Seeking 'second wind' in Bellator, Karo Parisyan doesn't want to be forgotten

Karo Parisyan keeps insisting that he doesn’t live in the past, that whatever happened with him before is over and done with, hardly even worth talking about.

“I don’t think it was really that big of a deal to begin with,” Parisyan told MMAjunkie. “But people seem to want to make it one.”

If you’ve followed Parisyan’s career since his early days in the sport, back when he made his pro debut at 16 and had his first UFC fight at 21, you probably already know what the “it” in the above sentence refers to.

First it was prescription painkillers, and then it was panic attacks. He got a second chance and then a third. After pulling out of a fight with Dustin Hazelett the day before weigh-ins at UFC 106, he was banned for life from the UFC, according to an angry tweet from UFC President Dana White.

At the time, former training partner Neil Melanson explained to FiveOuncesofPain.com that an addiction to prescription opioids was the source of his trouble.

“Karo’s had some problems with an addiction to pain medicine due to an injury he sustained a few years ago,” Melanson said. “Then when he started having these anxiety problems. It didn’t seem like the anxiety pills were helping him. The only thing that was helping him was the pain medication that he had been taking for his injuries. That’s when he just started down that slope.

“It’s just one of those situations where you have two guys that sit down to have a drink, and you have one guy that can go home and he’s fine, and the other guy has to go out and get wasted every single time because he’s an alcoholic,” Melanson added. “I think that maybe with the pills, that Karo is the second guy. Maybe he’s the guy that can’t take them here and there, or can’t use them effectively. It’s really hard on him.”

Even after all that, Parisyan would return to the octagon once more, suffering a TKO loss to Dennis Hallman at UFC 123. That was November 2010, just a few months after his 28th birthday. When he followed that with two consecutive losses in small, regional fight promotions, his MMA career seemed all but finished, and before he was even 30 years old.

“But I’m one of those guys where, when I fall, I always stand back up,” Parisyan said. “It doesn’t matter for me. I don’t know how to give up.”

People think about suicide from that

To hear Parisyan tell it now, his biggest problem with people’s perception of the struggles he went through in the UFC is that they simply don’t understand.

“When I tore my hamstring, I was prescribed painkillers, and I would take them for the pain, but I started getting this chemical imbalance in my brain,” Parisyan said. “It started hurting me in that department, and I didn’t realize it. I started getting full-on panic attacks. And I would still walk out and fight. People who know what a real panic attack is, they understand how hard that is.”

Everyone else, however, they might hear words like “anxiety” and “addiction” and come away thinking he’s mentally weak, which couldn’t be further from the truth, Parisyan insisted. In fact, some nights it was the only thing he had going for him.

“Seventy percent of my fights, I wasn’t in good enough shape,” Parisyan said. “I won based on ability and mental strength. I’ve never feared anybody in my life. No man ever scares me. When the physical part of a panic attack hits you, you can’t breathe. I could take that. My heart beating fast, blood pressure through the roof, I can take that too. It’s my mind running a hundred miles an hour that I can’t take. I don’t know what to do. I can’t settle down. People think about suicide from that. It’s horrible. And I had to walk out and fight.”

These days, Parisyan said, the panic attacks and the painkillers are a thing of the past. He insists he’s off the latter and hasn’t had an incident with the former for more than a year.

But lately he’s noticed a change. He keeps finding himself talking to people who say they’ve been fans of the sport for years, yet all they talk about are fighters Parisyan has never heard of, fighters who were just kids back when he was starting out in the UFC. He hears people talking about UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey as the first fighter to prove the effectiveness of judo in MMA, and he wonders whether he’s in danger of being forgotten.

“Ronda’s like a little sister to me, and I give her all the props,” Parisyan said. “She’s a great fighter, great person, great judoka. But I don’t want people to forget who brought judo to the table in mixed martial arts. No one can deny that I was the one who put judo on the map in this sport. There were a hundred guys carrying the flag for wrestling, a hundred guys for kickboxing and jiu-jitsu, but there was only one guy for judo. I don’t care what anyone says about that. They can say I’m cocky and arrogant, but it’s the truth. There was only one guy carrying the flag for judo, and that was me.”

That might be part of what’s driving him these days. Another part, he said, is that he thinks he still has more left in him than people realize. He’s only 31, after all.

“My second wind opened up in this sport,” Parisyan said. “I don’t care where I do it.”

‘We might scrap. LOL.’

The organization you can find him doing it in now is Bellator MMA, which brought him on board after Parisyan racked up consecutive wins in the Gladiator Challenge promotion. Although he suffered a knockout loss to Rick Hawn in his first Bellator outing, he rebounded with a knockout win of his own against Ron Keslar in April. After that fight, he said, his phone flooded with text messages congratulating him on the victory.

“One of them was Phil Baroni saying, ‘Congratulations Karo, you looked great. We might scrap. LOL.’ I told him thanks and didn’t think much of it,” Parisyan said.

When Bellator approached him shortly after that and pitched a bout with Baroni at Bellator 122 in Temecula, Calif., this Friday night, then it clicked. Since Baroni was a former training partner and longtime friend, Parisyan said, his initial response was to talk it over with him first.

“But since he said we might scrap, I figured that meant he’d already accepted the fight,” Parisyan said. “If he wants it, no problem. He’s an old training partner of mine and a buddy, but I’ve got to make the bread, and so does he.”

And sure, that’s part of why he’s still at it, Parisyan will admit. A fight against an old friend, and one who finds himself at a similar crossroads, although a little later in life, has the air of both opportunity and nostalgia. It’s two guys trying to breathe some life back into careers. It’s also two guys who know each other well enough to know exactly what to expect – or at least they think they do.

“But I don’t care if he knows what I’m going to do,” Parisyan said. “I have more guns than he does. I want to remind people of that. I want to remind people who Karo Parisyan is.”

For more on Bellator 122, check out the MMA Rumors section of the site.