Brenneman Stayed on Weight, but in Dark About Marquardt

Charlie Brenneman (file photo) was in the dark leading up to UFC Live 4. | (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

His scheduled opponent for UFC Live 4, T.J. Grant, had withdrawn just days before the fight due to an illness, but the UFC wanted Brenneman to stay on weight.

“I just thought that was part of the business,” Brenneman explained recently on the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “I had to make weight to get the paycheck.”

The paycheck was expected to be his “show” money, or the guaranteed compensation a UFC fighter gets regardless of winning or losing. It was nice to be getting something, but at that point Brenneman was frustrated. Not only was he not eligible for a win bonus, with the fight falling through he’d also lost most of his sponsorship money.

“This is horrible. I don’t even know where to begin, what to think,” Brenneman told his fiancée. “She was saying to me, ‘Don’t even try anything. Don’t try to be OK with it. Don’t try to be mad about it. Just kind of be. You can’t control it, so there’s no sense spending any time on it.’ That’s what I did.”

Even before the UFC asked him to stay on weight, Brenneman had planned on going through the rest of fight week as if he were going to compete.

“I didn’t have a prayer that [the main event] would fall through and I would get to fight,” he said. “I just figured I’ll do this anyway because you never know.”

On Friday, less than 48 hours before the show, Brenneman finally learned that he could be replacing Nate Marquardt, who was scheduled to fight Rick Story in the main event. Brenneman didn’t know why. He only knew there was a possible issue with Marquardt, and he still doubted he would get the call.

On Saturday, he got it. Marquardt was out, and he was fighting Story on Sunday. There wasn’t much time to build a game plan.

“I’ve been developing so much, but before really I even had a chance to give my input, my brother Ben and [manager Mike Constantino] had talked and they kind of just approached me and said, ‘Hey, this is what we want you to do and this is what you need to do to win the fight,’” Brenneman said. “And that was not only to just wrestle but to keep him off balance. If you watch [Story] in my fight versus when he fought some of the other guys, it was really hard for him to get off. He didn’t quite know where I was coming from, and that was the name of the game: to push the action, push the pace and put him on his back.”

It worked: Brenneman stunned the No. 6-ranked Story and won a unanimous decision.

“I train my butt off every day to do this and to be ready and should a gift like this happen, to be able to seize it,” Brenneman said. “But it also goes to show you that you can never be content about anything because there are guys that you don’t even know their names who can step up on a day’s notice and knock you off your pedestal.”

Listen to the full interview (beginning at 1:00:19).