In addition to being one of the least decision-prone fighters to ever grace the Octagon, James Irvin is also notorious for being the unluckiest bastard in the history of the sport. From poorly-timed injuries and ill-advised weight cuts to chemical misadventures and freak accidents, the Sandman has suffered through enough hardships to fill the careers of ten journeymen. So with the help of our friends at Havoc Store, we put together an illustrated timeline of the most unfortunate moments in Irvin’s MMA career, which you can check out after the jump.

Enjoy, share it with your friends, and show some love to Havoc Store by visiting their blog or following them on Facebook. And James? You have our sympathy, dude.

(Photo courtesy of Sherdog.)

Following career setbacks due to alcohol and steroids, a one-year suspension due to unapproved painkillers was the last thing that Chris Leben needed in his life. But in a recent appearance on MMAFighting.com’s The MMA Hour, Leben spoke publicly for the first time since the incident last November, saying that getting caught following his loss to Mark Munoz at UFC 138 was the best thing to ever happen to him:

“I’ve battled drugs and alcohol. I’ve battled with those for my entire life. I’ve had an issue with being addicted to painkillers for years now. I had some issues with my camp and it was almost a cry for help. I knew I was going to get caught and I just didn’t care at the time. I’m extremely embarrassed, I feel like I let down the UFC, but at the same time I think getting caught is probably the best thing to ever happen to me. The UFC has been unbelievable, they sent me to a rehab facility and they really took care of me.”

As Leben tells it, he had hoped to go cold-turkey off the painkillers before the fight, but his addiction was too powerful:

(Photo via the Justin Levens Remembrance Album on CombatLifestyle.com / Props to Deadspin‘s brilliant “Dead Wrestler of the Week” feature for the inspiration.)

By Ben Goldstein

All murder-suicides are shocking. Not all of them are entirely surprising.

On December 17th, 2008, UFC/WEC veteran Justin Levens and his wife Sara McLean-Levens were found dead inside their condominium in Laguna Niguel, California, both from gunshot wounds. Initial evidence suggested that Justin was the shooter. “It was a chest wound that penetrated her heart and killed her, and his was to the head,” said O. C. Sheriff Coroner’s Office spokesman Jim Amormino.

Amormino confirmed that painkillers and anti-depressants were discovered in the Levens’s home, along with the handgun Justin allegedly used to end their lives. Police had visited Justin and Sara at least twice in the previous month, once to investigate a possible drug overdose.

At the time of his death, Justin Levens was 28 years old and hadn’t won an MMA match in over two years. He’d gone 0-5 in 2007 — an agonizing year in which his close friend and IFL teammate Jeremy Williams committed suicide, also by shooting himself — and was dealt a six-month suspension by the California State Athletic Commission in July 2008 when a pre-fight drug test came back off-the-charts for the painkiller Oxymorphone. For the last five months of his life, Levens was unable to earn a living as a fighter, and fell deeper into a spiral of depression and prescription drug use.

Justin didn’t leave a suicide note. There were no signs of a struggle. He and Sara had already been dead for four days when their bodies were discovered.

(Leben might need to pray that MMA fans and the UFC don’t turn their backs on him in the next year while he serves his latest suspension. Ask Karo Parisyan.)

Anyone who says that the UFC isn’t policing its own athletes when it comes to drug use needs to talk to Chris Leben.

The troubled UFC middleweight, who blamed a massive weight cut on his sluggish performance, tested positive for Oxymorphone and Oxycodone in tests administered by the promotion following his UFC 138 loss on November 5 to Mark Munoz. As a result, he has been suspended by Zuffa for a year.

For those keeping track, this is the second time “The Crippler” has been popped for pissing dirty by the UFC. The first time was after his UFC 89 decision loss to Michael back in October 2008 when he tested positive for Stanozolol. Between these incidents, he also got picked up for DUI for the second time in October 2010, which clearly reveals a pattern of someone who needs help for a substance abuse problem or someone who really needs a hobby during the winter months.

(“Can’t….stop….giggling.”)

According to UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva, he injured his shoulder while sparring with Junior dos Santos prior to his UFC 134 bout with Yushin Okami and was put on painkillers for the injury. Silva revealed to the Brazilian magazine Veja that he was in pain the day of the bout and that he took some painkillers to ensure he could fight, but says that unlike guys like Bas Rutten and Karo Parisyan who failed to reveal their use of analgesics to their respective athletic commissions prior to bouts, he did tell the group in charge of overseeing the event that he took the unnamed drug prior to the bout.

“A month before the fight I injured my shoulder while training with Junior dos Santos and I was feeling a lot of pain in Rio. I had to take some medicine and warn the athletic commission about it. I’ve talked to my doctors. I had an MRI and then I started feeling pains in my shoulder but the doctors let me go and said it was not that serious,” Silva says. “It’s a small injury, but I guess it’s on the [rotator] cuff and bothers me. I’ll rest for a while and get healed.”

(Melanson and Parisyan, before it all fell apart. Props: elitefts.com)

In a new interview with Five Ounces of Pain, Karo Parisyan’s longtime friend and training partner Neil Melanson confirmed that Parisyan’s latest last-minute fight-cancellation was directly related to the painkiller addiction that has haunted him for years. After Melanson got permission from Karo to go public with the story, he laid it all out:

(You guys know this thing doesn’t even count, right?)

When the Nevada State Athletic Commission ruled yesterday to change Karo Parisyan’s decision win over Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 94 into a “no decision” on account of the various painkillers running through Parisyan’s veins at the time of the fight, I wondered the same thing I always wonder: how does this affect me?

As you may recall, I put a bet down on Kim when I was going crazy in Vegas the day before UFC 94.  I lost and was forced to dance for nickels under a bridge just to get enough money to make it home.  But with the bout result changed, did the MGM Grand now owe me my money back?  Were they also on the hook for the price of the tetanus shot I had to get when I got home (those nickels aren’t clean, no matter what anyone tells you)?  

I didn’t know, so I called the MGM Grand.  Turns out, they didn’t really know either.  After a lengthy back and forth, they gave up and told me to call the sportsbook at the Mirage, whose policies the MGM Grand follows on this sort of thing.  So I did.  I called the Mirage and got transferred around a bunch.  I got told several different times that the sportsbook didn’t take calls, but my question confused enough people, and eventually they put me through to the sportsbook, where my hopes were immediately shot down.

(Parisyan was also "strongly encouraged" to get an eyebrow-wax. Photo courtesy of UFC.com.)

It seems like our earlier post on today’s Penn/St. Pierre NSAC hearing contained a bit of foreshadowing. Yes, fights in Nevada can be overturned if one of the fighters was using banned substances, and Karo Parisyan just learned that the hard way. "The Heat" was busted last month after testing positive for three different painkillers following his three-round snoozer with Dong Hyun Kim at UFC 94. Well, the verdict has finally come down, and Parisyan has been nailed with a nine-month suspension, a $32,000 fine (40% of his total purse), and the official voiding of his split-decision victory against Kim. That fight will now be known as a "no decision," which means that Kim is still technically undefeated. As Sherdog reports:

(Photo courtesy of 5oz.)

Following his bust for three unapproved painkillers following UFC 94, Karo Parisyan was hoping to take his suspension and try to move on with his life. Unfortunately, he’s still stuck in punitive limbo, as he was informed in a Nevada State Athletic Commission hearing yesterday that a final decision regarding his positive drug test won’t be announced until next month. Though Parisyan is still under a temporary suspension, his actual suspension will be retroactive to January 31st; in other words, it won’t begin on the date that the final suspension is determined, which is good news. Still, the uncertainty isn’t exactly helping the Heat’s panic-related issues. As he told MMA Junkie:

(Photo courtesy of MMA Junkie.)

Shortly after Karo Parisyan’s unfortunate post-UFC 94 drug test results were released, the Heat expressed frustration at his situation, telling MMA Weekly that he’d revealed all his medications before the fight and was under the impression that he was not in violation of any rules. But Nevada State Athletic Commission executive director Keith Kizer has contradicted Parisyan’s account of the events, spurring the troubled UFC welterweight to sort of change his story. Now, Parisyan says his complete honesty about his painkiller use didn’t happen until after after the fight:

Apparently, that’s not a good enough excuse. Regarding Parisyan’s statement that a prescription would absolve him from punishment, Keith Kizer was dismissive:

(We could have used some painkillers during this fight too, now that you mention it. Photo courtesy of MMA Weekly.)

The Nevada State Athletic Commission has released the drug test results from UFC 94, and every fighter passed their screenings for banned substances except for Karo Parisyan, who was apparently medicated to the gills with the painkillers Hydrocodone, Hydromorphone, and Oxymorphone during his uninspiring split-decision victory over Dong Hyun Kim; Oxymorphone was also one of the painkillers that earned James Irvin a nine-month suspension following his loss to Anderson Silva in July. FiveOuncesofPain gets their pharmacist on:

A surprised Karo Parisyan told MMA Weekly that he revealed all his medications on his pre-fight medical paperwork, and believed that he had followed proper procedure and was not in violation of any rules. Unfortunately he appears to be, and the ensuing punishment could jeopardize his next fight, which was rumored to be a matchup with Josh Koscheck.

Parisyan has been engaged in a widely publicized battle with panic attacks in recent months — which led to a last-second pullout from a fight against Yoshiyuki Yoshida at UFC 88 in September — but had declined to take anti-depressants to deal with the illness. Whether that decision was due to an unwillingness to complicate his life with athletic commissions, or plain old Armenian Pride, it isn’t clear — but it has now become a moot point.

Parisyan will likely face a fine and a suspension. More details to come.

(“Indeed I did have a relationship with methadone that was not appropriate.”)

In a letter received by the Nevada State Athletic Commission yesterday, James Irvin admitted using methadone and oxymorphone prior to his July 19th beatdown at the hands of Anderson Silva; Irvin had tested positive for the heavy-duty painkillers in a post-fight piss-test. As the Sandman wrote:

“In the days leading up to my fight with Anderson Silva, I experienced some residual pain in my foot from a previous injury. I made the extremely poor choice to take some pain medications that I did not have a prescription for. I realize this was an ignorant and dangerous decision.”

Irvin, who tore his ACL and MCL during a fight with Thiago Silva at UFC 71 in May 2007, also broke his foot earlier this year while preparing for a scheduled fight against Rashad Evans, which was to go down at UFC 85. According to Sherdog, Irvin accepted the Anderson Silva fight only days after re-entering the gym following his recovery period from the foot injury. Irvin has been temporarily suspended by the NSAC pending a disciplinary hearing, and likely faces a longer suspension and a fine.