Rich Franklin -- Former Math Teacher, Current Badass

The story of Rich Franklin, a math teacher who is also a professional fighter, sounds like it could be the premise for a lost Van Damme flick. Franklin spent four years teaching math at Ohio's largest high school and kickboxing on the side, before following his dream and becoming a full-time fighter.

This Saturday marks his biggest match since a tough loss to Anderson Silva, so we asked Franklin to take some time out from training to tell us what it was like to be a math teacher by day and a professional fighter on nights and weekends.

Which is job is harder, being a teacher or being a fighter? I don't know, it all depends on how you look at it. Physically my job as a fighter is much tougher than anything I did as a math teacher was, but I'd much rather go into the cage than spending Friday night eating pizza and grading papers.

Did your students know you were a fighter? Actually the word had spread before I even got my job there. I remember I was bringing stuff into my classroom before school had even started and this little girl walked up to me and said, "You're the new teacher who's the kickboxer guy, aren't you?" And I said, 'Yeah, that's me." I'm not really sure how they found out, but from there it was just like wildfire.

So did you ever get a chance to fight a school gang or throw some drug dealers out of the school? No, I even taught in an inner-city school as part of my teaching program. I did my first year of teaching at an inner city school and even when I was at those schools I never had problems or anything like that. Maybe broke up one or two fights in a year when I student teaching. That's never been a problem.

Rich Franklin explains the worst thing a kid did in his class, and how being a teacher helped him as a fighter, after the jump.



What was the worst thing a kid did in class? I had two kids that got into a fight but I didn't have much trouble in the class. I never had many problems and I was never that strong-arm teacher where it's like, "It's my way or the highway." I had a good relationship with my kids, they thought I was cool because I was a fighter for a living, and I was one of those teachers at my high school that was able to take care of problems before they became major situations.

Were there any skills you learned as a teacher that helps you as a fighter? Patience. That'd be a good one, and I'll tell you what, as a teacher you will learn patience. When I have a bad day of training and get frustrated and things aren't going my way, you've just got to be able to walk out of the gym and start fresh again the next day.

Did being a former teacher help you as coach on "The Ultimate Fighter 2"? I'm sure it did. When I was figuring out how I'd go about training my team I came with a real systematic approached with how I was going to do things very similar to as if I was developing a lesson plan for a classroom. So you know, in the way that I prepped? Yeah, it was helpful.

Did you ever train with the school wrestling team? One of the seniors at the high school, he and I wrestled. And we wrestled his style of wrestling, which was free-style wrestling and we wrestled my style of wrestling and I remember when we wrestled my way I ended up triangling him and when we wrestled his way he ended up pinning me. And that was a big deal for the students.

Do any of your former students show up at your matches? I see students from time to time. I have about a half a dozen of them that keep in contact with me. When I was teaching, I was fighting professionally. Not in the UFC, but I was fighting professionally and I would have students that would show up for the fights. The parents didn't care, they were pretty OK with everything and that's kind of rare because when you're in a suburban school district you're dealing with a lot of conservative parents. But I actually had some parents that came to my matches.

Are there opportunities to use your math skills at this point? Pretty much anytime someone has a complex math problem they need a little help with, I'm the guy that gets the phone call.