All it took was one troubling tweet for Kevin Randleman to leap into action and likely save a man’s life years ago.
Marcus Sewell once considered taking his own life. An unlikely direct message, and follow-up phone call from the former UFC Heavyweight champion, changed all that. Sewell initially shared the story in a since-deleted Reddit post in 2017.
He recently shed more light on the encounter in
A Fighter’s Legacy podcast about Randleman.
“I had this thought that I should really just end my life. I went onto Twitter like, ‘This is the end of the ropes and stuff like that. I can’t take life anymore. Goodbye’,” Sewell shared. “I was really going to do it. I went somewhere, found rope wherever my dad’s shed was. I get a notification on Twitter. It was from Kevin Randleman. I think it was a private message. He was like, ‘Hey, are you okay? What’s going on?’ I just flat out said, ‘I’m just about to kill myself.’ He was like, ‘what’s your number?’ and I gave it to him. A couple minutes I get a call from a withheld number... He said, ‘Hello, is this Marcus?’ It was Kevin and I broke the f—k down.”
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“One minute you’re about to kick the chair out from under you and the next second you’re talking to ‘The Monster’ himself,” Sewell continued. “He talked to me a lot about what happened in his childhood. About 20 minutes goes by and I told him I want to make a change for myself. He told me, ‘You have to do something about it. I don’t want you to get off this phone and not do nothing about it. Do something about it.’ I thanked him and I went and got into counseling. I had never talked about when I was molested when I was younger. If Kevin hadn’t talked to me about it, I wouldn’t have faced that issue. Without Kevin Randleman calling me, I’d probably be dead in the ground.”
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Randleman had been open in the past about the abuse he suffered in his early life. The mixed martial arts (MMA) pioneer died on Feb. 11, 2016, from a
heart attack.
