Andrei Arlovski May Have Recently Tried to Kill Himself

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(Photo courtesy of MMA Mania.)

Getting knocked out in two consecutive high-profile fights has to be a devastating blow to a fighter’s confidence. And the idea of Tim Sylvia banging your ex-girlfriend, sure, that would make anybody want to throw up until they died. But we weren’t expecting this troubling bit of news from a fighters.com article posted yesterday:

Fighters.com’s tenth-ranked heavyweight “Pitbull” Andrei Arlovski (14-7) confessed to playing Russian roulette Wednesday night*, a suicidal gamble during which a revolver is loaded with a single round, the cylinder spun, and then placed against the temple. The hopeless player pulls the trigger, chancing the bullet could end their life.

“First time I was 16, second time I was 30,” said the thirty-year old former UFC heavyweight champion. “It’s when you don’t care about anything.”

…

After his devastating second knockout loss, Arlovski returned to his native Belarus. “I talked to some priest. He read me a poem,” Arlovski related. He also spent couch time with a sports psychologist to the Russian Olympic wrestling team and communed with his family.

“I cried a lot after my fights, you know. When I lost to Fedor, I cried. When I lost to Rogers, I cried. You might be surprised, but I had tears a lot in my last relationship,” Arlovski told, referencing his relationship with Playboy model Patricia Mikula.

* I’m taking this to mean that he made his confession to Fighters.com last night, not that he played Russian Roulette last night.

Hopfully the poem that the priest read him was so good that it made Arlovski not want to put a gun to his head anymore, but some ongoing professional help would probably be wise in this situation. To play Russian Roulette even once would suggest that you might be one chair short of a dinette set. To do it more than once would suggest that it’s only a matter of time before you die tragically.

Arlovski went on to say that he’s still working with Freddie Roach and plans to have his professional boxing debut in the fall.