Ben Askren’s win probability was zero. Not the betting kind — the biological kind. The former UFC welterweight and Olympic wrestler walked into a Las Vegas hospital last May thinking he had back spasms. He walked out more than a month later with someone else’s lungs.
Now he’s scheduling one more competition. Askren, 41, will wrestle Belal Muhammad in a Real American Freestyle match on July 18 in Milwaukee — his birthday — in what he calls a one-and-done return. “I’m going to wrestle once and that’s it,” he told PEOPLE.
The medical timeline is staggering. In late May 2025, Askren dealt with pain he attributed to muscle spasms, something he’d experienced before. He got chiropractic adjustments. He flew to a Bitcoin conference with his wife Amy. His vitals read normal at a hospital visit. The doctor agreed it was likely a spasm and sent him off with medication.
That night, everything deteriorated. Amy pushed him to go back. Askren resisted — he wanted to attend the conference. She won the argument. “After walking into the hospital, I have no recollection of anything for somewhere around 40 days,” he said.
The diagnosis was necrotizing pneumonia — tissue death in the lungs. “Where the lungs were eating themselves,” Askren described it. He spent weeks on a ventilator and life support before receiving a double-lung transplant. Most transplant recipients aren’t as acutely ill as he was; they’ve deteriorated over longer periods. Askren went from self-described healthy 40-year-old to near-death in days.
While he was unconscious, Amy kept a journal. She recorded videos and photographs so that when her husband woke up, he’d have some account of the gap in his life. “It’s like you’re reading a book that you don’t know,” Askren said of reading through it. “When you think you’re just a healthy, 40-year-old male who has zero health problems, and then you wake up 40 days later with two new lungs.”
Recovery at home was its own isolation. For five or six months, Askren wasn’t well enough to go out. His wife took their three daughters to sporting events and activities while he stayed behind. The solitude, he said, drove him toward reflection and reading the Bible. He became a Christian during that stretch and credits the faith with making him more patient and empathetic.
One year post-transplant — a milestone he calls “kind of a big deal in the transplant world” — the Milwaukee date landed on his birthday. RAF, the promotion organizing the event, told him they were coming to town. “That’s my birthday, I should wrestle,” he recalled thinking.
Askren is clear-eyed about where he stands physically. “I’m not who I was, but I’m doing good and I’m not all that far off,” he said. He still faces a long recovery road. The match against Muhammad is a farewell, not a comeback arc — there’s no second act being teed up here. After July 18, Askren plans to run his wrestling academy with his brother and high school coach and be home with his family.
“I wanted to get my ass out there and make it happen, and show people that they can deal with hard things and come back,” he said. The data on double-lung transplant recipients returning to elite-adjacent athletic competition is, to put it clinically, thin. Askren seems to know that. He’s doing it anyway.
Sources:
- People — Ben Askren Returning to the Ring for a Final Time One Year After Lengthy Hospitalization with ‘Deathly’ Pneumonia (Exclusive)
- Yahoo Sports — Ben Askren Returning to the Ring for a Final Time (Exclusive)