Frankie Edgar Reflects on Crazy Grey Maynard Fights | Joe Rogan

That's hilarious. So what's happening man? You just got off of the Chan Seong-Jung fight. Yeah. And what's next? What are you up to? I'm going to go down 35. Yeah? You know, uh... How much do you walk around at? I'm probably like 56 right now. Wow. You know, so for 45... Well, for 54. Marlin's got to be bigger than you, right? Marlin is about a little bit bigger than me, yeah. I think so. I think he walks around a little heavier. He's a little bit more of an eater than I am. Dude, that guy... I have a hard time believing he makes 35 sometimes. He looks at him. He's so jacked. He's got such a small waist though. His legs and shoulders are so big, but his waist is kind of small, so maybe that's how he carries it. So have you done a cut like that before? I haven't been... But I mean, my last fight, I think I was getting down to 45. I got down to like 44.5. I mean, it's only eight and a half over where I got to be to make 36. And it was such an easy cut for this last time. So you're in an interesting situation, man. Because you won the title at 55 and you didn't cut any weight at all. And a lot of people were like, well, fuck, man. Frankie, Edgar can do it. Because the thing about you at 55 was you were so durable. Like that was one of the craziest things about some of your fights, like the Grey Maynard fights. Yeah. Fucking A-man. Who ref'd those fights? Eve Levine. Both of them? No, the first one. The second one I think was Josh Rosenthal. Well, shout out to both of those guys. Because a trigger-hungry referee who's got an itchy trigger finger, they would have stopped those fights. Now, I think nowadays someone might stop it. Yeah. Back then, I feel like they let it go a little more. I mean, of course, there's still some time to let it go a little more. It all changes. It depends. You never know. You never know. It all changes. It's such a weird thing, right? It's like the referee is trying to help the fighter. They're trying to make sure that the fighter doesn't take unnecessary damage. But more than once, you see fights stopped where you're like, oh, that guy wasn't done. He was getting through a bad patch. And that's part of what a fight is about. It's like trying to figure out how to survive. For sure. I always want the benefit of the doubt. I don't want to get unnecessary punishment, of course. But I'd rather get the benefit of that. I've never been turned off, even with Ortega and Chan Zong-Jung fight. I got both those fights, even though I got rocked in my other fights, these fights I kind of was more coherent. I'm not complaining about stoppages or anything like that. I could see why they stopped it. But in the great fights, even the Benson-Henderson fight where I got upkicked, I don't remember any of those fights. I don't remember three, four rounds of those fights. Just because it was so wild? Just because it was getting hit? Yeah, because I got hit. And I kept getting hit, maybe. Maybe that's what I didn't remember. The Ortega fight, I got rocked pretty good. And I remember in my head saying, all right, just your time left. Let's get through it. Let's get through it. Obviously, I didn't make it to the end. But I remembered being coherent. Even this last one with the Korean Zombie, I remember the ref saying, you got to do something down there. You got to do something down there. And I was trying to do my best. And my body maybe wasn't reacting the way I needed it to be. But yeah, I've never been turned off. I don't know if that's a good thing or not. But I don't know if it's a good thing either. It's like some people say, if you get turned off, it's better. Because then you don't absorb as much punishment. I heard that argument. But then if you do get turned off, your body gets turned off easier next time. That's pretty true. Yeah. Well, it seems to be true. Guys that get cracked, that continue to get cracked and get rocked a little easier. I'm hoping that's not the case for me. It's more of the actual knockout itself. Yeah. Like a bad knockout. It's crazy that you have had a bunch of fights where you don't remember most of the fight. That's a thing that a lot of fighters don't necessarily talk about. But it's a reality of hard fights. Yeah. My second fight with Gray were Eve Levine was the referee. I remember, I think the fourth round, Mark, my coach Mark was like, telling me, we got one more round. In my head, I'm like, one more round? What happened to three and four? I didn't remember at all. And also, when he dropped me, I rolled my ankle really bad, probably a grade two sprain. And I remember in the fourth round coming too, and my ankle was hurting me. I'm like, what happened? I have no idea what happened to my ankle. And even walking back, I was kind of, I don't know, sometimes you get rocked, you get depressed for some reason. I noticed that even in the gym. When I get rocked, I get a little bit of depression going on for some reason. What does it feel like when you say depression? Like, what? My God, my middle bowl. You're just down on yourself. I was emotional. I think I was crying after the Gray fight. In the locker room, I think they have camera back there, and there's a video of me like- Even the second fight when you stopped him. Not the second fight, but the second. Well, that was the second fight, not the third fight. The third fight you stopped him. That's right. The second fight you won. The fucking fights that you had with Gray were so crazy. He was so big. Yeah. He's a big boy, man. He was so big for 55. And you were a guy who didn't cut any weight at all. Nothing. I literally would eat breakfast on weighing day. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah. Did you ever think back then about dropping him down? Or were you just like, fuck it, I'm the champ. Yeah, well, that's why. I was like, I'm the champ, why should I go down? I mean, I'm winning, I'm beating these guys. Even the Benson-Henders fights, they were super close. I could have went either way. But I just felt, all right, I'll go down now. I lost two in a row here. What more can I gain from here? Let me go down to 45. And that's when I fought Aldo for the 45-pound belt. When you think about it, if you had a chance to do it all over again, like if you had to engineer your career all over again, would you do it exactly the same way? Would you fight at 55? Well, you definitely would against BJ, right? Yeah. I mean, you can't go back and change those things. It all worked out for me. I got the world title. I'm continuing to have a pretty good career. There's always things you wish you could do differently. I can't be that guy that's going to say, I wish I did this, wish I did that. Things went the way they went. Well, they went pretty fucking good.