It’s not being a six-time world champion combat athlete. It’s not being considered one of the greatest mixed martial arts fighters of all time, having won both the UFC and King of Pancrase titles for Mixed Martial Arts. It’s not that he’s been in multiple movies and had a role on Chuck Norris’s Walker, Texas Ranger Mezger has multiple millionaires on his contact list and has trained US military Special Forces and world champion athletes. He fought in Japan for ten years and was practically a household name there. The man is literally a living legend. But these accolades don’t make him most proud.

Those victories were won not because Mezger enjoyed fighting or aspired from a young age to be a world champion in five separate sports. What made him such an effective fighter was his ability to use so many different skills at once. But he never enjoyed the idea of fighting. In fact, most of the men he fought were also good friends. The back story to Mezger’s fighting career is not a happy one. He grew up in Richardson with a physically abusive father who spoke with fists more than words. His mom and three brothers lived under that same cloud. So Mezger started wrestling at four years old, partly out of self-defense.

When he was eight, everything changed. He saw Rocky Balboa on the big screen and decided that he would be a boxing champion one day like his new hero. However, after a few bloody noses, he switched to wrestling. From that point on, his athletic star rose. He joined a Select wrestling team for 12-year-olds when he was ten and began winning. Athletics gave him a boost in his self-esteem and helped him compartmentalize the pain from his tumultuous home life.

According to Mezger, he was a smart youngster, but he got off track at an early age. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty, he was shot, stabbed, in gang fights and in a self-destructive spiral. He went to college at Texas Tech but left after his freshman year. Says Mezger, “There weren’t a lot of options for a guy like me.” Fortunately, thanks to an incredible mentor at Sunbelt Karate named Billye Jackson and others in the fighting world who supported him, Mezger began to turn his life around. As he reflects on his time with Jackson, who became his coach from then on, he states, “Superman was not a tall white guy from Metropolis. Instead, he was a short black man from Mexia.”

Interviewing a guy like Mezger was a little scary. Sitting across the table from someone who could literally kill you if he wanted to was uncomfortable at first. But then he began to talk…and the softer side of the man emerged. What makes him most proud? His wife Michelle and his three children— Alex, Logan and Rachel—are his true treasures. He describes Michelle as “modest, kind, smart and genuinely excited for other people’s success.” Alex, their oldest, lives in Atlanta and Logan, a wrestler and recent Jesuit graduate, heads to college this fall. Rachel is still in high school at Ursuline. Know what keeps a man like Guy Mezger up at night? It’s sending Logan off to college. For someone who has so much control of his life, having Logan far from home worries him.

In addition to being an incredibly loving family man, Mezger is also a naturopathic doctor who specializes in men’s health. He now spends 50% of his time teaching mixed martial arts and 50% practicing medicine. He is the lead instructor and CEO of Mezger Martial Arts, located within the Hidden Gym in Richardson. One of the best mixed martial arts instructors in the world, Mezger sees the sport as a vehicle for making people all-around better human beings. And he mentors them into an understanding that true strength does not live in one’s muscles; instead, it’s founded on reaching out with kindness and compassion but being able to back the gentleness up with strength.

The Mezger family

Mezger being trained by Billye Jackson for his first UFC fight