Former UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans appeared on the Late Show with Jimmy Fallon last night. I ended up missing it live, dealing with that whole Strikeforce cutting their champion thing, but NBC has archived video of the segment. And Evans came off quite well, if I say so myself.
We don’t get a lot of hype talk for the Ortiz fight at UFC 133, but the video ends without a proper send-off, so perhaps the interview went longer than the 4:47 timestamp indicates.
We do get Rashad’s hilarious impersonation of his mother, though, which always puts a smile on my face. Fallon encourages his guest to sing a few bars from Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.”
The most interesting anecdote emerges after Fallon asks about Rashad’s fight with Chuck Liddell. Evans talks about how the pre-fight analysis had him starting to doubt himself until he had a conversation with Randy Couture. Rashad impersonates Couture’s deliberate manner of speaking as the latter advised him to shed his fear and embrace the worst possible outcome.