After girlfriend's death, Josh Samman takes guilt, grief into UFC 181

Josh Samman

(This story appears in today’s edition of USA TODAY.)

Josh Samman knew something was wrong when his girlfriend, Hailey Bevis, stopped answering his texts on the night of Aug. 30, 2013. The UFC middleweight was in the couple’s shared hometown of Tallahassee, Fla., waiting for his girlfriend to arrive. Bevis, 22, was on her way there, preparing to merge from I-75 onto I-10.

They were texting each other as she drove, a “bad habit we had,” according to Samman.

“The last text that I got from her was at 8:36 p.m., and there was an officer on the scene of her car wreck at 8:41 p.m.,” Samman, 26, tells USA TODAY Sports and MMAjunkie. “So I’ve always held myself responsible for that.”

Samman’s last fight was in April of that year, when he scored a second-round TKO victory in his UFC debut, following a strong showing on the UFC’s long-running reality TV show, “The Ultimate Fighter.” His career was on the upswing. So was his life, once Bevis – his on and off and on-again girlfriend – moved in with him in Miami.

“People say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I knew,” Samman says. “I knew what I had when I had it. I’d never been more happy in my whole life.”

When Bevis died in a single-car accident, Samman says, “I was just lost.” Fighting in the UFC, once just a distant dream, didn’t seem so important anymore. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, whether I wanted to even be here anymore,” he says.

But his coaches and training partners didn’t give up on him, and neither did the UFC, according to Samman. It continued to fly him to fights and promotional events, and after one autograph signing, he came home with a renewed focus. Maybe, Samman thought, he was ready to fight again. The UFC had an event slated for Orlando in April, and fighting in front of fans from his home state seemed like just the motivation he needed to pull out of his depression.

“I figured that I had been miserable long enough and it was time to take some steps to assert myself and get back to my own life,” he says.

Then, a couple weeks before the fight, he suffered a severe hamstring injury; the muscle essentially ripped itself away from the bone. Just like that, Samman was sidelined again, and this time he was headed for surgery, followed by a “long, painful recovery process.”

Even Samman’s longtime coach, Joe Burtoft, found himself at a loss. After the death of Bevis and Samman’s struggles with injuries, Samman also lost his stepfather, which meant he was left to console his mother as she went through the same cycle of grief and loneliness that he’d been mired in.

“After a while, you just don’t know what to say anymore,” Burtoft says. “It was just, like, when is this kid going to get a break?”

Samman had begun asking himself the same question. But when he saw that the UFC was planning a major event in Las Vegas on Dec. 6, which just happened to be Bevis’ birthday, he knew he had to get on that fight card. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, he thought.

“Hailey always used to say, ‘Everything happens for a reason,'” Samman says.

With that in mind, he began begging and pleading with UFC matchmaker Joe Silva to give him a fight at Saturday’s UFC 181 (10 p.m. ET, pay-per-view). The opponent didn’t matter, only the date, to Samman (10-2 MMA, 1-0 UFC), who fights on the prelims (8 p.m. ET, Fox Sports 1). When the UFC finally settled on “TUF 19? winner Eddie Gordon (7-1 MMA, 1-0 UFC), Samman says, he just shrugged.

His coaches, including Burtoft, have tried to tell him not to put too much pressure on himself to win on Bevis’ birthday.

“What I’ve tried to tell him is, you dedicate the preparation to her and you dedicate the fight to her, but you can’t dedicate the win,” Burtoft says. “Just that you’ve made it that far is enough. We’ll worry about the outcome when it happens.”

But for Samman, there’s no pretending that this is just another fight.

“There’s no way I can describe how important that day is going to be for me,” Samman says. “I can’t express it in words, so I have to go out there and do it through my actions. My coaches and everyone around me can urge me all they want to leave my emotions outside the cage, but there’s no stopping it. No way.”

Instead of trying to suppress it, Samman says, he’s resigned himself to harnessing that energy, hoping to channel it toward something productive. He can’t guarantee a victory, he says, since nobody know what will happen once the cage door shuts on any given night.

“But I think (Gordon) will know when he gets in the cage and he sees me,” Samman says. “He’ll understand that the night is mine and not his.”

For more on UFC 181, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.