Sean Strickland didn’t hold anything back when discussing his childhood trauma.
Strickland competes in the UFC middleweight division. He has put together a string of victories. He’s riding a five-fight winning streak. He was supposed to meet former UFC and Strikeforce Middleweight Champion Luke Rockhold at UFC 268 but Rockhold pulled out due to a herniated disc.
Sean Strickland Reflects On Rough Childhood
Appearing on The MMA Hour, Strickland looked back on the trauma that his father caused when he was a child.
“I remember hugging my mom’s leg in the kitchen pre-elementary school, my dad all f*cking drunk telling my f*cking mom, ‘I’m gonna f*cking cut you up in little pieces and bury you in the backyard with a bottle of acid.’ So you hear that sh*t day in and day out from like my earliest memory, it start shifting the way your brain [works].”
The UFC middleweight then said he was constantly worried about one day finding his mother dead. He even attacked his father when he was in the third grade.
“I remember I used to like to sleep in my mom’s room a lot just cause I thought he’d kill my mom. One day I f*cking army crawled underneath their bed and he f*cking gets on top of my mom, maybe it was rough sex who f*cking knows. But he gets on top of my mom and is like strangling her saying, ‘Tonight’s the night you’re gonna f*cking die.’ And I’m probably like a third-grader. The only thing I see is a guitar, so I go and I grab the guitar and I f*cking just smack him in the head as hard as I can. I grabbed the phone, I ran out and called the cops. My mom, her dumbass, bailed him out of jail the next day.”
The final straw was when Strickland was 18 years old and his dad went from alcohol to narcotics. He had enough of his father’s abuse.
“When I was 18 one day I f*cking wake up to them fighting, my mom and my dad fighting. I’m like 18 years old, dropped out of high school, wanted to be an MMA fighter. He was holding my mom in the room saying crazy sh*t like, ‘You’re probably banging your boss, your mom’s banging her boss, your mom’s doing this or doing that.'”
Strickland ended up telling his father that he was being an “asshole.” Strickland then claimed that his dad got in his face and at that point, Strickland snapped.
“I f*cking headbutt him, break his nose. He falls down like f*cking crying and I’ll never forget the monster, the boogeyman of my life, just watching him fall to the ground crying, holding his nose, f*cking bleeding. It was almost disappointing. It was disappointing, I expected so much more from him.”
Strickland said the cops arrived and convinced his father not to press charges. He said that he and his mother moved out after that day. Strickland’s father has since passed away due to cancer.
