UFC champion Mark Coleman survived alcoholism. Then came the house fire and coma

“THUD.”

On March 13, Mark Coleman’s eyelids opened as his bed frame shook. His 11-month-old Rottweiler, Lil’ Hammer, cowered under the bed. Chronic nightmares had plagued Coleman since childhood, but it was his dog who woke him up around 3 a.m. that morning. Coleman left his childhood bedroom – he was visiting his parents – for a glass of water.

Why are there clouds in the kitchen? a sleepy Coleman thought to himself. He grabbed the back door knob to let in fresh air and burned his hand on the hot metal.

Firework. And not clouds, but smoke, which gathered quickly. Coleman’s first thought was of his parents, sleeping in their bedroom down the hall from their single-story, L-shaped home. At the age of ten, Coleman had helped his father build this house, and now it was collapsing around them. Coleman screamed for his parents into the pitch-black abyss.

Silence.

Coleman had to save his parents. They had been everything to him, the driving force behind their ultra-competitive middle child ever since he declared as a five-year-old that he planned to be the best athlete in the world. With the support of his parents, Coleman blossomed as a high school state champion in wrestling, football and baseball, joining Oklahoma State University’s top wrestling team his freshman year and winning the 1988 NCAA championship at weight 190 pounds. Years of international competition with the U.S. national team honed Coleman’s aggressive style and propelled him to a seventh-place finish at the 1992 Olympics. The dominoes had fallen, but they wouldn’t have happened without his parents. Where they got the time, money and energy while raising four other children, he didn’t know.

“TEAR! CRUNCH!”

The sound of the skylights shattering above him spurred Coleman into action. Coleman stretched out his arms and started doing what wrestlers do: he moved forward. He called his parents again.

“It was the sickest feeling ever, because I thought they were already dead,” says Coleman, who finally heard his mother respond, annoyed that her loud son had woken her up while he was watching another one of his crazy fitness videos at 4 a.m. filmed in the morning. Coleman grabbed his father tightly and he and his parents created a chain of interlocking arms.

A typical 10-second walk took minutes. Coleman gently pulled his 83-year-old father and led him to the garage, where Coleman finally stopped and turned around. Only his father stood behind him. Coleman’s stomach turned, but he led his father into the night and walked back to the house to retrace his steps.

Never abandoning their son, Coleman’s parents watched him turn to mixed martial arts and become a UFC 10 heavyweight champion in 1996. In 2000, Coleman made history in Japan by winning the illustrious Pride Fighting Championship Grand Prix title against some of the best fighters in the world. In three fierce fights over one night, Coleman cemented American wrestling as a mandatory discipline for any fighter pursuing MMA. It’s rare that a fighter can be called an architect of the sport he competes in, but Coleman’s ‘ground and pound’ style provided an effective blueprint against Brazilian jiu-jitsu tacticians and ushered in an era of wrestling in MMA that never saw has decreased.

His mother’s encouragement had been of the utmost importance, and he was determined to find her in the dark. She was eighty years old and had been asthmatic all her life. She had not come out of the bedroom when Coleman had initially tried to leave. However, she had turned on a bedside lamp, which became a beacon for Coleman through the haze. Coleman grabbed his mother and pulled her away. At this point his eyes closed: they were of no use if they were open in the darkness. Together they stepped forward, but Coleman tumbled sideways into the bathroom doorway as 50 years of muscle memory intervened to get him back on his feet and keep him from taking his mother away forever. It was the biggest struggle in Coleman’s life and he thought he and his mother wouldn’t make it.

Now unable to get his bearings, Coleman believes divine intervention led him and his mother to the back door. Coleman dared a third journey to find his training partner. Hammer had helped his owner recover from multiple hip surgeries, the last just a month before that evening. Coleman reached his bed, but couldn’t find his dog, and he staggered out of the house with empty arms.

Sedated and intubated in the ambulance, Coleman slept for the next 48 hours. When news of his bravery spread, no one who knew Coleman was surprised. He had always had a heart bigger than the hammer fists he rained down on his opponents.

This wasn’t Coleman’s first brush with death, either. Three years earlier, Wes Sims had nearly fainted from the stench of vomit and rotting food emanating from the motel room where Coleman had holed up that summer. Sims, who had met Coleman in 1998 and become a member of his Hammer House fight team, inspected the dingy room, darkened by the blankets draped over the windows. Cans of IPA (Coleman drank three to four six-packs daily), food containers and trash rose as high as the unit’s sink. Still, Coleman told himself that it was all temporary, that he could control it if he needed to.

Sims looked into Coleman’s yellowed eyes, his face covered in a white, unruly scruff. Few knew that this low point was twelve years in the making.

In 2012, Sims had seen Coleman – already a heavy drinker from his college days – sink into the bottle after his doctor told him he needed career-ending hip replacement surgery. The ever-chiseled athlete stopped training that day and never returned. Not even a heart attack could have slowed Coleman’s self-destruction. Coleman’s alcoholism had caused seismic conflicts with his parents and with his teenage daughters.

Sims chose his next words carefully.

“I can’t do anything tonight,” Sims told his mentor. “So tonight I’m literally going to clean this place up because if you die tonight, you don’t want your family to come in and see this.”

Sims worked in silence while Coleman slept, filling five 55-gallon industrial garbage bags with moldy cardboard and Styrofoam containers full of half-eaten food. He grabbed another five bags of aluminum cans.

When Sims returned the next morning, he persuaded Coleman, who was already drunk from half a bottle of vodka, to go to the hospital. Coleman complied because he knew he would be given pain and anxiety medication to combat withdrawal symptoms. Coleman raged against hospital staff for a week in withdrawal, but Sims contacted his friend every day and used that momentum to send Coleman to rehab.

Surrounded by other addicts, Coleman received the most humbling wake-up call he could have received: accept help or die.

During his five months at Seacrest Recovery Center, Coleman’s incessant feelings of failure were diagnosed as depression, and his uncontrollable fear of losing loved ones as anxiety. Self-conscious and uncomfortable in his body, alcohol had always given Coleman the confidence to look others in the eye.

“The word acceptance became a big word for me,” says the 59-year-old. “You now have to accept things as they come.”

Two days after the house fire, Coleman’s eyelids fluttered open. He asked about his parents, who were safe and recovering at his sister’s house, although he was told Lil’ Hamer had died from smoke inhalation. He hugged his daughters, both gymnastics champions, and the trio cried together.

“It was by far the highest highlight of my life,” says Coleman. “And I’ve made some highs, but at the same time the lowest lows. We should all stop living.”

Three days after leaving the hospital, Coleman was back exercising with King Martell, another Rottweiler he adopted to keep him company. Recovering, staying sober and getting his body to the highest fitness level he’s ever enjoyed are Coleman’s immediate goals. He welcomes the newfound peace in his life.

“Addiction never goes away,” says Coleman. “We have to take it day by day. I have been sober for three years and two months and it has been by far the best three years and two months of my life.”