Jun-19-2010

The Crowbar—A Grinding, Tough Son-of-a-Gun

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By Chuck Mindenhall

Chris Tuchscherer looks like a character from The Incredibles with his bleached-blonde hair, barrel-chested frame and conspicuous lack of neck— perfect for a television show that featured a houseful of thick-slab heavyweights looking to make a name in MMA. That’s one of the reasons why he was disappointed when they skipped over him in the casting of The Ultimate Fighter 10. Gone was the fast track to public awareness. Or so it seemed at the time.

It turns out, with his glinting professional record over-qualifying him for the house (he was then 17-1), the UFC just wanted to fast track him to the Octagon. In the end, eh, woulda-coulda-shoulda, it’s all totally cool with the easy-going giant of a man they call simply . . . “The Crowbar.”

“Yeah, you know I’m actually happier that I went this route,” he says. “After looking at that season of TUF, I just don’t think it would have been my type of deal. So I am glad that I got to go about it this way.”

As you probably know, Tuchscherer is saying a lot when he expresses gladness of this stripe. Stepping into his UFC debut against the formidable Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 102 last August, he was ushered in with one of the more surreal fights on company record. The bout ended in the first round courtesy of Gonzaga’s strikes shortly after a lengthy time-out when Tuchscherer took an octave raising low-blow that made the whole fight-game demographic cringe and shift in their seats uneasily.

Even the women.

“That first fight, the Gonzaga fight, that was a weird deal,” he says. “I had a lot of nerves heading into that fight. That was crazy—I still can’t remember the whole thing.”

He doesn’t need to be told that it’s probably a good thing he doesn’t.

After purposefully beefing up in subsequent months, though, Tuchscherer successfully moved on to outlast Tim Hague at UFC 109 in February in a fight that surprisingly stayed on the feet for three rounds, something completely counter-intuitive for a guy whose first instinct is to get things to the ground. That was his Minnesota State University wrestling pedigree—where he was a two-time All-American—being adapted into MMA. To fight that way was mental coercion, he says. But a bad weight cut—14 pounds in a few days to get down from 280, for a guy who wasn’t used to cutting weight—ultimately took its toll, and his gas tank went empty midway through.

“That last round was just horrible,” he says. “I didn’t feel good at all about the fight. I wasn’t happy with it. But I think it was good for me to go three rounds with Hague, to go three rounds in the UFC. Just knowing that I opened up my hands a little bit. Before then I’d be a little too scared to open up my hands, but after standing in there with a big guy like Hague and banging, I got a lot of confidence coming off of that heading into my next fight.”

The recent father of a baby boy—whom at just 13 weeks old he has dubbed “Little Crowbar”—he has come a long way from his life in a singlet on the Minnesota prairie. Tuchscherer (pronounced TUCK-shur) needed a strong nickname, and it was his high-profile training partner Brock Lesnar that saddled him with the handle, “The Crowbar.” Lesnar saw all those consonants in a row and grew weary one quiet night near Lake Ida.

“We were staying out in the camper one night right when he first moved to Alexandria and he said, ‘you know, you need a nickname, that Tuchscherer is too hard and nobody knows hot to say it,’” he recalls. “And Brock goes ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and you know what would be a really good nickname for you is the Crowbar.’ I was like, why is that? And he said ‘You’re just a grinding, tough son-of-a-[gun] and you’ve got that look,’ and he began calling me it. Pretty soon everybody started calling me it.”

And so The Crowbar—whose natural hair color is dirty blonde, for those wondering—came into existence. As he prepares to take on TUF 10 runner-up Brendan Schaub at UFC 116 on July 3 in Las Vegas, he is walking around 20 pounds lighter than he was pre-Hague, right at 260 pounds. For the first time also, he centered his training camp full-time in Alexandria with the likes of Lesnar and Marty Morgan, the latter who’s put Tuchscherer on a regime to boost his cardio and prep for the quick opening round fury of The Hybrid (5-1).

“It’s totally amazing, and it’s a whole different situation,” he says. “Usually I’m in Minneapolis trying to find cheap guys to come work out with me, and it’s hard to find big guys as well. Now, all I do is show up at the gym and train my butt off. Everything is mapped out. Marty’s got everything mapped out for the week, and I don’t have to think about any of that. I just have to concentrate on busting my ass 100% every day.”

And as a sort of bonus to the newfound situation, he even got to roll with one of his icons, Randy Couture, who made a cameo appearance in Alexandria.

“It was great—Randy’s basically the guy who kind of got me started in MMA,” he says. “When I started this journey, he’s the guy that I looked up to and thought to myself, you know, I want to be like him some day. When he was here, he showed me some things that could help me. So it was awesome having him there and to get his thoughts.”

And right now all thoughts are on the former college football player Schaub, who in all his pro fights on record has never made it out of the first round. Every fight Schaub’s been in, somebody has been toe-tagged with a TKO or a KO, and that’s just what a crowbar likes to hear.

“He’s going to come out hard, and come at me right away,” Tuchscherer says. “That’s what I like—I like guys that come out hard and that’s the way I like to come out too. I can guarantee you he’s not going to take me out like he’s been taking out all the other opponents. He’d better be ready for a war.”

Other than that?

“Other than that, I think he’s an arrogant, cocky guy, and he’s going to have to get hit with the crowbar.”