Forrest Griffin recalls Stephan Bonnar scoring head kick knockout in absurd street fight in dress clothes

UFC 167: St-Pierre v Hendricks — Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar | Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

Forrest Griffin always has another story to tell about Stephan Bonnar and their history-making run on The Ultimate Fighter.

Their April 9, 2005, scrap has long been revered as one of the most important fights in UFC history, with Griffin eventually winning a war of attrition to earn a decision over Bonnar and become the light heavyweight tournament champion of the first-ever TUF season. Since then, the bout has been inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame Fight wing and is regularly cited as playing a major role in pushing the promotion to the mainstream.

During a recent appearance on the Verse Us podcast, Griffin reflected upon his relationship with Bonnar (who died in 2022), and how “The American Psycho” more than lived up to his moniker.

“We became buddies,” Griffin said. “He’s a weirdo, I’m a weirdo. He’s nuts. He reminds me of one of my best friends, who’s also passed, but he’s just like he has a good heart, but he’s insane. He’s like, ‘Let’s do this,’ but he means well, I’m like, ‘That’s a horrible idea.’ Especially when you’re in your 20s, you like a guy that can make you do stupid things. He was an adventure. He was like a walking adventure. You just bring him in and he’s like, ‘Hey, I got an idea,’ and you’re like, ‘That’s a horrible idea. Let’s do it.’”

“We were walking into a bar, out of a bar, these three dudes are messing with us and it’s whatever, and he just out of nowhere—there’s three of them, three of us—he head kicks a guy, knocks out their leader,” Griffin continued. “Head kicks. We’re in dress clothes, walking into a club, people everywhere. Yes, Bonnar. I look at the other two guys with him. They’re in shock, I’m in shock. I don’t know what to do, they don’t know what to do. They just pick their guy up and move on. We just go in the club, like, ‘I hope nobody saw that.’”

It wasn’t a fast friendship for Griffin and Bonnar in the early days of the show. Even before it became clear they would have to go through each other to win the TUF tournament, the competition was fierce, and Griffin rubbed both Bonnar and season coach Randy Couture the wrong way at first.

“Randy didn’t like me right away because me and Stephan clashed heads,” Griffin said. “The old gym, there was the mat, and so I stepped down off the mat, Stephan was coming forward, and I kind of looked back like, ‘Ow, my knee,’ because you stepped off the mat, and he hit me with a 1-2 right then. I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ So I clinched him and I started kneeing him, and we clashed heads, it was a big cut.

“I ended up going really hard with [Mike] Swick, too, because I didn’t know Swick was good. He immediately shot and took me down. I was like, ‘Oh, OK,’ so I ended up throwing him on the concrete. So Randy didn’t like that I was just kind of like—but you put people in sparring, I don’t know these people. I don’t know these people. All of a sudden, people are going hard with me, we’re sparring, the first week. It’s crazy, right?”

In the end, Griffin became close friends with Bonnar and even earned Couture’s respect, with the multiple-time UFC champion later inviting Griffin to train with him after TUF was over.

Everything comes back to his first fight with Bonnar, though, which memorably aired live on Spike TV on. Since it wasn’t a pay-per-view event, the first TUF finale managed to draw plenty of casual eyeballs throughout the evening, no more so than when it became clear Griffin and Bonnar were throwing down in an instant classic.

At the time, the two were competing for a six-figure UFC contract. They had no idea that this little fight on free TV would help to shape the entire MMA industry.

“You could feel the stomping in the cage,” Griffin said when asked if he had any concept of the impact his fight with Bonnar would have in the long run. “I’d been in some big fights, I’d fought in front of thousands of people, I’d fought all over the world by that time, which is really good, kind of like I’d had a career before I got to the UFC, which is important.

“But no. The thing is, after that fight, I knew my life was changed.”

Forrest Griffin recalls Stephan Bonnar scoring head kick knockout in absurd street fight in dress clothes

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