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“It’s fine.”

With that simple response, as blunt as a forearm to the jaw, the career of the former UFC heavyweight champion can finally begin again. But can we get a little more elaboration on just what ‘fine’ entails?

"It’s rehabilitated, so now I’m just training like normal and basically waiting to get back into a fight,” said Mir last week from his home in Las Vegas. “You can spar, train, and lift weights and stuff, but I guess you’ve just got to see how it reacts when you go out and compete with top-level guys.”

Just the fact that the 25-year-old is seriously talking about fighting again is a miracle in itself. On September 16, 2004, being able to compete at the highest levels of mixed martial arts was the last thing on Mir’s mind after he was blindsided by a car while riding his motorcycle. Thrown at least 70 feet from his bike, Mir’s left femur broke, requiring four hours of surgery and forcing a titanium rod to be placed in his leg permanently.

He’s lucky to be alive.

”Oh yeah,” Mir admits. “Especially because I got hit in the one part of my body that’s larger – I always had strong legs.”

Of course, there’s a difference between living and just being alive. For Mir, that meant that as soon as he was able, the big question had to be asked of his doctor.

“Can I fight again?”

“Because it was a clean break, I was told that I could come back and still play ‘full contact sports’ – as the doctor said it,” said Mir. “I don’t think he realized the extent of it. (Laughs) But he got the point that I needed to be able to take a really hard shot from really crazy and stupid angles. That was what I asked him. ‘It’s not really normal angles that I’m gonna be getting hit at – it’s really crazy, tweaky angles, something really weird.’ He said, ‘well, as long as it wouldn’t have broken under normal conditions, it should be fine now.’ Basically, what the muscle side saved me from is that my leg would have shattered, broke in several pieces, and then they would have to piece it back together. There would be no chance in hell that I’d ever be able to take a shot there again. The fact that it was a clean break and they were able to put a rod right in between the bone saved it.”

So that was the good news, but Mir is not a weekend warrior. He wasn’t asking his doctor for the green light to shoot hoops on Saturday or play in a flag football league on Sunday. He wasn’t asking to do Tae-Bo at the local gym. He needed not only to compete in the most demanding full-contact sport in the world; he had to do it at the elite level. That wasn’t going to happen overnight, and the rehabilitation for such an injury was going to be long, painful, and tougher than any fight he had in his 8-1 mixed martial arts career.

“It made me an old man,” said Mir of the accident. “It gave me a taste of what it’s like to be older.”

And so the road to recovery began for a seemingly invincible young man forced to address his mortality. Needless to say, there are ups and downs on that journey.

“You go back and forth, and some days are better than others,” he admits. “I think anybody who’s had a major accident or major injury realizes that one day you’re full of hope and the next day you’re like ‘this sucks, this is too long of a road, I’m depressed.’”

But he kept working, helped by the support of his wife, his children (a second child was welcomed to the Mir family this fall), and the rest of his family, both locally and in the gym. He also got daily reality checks just by turning on the television.

“You have to sit there and go, ‘people have got it a lot worse than you do and they don’t snivel half as bad. Chill out,’” he said. “Everybody does that - they feel sorry for themselves at one moment or another and then you just have to catch yourself. I was watching the Science channel and they were talking about a guy who got his arm blown off in . He’s got a mechanical arm now and he’s just happy that he can lift up his baby and hold her. I’m sitting there looking at this guy and going ‘wow, and I’m depressed that I’ve got a metal rod in my leg? What the hell is my problem? I’d be embarrassed if this guy ever heard me talking.’”

Then, as the days, weeks, and months passed by, Mir got stronger – not only physically, but mentally. To him, that was an epiphany.

“When I got hit by the car and I realized how frail my body really is – and I’m a strong human being – it just reaffirmed the fact that skill is everything,” he said. “I’m not always going to be able to jump this high or run this fast – how am I going to be able to beat people if I don’t have this? If I’m weaker, if I’m tinier? Let’s say I go into a fight and I only have one hand – now what am I gonna do? So all it did was show me a glimpse of the future – you’re 25 now, but you’re not always gonna be, so what are you gonna do when we take this away from you? And it was taken away from me. ”

Once back in the gym, Mir began reconstructing his technique from the ground up, making up for his physical deficiencies with a hard to crack mental game.

“The first few times I went back to the gym, I’m walking around limping,” he remembers. “I was learning how to protect certain sides of my body, I couldn’t do certain moves because I was still healing, and I had to find a way to beat people.”

It wasn’t going to be with brute force or physical supremacy – not now at least.

“I see guys push their strength and push the physical side of their bodies and I look at them and say, ‘that’s not why we’re on top of the food chain,’” Mir continues. “They’re like ‘what do you mean?’”

He explains.

“An orangutan can rip your head off. You can get (noted strongman) Bill Kazmaier, and a 150-pound orangutan is gonna throw him around the gym. So all that strength and all that training, what good did it do? So why not accentuate what makes humans so dangerous? Your mind.”

That’s all well and good, but the next time you see Stephen Hawking in the cage, or want to show me some tapes of Albert Einstein locking in a guillotine choke back in the day, let me know. You’ve got to have the skill and athletic ability to back up the mental acumen and strength once the bell rings. But don’t worry, Mir’s got that covered.

“I actually just pushed my mind a step further where it kinda shot my skill level through the ceiling. I was like, ‘you know what? It’s all about skill.’ I don’t care what anybody wants to tell me about being bigger, stronger, faster. You could have cardio that can last three days – if I choke you out in 30 seconds it doesn’t matter how long your cardio lasts.”

‘Nuff said. In fact, armed with these realizations, Mir feels he may be even more dangerous when he returns than he was before the accident.

“In some ways, yeah,” he admits. “Just because I had to sit down and really evaluate what makes me beat everybody. Look at Tim Sylvia when I defeated him. The guy’s 6-8 and he’s knocking everybody out. When I went out there it was all just technique. That was the difference between the two of us. He’s strong, fast, he hits hard. What was the difference? His technique. He’s got a good camp, his cardio is always great, so it was technical supremacy. That’s one area that I always kinda knew, but it just reaffirmed it in the accident.”

“Everybody asks, ‘can you make it back?’” Mir continues. “After a while, I realized that as long as I can pass what the doctors consider physically enough to compete, that’s all I need my body to be to perform and to beat people, because the thing that they’re all missing is that they’re just trying to be bigger, stronger, faster. And that’s not a good thing to have in your confidence because when you walk in the ring and you’re about to fight a human being - I’ve done it, so I know what they’re thinking and what I’m thinking - you have to have something you have pure confidence in. I don’t think size, strength, and power can do that. What if you’re fighting a guy who’s bigger than you, stronger than you? What if you don’t feel that strong that day? What’s your confidence gonna derive from now? I know that my mind gives me the ability to go ‘well, I’ll figure it out.’ So when I walk into the ring, I don’t care what you put in front of me because I know that I’m gonna figure it out.”

So his mind is strong, the skills are still there, and the desire to compete is alive and well; but is Frank Mir physically ready to get back into the Octagon to try and regain his heavyweight title from Andrei Arlovski?

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of Frank Mir: Breaking The Silence, where the former UFC heavyweight champ talks about his timetable to return to the Octagon, and his thoughts on current champion Andrei Arlovski and the heavyweight division.

http://www.ufc.tv/index.cfm?fa=news.detail&gid=1802