Remembering MMA Announcer Chris "Big Poppa" Schnake

On August 30, 2011, beloved MMA announcer Chris "Big Poppa" Schnake passed away suddenly and without warning. Having known "Big Poppa" since his start in MMA with Victory Jay in the early 2000s, and then through his subsequent work with Monty Cox of Extreme Challenge and Terry Trebilcock of King of the Cage, I considered him not just a friend but also a great talent who deserved recognition. In the current issue of Gladiator I decided to write an extensive story on Big Poppa to give him credit for his tireless years of devotion to MMA. Just two weeks ago on 8-20-11, at a King of the Cage show at Riverwind Casino in Norman, Oklahoma, I gave him a copy of Gladiator Magazine with Renoldo "Jacare" Souza on the cover and sat with him while he read the article. "What a great legacy this story is," he said. "I can't believe how long you made it." I told him that if anyone deserved the recognition that he did. Now just 10 days later his life has tragically and unexpectedly ended, but his legacy, as he himself said, will continue on. I've always believed that people should be given recognition while they are around to see it themselves, and that accolades shouldn't come after they are gone. It's important that people know that they are appreciated and what they've done with their lives has mattered. That was also Schnake's belief and we discussed that on more than one occasion and he was always on the front lines of making sure that people who mattered were given credit for it to their faces. I'm so very glad that I wrote his article, was there to see Big Poppa read it for the first time in person, and that he realized that he did matter very much to all those around him and was an important part of the growth of MMA as a core historical figure. He will be sorely missed. -Todd Hester

Big Poppa Schnake: The Minister of Madness
story and photos by Todd Hester

One of MMA’s most memorable announcers, Poppa Schnake has plied his trade across the bars, ballrooms and arenas of America for over a decade, preaching the gospel of MMA. A fanatical high school wrestler despite his diminutive size, whatever Chris “Big Poppa” Schnake lacked in physical presence he more than made up for with his piercing voice which sounded like it came from the throat of a giant. Joining the Marines straight out of high school, he got his first taste of announcing at clubs near El Toro Airbase in California, where he was promoted from doorman to deejay when the club owner kept hearing his voice all over the club. Returning to his home of Jacksonville, Florida after his discharge, he hooked up with some old high school friends and eventually found himself in Omaha, Nebraska, where one of them was originally from and had opened a business and was sponsoring MMA events. An MMA fan for years, Schnake was introduced to a promoter who needed an announcer for a fight that same week. He filled in, was an immediate hit with the audience, and away he went. Averaging a show a week over the past 10 years, Papa Schnake has been a tireless ambassador for the sport. No job is too small for him to ignore and no arena too big that he can’t spend time talking to the fans one-on-one and selling them on the sport that has become his lifelong passion.

Q: You’ve been called both the Minister of Madness and the Mouth of MMA. What do those titles even mean?
A: Because I am such a small man in stature I’ve always been called “The Mouth” by my friends just because my voice sounds like its coming out of a giant. There was a wrestling promoter called Jimmy Hart “The Mouth of the South” and since I was originally from Florida I think that nickname of “The Mouth” just stuck with me from that. So it wasn’t a big stretch for that to turn into “The Mouth of MMA” later on. I’ve also been called the “Minister of Madness” which probably fits even better.” I was always the class cut-up and the class clown and I really hated the term “loud and obnoxious” because I always heard it in reference to myself. But now that I’m 37 years old I’ve finally come to realize that I am loud and I am obnoxious and so it’s more of a badge of honor I wear now.

Q: As an MMA announcer and commentator people don’t ride the fence with you.
A: People either love me or hate me. There isn’t much middle ground when you’re talking about Papa Schnake. And that’s okay. I know who my friends are and I know who doesn’t like me and people know where they stand with me. Most people end up liking me because I’m a good guy at heart but it does take people a little time to realize what’s going on in my head. I’ve always said that in order to educate people you had to entertain. So while I’m on the mic at MMA shows I’m mixing education with entertainment in order to teach people. At first it throws people but after a while they mostly get it.

Q: So you’re an acquired taste?
A: I make horrible first impressions because I am loud and boisterous and very in your face when it comes to MMA. A lot of people will say to me, “Dude, why are you so angry all the time?” I’m not angry and I’m not raising my voice at people but I’m just a loud person and that’s my normal volume. I don’t have a mute switch. This is especially the case when I talk about something I’m very passionate about; my voice rises in octaves and decibels. So whenever I’m talking about MMA I am very loud and intense and will tell people that this is the greatest sport in the world. If they don’t see it that way then I’ll tell them that they’re complete idiots for not seeing it. Now I might not say it that exact way but I am very opinionated. How can somebody not be excited about MMA? I just can’t understand when people don’t see how beautiful this sport is.

Q: Where did you get your passion for the sport?
A: I grew up in the Jacksonville, Florida area and I loved wrestling. The sport wasn’t big there at that time but all I wanted to do was to grapple on the mat. We’d train with a small group of guys and then drive down to tournaments in south Florida. I was just crazy about wrestling and my favorite movie was Vision Quest which I watched a hundred times. Around this same time I started watching the UFC on TV and fell in love with it. I watched loved the fighters and their back stories and all the drama of different styles matching up against each other but, of course, I always rooted for the wrestlers. So my passion for MMA came out of my passion for wrestling. Now I don’t follow wrestling because MMA is just so exciting and so real to me.

Q: When did your personal MMA journey start?
A: I went into the Marines straight out of high and got out four years later. I left for boot camp two weeks before my class graduated, did my tour in El Toro as a heavy diesel mechanic for the Third Air Wing. On the weekends I used to work the door at a strip joint until the manager kept hearing my voice all over the club. He decided that with a voice and a personality like mine I could be a DJ without an amplifier and so I started spinning records and announcing the girls. Plus, since I didn’t drink or do drugs I was a safe bet to not raid the cash register or steal bottles from the bar. I had a pretty good life then I had an accident my last year where I got ran over by a truck and shattered both my shins to where they looked like stained glass windows. I was in a wheelchair for six months and went from 163 lbs. shredded to a 200 lb. doughboy. I got an honorable discharge after that and went home to Jacksonville, Florida.

Q: Did you have any plans to get into MMA then?
A: I was still a fan and followed it but it didn’t cross my mind to get involved professionally. I worked in a tire store doing oil changes and alignments until I saved enough money to go to motorcycle mechanic school in Orlando. I had two friends down there who were top body piercers and tattoo artists. So I lived at the shop they worked at, sleeping on the couch in the waiting room, and getting extra money by working the door at an Irish pub. Around this time I forgot to pay a $125 speeding ticket and so they suspended my license. When I got pulled over one night I was arrested and was put in jail for six months. I learned that it isn’t the smartest thing to be loud and obnoxious to the judge who’s hearing your case. When I got out my two friends had moved to Iowa and sent me a ticket to come visit them. That would end up being the thing that changed my life.

Q: So your whole MMA career was an accident?
A: You could call it an accident or you could call it fate. While I was in jail my two friends, Chris and Smitty, had moved to Chris’ hometown of Omaha, Nebraska and opened up their own shop called Big Brain Productions, one of the biggest shops in the Midwest. I got out Sunday and I got a call on Monday from them and they had left me a ticket at the airport to fly up to see them in Omaha. The ticket, though, was to Des Monies, Iowa because it was cheaper flying in there. So they were going to meet me there and drive me to Omaha. On the plane someone had left a copy of a martial arts magazine that had a piece on the Miletich MMA camp. Since I had followed the sport I knew who those guys were. Smitty met me when I got off the plane and told me that we were going to a local sporting event that his tattoo shop was sponsoring. So when we got there and walked into the Omaha Armory I was stunned to see that it was an NHB event, like we used to call it back then, and the Miletich camp was there including Jens Pulver, Matt and Mark Hughes, Jeremy Horn, Pat Miletich himself, and a bunch of other guys. Here were my idols of the sport that I was just reading about and here they were in person.

Q: So how did that lead to announcing?
A: At the time there was a friend of Monty Cox there who was also doing shows of his own in the area. I was talking to him and he said that he needed someone on the mic to introduce the fighters the next week. When I told him that I had some some dejaying he said to come by and he’d give me a turn on the mic. I went there the first night and people just flipped out when I started doing my thing and it just steamrolled from there. Since June of 2000 I’ve been averaging a MMA show a week all over the U.S. I don’t think anyone has done the sheer number of shows I have.

Q: How long did it take you to branch out from Omaha?
A: The first big place was in Des Moines. Victory Jay and I started doing a show there called Toad Hollar Wednesday night fights. We would set up a ring and offer people from the crowd the chance to do submission grappling, kickboxing with gloves and shin pads, or no-hold-barred. You would have eight guys signed up but we wouldn’t have any matches because we were trying to keep everyone within a ten pound difference for NHB fights. We didn’t care so much if it was submission grappling but the weights for NHB we were careful about because we didn’t want to see anyone get really hurt. So while we waited for matches to be made from the crowd I would just stay on the mic and harangue people and tell stories and jokes until we got a few matches and could start them up. Then we’d run through them and I’d talk for 10 or 15 minutes more until a couple of more matches were made. So that’s really where I learned to mix entertainment with announcing because if you didn’t keep the crowd occupied people would start to throw things...at me.

Q: Did the Toad Hollar show immediately catch on?
A: The first night Victory Jay and I were there we had 12 people in the crowd. Four of our guys who helped to set up the ring fought just so we had a show. Nobody from the crowd fought because there were only 12 of them. After the show was over I walked around and shook hands with each of those 12 people and thanked them for coming and talked about MMA to all of them. The next week 54 people showed up and we had five fights. The week after that there was 103 people and even more people. It just kept building up from there and when we were at our peak we had 1138 slammed into this bar, screaming and yelling for what was going on in the ring. A lot of the Des Moines boys who would later fight professionally in MMA started coming to Toad Hollar to get fights. Some of these guys would come in with teams with NHB gear and gloves and in the other corner you’d have some tough cowboy who take off his boots and strip down to his bare waist with his levis to go against him. It was the days of the Wild West MMA shows and went on until 2003 or 2004 four until the sport started to get more regulated and controlled, which wasn’t a bad thing. It was just the sport growing up.

Q: From the time you started announcing professionally in 2000 you’ve been a regular with several promoters such as Monty Cox and Terry Trebilcock.
A: Monty Cox is a legend and I with him in Extreme Challenge 38, I think, in 2001, and Monty is now getting close to having done 200 of those shows. So that’s been a long run for me and I have a great deal of admiration for what he’s done for the sport and how he has grown it. I’m honored to not just call Monty Cox my boss as a promoter but also to call him a very good friend of mine. He laughs as me because I’ve watched his kids grow up and they things at home that they’ve watched me say inside the cage. At a lot of the smaller shows that aren’t on pay-per-view the timekeepers don’t know how to ring the bell because they’re freaking idiots. They hit it on the top instead of the side and nobody hears it. So I’ll be sitting next to Monty and I’ll yell out “Time! Time! Time” so the referee knows to stop them from fighting. So his kids, who are teenagers now, will get done with dinner and yell out “Time! Time! Time!” from hearing me say it. It’s freaking hilarious.

Q: How did you start doing all the major King of the Cage events?
A: There was a KOTC show in Davenport, Iowa and Jeff Curran was headlining against Krazy Horse and I did some commentating with Eric Apple and Jens Pulver. During that broadcast I made some comments about a fighter, who was a great friend of mine, that was not well-received by him. He called up Terry and was extremely mad and was threatening to sue him. Now I don’t think he ever would have done it but Terry didn’t know that and so he got really angry at me and vowed to never use me again. So we got off to a rocky start to say the least. But then another friend of mine started helping Terry out with some local shows in his area and showed Terry a tape of me doing announcing inside the cage. So Terry gave me one more chance at a show in Rockford, Illinois in the Metro Center and I did the preliminary fights and Terry liked it and I’ve been doing his shows every since. Now I’m guessing that I announce to over 100 thousand fans a year at live events.

Q: What has allowed you to connect with the fans so they respond to your message?
A: I love what I do and I’m out there in the trenches week after week, talking about MMA to people at the shows and in the towns the shows are held in. I have a great passion for the sport and I think that is what people cue into. If you’re a fake and are just in it for the money only then people can tell. But when you’re genuine, even if they don’t agree with you 100 percent, then they respond to you. I’ve even have fighters come up to me and tell me that no one gets them amped up to fight more than I do just because they know I really excited to be there and love the sport. If I can get a fan who is watching half as excited about MMA as I am then they’ll be a fan for life.

Q: What’s the nicest thing anyone ever said about you?
A: I’ve had people stop me on the street in Las Vegas and other places and ask if I was the King of the Cage announcer and that is always a real thrill for me to be recognized as being associated with the sport. Probably the greatest compliment I ever got came from the late Ryan Bennett, who I used to radio shows with about the UFC for about a year and a half before he passed away. He was asked in an article right before he died who he had the best chemistry with and he said that it was me. I’ve always remembered that because even though Ryan never told me that directly it let me know that you can effect people in positive ways even if you aren’t aware of it simply by being passionate and enthusiastic. That is the type of announcer and fan and ambassador for the sport that I always want to be.

Chris “Big Poppa” Schnake passed away suddenly on August 30, 2011 at the age of 37.