Michael Chandler is one of the biggest names in MMA with some notable fights in the UFC and being a three-time Bellator Lightweight Champion. Moreover, Chandler is also well-known for being a family man. He has a wife and two adopted kids.
He got married to Brie Willett, who is in the medical profession just like her father, in 2014. They adopted their first son in 2017 and, five years later, in 2022, the couple’s second adopted son was born.
(Watch from 1:14:00 minutes)
In a recent interview with Shawn Ryan, Chandler had a long segment where he spoke about his wife and his children. ‘Iron’ talks very lovingly about his family and he has a great story behind it all.
Michael Chandler was a distant admirer of Brie Willett before convincing her to become his wife
Chandler narrated a fascinating story about how he first got to know about Brie and how they met. The UFC fighter was a wrestler during his college days and he chipped his tooth during his freshman year at the University of Missouri. At the time, Dr. Kent Willett was a famous dentist and Chandler went to his clinic to get his tooth fixed. At the clinic, Chandler saw Brie’s pictures, she was Kent’s daughter. He immediately fell in love with her.
He admitted it was weird to fall in love with a picture, “I fell in love with a picture of this girl I had never met.” He kept talking about having a vision that he would marry her. Years passed and the pair, who were Facebook friends as they had mutual contacts, were even more distanced than when they first began. Chandler explained that he had envisioned them crossing paths but that never happened.
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So, around four years after he saw her picture in the dentist’s clinic, Chandler finally texted her on Facebook. She gave him her e-mail address as she was about to leave the social media site. Chandler talked about how Brie took months to respond and he responded within no time.
Almost two years of e-mailing later, the pair finally went on a date on January 24, 2013, in a coffee shop near Brie’s workplace in Missouri. About their first meeting, he said, “She walked in the door and I saw her silhouette and I knew that my wife was walking through the door.”
He explained later, “When we had our first date, in my mind, it was almost like if she’s anything like I think she might be she’s probably my wife. But, she actually exceeded expectations of what I thought she could be. So, then it was just trying to convince her to uh you know to to be with me.”
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The pair dated for 11 months before they got engaged and in September 2014, they were married. He said, “We dated for about 10-11 months and I got down on one knee in San Diego, California, and then we got married in San Diego, California, four, five, or six months later.”
Chandler regularly posts about his wife and their stories on Instagram. He is very proud of her career in medicine and supports her at every point.
Michael Chandler and Brie Willett have adopted two sons, Hap and Ace
During the interview, Chandler opened up about how from an early age, Brie wanted adoption in her future. He said, “Ever since she was like 13, 14, 15 years old, she always told people that she wanted to adopt.”
Chandler proceeded to talk in-depth about the adoption procedure and how it takes years to adopt a child. He said it was a “full-circle moment” to adopt a dark-skinned child. One of the first pictures that Chandler saw of Brie was of her with a child in Jamaica. She was probably there to help underprivileged people along with her father.
There was a lot of controversy about Chandler adopting a dark-skinned child but he does not believe in any of it. He talked about being questioned, “You’re a white dude from Missouri living in Nashville, how are you going to raise black children?”
His response to the questions was, “I’m not raising black children, I’m raising children.”
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He further said, “Our skin color, our gender, or our sex or political affiliations or all these different identity politics or the identities that we put on each other when we really we’re just human beings on this Earth. There are certain things about being a good person that transcend skin color and age and sex and religion and all of those things.”
The couple grew their family by adopting Hap in 2017 and then Ace joined their lives in 2022. He said it was a difficult decision when it came to adopting a second child as the couple were deep into their careers. He said, “There was a time when we thought we might just be one and done.”
However, he is happy with their decision. He says, “[Hap] is a wonderful big brother and Ace is a little firecracker.” Chandler loves his family very much.