Home US SportsUFC ‘The community lost a legend:’ The life and legacy of Duke Roufus, founder of Roufusport and coach of UFC champs

‘The community lost a legend:’ The life and legacy of Duke Roufus, founder of Roufusport and coach of UFC champs

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When last Friday afternoon rolled around and no one had heard from him, Duke Roufus’ friends and family began to worry. This wasn’t like him.

When he didn’t pick up his 13-year-old daughter as planned that day, then they knew for sure something was wrong. Roufus might conceivably forget anything else, said his friend and longtime business partner, Scott Joffe, but never his daughter.

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“She was everything to Duke,” Joffe said. “When he didn’t pick her up late that afternoon, that’s when we knew someone needed to check on him.”

Shortly thereafter, their worst fears were confirmed. Roufus, at one time a champion kickboxer who became one of the top coaches and trainers in the sport of MMA, was dead at 55. With an autopsy report still yet to be filed, the cause of death remains unknown. But as the news spread across the combat sports world on Friday evening, a lot of professional tough guys found themselves confronting complicated feelings.

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“[It’s] not easy, man,” former UFC champion Anthony Pettis told Uncrowned’s Ariel Helwani earlier this week. “I lost my first father at 16 years old, and Duke became my second father. Getting this tragic news, I was coming out to my house in Mexico — I landed and I got all the text messages: ‘Duke passed away.’ I’m like, ‘No way. This cannot be real.’ And yeah, man, it’s all the emotions I lived as a kid all over again.”

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Former UFC fighter and current commentator Paul Felder paid tribute to Roufus during Saturday’s UFC Fight Night broadcast on ESPN, fighting back tears as he remembered his coach.

One of the proudest moments for Duke Roufus was coaching Anthony Pettis to a UFC lightweight title in 2013. Roufus died last week at the age of 55. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

(Jeff Bottari via Getty Images)

“Duke, he took guys in and became a father figure to so many of us,” Felder said. “He was more than just a coach to me. He was more than just a coach to everybody that ever worked with him. I got to travel the world with that man, and he’s gone way too soon.”

UFC middleweight Brendan Allen, who won Saturday’s main event from the UFC event in Vancouver, made it his first order of business to request a moment of silence for Roufus during his post-fight interview in the cage. At the press conference after the event, he recalled training at the Roufusport gym in Milwaukee as a young fighter making his way in the sport.

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“Me and [former UFC welterweight champion Belal Muhammad] were in that room training for years,” Allen told reporters. “For years we were there for camps and learning from him and around him. Seeing his daughter, his family, his dad and, you know, it really hits home. No matter what happened in that room, he still got all of us — we had such a great room. … We had such great camaraderie between each other. We had such great times, great moments, and it was because of Duke. [He] brought us all together and taught us a lot. The community lost a legend.”

Jeffrey “Duke” Roufus grew up in a fighting family. His father, Pat, a martial artist and kickboxing referee, had his boys in the gym almost from the time they could walk. Duke’s older brother, Rick, rose quickly through the kickboxing ranks, becoming a star in the nascent sport while winning titles in multiple weight classes throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.

It wasn’t always easy being the younger brother of Rick “The Jet” Roufus. When I visited the Roufusport gym in Milwaukee in 2015, Duke told me professional fighting is “a tough thing to do as a family sometimes.”

It got cold in his brother’s shadow. His father’s love and attention sometimes felt like it depended on which son looked better in the ring more recently. Egos clashed. Ambitions frayed familial bonds. Sometimes, Duke said, all three of them had “let pride get in the way of love.”

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A defining moment in his life came when Roufus was 15. He was a good student, excelling at high school sports, and then one day he walked in and found his infant sister dead in her crib. She was later determined to be a victim of SIDS — sudden infant death syndrome — still a leading cause of death for children under 1 year of age. Roufus’ life changed in that moment.

“It was a pretty traumatic experience,” he said.

Going to school like usual and focusing on classes felt impossible. His grades plummeted, which soon made him ineligible for the usual high school sports. Kickboxing would become his only outlet, a place to put his feelings while also distinguishing himself in the family pecking order.

Roufus had a successful kickboxing career, winning and defending the IKF super heavyweight title, but he never really came close to eclipsing his older brother in the eyes of kickboxing hardcores. To many in that world, he said, he would always just be Rick Roufus’ brother. He tried as best as he could to make peace with that, taking solace in the fact that he was an “overachiever” in many ways. He wasn’t fast enough or athletic enough, he explained, but he got further than he should have just on determination, stubbornness and grit.

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He carried all these qualities into his post-fighting career as a coach and gym owner. As hard as he’d pushed himself to squeeze all he could out of what he felt were somewhat meager athletic gifts, he sometimes pushed even harder to extract the same from the fighters on his Roufusport team.

“The thing he said to me when we were first discussing the gym business was, ‘I’m not here to be average,’” said Joffe. “That really defined the way he approached things. He didn’t want his guys to just make it to the UFC, or just be someone who’s in the UFC. He wanted them to be great.”

But that drive for success, or perhaps just Roufus’ own way of going about it, sometimes drove fighters away. In 2014, after the death of an amateur Roufusport kickboxer following a local event, some former Roufusport team members came forward alleging a toxic gym atmosphere. Roufus, they said, had sometimes crossed the line between being hard on fighters and being abusive toward them. Roufus always pushed back on that characterization, insisting that, as a coach who’d been in the ring himself, he knew the risks of entering a fight unprepared.

“This is a tough business,” Roufus told me in 2015. “It’s a dangerous sport. To me, if you don’t push people to be their best and to be ready to defend themselves in there, it’s like, do you even really care about them?”

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Current BKFC heavyweight champion Ben Rothwell was one of the first high-profile fighters to join Roufus’ stable. While he also left the gym with some hard feelings eventually, he also credits Roufus with helping him transform into a heavyweight knockout artist.

“Duke evolved my striking,” Rothwell said. “Before that I was very rudimentary, very basic. Duke really taught me the kickboxing realm, opening up my game with elbows and knees and different angles for my punches, all these things I’ve continued to develop to this day.”

Another longtime Roufusport member, former UFC lightweight Danny Downes, described Roufus as “one of the most influential people in my life.” He, too, had some complicated feelings about his time on the team. As he said back in 2014, when Roufus came under fire from former fighters, the coach was always “the kind of guy where, if you did a s***** job, he’ll tell you that you did a s***** job.”

As the years passed, Downes said, he felt like he understood both the reasoning and the limits of Roufus’ approach. He’d always hoped for some kind of closure with the coach who had helped make him into a professional fighter at a formative time in his life.

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“I was going to reach out to him and have a sit down to just talk over a lot of stuff,” Downes said. “I won’t have that opportunity now.”

PHOENIX, ARIZONA - JANUARY 14:  (L-R) Sergio Pettis and coach Duke Roufus interact backstage during the UFC Fight Night weigh-in at the Talking Stick Resort Arena on January 14, 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

Roufus with Sergio Pettis ahead of a UFC Fight Night event in 2017. (Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

(Mike Roach via Getty Images)

In many ways, the tension that existed within the team at times mirrored the dynamic Roufus had known in his own family. When his older brother was winning, he was the favorite son. When Roufus started finding success of his own in the ring, he managed to claw back some of that attention through blood and sweat and suffering. It also took its toll on his own relationship with his father and brother, he told me, but it was learning from the example of his own fighters that helped him mend some of those fences.

For instance, Roufus said, when the elder Pettis brother used some of the money from his earnings as a UFC champ to buy his mother a house, it made Roufus rethink his own family relationships.

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“When I saw Anthony do that for his mom, I immediately reached out [because] I hadn’t spoke to my dad in a while,” Roufus said. “I reached out to my brother, Rick. And we all united this year at Christmas. I was just moved by the whole situation, and as well, being a parent. I’m thinking to myself, some day my daughter is going to be Anthony’s age. I hope she treats me with the respect and admiration that Anthony, Sergio and their brother, Ray, have for their mother.”

The team plans to continue on under the Roufusport banner, according to Joffe. Already, he said, other coaches and team members are strategizing ways to carry on the legacy and keep the gym running.

But for Joffe, as well as many others, Roufus’ death means far more than just the loss of a coach or a business partner.

“I know it’s hitting a lot of people really hard,” Joffe said. “I’ve known him 29 years. … We were basically like a good marriage, the way we worked together. I remember back when we started making plans, the only rule he had for me was, ‘Don’t ever say no to me when I want to buy a piece of equipment for the gym.’ That was it for him. He just wanted to make sure his fighters had the best of everything, the best chance to succeed. That was Duke.”

A celebration of life for Duke Roufus will take place at Rave Grand Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Sunday, Oct. 26, from 3-10 p.m.

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