It’s been a rocky road for UFC Hall of Fame legend Don Frye.
The MMA legend that helped pave the way in the early days of mixed martial arts has suffered in recent years, going through a divorce and having several surgeries done which caused a brain hemorrhage which forced him to be put into a medically induced coma.
Over the last couple of years, Frye was suffering from terrible pains in his body, only to find out that the titanium rods he had in his back from a previous surgery had snapped and were scraping away at his insides.
“I walked around for a year and a half, two years, with two broken titanium rods in my back,” Frye said on UFC Unfiltered (transcribed by Oscar Wills of The Mac Life). “I knew I was hurting, I hurt terribly and I [was living] so miserably and was in so much pain.”
“They were broke in half, they were stabbing me in the back. One of the surgeries was three hours long for them just to clean up the scar tissue on the insides from the rods stabbing me in the back and scraping and all that.
“The first surgery was to replace them, and then I was out for three days. Then, I had a brain hemorrhage [so they] put in me into a coma. Then I was in ICU in a coma in ICU for three weeks, while they fucked with that, and I got pneumonia, and I got a spinal infection. Would have killed a normal man, but just a bad weekend for ‘The Donger.’”
With all the health complications compounded by the recent divorce, Frye said he had enough. Things got so bad for the UFC Hall of Fame legend that he attempted suicide by putting himself into situations where he thought the police would end his life.
“It changed my whole outlook,” he said. “I’m ready to go, I was ready to go before [now]. The divorce fucked me up so much, I lost everything, I tried getting the cops to shoot me two or three times. God bless them — good ole’ boys — they were fans, they knew who I was. They didn’t pull the trigger when they could have.”
With all of the recent mishaps that Frye has battled through in the recent years, he now is living out of his truck.
“I’m homeless right now,” Frye said. “So I don’t have a girlfriend, don’t have a job, don’t have a family and I got half my healthy back. So I’m halfway to one. … [I’m living] in my truck — well, as far as the ex-wife knows. Other than that, she’ll be asking for money, you know.”
With two more months of rest needed for recuperation, Frye says he has found happiness after rambling through the rocky road along with giving up drinking and is now looking forward to living and loving life.
“Nothing ruins my day anymore,” Frye said. “Life is short, life is a gift, and it’s over in a blink of an eye so appreciate it.”
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 4/7/2017.