Robert Follis was an influential coach and trainer who worked with some of MMA’s biggest names over the better part of two decades in the fight game. His sudden death by suicide in December 2017 left many of those fighters feeling shocked and baffled. But as the details of his life made clear, there were certain battles that only those closest to him knew he was waging.

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The news started to spread among the fighters on that Saturday night in mid-December 2017. Texts, phone calls. An unmistakably urgent tone. The tone that almost always means bad news.

Robert Follis, a well-known coach who’d been a force in mixed martial arts for almost as long as the sport itself had existed in North America, was dead.

To most of those on the receiving end of that news that weekend, it didn’t seem real at first. Like a bad joke or a rumor gone wild. Surely someone would set the record straight soon … wouldn’t they?

Former UFC middleweight title contender Chael Sonnen was one of the first to get the news. He reached out to friends and training partners, hoping to inform them before the headlines did, but also hoping to have someone tell him that he was wrong, that they’d just seen Follis alive and well minutes ago.

“Everybody had the same reaction,” Sonnen said. “Just somber and quiet and, just as I had done, like they wanted to say, ‘No, you’re wrong.'”

Eric Nicksick, the gym manager at Las Vegas’ Xtreme Couture MMA gym, was out to dinner when he got a call from UFC bantamweight Bryan Caraway.

“He just kept asking me, ‘Have you heard? Have you heard?'” Nicksick said. “I was like, ‘Heard what?'”

Nicksick called Dennis Davis, a retired fighter-turned-coach who had been instrumental in pushing the Xtreme Couture team to hire Follis.

“My first reaction, it was like it wasn’t true,” Davis said. “Like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ It didn’t really hit me until me and Eric got off the phone.”

The gym’s namesake, former two-division UFC champion Randy Couture, couldn’t quite believe it either. The coach who’d been in one gym or another with him for most of his career, dating all the way back to the primordial days of MMA and the infancy of the UFC itself, was gone.

“I was devastated,” Couture said. “I think we all were.”

It was the morning of Dec. 15, 2017, when a hiker found Follis’ body at Red Rock Canyon, just a short drive from Las Vegas. He was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to the Clark County (Nev.) coroner’s office. He was 48, a lifelong martial artist and motivator, a coach with two decades worth of experience in the fight game.

As news of his death rippled through the MMA community, there were the social media tributes and remembrance, plus the usual message board gossip.

His family and friends organized dual memorials – one in Portland, where he’d been a co-owner of the influential Team Quest gym during MMA’s first major growth phase, and another in Las Vegas, where he’d helped restore the Xtreme Couture MMA gym to prominence on the national scene.

But as the initial shock wore off, the fighters and fellow coaches who knew Follis best were left asking themselves why.

Why did one of the sport’s most magnetic motivators take his own life? What could have made the man known for his infectious positivity decide that his life was no longer worth living? And was there anything they could have done, if only they’d known just how bad he was hurting inside?

‘The natural fit’

Ask the fighters who worked with Follis at Xtreme Couture MMA, and they’ll tell you that the tall, lanky guy with the scruffy face and the searing stare was more than just a coach and trainer.

“He was like a father figure to so many people here,” Davis said.

There was some special quality about him, his friends said, some quiet intensity. He could be talking to you about anything, and somehow you’d end up telling him about your own life, your hopes and goals and fears.

His girlfriend, Myra Fukuno, noticed it the first night she met him, when she wound up seated next to him at a UFC 159 viewing party in downtown Las Vegas.

“It didn’t matter how many other people were around,” Fukuno said. “He had a way of making you feel like you were the most important person in the room. He had that look in his eyes like he was seeing right through you. It made you almost afraid to hold eye contact, because what’s he seeing in there?”

In the gym, Follis was known for his ability to hone in on a fighter’s specific needs. This one might require a gentle touch, while another might need someone to get in his face and fire him up. One might need to have her fears calmed, while another just wanted them recognized.

“You have to reach them on their level, the way they communicate, not the way you communicate,” Follis said in a 2014 story about the resurgence of the Xtreme Couture MMA gym. “My goal as a coach is to figure out what you need — whether it’s the tough guy, the sensitive guy, the kid gloves, whatever – and give you that. I pride myself on being able to morph to their needs, rather than them morphing to mine.”

This was a talent that the fighters who knew him from the early days of his coaching saw firsthand.

“The way he treated Randy (Couture) was different from the way he treated me,” Sonnen said. “… He had different strategies for each athlete.”

Sonnen got to know Follis when they were both just starting out in the Pacific Northwest fight scene. At the time, he said, Follis was aiming for his own fighting career. He even had a couple amateur bouts under his belt.

But looking around the room in the Team Quest gym, it quickly became apparent that the squad didn’t need another aspiring fighter with a late start on his own athletic development. There were former Olympians and standout college wrestlers on the mats every day, plus young brawlers with more physical ability and more prime years ahead of them. What they needed was a coach, someone to run the team and the gym itself. Follis was the ideal candidate.

“He wasn’t the best athlete in the room that looked like he was going to have the best career, even though that’s what he wanted to do,” Sonnen said. “But what he did have was, not only knowledge, but organizational skills. He loved to teach. He loved to work on strategy. He loved to watch film. He liked all that, and the rest of us did not. We wanted to show up, get a workout in and go home. So he was really the natural fit, and he resisted it at first. He had his own dreams and his own goals, but as soon as he started coaching, that was it, that was all behind him. It was the best decision he ever made.”

To the younger fighters who started coming through the Team Quest door as MMA bloomed in popularity, Follis became an important mentor. And it wasn’t just the champions who caught his eye. He was known for taking the time to sit down over coffee or lunch with his fighters so he could get to know them, find out where they wanted to go with their careers and what they needed from him to get there.

A devotee of self-help guru Tony Robbins, Follis studied the art of motivation and inspiration, seeking to pass on a formula for success to the fighters who entrusted him with their training.

Over time, his fighters even learned a thing or two about him. Occasionally he’d share bits of his own history, how he’d grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness, how he was forbidden from taking part in school sports or even enjoying small indulgences like celebrating his own birthday.

Those who inquired further might learn that he was mostly cut off from his family due to his decision to leave the organization as a young man, which still distressed him.

As Couture got to know him better over the years, he began to see how the trauma of Follis’ youth had shaped him into a man who was passionate about understanding himself and others, even if there were some fractures under the surface that didn’t seem completely healed.

“It made him the guy he was,” Couture said. “Not a lot of people saw it. He didn’t share that part of him with everyone he came across. But those of us who were close to him knew about it and knew how troubled he was by that, by the breaking up of his family.”

Follis’ personal history was especially relevant for Nate Quarry, who also grew up in the Jehovah’s Witness organization. He discovered MMA after leaving the faith in his early 20s, he said, and was drawn to it both as an athletic pursuit and as an outlet for the anger he’d built up over the years.

“It made me realize that I’d seen more violence at home than I was watching on TV,” Quarry said. “I had a lot of issues from how I was raised, and even though I wasn’t in the religion anymore, I still believed it was the truth because it was the only thing I knew.”

He mentioned to training partners that he felt his wrestling was lacking because he hadn’t been allowed to learn the sport in middle or high school, as most others around him had. When they asked why, he had to explain what it meant to grow up as a Jehovah’s Witness, how he was isolated from non-members and forbidden from participating in extracurricular activities like sports.

It didn’t take long before someone told him about Follis, a coach with experiences he could relate to.

“Once we met up, it became clear pretty quickly that I was a fighter, and he was a coach,” Quarry said. “We had this shared experience with our childhoods. A lot of things from that he had already come to terms with. He’d dealt with them better than me, and he’d been out of it longer than me. When you leave something like that, it’s pretty overwhelming. You have so many thoughts and feelings that you’ve been indoctrinated with, in my case since birth.”

Quarry’s struggles after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses were common ones. For its adherents, the faith can be consuming. Though modern Jehovah’s Witnesses strongly reject any suggestion that they are a cult, former members have often compared its practices to one, particularly the doctrine of “disfellowship,” a form of excommunication that affects an estimated 70,000 of the approximately 8 million Jehovah’s Witness members each year. The Jehovah’s Witnesses national organization did not return requests for comment for this story.

Members can be disfellowshipped for any number of infractions, and after they’ve been “shunned” even their families are instructed to break off contact with them.

“You lose everything you’ve known your whole life,” Quarry said. “You lose your parents, your siblings. You might lose your job, if you work for a Jehovah’s Witness, which many do. It’s your whole community, which is all you know, just gone.”

Quarry had watched his sister go through it when he was 14. Afterwards, he said, he was instructed never to even speak of her. He didn’t see her again until he was in his late 20s.

Even after he’d left the religion, Quarry said, the fears instilled in him as a child still retained much of their power. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Armageddon is imminent, and much of the literature given to children focuses on this threat.

“As a kid, you see it illustrated for you,” Quarry said. “Those images stick with you. Even after I left the organization I had nightmares for well over 10 years, and it was the same thing every night. There’s one painting in one of the books, where the wicked people are dying, and there’s someone laying on the ground reaching out, saying, ‘Please help me.’ And in the dream, that guy was me. The sky was black, although I could see clearly, and I was reaching out to my family asking for help, and they just shook their heads, saying, ‘You made your decision.’ It was a traumatic thing.”

For Quarry, meeting Follis was like meeting a veteran of the same wars. They could talk about their childhoods, about the ways it still affected them as adults. Quarry learned that Follis had also watched older siblings go through disfellowship. He found someone who had successfully navigated life after leaving the faith, and not only survived it but actually seemed to be thriving.

That was rare enough to be remarkable. Even if it masked some of the struggles going on beneath the surface.

A devastating loss

The way team members remember it now, the Portland gym grew until it began to buckle under its own weight. The founding members began to splinter off. Couture was going through a divorce. Dan Henderson moved to Southern California to start his own Team Quest branch, which put him in a battle with Matt Lindland for rights to the name.

Follis tried for a time to hold things together. And though they later reconciled, it initially led to a bitter falling out with Quarry.

“Long story short, I wasn’t happy with how he was running the business,” Quarry said. “He thought he was doing what was best, and I disagreed, so we went our separate ways.”

Follis eventually sold his shares and went through a divorce of his own. Before too long he found his way to Las Vegas, where many of the Team Quest alumni had relocated after Couture opened his own gym in a strip mall warehouse not far from the Vegas Strip.

While the Xtreme Couture gym started strong, its fortunes largely mirrored those of its founder. When Couture was an active fighter, the gym was one of many thriving training grounds in prizefighting’s capital city.

But when Couture retired and focused more on his budding acting career, the strength of the gym atrophied. It was Davis, a former Team Quest fighter turned Xtreme Couture coach, who suggested Follis lead the team.

“Dennis looked up to Robert, who was one of his mentors for sure,” Couture said. “He approached me about making a spot for Robert and literally took a cut in pay to bring Robert in as the head coach of the team practices.”

For a time, the arrangement worked well. Follis brought his brand of motivational and at times hard-nosed leadership to the gym, and success came with it. The gym attracted fighters like former UFC women’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate and even convinced former team members like UFC title challenger Gray Maynard to give it another try.

But in 2014, Follis received tragic news. His younger brother, Randy, the lone sibling who had remained in the Jehovah’s Witness organization, had committed suicide.

The loss was devastating for Follis, in part because he felt like he had left his little brother behind when he left the family and the faith.

As he told several people later on, when the two boys were both teenagers, they began to talk about leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their concern was that, if they both left, it would devastate their parents, who had already lost their two older children to disfellowship.

Someone had to stay behind, they reasoned, and that someone was Randy.

As Follis’ older brother Rick recalled, the two youngest brothers were a lot alike in many ways.

“Randy was like Robert, but in his own organization,” Rick Follis said. “He’d done a lot of missionary work, became a respected elder, and he tried to help young people, people who had gone through trauma and were dealing with their own issues. He and Robert were identical in that respect. Their whole lives were about helping others, and I think they did it to try to ease their own pain.”

Rick was the second of the Follis children to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, following their older sister Sharon Follis, who was disfellowshipped two months before she turned 22. Rick was 17 when he left the organization, he said, “but I was ready, because I just didn’t believe what they believed anymore.”

Growing up, the Follis children had moved from one place to another as their father traveled from one congregation to the other in his role as an elder within the organization.

“In a course of 15 years, we lived in four states, 10 houses, 14 schools,” Rick said. “We were always on the go. Three days a week we had meetings. One night a week we had family study. One day a week we went door to door. We weren’t allowed to engage in outside activities. Sports, drama, hanging out with people outside our organization, those were all no-fly zones. It was a very controlled environment.”

When their parents discovered that Sharon, the oldest sibling, had been dating a man who wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, she was given a choice: Stop immediately and repent, or leave the religion and the family.

But by that point, Sharon said, she was ready to leave.

“I was told that I could stay the night, and I needed to be gone in the morning,” she said. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone. My brothers just suddenly lost me, and I suddenly lost them. I lost my family, and it was a very harsh cutoff.”

According to “The Watchtower,” a magazine that’s been published by the Jehovah’s Witnesses in one form or another since the late 19th century, beginning shortly after the religion was founded, disfellowship is a “loving provision” designed to show wayward members the error of their ways.

A 1991 article from “The Watchtower” explains the purpose of disfellowship this way:

“Imagine a hiker who succumbs to exhaustion on a cold winter day. He begins to suffer from hypothermia, and he feels drowsy. If he falls asleep in the snow, he will die. While waiting for a rescue party, his companion occasionally slaps him in the face to keep him awake. The slap may sting, but it could well save his life.”

For Robert and Randy, who were both in their preteen years at the time, the sudden loss of their older sister was a shocking blow. They were close with their big sister, who had been instrumental in raising them. When their older brother, Rick, was also disfellowshipped some eight months later, it only added to the sense of upheaval.

“The biggest difference for Rick and I is that we wanted out, and we got out,” Sharon said. “We were not left behind. We did not suddenly get told as children, ‘Your sibling is gone, and we’re not going to talk about them anymore.’ We didn’t experience that, but they did.

“One thing I’ve thought about a lot is, did they feel like we abandoned them?” she added. “Did they experience that as abandonment and rejection? They witnessed the fact that their parents, who loved them – and I want to be clear, our parents did love us the way that they knew how, and they were good parents in many ways – but Randy and Robert learned that if they did not follow the rules and do what they were supposed to, that they could lose their parents. And that has to be terrifying when you’re in the fifth or sixth grade.”

For Robert, the hope that some day the family would be reunited again was an enduring and sustaining one. He clung to it even after his brother Randy’s suicide, and he urged a reunion of sorts. Since he was never officially disfellowshipped, he served as the go-between, encouraging his parents to open themselves up to a meeting with their surviving children while also encouraging Rick and Sharon to call and talk to their parents. (Follis’ parents declined to comment for this story.)

“He would share things with me about how he had looked into the issues and looked up certain things in The Bible so that he could address things from my parents’ point of view and communicate in a way that was meaningful to them,” Sharon said. “Especially with my mom, he would work through ways he could approach it to try to get her to see how illogical some of this was.”

Initially, it seemed like his efforts had worked. Over a long weekend the family got together at his parents’ house on the Oregon coast, and for the first time in nearly 35 years, Robert had both his parents and his older siblings under one roof.

“At first it was awesome,” Sharon said. “Lots of hugs and stories. Mom was right there with her hands on everybody. She was still a mom. We were still her kids. It seemed like there was a chance.”

But when it was time to leave after their last night together, Rick stayed behind to talk with their father.

“Robert was just so excited,” Rick said. “And then my father and I were in the kitchen talking while Robert and Sharon walked out to the car, and my father said to me, ‘I think it would be a good idea if we don’t meet like this again.’ I probably talked to him for another 20 or 30 minutes after that, getting clarity on that, seeing my mother agree with it even though I could tell it broke her heart. When we got back to where we were staying I told Robert. I think that was it for him, being shunned that one final time.”

‘He just found his justification’

His colleagues at the gym noticed the change in him gradually, and then dramatically. After his brother’s death and the failed reunion with his parents, Follis’ behavior became more erratic, they said. Davis got worried when he noticed Follis drinking heavily.

“And up in Oregon when I met him, he never really drank,” Davis said. “I remember after fights when we’d go out, he’d maybe have a beer. Maybe. But after his brother killed himself, I think he took to drinking to deal with the pain he was feeling.”

It also carried over into his job performance, according to gym manager Nicksick. He’d miss practices, or show up late, both of which were deeply uncharacteristic. Some days Nicksick wondered whether Follis had slept at all.

“After his brother committed suicide, the tables turned for us a little bit,” Nicksick said. “He opened up a lot. I think he felt like he could be vulnerable with me, like it was OK to come and talk and cry. And it was. We helped each other through a lot of ups and downs. But the one thing I couldn’t help but be critical about was, when I met him he was sober. He didn’t drink. But in the aftermath of his brother’s death, I think he turned to alcohol. I tried to tell him, ‘I’ll always be here for you, but the alcohol is always going to make things worse.'”

To his girlfriend, Fukuno, he expressed his dissatisfaction with his job. Here he was, in his late 40s, a coach at someone else’s gym. Other trainers who’d been in the sport as long as him had their names on the door at their own facilities. They had a brand. What did he have?

“He had been unhappy at Xtreme Couture for a long time,” Fukuno said. “He didn’t feel valued there. He had some fears, and one of them was not being important, not being valued. Individual fighters valued him, but as a whole, I think the relationships started to deteriorate because he didn’t feel valued.”

According to Couture, Follis never explicitly asked for an ownership stake in the gym but did occasionally tease ideas he had to improve membership and team performance.

“At the same time, he was very guarded about that information,” Couture said. “He wanted to be remunerated for that information, so we kind of did a dance. He never came right out and said, ‘I want to be a partner.’ But at the same time we had several discussions where he wanted to sit down and talk but never said what was what.”

The relationship continued to deteriorate until November 2017, when Follis abruptly resigned from his coaching position. In the weeks that followed, Follis started reaching out to old friends and colleagues, even though, as Sonnen put it, “He was well known for not returning phone calls.” But far from seeming morose, he told of exciting new ventures to come.

“He was doing great,” Sonnen said. “Everything was great. He had a girlfriend he really liked. He was going to open a gym. It was going to be called Follis MMA. I didn’t know where it was going, if I was going to be asked to be an investor, but he was really after my opinion. The only reason that surprised me was that wasn’t our relationship. I was always after his opinion. He was the coach, and I was the fighter.”

Only later did many of his fighters find themselves reflecting on the nature of that dynamic. For them, Follis was the one who solved their problems. He asked how they were doing and took a genuine interest in the answer. Usually it didn’t occur to them to put the same questions to him. The one-way street they were on simply didn’t run in that direction.

“Coach knows everything, right?” Sonnen said. “He’s the captain, and he knows everything. He tells other people good job, and no one tells him good job. That’s just the way it goes. Athletes are selfish, and coaches are selfless. I think that’s a big part of it. I don’t think he knew who to turn to. I think I greatly underestimated, during my entire relationship with him, that he didn’t really have a support system.”

But privately, Fukuno had worried for some time about Follis’ depression. After Randy’s suicide, she said, Follis had gone through his brother’s old journals, looking for an insight into his mental state.

“His brother had written about how people thought of suicide as selfish, but what was really selfish was other people wanting him to remain alive with that kind of pain,” Fukuno said. “When Robert told me that, he had this look on his face that made me think, he just found his justification. And you could never really pressure him to talk about things if he didn’t want to. If you tried to push him, he would push back and push back hard. I just tried to really pay attention so I could see when he was smiling and laughing through the pain.”

One day that week, Fukuno came home from work to find Follis gone – “which was not necessarily unusual,” she said. Still, the more she thought about it, the more concerned she became.

“I hadn’t heard from him all day, and the night before he had just seemed completely deflated,” she said. “I tried calling and texting him. His phone went straight to voicemail. I checked his Facebook page and saw he had shut it down, and that was my first clue. Him having a Facebook page was important to him for business. Him shutting that down was a big red flag.”

Follis’ last social media activity came sometime after midnight Dec. 13, 2017. The coroner’s office estimated his time of death at some time later that morning. It was two days later when his body was found in one of his favorite hiking spots.

To many fighters, his death came out of nowhere, leaving them with questions they couldn’t answer. For Kevin Lee, who’d worked with Follis leading up to a fight for the interim UFC lightweight title that October, one of the first reactions was guilt.

“It took me a long time to understand why,” Lee said. “A part of you wants to blame yourself. Especially coming off that fight with Tony Ferguson. I’m like, ‘Man, if I had won that fight – is that the reason why?'”

Quarry found himself reflecting on a few weeks earlier, when he’d been in Las Vegas on business, but a plan to meet up with Follis never quite solidified.

“If I would have known that in a few weeks he was going to take his own life, I would have made sure we met up so I could talk to him,” Quarry said. “But that’s how hindsight works. A lot of times, when it’s happening, you don’t see the signs.”

At Xtreme Couture, the mood was split. Some were heartbroken by the loss, while others were angry. They had looked to Follis as a mentor for so long. They’d been inspired and motivated by him. Did those lessons still matter? How could he be so good at helping others, but so incapable of helping himself?

For Nicksick, it wasn’t until Follis’ older brother Rick visited them after the memorial that he finally got some answers.

“It was almost like talking to him in person,” Nicksick said. “When Rick came to see us, the way he looked and talked, his mannerisms, it was almost the exact same. It gave us a lot of closure. Being able to speak with him, he’s a very gentle man, and it helped us get some insight into what had happened. It was almost like being able to say goodbye to him in person.”

The way Rick explained it, he went to visit the team because he wanted to ensure they were free of any hint of guilt, in part because he knew how tortured Robert had been by guilt over his younger brother’s suicide.

“I know how he felt about those guys, about Eric and the Coutures and Dennis,” Rick said. “I wanted to let them know that there was no hard feelings. Because Robert had no hard feelings. I knew how Robert felt, and I didn’t want them to carry any guilt about it, thinking that they could have or should have done something. I wanted them to know that they carried none of that on their shoulders, and I wanted to explain to them why. I wanted them to have peace.”

For Fukuno, the meticulous planning of Follis’ suicide, as well as the journals he left behind, helped her understand, even if the loss still hurt her deeply.

“He didn’t leave any unanswered questions for me, and I think that was intentional,” Fukuno said. “We weren’t fighting. We weren’t going through anything like that when this happened. He alleviated any sense of guilt that he knew I might feel.”

As has time has passed, the how and why of Follis’ death have finally begun to seem less important for some of those he impacted most in the fight game. Their friend was hurting, whether they fully realized it or not. And then he was gone, whether they understood it or didn’t.

Their choice moving forward was deciding how they wanted to remember him.

“I remember the smile,” Couture said. “I remember the times we worked together, the times he was in my corner, the times on the mat and discussing fighters, discussing the sport. Those are the things I’ll never forget. The couple of anomalies after his brother passing, and the things that happened in the gym, those in no way diminish the person that Robert was in our lives.”

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Phone: 1-800-273-8255 (English)

Other mental health and substance abuse resources:

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: samhsa.gov

National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP

Behavioral health treatment services locator: https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov

National Alliance on Mental Illness: nami.org

Phone: 1-800-950-6264, or text “NAMI” to 741741.

MMAjunkie’s Matt Erickson contributed to this story.