How fighter/sculptor Luke Rockhold won a high school art show with a bong

UFC middleweight Luke Rockhold may make his living in MMA, but he’s a Renaissance man of sorts.

“I was thinking about majoring in art, but I just found that it’s very hard to sell yourself in that world,” he recently told MMAjunkie Radio.

Rockhold (12-2 MMA, 2-1 UFC) now sells his services as a fighter. But before he picked up four-ounce gloves, he was an avid sculptor.

“I like to do it when I have time, but I’m so busy,” said Rockhold, who’s awaiting his next booking after suffering a broken toe in his most recent fight. “It takes a long time, and I’m very meticulous, and everything has got to be perfect.”

Although the 29-year-old fighter shied away from professionally pursuing art, he once got pretty close to perfection with a creation he made in a ceramics class. It wasn’t your average art-show piece.

“I’m not going to lie – let’s just put it out there – I made a bong,” Rockhold said. “I made a bong, and my ceramics teacher would always break all these bongs. Anybody who would try to fire a bong, when it got to the firing shelf, he would see it, and he would break it. He would break all these guys’ bongs.

“I sat there and made the most intricate (bong), like disguised it to the max, and you could not even understand what was going on. At the end, he saw it on the shelf, and then he actually took it and held it front of every one of his classes and said, ‘If you put this much time and effort and you are this good, I will fire it for you.’

“And then it went into the high school county art show, and I won the high school county art show.”

Given the concept behind the smoking apparatus, it’s not surprising Rockhold got a pass.

“It’s a head, this crazy alien head, and then another head is morphing out, and this guy’s climbing out of it, and then there’s another guy getting older, so it’s kind of morphing, the whole thing,” he explained. “The head is coming out the top, and there’s this old guy at the top, and he’s wrinkled and his mouth is open and the eyeball comes out the bottom. It’s a pretty cool piece.”

Of course, not all of Rockhold’s work blended art with pot paraphernalia. He sculpted several pieces that he keeps to this day. The fighter crafted a piece for his dad that depicts a man with no arms and a hand breaking out of his heart that’s choking him.

“I have some other cool stuff,” he said.

With medicinal pot legal in Rockhold’s home state of California, though, it sounds like he’s got a reliable side job once his fighting career ends.

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