Less than a year removed from staring death in the face, Ben Askren made his miraculous return to competition this past weekend.
The legendary wrestler, Olympian and former MMA champion overcame a battle with a severe case of pneumonia last year that changed his life forever. Askren, 42, has often said his heart stopped four different times in the process of what ultimately resulted in a life-saving double-lung transplant. Yet, against the odds, he still managed to recover enough over the past year to a point where he took on former UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad in a wrestling match at RAF 11 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Askren lost his official retirement match by a 6-3 score, but started strong, outscoring his opponent with the opening three points. Now a few days removed from his improbable return, Askren said he feels physically fine on Monday’s edition of “The Ariel Helwani Show.”
“I think it was a great ending,” Askren told Uncrowned. “If you were to write a script for the movie, if I would have been able to hang on to the lead, maybe if I had a few more points and I could hang on as my body was working against me, that probably would have been a better ending, but I did the very best I could.
“I trained so hard to get my body in shape, and just based on the medications I’m taking and where I started from, it was hard to do that. So, I thought it was great.”
Having been a competitor at the highest levels for essentially his entire life, Askren could never have anticipated the differences in physical conditions his current body can handle. It was tough to gauge where his new limit was ahead of the match, said Askren.
“I started out at such a low point, it’s hard to even describe,” he said. “Obviously, I couldn’t stand up on my own power at one point. If you can imagine the low point that is, then when I started working out, the kind of tired I felt was different from anything I’d ever experienced in my life. I don’t know if it’s due to the medications or just where I was; I don’t know what it was, it was just different.
“So many of the workouts leading up to this match were pushing myself to failure, because I had to figure out where that was and I had to push the walls back.”
Concerns from the outside world over Askren’s health were voiced aplenty ahead of RAF 11. Askren admitted that as soon as the match was officially announced, his doctors weren’t keen on the idea of him getting back to competition, even for one last dance.
In his post-match interview on Saturday, Askren noted the rough state of his recently transplanted lungs, but clarified Monday that he misspoke out of exhaustion in the moment. The new lungs held up fine, according to “Funky.” The same couldn’t be said for his legs though, which were the real cause of his competitive downfall against Muhammad.
“I meant to say my lungs didn’t hurt. They are fine. It’s my legs,” Askren said. “My legs give out every time [now]. So, I couldn’t say this before the match because I obviously didn’t want Belal to have the strategy to beat me, but my legs won’t go hard for six minutes. So unless I can keep the pace low, or be really crafty, or I caught him underneath me and forced him to shoot or something, I knew it was going to be a really, really tough night.
“So I was able to kind of really control the hand-fight for the first portion of the match, but after the second period, I went back to my corner, and I knew my legs were just about done. Then when he came out for the third period really hard, I was like, ‘S***. I can barely stand up. What am I going to do now?’ I tried to figure it out.”
“If you want to get the technical thing of what I think happened, I had this thing called cytomegalovirus [in the match’s lead-up],” Askren added, “and for normal people it’s not really a big deal whatsoever, but for immunocompromised lung transplant patients, it can be a really big deal. I got on medication for it and I thought I’d clear it really quickly, but then the medication’s really hard on your body and I ended up being on it for like, I think 11 weeks or something, when I would’ve preferred it be like four. And I really think that set me back quite a bit.
“It’s funny because it’s not like I had a trial run at this. It’s not like I had another time where I got a [double] lung transplant and then was in a coma for 40 days and then started training, and I knew like, ‘OK, by this week, I’m going to be ready.’ I’m flying blind here, and I just decided, ‘Hey, wherever I’m at on July 18, that’s where I’m at. That’s going to be good enough and I’m going to go put it on the line.’”
As big of a moment as the final sendoff was for Askren, he swears he had no nerves. His expectations regarding Muhammad and the match were met, but preparation-wise, no one in any combat sport has ever gone through something like what he did.
“I think I predicted correctly,” Askren said. “If I picked one of the world-class guys [to wrestle against], I was going to get smashed, right? And there’s obviously some people on the roster who would be easy enough for me to beat, someone who’s not very good. But [Muhammad] was just the perfect test.
“I like that he said he wanted to take it easy on me and then he didn’t. When I was up 3-0 in third period, and he just came up really hard, I was like, ‘S***, I’m so tired. I don’t know if I can hang on now that he’s trying to come at me this hard.’ That was unfortunate, but I think that opponent was a great one. He’s a good person, always been really respectful, so I thought it was really good.”
Askren’s RAF debut was supposed to happen prior to his illness last year. In the end, everything worked out in a fashion no one involved could’ve ever foreseen.
Win or lose, Askren knew RAF 11 was going to be it for him. An accomplished MMA fighter at the highest level, Askren hung up his four-ounce gloves years ago. Now, it’s time to hang up the singlet as well, and he has no intentions of going back on his word.
“I don’t need to wrestle,” Askren said. “I’m doing other things I want to do in my life. Being a competitor is not who I am. It’s something I’ve done. It’s something I’ve done well. It’s something I enjoy doing, but we all have to move on in life. So that part of my life is over. That chapter is closed.”
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