10 MMA stars who ruined their careers with drugs and alcohol

Leben Guillard Jones Drugs
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1. Evan Tanner

Evan Tanner

The former UFC middleweight champion, Evan Tanner, was a complex character who went through sport as one of the good guys, but in was a tortured soul with a life with a tendency to derail. Tanner was not a party animal, but his internal torments led him to become an alcoholic and a gambling addict.

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At its worst, Tanner stopped fighting and training for two years while leading a nomadic existence, traveling from place to place with no fixed direction as he fell into the depths of his addiction. “I’m so gone, living on the road, and drinking into oblivion, that in these moments of weakness I wonder if I can go back,” Tanner confessed in an online diary. Evan even revealed that alcohol was already a problem when he was at the peak of his career.

“Throughout my career, if you want to call it that way, I’ve been a heavy drinker. I’ve only trained a month or two at the time I sign up for a fight. Sometimes I have stopped drinking, sometimes not. I think it’s obvious in what fights I did not quit. “

Even though Tanner eventually recovered, he admitted after a series of defeats, that his addiction could have charged him a price his body could not recover from. Tanner died tragically in 2008 on a solo camping trip that went awry.

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