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Rich Franklin – Easing into Stardom
By Administrator | November 18, 2005
For good or bad, a life can change in a matter of moments. Yet for some, it takes a little longer. For UFC middleweight champion Rich Franklin, it took a year.
At this time in 2004, Franklin wasn’t preparing for a fight under the bright lights of Las Vegas, like he is now; he was getting ready for a Superbrawl bout with Curtis Stout on December 12th of last year. The Cincinnati native was coming off a hard-fought submission win over Jorge Rivera at UFC 50, and he had a contract in hand to come back to the big show in 2005.
Of course, the last time he had taken a December tune-up he lost, to Ryoto Machida in Japan. So there was a lot on the line against Stout, and at the time, the former math teacher was wondering just what his future in mixed martial arts was going to be.
“Prior to the Stout and Rivera fights last year, I had given some serious consideration to quitting,” admitted Franklin. “I was going to go back to my job and teaching, and I wasn’t making bad money, but I wasn’t making great money, and I thought if I can make X number of dollars a year teaching and make the same amount of dollars fighting, it makes no sense to me if teaching is more of a secure environment. So with my degree and everything, I really thought about going back to teaching and just hanging the hat up here. But how quickly things turned around. I prayed about it, asked for some guidance, and God gave it to me.”
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