“We had a little ER afterparty,” Bonnar adds.
Life had changed forever for the two combatants, though not immediately. When I spoke to Griffin shortly after the bout, his task for the day was removing his stitches from the fight with an X-Acto knife.
“That’s how we took stitches out back then,” he laughs.
Bonnar didn’t flinch when I told him that story.
“Taking stitches out is pretty easy,” he said. “It sucks having to go all the way to a doctor’s appointment and wait in his office for an hour. I personally use nail clippers usually. They work pretty good.”
As for “The American Psycho,” he was getting used to his newfound celebrity, which seemed to hit him everywhere but in his adopted hometown of Chicago.
“They were showing a replay of the fight, so I had a party for it,” he said. “The guy at the door didn’t know who I was and charged me five bucks.”
Eventually, the two got to move to the next tier of celebrity that meant trips to the doctor for medical procedures and no cover charge at club. They also made the media rounds together, developing a close friendship that remains to this day. They would fight once more in 2006, Griffin winning another decision in a fight that was decent but couldn’t hold a candle to their first one. That was okay though, because nothing would ever compare to that.
In their careers away from each other, Griffin won a world light heavyweight title, and Bonnar fought the best of the best, always staying within striking range of the belt even though he never got a shot at it. And not surprisingly, when the UFC announced its Hall of Fame inductees for its 20th Anniversary in 2013, Griffin and Bonnar went in together.
Griffin can admit that April 9, 2005 was “without a doubt the biggest moment of my life.”
As for Bonnar’s thoughts on the fight and that night, “It was kind of a little lesson. If you never quit, you really can’t fail. That was the perfect example of that. Give it everything you’ve got and something good will come out of it.”
