Documentarian Charlie Minn: Diego Sanchez has had a crazy life all his own

If the nickname “Mi Vida Loca” hadn’t been taken, it easily could apply to the life and career of Albuquerque MMA fighter Diego Sanchez.

Yet, while the parallels are many and obvious, Sanchez is by no means Johnny Tapia 2.0. Sanchez has lived his own life, had his own career, his own story.

Documentary filmmaker Charlie Minn decided to tell it.

“Nightmare UFC Legend: Diego Sanchez,” Minn’s film, is scheduled for showings starting Friday at theaters in the Albuquerque area.

Some 12 years ago, documentarian Eddie Alvarez produced a film about Tapia — focusing less on the late, legendary Albuquerque boxer’s ring career than on his life as a whole.

Minn has taken a similar approach with Sanchez.

“I think if people are looking for a movie about his fights, just his fights, that’s not the case,” Minn said in a phone interview. “It’s a clean sweep of the man … a clean sweep of a very eccentric athlete, a very, very in-depth, comprehensive look at what makes the man tick.

“We talk about his training, we talk about his family, we talk about his addictions. We talk about his coaching, we talk about (whether) he should retire.”

The fights, of course, are there as well — from his wrestling state championship victory for Del Norte in 2000, to the stunning victories in the Octagon that made him a UFC star and an Albuquerque icon, to the brutal, bloody defeats that stopped him from ever wearing a UFC title belt.

Minn talked at length with Sanchez, who, he said, was forthright and sometimes brutally so.

“After we conducted the first long interview, which I thought was sufficient,” Minn said, “he contacted me and said, ‘I’d like to say more.’ … “He said, ‘I want to let the world know that I had a substance-abuse problem.’

“He admitted that, and then he said he’s clean now. I’ll let the audience decide that part.”

Minn filmed hours upon hours of interviews with people who’d been close to Sanchez, interacted with him or wrote about him in one phase or another of his life and career.

Among them:

Sanchez’s mother, Kenny Sanchez, and his daughter, Dieja; Charlie Dotson, his wrestling coach at Del Norte; Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn, his longtime coaches at Albuquerque’s Jackson-Wink MMA; Albuquerque combat-sports journalists Mike Frankl, Jorge Hernandez and Michael Carlyle; UFC President Dana White, and many others.

One person who made a major impact on Sanchez’s career in its later years but was not interviewed — and is not so much as mentioned in the film — is Josh Fabia, who trained Sanchez after he left Jackson-Wink in 2019. That failed relationship ended with Sanchez’s removal from the UFC roster in 2021.

Fabia, who’d learned of the upcoming documentary, called and emailed the Journal, apparently concerned that he might be mentioned in a negative light.

He needn’t have worried. A ton of ink was spilled in the MMA world on the Sanchez-Fabia relationship and breakup during its brief span, but Minn saw it as little more than a blip on a far wider screen.

“Diego went off to other areas, went off with other trainers,” Minn said. (Sanchez had left Jackson-Wink and Albuquerque to train in San Diego in 2008, returning a few years later).

“I think I did a good job of telling the story without mentioning (Fabia) at all.”

As for the film’s title, Sanchez’s nickname for most of his career has been “Nightmare.” For a period of time, he changed his nickname to “The Dream.” Then, he changed it back.

That reflects the mercurial nature of Sanchez, Minn said, that he found so fascinating and so worthy a subject of a documentary.

The film is, Minn concluded, “Everything you want to know about Diego Sanchez. … We kind of cover it all.”

Some may remember Minn from his brief stay in Albuquerque as a TV sports anchor at Channel 13 in the 1990s. His résumé as a documentarian includes “A Nightmare in Las Cruces,” a 2011 film about the still-unsolved Las Cruces bowling alley murders of 1990.