The life of a UFC wife can have many ups and downs

The fight over, it's just beginning again.

"He loses, and he's not going to be a very happy person and the next three months are going to be miserable," she says. "He's going to be driven to win again, start training, and find out what went wrong."

She believes, of course, he will win. "And it will be great for a week," she says.

Now some folks might wonder how any wife can handle her husband's face being torn up or bones broken, but as Frank says, "Whether she can handle it or not, it can't stop it from happening."

What would you expect from someone who makes machismo a career? But you know what -- he wasn't so tough just a few years ago.

He bought a motorcycle, his wife horrified. "Why would you take such a risk?" she says.

"If something happens to you, you risk your career, you don't get to compete, you don't get to train, don't get to use everything your dad taught you, and you know how much you admire your father. You don't get the chance to teach your kids what your father taught you."

When motorcycle hits car a little later, Mir goes flying 60 feet into the air, a helmet saving brain damage, but his leg broken in two places, his knee so damaged there was talk he might never walk again.

Boo-hoo, though, just isn't enough for Mir, who goes into depression -- drinking and drugs following, "one night just crying at the dinner table," Jenny says, "because he didn't think he could protect his family any more, someone running off with our little Isabella and he can't even run after them."

No way for anyone to know what had to be endured, as she says. "If it was just me, I don't know, maybe I would have left him, but it was the kids.

"I was the only person there for him, everyone else abandoning him. I was asking myself, 'Did I do enough to save Daddy?' and 'How could I leave him in the mess that he was?' -- for them."

She says she "struggled with addiction before meeting with Frank, so I knew I couldn't say to him, 'quit right now.' I just had to gradually sober him up."

So he did, stinking up the octagon the first three times he tried coming back as a competitor, at one point submitting to the disappointment and tapping out, he thought, for good.

His wife wasn't buying it, though, sending him back into the cage, and now he's standing on stage beside his martial arts-teaching father in front of thousands of admiring fans, one submission or knockout from being the UFC's heavyweight champ.

"He's still in high school courses," Mir tells one interviewer after another in sizing up Brock Lesnar, his opponent who has only four of these fights on his resume. "I'm doing advanced graduate work."

The interviews over, he now has plans to join 40 others for a pasta dinner, and just maybe play video games rather than go to bed.

"My wife won't ever let me stay up all night to play video games," Frank says, "but now this is my chance to say, 'I've got a fight tomorrow and I really need to do this to relax.' So we'll see."

Talk about a fight no man can win; good luck, tough guy.

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t.j.simers@latimes.com