Joe Rogan began his martial arts journey with karate and taekwondo at just 14 years old, and he was once thought to have a bright future in combat sports. But instead of continuing in the fighting world, he shifted his focus to commentary and became one of the most well-known voices in MMA, serving as the UFC’s color commentator for many years.
Joe Rogan Explains Why He Walked Away from Taekwondo After a Scary KO
When Joe Rogan was 19, he was really good at Taekwondo and won the US Open Championship. But after a tough experience in the ring, he decided he didn’t want to continue with Taekwondo. It was a moment that left such a strong impact on him, he says he never truly got over it.
“I was very enthusiastic about fighting until I was 19, it was a time I never recovered from,” Rogan began to explain in an episode of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
“When I was 19, I fought in this tournament in Anaheim California, it was the National (Championships), I was the Massachusetts state champion, and I fought this kid who I think was from Illinois, he was Illinois state champion.
“I hit him in the head with a wheel-kick, and what a wheel-kick is, is like your body spinning so I’m standing with my left foot forward, and I’m spinning my right heel around in a circle and it has insane power, I mean insane power,” Rogan said.
“It’s my legs, it’s my upper body, there’s whip to it, it’s got all this torque, and I caught this guy perfectly. He came at me with what’s called a stepping roundhouse kick, so he had his front leg forward and he stepped forward with his left leg as he was going to throw a kick, and I spun with my right leg at the same time.
“He went out, face plant, snoring, never woke up. Never woke up. He was unconscious for half an hour, they put him on a stretcher, I was watching. He never got out of that stretcher, they took him to the hospital, I have no idea what happened to him and it freaked me out,” said Rogan emotionally.
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Joe Rogan was in a big tournament where he had to fight a lot. After he won one fight, he kept going and fought again that same day. But sadly, he lost the next fight.
After the tournament, Joe Rogan felt like something had changed inside him. He went back to his hometown in Boston and spoke with his coach. He shared how the tough knockout made him feel and explained that he didn’t want to keep fighting anymore.
“When I went back to Boston, my main instructor, he wasn’t there in California when I was fighting… And he said to me, ‘I heard you had a great knockout?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I thought he was dead, he never got up’. He goes, ‘Sometimes they die’, I was 19 and fighting for zero money.
“My heel was sore. I was limping the next day because my heel was sore from his face. And then I was thinking, I’m not immune to that, someone could 100% do that to me, we’re whipping bones at each other.
“It changed my feeling about it, I never had the same enthusiasm after that, that was the beginning of the end for me,” Rogan confessed.
Joe Rogan was lucky because his love for combat sports took him on a new adventure. Instead of fighting, he became a UFC commentator in the early 2000s and found a whole new way to stay close to the action.
