UFC icon Joe Rogan once had an extremely promising combat sports career, but after a harrowing experience, he put the gloves down and replaced them with the microphone and headphones.
Joe Rogan‘s combat sports career began in Karate and Taekwondo when he was just 14 years old, and he was once considered to have a bright future in the sport.
Since then, Rogan has become one of the most recognisable faces and voices in MMA having turned his attention to commentary, where he has been the UFC colour commentator almost since the beginning of the company.
Joe Rogan explains why he quit his promising Taekwondo career after scoring a harrowing KO
When the 57-year-old was at the peak of his powers, he would regularly compete in Taekwondo competition, and at the age of 19, Rogan won the US Open Championship.
However, at the same age, the UFC icon suffered an experience that made him decide he didn’t want to continue in the sport, and a moment that he has stated he will never recover from.
“I was very enthusiastic about fighting until I was 19, it was a time I never recovered from,” Rogan began to explain in an episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
“When I was 19, I fought in this tournament in Anaheim California, it was the National (Championships), I was the Massachusetts state champion, and I fought this kid who I think was from Illinois, he was Illinois state champion.
“I hit him in the head with a wheel-kick, and what a wheel-kick is, is like your body spinning so I’m standing with my left foot forward, and I’m spinning my right heel around in a circle and it has insane power, I mean insane power,” Rogan continued to explain.
“It’s my legs, it’s my upper body, there’s whip to it, it’s got all this torque, and I caught this guy perfectly. He came at me with what’s called a stepping roundhouse kick, so he had his front leg forward and he stepped forward with his left leg as he was going to throw a kick, and I spun with my right leg at the same time.
“He went out, face plant, snoring, never woke up. Never woke up. He was unconscious for half an hour, they put him on a stretcher, I was watching. He never got out of that stretcher, they took him to the hospital, I have no idea what happened to him and it freaked me out,” Rogan emotionally admitted.
With it being a championship format tournament, Rogan went on to compete again on that same day but went on to lose.
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Joe Rogan details the conversation he had with his coach after the harrowing KO
After coming up short in the tournament, Rogan knew his mindset towards the sport had changed, and that he no longer wanted to compete on the mats.
He returned to his home city of Boston and talked to his head coach at the time about the feelings he felt after scoring such a harrowing knockout.
“When I went back to Boston, my main instructor, he wasn’t there in California when I was fighting… And he said to me, ‘I heard you had a great knockout?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I thought he was dead, he never got up’. He goes, ‘Sometimes they die’, I was 19 and fighting for zero money.
“My heel was sore. I was limping the next day because my heel was sore from his face. And then I was thinking, I’m not immune to that, someone could 100% do that to me, we’re whipping bones at each other.
“It changed my feeling about it, I never had the same enthusiasm after that, that was the beginning of the end for me,” Rogan admitted.
Fortunately for the 57-year-old, his passion for combat sports led him down a new path and he became the UFC commentator in the early 2000’s.
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