? The book makes me feel like the first time you stepped into Jackson’s gym in New Mexico, you’d finally found your home. Is that how it feels for you?

Stann: It really is. I am very close with both Greg Jackson and Mike Winklejohn. And they both really understand me and the type of person I am, and I have a pretty good understanding of the type of men that they are.

Greg, being a very avid military historian, I think he understands people with my type of personality. He knows exactly what I respond to. And he uses that in my fights. For my last fight, he basically came up to me in the locker room and gave me a direct order on how I was going to fight. He formulated exactly what he wanted to say to me almost like we were in the military. And he corners me in that way because he knows that’s what I respond to.

Coach Winklejohn does the same thing. He’s already a very no-nonsense kind of guy. He only says what needs to be said. He doesn’t have a lot of time and he’s very busy, so everything he does and says matters a lot. He’s very calculated and a very tough individual, and I really respect that. I respond very well to both of their styles of coaching.

Those are gentlemen who I believe would be mentors of mine in just about any realm and not just fighting.

Heavy.com: Let’s shift for a second to Operation Matador. Normal people would have a tough time relating to stories such as this one, where you go through horrific ordeals and conditions that only a few people ever experience in their lifetime. How did the experience as a whole change you as an individual and how does it inform your life now as a regular citizen?

Stann: I definitely think it changes you to a certain extent. But I believe that we have a choice when we come back from combat. You can either be the same person you were when you left, or you can allow the experience of combat to change you and follow you in a negative manner. I was very conscious of that choice when I came back. I’m a very active thinker. I like to think about things. I know that I made that choice and I wanted to be sure that these experiences didn’t change me in a negative way.

I say the same thing to these companies that I talk with about hiring veterans. There is nothing I’m ever grown to be thrown in this life that will be as difficult or as complicated as what I went through during those times. I don’t fear anything other than something happening to my wife and children, and I don’t think I ever will.

Heavy.com: For me, it’s still a dreadful experience looking at the newspaper to see if any of the friends I made while in the military have died in combat. Do you struggle with the same thing?

Stann: Yes. Every day. At this point, it’s also for every young man or woman who is over there. I shrink every time I see it, but I understand that we all raised our hands. We knew the rules of the game before we got involved and took that oath. The biggest thing I have to deal with is the guilt of not still being over there. I struggle with that a lot of times, knowing that I could have a positive impact over there in Afghanistan or Iraq right now, but I’m not there. Sometimes I feel like I’m selfish because I’m going to be a family man.

Heavy.com: What is the one thing you hope readers take away from your book?

Stann: The biggest thing, I think, is overcoming adversity. That no matter what happens in your life, tomorrow is another day and that a lot of the things we believe are catastrophic at the moment, the things that are imploding our world, that a year or two years down the road you’ll be able to look back on that and to make a decision. Did it change you for the better or did it change you for the worse?

Because no matter what we do, what happened has already happened. Whether we make a mistake or if something happened to us that wasn’t fair, we have to realize that we do have to move forward, that we have to make the right choices to turn any negative into a positive — even if was horrible and the only positive you can get out of it is that it made you a better person in the end, then that is what you need to take away from it.

But there’s nothing that is so catastrophic that we cannot recover from it.