On Chris Leben, and the difference between reasons and excuses

Here’s a question for the armchair psychologists out there: What’s the difference between a reason and an excuse?

Think about it as it relates to fighters, none of whom want to be caught making excuses after a loss. Excuses are what other fighters whine about when they lose. Their injuries. Their shortened training camps. Their bad weight cuts.

But you? You’re not making excuses. You wouldn’t do that. Still, there had to be some reason you lost, right? And it can’t just be that the other guy was way better than you, because if that’s the case then what’s to stop you from losing the next one and the one after that?

In order to keep your mind together from one fight to the next, it helps to zero in on a cause for each loss, even if it’s wrong. The thing that separates reasons from excuses is who the blame falls on once you find that cause. If you blame something out of your control, that may be an excuse. If you find fault with something you did (or didn’t do), that’s more likely to be a reason. It’s also more likely to help you fix the problem, or at least feel like you fixed it. But how do you know you’re right?

That’s one of the questions facing Chris Leben at UFC 162 on Saturday. In a little over eight years with the UFC, he’s been up and down and everywhere in between. He’s battled substance abuse outside the cage, and middleweights of all different calibers inside it. He’s also lost three of his past four, and has seen his life turn upside down in that span.

Now Leben is out of rehab, living clean, and training at San Diego’s Alliance MMA gym after relocating to California from Hawaii. At this point in his career, he recently told MMAjunkie.com (mmajunkie.com), “A gym change is actually kind of a big deal.”

But how is he supposed to know if all these changes are really for the better? And will a win or a loss in one MMA fight in Las Vegas on a Saturday night in July really provide him with the answer?

“I’m doing everything right, and it’s supposed to pay off, right?” Leben said. “That’s what I keep telling myself: ‘Chris, you’re walking the line.’ Everything’s going to pay off, and hopefully I can be a good example to some of these guys out there to clean up your act and look what you can do. But obviously, it’s not my first rodeo. I know a fight is a fight. You prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

For instance, say Leben loses even after doing everything he told himself he had to do. He stays clean, eats healthy, trains his tail off, and still loses a unanimous decision to Andrew Craig. That would be his third straight loss in the UFC, but would it necessarily mean that he hadn’t addressed the right problems, or that he hadn’t addressed them correctly?

I doubt it. It seems entirely possible to do everything right and still lose, which has got to be tough for fighters to swallow. They want to believe that doing good things leads to good outcomes, but I doubt it’s that simple, especially in a sport like this. Maybe the other guy is better than you. Maybe he’s just better that night. Maybe he lands one punch that you didn’t see coming and the next thing you know your coach is standing over you, trying to explain what happened. In fighting there’s so much that’s out of your control. So what do you do about it? How do you make sense of it?

One solution is to focus on what you can control, and on the process rather than the outcome. That’s something Leben seems to be doing, at least in his preparation for this fight and in his ongoing struggle to stay clean.

“It is something I have to address and am consciously always working on and finding different avenues for a lot of things, including working on stress and for recreation,” he said. “When I get in the gym, the only thing I can control is how much I’m concentrating and how hard I’m pushing. I come home, and it’s about centering myself and keeping calm and mellow and not wanting these other avenues to escape.”

But then, there’s still the fight itself to consider. In his loss to Derek Brunson in December, Leben said, there were a lot of contributing factors that led to a poor performance.

“I hadn’t fought in quite a while, and nerves got to me a little bit,” Leben said. “I was a little worried about my performance. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.”

That’s understandable, especially in a sport like MMA and in a company like the UFC. Neither are known for their forgiving nature. It’s not like you’re going to lose a fight, explain that you’re not too bummed about it because at least you did all the right things in training and tried your best in the fight, and then you’re going to wake up to a sea of compassionate fans and merciful promoters. This is still a business that’s about performance and results, and Leben’s been at it long enough to know that.

Then again, if you do the right things hoping for the best, what’s the worst that happens? What, you live healthier, eat better, and then still lose? If you hadn’t done those things, you probably would have lost anyway. And isn’t it a better process – even if it doesn’t lead to the result you want – still its own reward in some way?

According to Leben, “It’s like a domino effect. Getting straight, changing gyms and now I’m at this gym where people push me so hard, and when I come home I don’t want to eat crappy food because I know I’ve got to train the next day. So I only want to put into my body what’s going to be fuel. Feed the machine, you know? That’s really what I’ve been doing.”

Whether it leads to a win or not, it at least seems like he’s coming up with some of the right answers to the essential questions.

For the latest on UFC 162, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.

John Morgan contributed to this story