March 3, 2010 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:34:21
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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And we're live. | |
| We're live with the champ. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're live. | |
| We're live with the champ. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
|
unidentified
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How are you? | |
| I'm chilling, man. | ||
| How you doing, brother? | ||
| You look better than anybody I've ever seen just a couple weeks out of shoulder surgery. | ||
| I'm a savage, man. | ||
| You're walking around like there's nothing going on. | ||
| They took my savage stem cells out of my own damn back and they threw them in my shoulder. | ||
| Out of your back? | ||
| The hip bone, whatever the fuck. | ||
| Bone marrow, they got in there, centrifuge, spun them, shot them into my shoulder, and shit. | ||
| I should have a sling on, but I'm out Tuesday anyway, so I kind of prematurely decided to come out of the sling. | ||
| Oh, so you're supposed to be out of the sling in six days? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Is that six days? | ||
|
unidentified
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Five days? | |
| Whatever Tuesdays is. | ||
| Five days. | ||
| Yeah, it's Thursday. | ||
| Four or five days, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So my guy's really aggressive. | ||
| I went to Dr. Andrews. | ||
| He's out there in Pensacola. | ||
| And he said, no, we need you back punching in two months. | ||
| So the day after surgery, yeah. | ||
| Hard? | ||
| He said making contact. | ||
| So right after surgery, I was doing two-a-days. | ||
| Fucking full-ass rehab. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, like crazy. | ||
| So I'm like, these dudes is nuts. | ||
| This shoulder, I had this done in 08. I didn't move for like three weeks. | ||
| What'd you have done with that one? | ||
| Same thing, labor. | ||
| Now, are you hurting this in training? | ||
| Are you hurting it in fights? | ||
| A lot of what people don't know about me, they think I just throw my right hand a lot. | ||
| But I wasn't never really confident with my left hand because I had that left labrum tear. | ||
| So it felt weird to throw hooks and it felt weird to use my jab a lot, my shoulder fatigue a lot. | ||
| So I didn't tell a lot of people that, so I just started bombing like hell with my right hand. | ||
| It wasn't because I was just so right hand heavy. | ||
| So now that I had the surgery on this one, I'm going to stem cell both shoulders. | ||
| Rehab the crap out of it and also bought this on the rehab machine called art wave You ever heard of it like a Russian stand is like nuts. | ||
| No, what is it? | ||
| It's like a Russian stem machine that has ability to make your muscles contract 500 times a second At its highest setting. | ||
| So a lot of people use it. | ||
| The Colts use it. | ||
| A lot of pro athletes use it. | ||
| The people that made it in Minnesota, they don't give a lot of information because they don't want their intellectual property stolen. | ||
| But they charge you like $12,000 to $14,000 for the machine. | ||
| Then they charge you $5,000 to show you how to use it. | ||
| Then if you really, really want to know how to use it, they charge you another $5,000. | ||
| So I was lucky enough. | ||
| I hope they ain't watching this shit. | ||
| I was lucky enough to get one from my homie Mark Clayton. | ||
| They used to play with the Rams. | ||
| I just bought his from him. | ||
| And so what is it called again? | ||
| It's called an ARP Wave. | ||
| ARP Wave? | ||
| ARP. A-R-P. ARP Wave. | ||
| I think that stands for Advanced Recovery Program. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Advanced Recovery Program. | ||
| So basically if you think about scar tissue, soft tissue, It has ability. | ||
| It's not like that stem that feels like the needle poking, but it's like intense stem that goes through. | ||
| It can break that fucking scar tissue up, go through soft tissue and basically increase blood flow, range of motion. | ||
| So spraying ankles in one session, that should be healed. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've used it hundreds and hundreds of times. | ||
| I just didn't have the money to buy it until recently. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| I've been using it since college. | ||
| And so now you put this on your shoulder and what... | ||
| Well, you put it on your shoulder and they have like this posture. | ||
| So you hold this posture to this position, right? | ||
| And then they also do a balance test first because if your back is fucked up, your knee, and your balance is off, then neurologically it's not going to actually send the current to the right spot. | ||
| So maybe it's your lower back. | ||
| And your shoes are fucked up, so now your shoes are messed up, so it'll make your lower back hurt. | ||
| You know how to balance that. | ||
| So they do that first, adjust you, make sure you're all balanced out, then they find what they call a hotspot. | ||
| So they put it at a neutral site, the black pad, which is like your lower back or something. | ||
| Then wherever you're feeling the pain, if I'm feeling it right here, the pain might not be coming from there. | ||
| So they might, they search around and, ooh, this shit jump out. | ||
| So now this becomes a hot spot. | ||
| So now they take the other pad off and find a spot that when those two connect, you feel like you're about to die. | ||
| Then they wrap you up and then they do seven minutes on reverse, seven minutes on positive. | ||
| And then it's painful as shit. | ||
| I've done training camps, had some severe injuries, and nobody would ever know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| So you're saying that if you have something that's bothering you, a lot of times there's something that's wrong somewhere else that's causing that to be bothering you, and this somehow or another finds that? | ||
| No, you do a balance test first. | ||
| So say like a chiropractor comes in and he say, oh, your hips are off, your legs are longer. | ||
| He adjusts you. | ||
| You have to be adjusted and balanced first. | ||
| Then they put the pads on there and they locate what they call a hot spot. | ||
| So say my shoulder, right? | ||
| For some reason, I broke my wrist a long time ago. | ||
| So I can't do like that. | ||
| You can't push down on things? | ||
| Yeah, so see how I can't get my hand to bend? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So if you get down to push-up time, I'm going like this. | ||
| Because my wrist just doesn't bend. | ||
| With knuckles, right. | ||
| So when I'm throwing a punch, especially if I'm throwing just a crazy-ass punch, you can imagine that if I don't distribute the force properly, My forearm's gonna be sore. | ||
| Probably what's causing my shoulder pain. | ||
| Also being extended position in wrestling, extended and stretched out over time and time, it caused a shock. | ||
| Now, just that one punch I hit Damian Maia with, maybe that wasn't a punch. | ||
| That might have been the last damn straw that broke the camel back. | ||
| But I think wearing terror from all those different years just beat my shoulder up. | ||
| So you... | ||
| Oh, so what's this guy doing here? | ||
| Before and after, best kind of version I think I could find of a good video. | ||
| Yeah, range of motion-wise is actually deceiving because sometimes you'll fucking get zapped on this deal, and you couldn't bring your arm up at all, and then all of a sudden now you're like, oh shit, I'm healed. | ||
| But you're not really healed. | ||
| You gotta continue to do the protocol, continue to do the treatment, and work on that range of motion. | ||
| If you do it one time and you feel great, go out there and start shooting threes, your shit gonna be fucked up. | ||
| Hmm, yeah, so so in the Damien Maia fight you hurt your your shoulder like with one of the first punches you threw right guys I was I knew it happened because I Knew it I knew it's what they call subplex or dislocated whatever so I threw I saw opening had already lumped his eye up I'm like I'm trying to fuck that that side of his face up So I saw his left eyeball already almost closed. | ||
| So I said I'm gonna try to go ham on him Bow, I threw the punch, and I felt my shoulder go down. | ||
| And I'm like, oh shit. | ||
| So then I was like, I can't lose a fight. | ||
| I can't let the dude take my belt. | ||
| So at this point, I said, I'm going to throw straight punches. | ||
| And reaction, and I see my power punch, I'm going to throw it. | ||
| So a couple times, I forgot, and I threw it, and it kind of went out again. | ||
| And he took some shots, and I lift him up, and it kind of went out again. | ||
| So three or four times in a fight, I can feel it just go, like a whole five or six light bulbs just crushing on your shoulder. | ||
| You kind of feel it going, like. | ||
| But I had that pain before, and I mean, it sounds stupid. | ||
| I'm blessed that I tore this one because I know what it felt like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I know that the only pain that I'm going to feel is when I extend, when I try to go that direction, or any overhand right, that shit was going to be a wrap. | ||
| So when I stayed here, I just threw straight punches. | ||
| And there was a couple times I blitzed forward, and I wanted to punch, and I didn't punch because I didn't feel confident with my hand. | ||
| Hmm, so you knew something was wrong, but you just didn't know exactly what it was. | ||
| I knew it's subplex, so I knew it dislocated for sure. | ||
| Whether the ligament was torn or not, I was praying that it wasn't. | ||
| Because you can actually do that, slip it out without it tearing. | ||
| But most times when you do that, it's a result of these muscles fatiguing, you punching too hard, making contact with your target, and then your whole muscles just kind of feel like, the best way I can explain it, everything just kind of fell down. | ||
| So you tried to rehab it for a while, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What did you try to do? | ||
| Man, I did. | ||
| I did the ARP treatment. | ||
| I did regular physical therapy. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| You got an MRI? MRI. I got two MRIs. | ||
| I had one doctor tell me that, you know, I didn't have to do it. | ||
| I could. | ||
| One doctor can care less. | ||
| And then finally I went to Dr. Andrews and he was like, you know what, how long do you plan on fighting for? | ||
| And I hate when people ask me this. | ||
| I'm like, until I get tired of fighting. | ||
| And he's like, well, if you think you're going to be done fighting, then don't get it done. | ||
| But if you want to have a career and you want to be able to confidently punch... | ||
| He said, I watched your video. | ||
| He said, you make your money with your right hand. | ||
| He said, if you want to go out there and punch and be confident... | ||
| Let me go in there. | ||
| Let me clean it out. | ||
| Let me anchor it down. | ||
| We'll shoot some stem cells, some PRP in there on the way out of the surgery. | ||
| We'll be aggressive. | ||
| We'll make sure you get that range of motion, and you'll be back in there punching. | ||
| So I decided that my ass fought four times, four World Titan fights in a year. | ||
| If anybody deserves to touch up something they hurt in the fight, it's me. | ||
| So I decided to go with it. | ||
| I was so close, man, even all the way up until the day of surgery. | ||
| I was like, man, I don't want to fucking do this. | ||
| I don't want to do this. | ||
| I just don't want to be down. | ||
| Now, were you still training? | ||
| Were you still throwing punches? | ||
| Yeah, I was training. | ||
| And what did it feel like when you were throwing punches? | ||
| I mean, that's the reason why I got it. | ||
| I mean, uppercuts, straight punches. | ||
| If I throw a straight punch and I didn't turn my body over and I was just arm punching, shit would hurt. | ||
| If I throw uppercut, it didn't hurt. | ||
| I was shadowboxing, hitting pads, hitting the bag. | ||
| If I throw overhand right... | ||
| It was not going to happen. | ||
| Shoulders are such a weird joint. | ||
| There's so much motion. | ||
| Even now, like you're doing the rehab now, part of my protocol is with dumbbells. | ||
| I can light shadow box. | ||
| But if I come out here, you can just see the way my body is starting to get alarmed. | ||
| I don't feel comfortable yet. | ||
| But you're only how many days out of surgery? | ||
| Two weeks. | ||
| Two weeks is nothing. | ||
| Nothing, yeah. | ||
| It's amazing that you can move it that much. | ||
| I'll be back training in a couple months. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But with this ARP machine and then with stem cells and PRP, it's like the world's a different place now for injury rehab. | ||
| I had this shit in 2008. So I tell you, and I rehabbed myself. | ||
| I took a rehab book. | ||
| I had all these protocols from these sports medicine people that gave me, and I put my own shit together, and I made my own workout. | ||
| And I did it religiously twice a day, but it's not the same as somebody... | ||
| Stretching you every single degree, every direction, every plane, watching your growth, and actually being a specialist. | ||
| I was just doing shit because I didn't want my shoulder messed up, and I just started fighting. | ||
| When I first started, I was a wrestling coach for Tiago Alves, Eve Edwards, Dean Thomas. | ||
| I wasn't really a fighter fighter. | ||
| I had a couple amateur fights, but I didn't know if I wanted to do this shit or not. | ||
| Then, I had to have a shoulder surgery. | ||
| I'm like, damn, man. | ||
| I don't know how the hell I'm going to pay for this. | ||
| So a guy named Weight Room, he was an American Top Team guy. | ||
| I didn't know what the fuck American Top Team was. | ||
| He brought this satellite school to University of Missouri where I was coaching at. | ||
| He came in the gym and he wanted to pay for our Weight Room wrestling team. | ||
| And I'm like, well, shit, let me go in there and train in his gym. | ||
| And I went and trained in his gym and I worked for him full time so I can get insurance, so I can get the shoulder surgery. | ||
| And shit, after that, I said, let me get this fighting thing to try. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I wasn't even... | ||
| I was just doing it just to see what it was like. | ||
| But... | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy when you think about how successful you've been at it. | ||
| And I had a lot of chances to quit, too. | ||
| Broke in debt. | ||
| 50 grand in debt. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| I told my coach, I said, I can't do this shit anymore. | ||
| I said, I'm a full-time coach. | ||
| I'm going negative day 15 out of 30 days. | ||
| Man, I can't even afford... | ||
| That's when gas... | ||
| Remember if gas first hit... | ||
| I was getting 99 cent gas and all of a sudden went to three bucks at the brokest point of my life. | ||
| I was like, hell with that. | ||
| So I did that and he said, you know what? | ||
| You got a future in this, man. | ||
| He said, take out a student loan. | ||
| I was in graduate school. | ||
| He said, take out a student loan. | ||
| So I took out a student loan in graduate school to fund my MMA training. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I didn't even finish graduate school. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy that it all worked out the way it did. | ||
| Now I'm a workshop, shit. | ||
| Hey, it worked out. | ||
| I would complain about it. | ||
| Dana tried to pay me 50 grand, less known being 50 grand in debt. | ||
| It's like tables have turned quite a bit. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? | ||
| If you look back 10 years ago... | ||
| 10 years ago. | ||
| I can't believe I've been fighting for, what is it, 12, 13 years now? | ||
| 2005 was my first fight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Nuts. | ||
| Now you're world champ. | ||
| So with this rehabilitation, they said they'd like you to throw punches inside of two months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then when would you be able to fully resume training? | ||
| They think three months. | ||
| They think three months. | ||
| I mean, granted, with this surgery, you can hear someone say four months, you can hear six months. | ||
| Some people take a full year. | ||
| It depends on who the surgeon is, how aggressively they push you forward, and it depends on why you need to get back. | ||
| I got a belt to defend. | ||
| I got money to make, and I got people asked to be, so I got to get back. | ||
| So with that said, I'm going, I called the UFC, I'm like, this is bullshit. | ||
| I'm your world champion. | ||
| I need, what am I going to do with three days a week? | ||
| I'm not a senior citizen. | ||
| I need physical therapy approved for five days a week. | ||
| I need this game-ready ice machine. | ||
| I need to do PRP in six weeks. | ||
| They should want me to get back. | ||
| And, you know, they listened to me and said, you know what, he's right. | ||
| You know, give him whatever you want, give him so he can get back and get in and fight him. | ||
| Because I was fighting extremely often for them. | ||
| Now, you're living in St. Louis? | ||
| Yeah, I got a house in St. Louis. | ||
| I'm out here every week, though. | ||
| I'm doing Fox, TMZ. I didn't know you were doing that many different TV things. | ||
| So, what are you doing on Fox? | ||
| I'm doing UFC tonight. | ||
| DC's out in training camp, so anytime DC, Bisping, or whatever, I'm usually the guy that fills in with UFC tonight. | ||
| And you have to come out here and do that every week? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They don't watch themselves. | ||
| Hey, biz me. | ||
| You and DC don't watch yourself. | ||
| I'm going to snag your damn job. | ||
| I'm going to be a permanent out here. | ||
| Because I had a good show yesterday. | ||
| I didn't want to watch out. | ||
| Do you like doing it? | ||
| I love doing it. | ||
| I love getting out of the box. | ||
| That's why, you know, I know we're probably going to get into it later. | ||
| That's why I did stand-up comedy the other day. | ||
| I did stand-up comedy. | ||
| I heard about that Adam Hunter had you up at the Dime Bar. | ||
| Yeah, I went to the Dime Bar because I feel like acting is what I'm gonna do after I get done fighting. | ||
| And if you can be okay with being embarrassed, not being uncomfortable, and really not giving a fuck, then you can become a great actor if you have the gift and you're willing to put in the work. | ||
| So I've always put in the work. | ||
| I'm not worried about that. | ||
| But if I gotta cry, I gotta be a college douchebag, I gotta be a Something that I'm not used to being. | ||
| I can be a tough guy all day. | ||
| I can be a secret agent. | ||
| I mean, you've done film. | ||
| We can watch a film and mimic it. | ||
| I used to mimic Friday. | ||
| You could not tell me I wasn't Smokey. | ||
| I would sound just like Chris Tucker, like I was really in a fucking movie. | ||
| But he didn't have anybody to look at. | ||
| He had a fucking script, and he had to bring that to life. | ||
| And we're really critical in actors, and I just don't want to be the weakest link ever on a film. | ||
| So that's what you want to do when you're done with all this? | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| Has that always been an aspiration, or is it something you saw as a way to do it after it's over? | ||
| I mean, I got a lot of stuff. | ||
| I don't really even like fighting, to be honest. | ||
| Yeah, I'm just good at it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What don't you like about it? | ||
| I don't like the politics behind it. | ||
| I don't like the martial art aspect that's been taken away from it. | ||
| I don't like the disrespect to the sport. | ||
| Guys that are not really training hard... | ||
| They don't look the part. | ||
| I think professional athletes should look a certain way. | ||
| I really just don't like the youth, this generation of fighters that watch and move on TV, on YouTube, and they go and they try to do it. | ||
| They don't want to drill repetitiously. | ||
| They don't want to actually put in the work. | ||
| But why does that affect you, though? | ||
| It affects me because our sport is also the fans, and the fans actually culture who gets to fight. | ||
| And if a guy's gonna talk enough shit and start wearing fly suits, then this day and age, that's good enough for a title shot. | ||
| And I think it's disrespectful to everybody that came before. | ||
| Remember that you had to go 10-0, then you get the fucking call from the UFC? If Conor wants Artem Lobov in the UFC at a 500 record, he's going to be in the UFC. It's ways that the sport is taking the love out of it, but I just find a way in dominating my opponents, taking all their twos away from them. | ||
| Dean, Thomas, shout out to them, and Duke Rufus are fucking masterminds. | ||
| So I take pride in that. | ||
| I take pride in going in there, not getting hit. | ||
| Dominating, knocking people out, whatever. | ||
| But when you say you don't like fighting, you like all those things. | ||
| You don't like what other people are doing. | ||
| I love training. | ||
| I don't like what the sport has become. | ||
| So, this is an interesting thing to talk about because a lot of people have different points of view on that. | ||
| On one hand, A lot of people like the traditional martial arts approach of respect for your opponent and just fighting to the best of your abilities and letting the chips fall where they may. | ||
| Whereas other people say, well listen, to get people to show up, to get asses in seats, to get pay-per-view buys... | ||
| There's got to be some drama and some entertainment value to it, and that's where someone like Conor comes into play. | ||
| Conor's the only one that's done it, though. | ||
| Yeah, well, Ronda a little bit. | ||
| Ronda did it a little bit. | ||
| Conor's done it the best, but he actually puts in the work. | ||
| Right, Chael Sonnen before him. | ||
| Chael Sonnen did, but his mouth was louder. | ||
| He's actually probably the best at it. | ||
| He's better than Conor at it. | ||
| Conor's very close, but Conor actually delivers on more of what he said he's going to do than Chael did. | ||
| I would agree. | ||
| So if you've got to think of anybody who's brought both worlds together best, I would have to say Conor. | ||
| He knocks a lot of guys out. | ||
| He's tried to call the round. | ||
| He's only lost a few fights total. | ||
| And even those fights, it was risk-matching reward. | ||
| Fighting a guy, switched opponent, disnoticed, different weight class. | ||
| You know, he's taking those risks and rewards that if you lose, it's not really that big of a deal. | ||
| Nobody's going to really, oh my God, drop him down to the bottom of the pack. | ||
| But these other guys that haven't done it, don't have the skills, ain't put in the work. | ||
| I mean, they can kind of really just... | ||
| Well, you see the trend, right? | ||
| There is a trend right now. | ||
| Be good at it, at least, though. | ||
| People being incredibly disrespectful, very rude. | ||
| And, you know, you saw what happened with Colby Covington and, you know, Fabrizio Verdum hits him with a boomerang. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Now he's pressing charges. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| That dude's a queef. | ||
| Well, there's... | ||
| Coward Queefington. | ||
| There's a lot of attention being placed on him, though. | ||
| I mean, it's slightly effective. | ||
| Let me see how much attention is being placed on him. | ||
| But it is effective in the moment, right? | ||
| I mean, you don't want to go look at his stuff. | ||
| It's effective in the moment. | ||
| I'm going to tell you why. | ||
| Because sometimes our sports... | ||
| Well, because people like drama. | ||
| Sometimes our sports is like, you know, there's nothing going on. | ||
| It's like, fuck, well, this kid's talking shit. | ||
| Let me listen to him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And right there at that point, Conor wasn't around. | ||
| Ronda wasn't around. | ||
| John wasn't around. | ||
| Who has UFC really projected as a star? | ||
| Sage Northcutt had a few bumps. | ||
| Paige Van Zandt had a few bumps. | ||
| They're trying to push up Ngannou. | ||
| But what star did they have? | ||
| So now if you've got this person that's willing to go crazy, even though we know it's WWE and the person's really not getting slammed, we want to live in that moment anyway. | ||
| We want to go for the villain. | ||
| But who has he really beat beyond Damian Maia? | ||
| What was the other top 15 victory? | ||
| Well, the Damien Maier was a big one, but that was the one. | ||
| It was a big one, but he was unmotivated, and he was a guy that already had his title shots, and, you know, he's getting up there in age. | ||
| What is really his motivation? | ||
| I wrote the book on how to beat Damien Maier, and he didn't even read the book. | ||
| He just skimmed through it because no part of the book said, let the jiu-jitsu guy fuck you up and bloody your face. | ||
| Kobe Coffin did that by himself. | ||
| I didn't do that, you know, even with my right arm being messed up, so... | ||
| Yeah, I'm just looking. | ||
| How many followers do you have? | ||
| He didn't have a big following before that. | ||
| That was his biggest fight. | ||
| That was the big coming out party. | ||
| I don't want to discredit him. | ||
| Damian Myers is a G. I don't want to discredit Kobe. | ||
| You know, for me, have some people on your resume. | ||
| Have some, you know, I didn't beat Derek Safanine, Paul Daly, Jordan Meehan. | ||
| This was before I even got into the UFC. My first fight was Jay Heron, who had only been stopped by George St. Pierre. | ||
| Lost one fight to Ben Ashland that was close and had won every fight after that. | ||
| So I never had an easy fight. | ||
| All my guys was either former champions or former contenders or former, you know, people that were interim champions. | ||
| And when you got a list like that, you still don't get the respect. | ||
| Koshchek, Condit, Robbie Lawler. | ||
| Why are you saying you don't get the respect? | ||
| From who? | ||
| From him? | ||
| From Kobe? | ||
| Oh my god, I can care less. | ||
| What are you saying you don't get the respect? | ||
| You definitely get respect. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| When you think of Robbie Lawler. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Carlos Condon, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're in a different category. | ||
| Now, is it weird to you that I'm the champion and I beat both of those guys? | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| What do you mean by a different category? | ||
| I see them in a category—and this might just be me—I see them as in the category as if you're talking about guys that are going to enter the Hall of Fame, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you think about, oh, Josh Koscheck and Carlos Condit and Robbie Lawler and, you know, this guy, Anderson Silva, all those different guys. | ||
| But it's funny that I've defeated these guys. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| You're talking crazy. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Yeah, no, you're definitely talking crazy. | ||
| You're the champ. | ||
| I know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're the current champ. | |
| You're acting like people don't respect you as the champ. | ||
| They respect the people I've defeated more. | ||
| And you think that people think that Carlos Condit gets more respect or Robbie Lawler gets more respect? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Carlos Conant gets more respect than me. | ||
| Robbie Lawler gets more respect than me. | ||
| But from who, though? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Even guys that I defeated, like, you know, Stephen Thompson. | ||
| Stephen Thompson will get more respect than me. | ||
| I'm not going to say that. | ||
| But people are willing to be like, oh my God, you know, tell them, Dana said, tell them to get in the cage with Tyron Woodley. | ||
| He didn't say, hey Tyron, tell them to get in cage with Stephen Thompson on the seven fight win streak, knocking everybody the fuck out with a really super weird style that took me months and a fortune bringing all these fucking crazy Taekwondo, Raymond Daniels, all these, the best of the best to train to beat him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like nobody gave me that pass. | ||
| I don't know why you concentrate on that. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But you are, because you're talking about it. | ||
| I'm not concentrating on it, because my path is pretty easy. | ||
| You need to call me when you have these nutty thoughts. | ||
| I'm telling you, man. | ||
| I'm going to talk you through this shit. | ||
| You're the fucking champ. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| This is all nonsense. | ||
| This is wasted energy. | ||
| When you think about... | ||
| It doesn't matter to me, because my path is pretty clear what I want to do. | ||
| I want to be the best welterweight of all time. | ||
| Reigning, defending, undisputed UFC welterweight champion. | ||
| You act like me in 2007, when that was the shit. | ||
| But it is the shit. | ||
| It's just in the middle of it. | ||
| You're in the middle of it. | ||
| Why is Conor and Nate fighting superfights that are bigger than a world title fight? | ||
| Because people don't know you as much. | ||
| They don't know you as much yet. | ||
| Look, Conor's a weird enigma. | ||
| And whatever reason why that guy caught fire the way he did, it's a weird combination of personality, results, skill. | ||
| And Ireland. | ||
| Ireland's a big factor. | ||
| I mean, if Conor was from Nebraska, I guarantee you this shit wouldn't have happened that way. | ||
| Ireland's a big fight country, too. | ||
| It's not just a big fight country. | ||
| The loyalty and the love that those people have for the people that fight from Ireland, there's nothing like that. | ||
| It's a weird anomaly. | ||
| So he's just this weird aberration, and he gives people almost like false hope of what's possible. | ||
| Because I don't know if it's possible with a lot of people. | ||
| It's lightning in a bottle. | ||
| For whatever reason, it worked with him. | ||
| But he started it himself, and then what happened? | ||
| Here come the jumper cables. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| UFC put the machine behind him, right? | ||
| They definitely put the machine behind him, but without the machine behind him, there was giant hordes of people flying in from Ireland. | ||
| I remember one of some of his earlier fights, I was like, and I was commenting on it, and I was saying, this is a guy who was on the undercard, and they're acting like this is the main event of a pay-per-view. | ||
| They've flown from Ireland. | ||
| The audience is filled with thousands of people that flew from Ireland for this guy. | ||
| Even back then, it was insane. | ||
| I didn't know him back then. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| My old striking coach was like, Conor McGregor's this huge star. | ||
| That's when he first got in the UFC. And I'm like, I don't even know who the fuck this kid is. | ||
| He was trying to convince me, no, he's a superstar. | ||
| And then every time I get a chance, I say, you were right. | ||
| He wasn't then, but this motherfucker ended up being a superstar. | ||
| And he loves to get that credit because at that moment, I think I was getting ready to fight Duncan Kim and he kept talking about this Conor McGregor. | ||
| So I said, let me look at this motherfucker. | ||
| Let me look him up because you obviously got a boner for this dude. | ||
| And I looked him up. | ||
| I'm like, all right, he's good. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But let me see him beat a couple people. | ||
| And then if he can beat Dustin Poirier, then I'm going to give him his props. | ||
| Knocked out Dustin Poirier. | ||
| He's 100% legit. | ||
| He's legit. | ||
| But it's what else is going on that's so weird. | ||
| He's not just legit. | ||
| He's also this unbelievable personality. | ||
| People are drawn to him. | ||
| No one can manufacture that. | ||
| He's rehearsed it. | ||
| He's practiced it. | ||
| He's looked in the mirror. | ||
| He has natural wit. | ||
| He's willing to go risky and say some below the bell shit. | ||
| And he does his research. | ||
| He don't come to a press conference just, you know, smoking you like the front row of a comedy show. | ||
| He's looking into some deep shit. | ||
| And when you get there, you kind of stumble. | ||
| So you're right. | ||
| He has that. | ||
| He also has a fight style. | ||
| He also has so happened to do 80% of the shit he says he's going to do, so now he's the fucking messiah. | ||
| Right, but you can't say that the UFC has not gotten behind you or people don't give you the respect that you deserve. | ||
| That's why you're not in the same level as him. | ||
| I didn't say that, Joe. | ||
| But you said that him and Conor, or that Conor and Nate are fighting these superfights. | ||
| I'm saying that he has gotten that. | ||
| And I'm saying that he has gotten that. | ||
| And he has lived up to what he said he's going to do. | ||
| And on top of that, you got to be able to fight. | ||
| And he can fight. | ||
| And he's been able to talk. | ||
| So now not only can he generate the pay-per-view buys and get people interested, he's actually going to deliver a knockout against Jose Aldo, a stoppage against Eddie Alvarez, and the crazy back-to-back fights with Nate Diaz. | ||
| Don't you think that you're in an unusual situation, first of all, because you win the title by spectacular first-round knockout against Robbie Lawler, right? | ||
| Unbelievable knockout. | ||
| But then you have the most... | ||
| Awkward and difficult guy to defend your title against. | ||
| Wonderboy Thompson is a very unusual opponent, and it's hard to look good against him. | ||
| And out of all the people that fought him, you're the only guy that put him in danger not once but twice. | ||
| And the way you fought him, I've defended the way you fought him many times because I say, look, if you look at tactically, if you look at technique, and you look at the art of fighting, that's the way to fight him. | ||
| If you're a guy like Tyron Woodley, a powerful puncher, who's a great wrestler, who's got real one-punch knockout ability, you're not going to open yourself up to Wonderboy. | ||
| You're not going to rush him either. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Don't get picked apart. | ||
| You're not going to fight him the way he wants to fight. | ||
| What you did is you laid back a lot, and people booed a lot because of that. | ||
| But when you connected, you were the one that hurt him. | ||
| In those two fights, he was the one that was in big trouble in both of those fights. | ||
| Not you. | ||
| With his fight, it was not... | ||
| For me, I'm never... | ||
| I got the same thing in the Maya fight, but at the end of the day, if someone's attempting to take you down multiple times, over 20 times, it's very hard to get in any type of exchange. | ||
| Every time you swing, they want to go in and get the shot to take you down. | ||
| Well, the Maya fight was tough, too, because of your injury, but... | ||
| You gotta go back and look at Anderson Silva's dark days. | ||
| There was a dark days when Anderson Silva fought Damian Maia, where nobody wanted to have anything to do with him after that fight. | ||
| And Anderson Silva fought, when he fought, there was several fights where he had Just boring results. | ||
| And people weren't interested in him fighting anymore. | ||
| One spectacular knockout, and everybody's back on board again. | ||
| One spectacular knockout to get the belt, and then everybody slowly forget about it moments later. | ||
| Because at the time, Stephen Thompson said, no, I'd rather fight Robbie, and I think he's going to win anyway, and da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| And then he'd think, I'm supposed to be just so graciously like, oh, let's fight in honor. | ||
| No, you wanted to fight Robbie, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You said Robbie was going to win. | ||
| You said you personally prefer to fight Robbie because I've been waiting around, even though that wasn't the case. | ||
| So you said this stuff. | ||
| So don't think that I'm just going to give you my spotlight and say, hey, you know what? | ||
| Yeah, let's do this. | ||
| No. | ||
| If I'm seeing the table being set, I know there's Nate Diaz's out there, Nick Diaz's out there, George St. Pierre's, Michael Bismings, guys that have that name, they have that status that I'm trying to get to. | ||
| Those are the guys I want to fight. | ||
| I want to knock those guys down because now I can continually inch myself up. | ||
| Fighting him, well, he's trying to get the same thing I'm trying to get. | ||
| Why the hell am I going to pull you up with me? | ||
| Right. | ||
| If that's the fight they wanted me to fight, number one, they never offered me the fight. | ||
| He said something. | ||
| Then I think the UFC thought I wouldn't take the fight. | ||
| The first time they offered me the fight, I accepted it. | ||
| So when all these people are like, oh my god, he don't want to fight, trying to pick his fights, he's just got the belt. | ||
| I'm like, man, it's so weird. | ||
| But you listen to too many people, man. | ||
| No, I'm talking about... | ||
| But there's too many people saying things that you're responding to that are irrelevant. | ||
| I think it's the people that... | ||
| That are in the organization, I gotta, you know... | ||
| Okay, you're dealing with people that I don't deal with, then, in that regard. | ||
| But as far as, like, people that are analysts and experts... | ||
| As far as, like, the social media, like, I really don't read social media. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good. | |
| I post because I want to post, and I leave it alone. | ||
| That's smart. | ||
| When I say that, I'm not saying... | ||
| Without saying who it is, I'm not saying that the fans are making me feel some type of way. | ||
| Because my path is clear. | ||
| I want to be the greatest world to win of all time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whatever it takes. | ||
| When I get an opportunity, I'm trying to knock you out. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| At all times. | ||
| Stephen Thompson is a different type of fight, as you said before. | ||
| Look what happened when Robert Whitaker rushed in. | ||
| Look what happened when this guy rushed in. | ||
| Those guys, that's what he thought of. | ||
| People forget he KO'd Whitaker. | ||
| They forget all this shit. | ||
| And I also realize how tough it is to take him down against the cage. | ||
| Remember how fast he pops up. | ||
| So why not give myself 31 foot that if I want to double-leg him, I got the whole place to stretch across and blast him out. | ||
| He don't have one-punch KO power. | ||
| So even if my back is against the octagon, when I go for a shot, I got the whole entire octagon to take him down. | ||
| Versus pressing him, go for the takedown. | ||
| Him and the cage are both defending my shot. | ||
| And then him trying to, you know, do some razzle-dazzle kick. | ||
| So I have no issue with the way I follow him. | ||
| Or Damian Maia. | ||
| I don't think there's another way to fight him. | ||
| Look what George Masvidal did. | ||
| He didn't take Maia serious. | ||
| He didn't train the way. | ||
| He didn't bring in the top jiu-jitsu guys. | ||
| It's easy to spar and kickbox and look good and never have to take a shot. | ||
| The way I train, I put myself in positions I know I'm never going to be in. | ||
| You're never going to take me down. | ||
| You're never going to have my back. | ||
| I'm never going to be mounted. | ||
| But I'm training that shit anyway, just in case I slip on a banana peel, I get clipped with a punch. | ||
| So George Masvidal, just from the way I watched him fight, he was surprised. | ||
| Even the stuff that Steven Thompson hit me with never surprised me. | ||
| I got hit with it. | ||
| He landed some good shots. | ||
| He's really quick. | ||
| I mean, I'm fast and explosive, but he's quick. | ||
| Those punches get to you fast. | ||
| He's long. | ||
| And when you start bouncing, you don't even know what the hell he's going to do. | ||
| And it's kind of like, what are you about to do? | ||
| What are you about to do? | ||
| You can watch his performance until he didn't do the proper work. | ||
| Same thing with Damian Maia. | ||
| He trained with Kobe, like, try to take me down, I'm going to stop the shot and just knock you out. | ||
| That's not how it works. | ||
| You got to bring in guys that know his half guard, how he hooks an ankle, how he sweeps, how he switches from one side to the other. | ||
| What happens when you grab around your waist? | ||
| If you give him his back, that's how you're going to lock up. | ||
| I trained with guys that trained with him, and the guys that are better than Damian Maia on the mat. | ||
| That way, when I got out there, had he taken me down, I would have been prepared to escape, get away, get back to my feet. | ||
| Do you think that having a chip on your shoulder in some way helps you? | ||
| Like, all these people that doubt you in some way, you have to prove yourself? | ||
| I just know that I'm the best. | ||
| I just know that I'm the best. | ||
| Like, you know, me and Dean was training one day, and I stopped practice, and I just had a brain fart, and I just started thinking about Joris St. Pierre, and I started thinking about all his skills, and I started thinking about Robbie, and all the top welterweights. | ||
| And I said, I'm the fucking best in the world. | ||
| Nobody's faster than me. | ||
| Nobody's stronger than me. | ||
| Nobody works as hard as I do. | ||
| Nobody has all the skills, the striking, the wrestling, the jiu-jitsu, the defense, the timing, the explosion, the toughness. | ||
| I've been in wars. | ||
| I've been in close fights. | ||
| I've been in fights where I knock people out. | ||
| I've been in it all. | ||
| So when I decided that I'm the best, I started carrying myself as if I was already the champion. | ||
| And that's why I had champ camp before I even had the belt. | ||
| And when was this around? | ||
| Like, which fight? | ||
| Right, shit, Robbie. | ||
| Right before Robbie. | ||
| So right before Robbie. | ||
| Yeah, I was supposed to. | ||
| No, champ camp actually was supposed to start with Johnny, but Johnny had some complications, didn't make it to the scale. | ||
| So they told me I was fighting Robbie. | ||
| Yeah, I remember talking to you backstage one day at one of the weigh-ins, and you were frustrated. | ||
| And you were like, when the fuck am I getting my title shot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, this is the thing. | ||
| We know the game changes, and sometimes they want to see fights play out before they make a call. | ||
| They never want to be on the line saying, you are definitely getting the title shot. | ||
| They've done that a couple times, and we've seen what happened, right? | ||
| And they pulled out of it. | ||
| So I fought Kelvin Gastelum. | ||
| Kelvin Gastelum was supposed to be this conditioning freak, and he missed weight by 10 pounds, and... | ||
| For me, I don't play that shit. | ||
| Don't act like you were so sick. | ||
| No, you didn't make weight. | ||
| And what happens when you don't make weight, you actually didn't have to go through and suck your body all the way down to scratch weight like I did. | ||
| So you should actually look better. | ||
| So I don't want to be like, oh, he was sick and that's why. | ||
| No, he had a chance. | ||
| He just is never going to beat me. | ||
| I fought him. | ||
| He was the one that was huffing and puffing. | ||
| He couldn't hit me. | ||
| He couldn't land. | ||
| Any significant punch, I landed. | ||
| And after that fight, you know, it was some scrutiny on the fight. | ||
| I'm like, okay, you want me to grapple with him so he can try to take my back and do a redneck and choke like he did to everybody else? | ||
| You want me to exchange with him and let him get into the fight when I know I'm faster, I know I'm sharper. | ||
| He can't hit me. | ||
| I got better defense. | ||
| The whole time he's pushing me against the cage, I hear his coach say, no, no, no, don't go there, don't go there. | ||
| He was terrified. | ||
| The Koshek thing was going to happen to him. | ||
| So he backed up every time he pushed me to the octagon. | ||
| Why wouldn't I play on that? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| So when people look at that, he said that he was going to get a title shot. | ||
| I don't know if you remember that. | ||
| They said if Kelvin Gaston would beat Tyron, he's going to get a title shot. | ||
| I don't remember people saying that. | ||
| They were saying that, but they weren't saying that about you. | ||
| They didn't say that if you beat him. | ||
| Dana White said if Kelvin Gasolin beats Tyron, he's getting the title shot. | ||
| Remember, he had already been selected for the coach. | ||
| He got the coaching job off the loss. | ||
| Off the missing weight by 10 pounds. | ||
| And then they told me he would never fight at 185 again if I took the fight. | ||
| I mean 170 again if I took the fight. | ||
| So he lost to me in this weight. | ||
| Still got the tough coaching job. | ||
| And on top of that... | ||
| He was going to get a title shot had he beaten me. | ||
| So again, it comes to this chip on your shoulder thing. | ||
| You feel like everybody's against you. | ||
| No. | ||
| You do a little. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I know you want me to though. | ||
| No, you do. | ||
| This is what you're saying. | ||
| It's the things that you're saying. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| I'm just saying that I know the deck of cards I got. | ||
| And I know how to play these deck of cards. | ||
| But what do you think the deck of cards is? | ||
| The deck of cards is there's going to come a moment where I'm a superstar. | ||
| And when I get to that moment, I have more leverage. | ||
| At this time, I'm not at the point where Conor McGregor's at. | ||
| So if I've got to fight the number one contender, and I can't vouch out to fight a George St. Pierre or Bisping or Conor or Nate at this moment, I'm going to keep whooping the ass until I get to that point. | ||
| Well, after George is beaten right now, George is in an amazing position, right? | ||
| George beats Bisping. | ||
| And he dropped the title. | ||
| But if he wanted to come back and fight you... | ||
| For the welterweight title, that's a legitimate super fight right there. | ||
| I mean, that makes a lot of sense. | ||
| You think George won't fight me? | ||
| Particularly coming off of his big fight. | ||
| You don't think he does? | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| You think George won't fight me? | ||
| Look at your face! | ||
| George had the chance to fight me before Bisming. | ||
| He chose to fight Bisming. | ||
| Well, maybe he felt like that was a better fight for him to come back with. | ||
| It was definitely a better fight because if he would have came back against me looking like that, George would have been right back in retirement. | ||
| He did not look great. | ||
| Bisming did not look great. | ||
| One thing that helped George in that fight, his experience. | ||
| He loosened up. | ||
| He was a little uptight. | ||
| He had men in the octagon, what, four years almost? | ||
| A little over two. | ||
| Yeah, a little over three, right? | ||
| It was more than that, right? | ||
| Was it four? | ||
| It was almost four. | ||
| It wasn't quite four. | ||
| It was almost four. | ||
| Because I fought November, UFC, it was the 25th anniversary. | ||
| No, I think you're right. | ||
| I think it was like four years. | ||
| Because I fought Koscheck on the card. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I fought Koscheck on the card. | ||
| That's a long ass time. | ||
| So for him to not fight... | ||
| I don't care how much you train. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| In a fight, you don't have to train the camp, focus on a person. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| So when he came back, I saw the experience kick in. | ||
| He relaxed a little bit. | ||
| That's when he landed a left hook. | ||
| Had he not relaxed, I mean, who knows what would have happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was interesting because Bisping was tight. | ||
| And I expected him to be looser. | ||
| Big, Bisping doesn't have the, I mean, he's not guys out, but he's not a guy that, you know, you're thinking of like a Rumble or Ngannou or myself or somebody. | ||
| A one-shot guy. | ||
| Or Stevens, Jeremy Stevens, somebody that's going to touch you and it's over with. | ||
| So with that said, he's a person that's going to be volume. | ||
| He's going to be in your face, great conditioning. | ||
| He's very durable. | ||
| And... | ||
| George had to make that adjustment. | ||
| He said, alright, I'm going to be an athlete on this guy. | ||
| Let me fake him out. | ||
| Let me get him thinking about the shot. | ||
| I took him down twice. | ||
| Let me get him thinking about it. | ||
| Level change, come up left hook. | ||
| Very smart move. | ||
| And that's something that the experience of being a champion allowed him to do. | ||
| Well, there was some talk about him fighting Conor, but I didn't hear any of that from the official people. | ||
| And him fighting Conor at 170 pounds would have been fascinating. | ||
| In terms of like, it's a terrible matchup for Conor. | ||
| You know, in terms of like, just physicality. | ||
| Once again, risk and reward. | ||
| What happens if you lose to the greatest welterweight of all time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| People are going to torture him about it? | ||
| Yeah, but Conor doesn't want to lose another fight right now. | ||
| This is not a good time. | ||
| Especially in his division, there's so much talent. | ||
| Right now, at 155 pounds... | ||
| You think he want to see Khabib right now? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's what I want to see. | ||
| Tony? | ||
| What about Tony? | ||
| I mean, Tony, if I was Conor, which I'm not, if I had to pick the fight, they both are going to be, I mean, Habib might be a bigger draw because he got a huge, huge 140-something million people in Russia. | ||
| Might be a bigger draw, but they both are very annoying fights. | ||
| Very dangerous fights. | ||
| Dangerous. | ||
| Tony Ferguson, you know, it don't take much for him to find a way to get around your neck and choking. | ||
| He doesn't get tired. | ||
| He doesn't get tired. | ||
| He looks like he's losing fights and he don't care. | ||
| His striking is very awkward. | ||
| He can really do what Nate Diaz did to Conor. | ||
| And Nate Diaz, you know, baffled him. | ||
| Like, damn, I hit you with everything. | ||
| You're still around. | ||
| Then Conor went for the damn shot. | ||
| The same thing's gonna happen if you do that to Tony. | ||
| Tony's gonna submit him. | ||
| Here's my prediction. | ||
| My prediction, Conor doesn't fight for a while. | ||
| He watched those two fights. | ||
| They strip him. | ||
| They strip Conor. | ||
| He comes fight me. | ||
| Khabib and Tony fight for the world title. | ||
| For you, you're in a situation. | ||
| I don't think either one of those guys are in the cars right now for you. | ||
| But for you, who do you see at 170? | ||
| Well, what's your dream? | ||
| Tell me what your dream is. | ||
| You know what, to be honest, my dream was to really, I wanted to fight George. | ||
| That's still possible. | ||
| I feel like if I fight George, I can legitimately say I'm the best welterweight of all time if I beat him. | ||
| It's still possible. | ||
| George hasn't retired. | ||
| Has he said anything about you? | ||
| He asked one time on a Fox Q&A where he was like, so Tyron, if you fought, what would be your game plan if you fought us? | ||
| But they got X'd out because they didn't want to get all the fans pumped up that we were fighting. | ||
| Why wouldn't they? | ||
| Do you think they're plotting against you? | ||
| I see it in your face! | ||
| Joe, he is not going to do that to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am too bright, motherfucker. | |
| You want me to be like the people who are against me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't. | |
| Listen, I want you to just be focused. | ||
| You want me to be real? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| You want me to be real? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Do I think that the people want to see me lose? | ||
| No, I don't think they want to see me lose. | ||
| Do I think that sometimes I'm a pain in the ass? | ||
| Yeah, I am. | ||
| In business, at one point in any business, the person that's doing the business does not want their best interests. | ||
| So if I'm an athlete and I'm looking out for my best interests and I'm trying to put myself in a position where, you know, I can fight, become a legend, become a Hall of Famer, I should do that. | ||
| If I want to be paid appropriately, I should do that. | ||
| In our sport, because of the way the UFC started, we the damn UFC, you do what we say, and that's it. | ||
| No questions. | ||
| You fight who we want to fight, you get paid who we want to get paid, and that's it. | ||
| And then what happened? | ||
| The specialists, the one-trick ponies, stopped. | ||
| Then, collegiate athletes start getting in there, college wrestlers. | ||
| You know, Kenny Florens is the goddamn, almost thinking about being a doctor at one point. | ||
| So now you got intelligent people coming into the sport. | ||
| They just so happen to be businessmen, entrepreneurs. | ||
| So now I'm looking at market value. | ||
| I'm seeing what these motherfuckers are making. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| I should be making this if they're making that. | ||
| If I'm a champion and this person's doing this, I should do that. | ||
| Knowing what everybody's making, knowing all the numbers, I want to be at least fair. | ||
| I don't ask for no crazy, I don't ask for no 15 million and all that other stuff. | ||
| So if me doing that makes me become difficult, then I guess I'm just a little bit difficult. | ||
| Okay, but let me look at it from their perspective. | ||
| What they look at in terms of what an athlete is worth is like how much are they bringing in? | ||
| Like what kind of pay-per-view buys are you getting? | ||
| How much was George bringing in when he first started fighting? | ||
| Well, he wasn't making nearly as much money back then. | ||
| Everybody has to start a certain way. | ||
| You can't throw you out and say, okay, fight Wonderboy, UFC, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And if you don't do five, oh, well, you did 300,000 buys. | ||
| You're not a draw. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| How was I promoted as a champion? | ||
| Yeah, this is a long, circuitous sort of a conversation if we continue along this way, but what I'm trying to say is there's a way. | ||
| It's like a circular sort of a thing. | ||
| You're going to keep circling back around to it. | ||
| What I think is there's a way for if you want to make a big super fight, like if George St. Pierre really wanted to make a big super fight and the UFC wanted to make a big superstar out of you, that's the fight. | ||
| Because one of two things happens. | ||
| Either he beats you and he's even bigger than ever. | ||
| Or you beat him and you become bigger than ever. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| There's no other fight that makes sense. | ||
| But that makes sense. | ||
| No one's trying to stop that from happening. | ||
| When the UFC is not willing to pay a certain amount of money, it's because they don't think they're going to get a certain amount of money. | ||
| It's not because they're trying to avoid getting paid. | ||
| If they thought that you could be some enormous superstar and they could make Conor McGregor-type money from you, they would never say, we don't want to do that because we don't want to give Tyron power. | ||
| They don't think like that. | ||
| There are numbers people. | ||
| They're trying to make pay-per-view buys. | ||
| And if you only sold 300,000 pay-per-view buys because of the Wonderboy fight, there's not much they can do about that. | ||
| I mean, it's not whether or not you are promoted a certain way as a fighter. | ||
| It's like that fight for someone like me is fascinating. | ||
| But for the average fucking Johnny Lunchbox, I want to see blood type person, that's not... | ||
| But the pay-per-views are bought before the fight takes place. | ||
| Right, but they knew the style. | ||
| They knew the style, they knew the matchup, and especially the second time you guys fought. | ||
| It was the fight of the night on the biggest card of UFC history, UFC 205 in Madison Square Garden. | ||
| According to them, it was the best fight of the entire card. | ||
| So if that was the best fight, it was Fight of the Night. | ||
| Is that because he got the award of Fight of the Night? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just so you can get a bonus though, right? | ||
| I mean, when you look at the fights in terms of like, you could have a card where there's a lot of fights that aren't entirely significant and that would be the Fight of the Night. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with that fight. | ||
| I've told you before, I like that fight. | ||
| What I'm saying is that if the UFC, the people that are casting the checks, if they deem, because they didn't want to make decisions, right? | ||
| Dana and whoever. | ||
| If they say that this fight was a fight of the night, right? | ||
| Which means you get more money. | ||
| You get more money. | ||
| A couple more bucks. | ||
| But think about this. | ||
| How different was the second fight? | ||
| It was really kind of the same fight. | ||
| Pretty much the same. | ||
| So how is that fight the fight of the night? | ||
| And then the very exact fucking fight a few months later is a boring fight. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Well, who said it's boring? | ||
| If you said it's boring, the world's gonna say it's boring. | ||
| If Dana says it's boring, the world's gonna say it's boring. | ||
| Well, I never said it was boring. | ||
| No, I'm just saying. | ||
| I say, if you look at the result after the fact, people might say, if you knew what happened during the fight, you might say, well, it's boring to watch again. | ||
| But watching it live was not boring at all because the consequences are so grave. | ||
| It's one of the things that I pointed out. | ||
| If Wonderboy fucks up, he's going to sleep. | ||
| If you fuck up, you're going to get kicked in the head too. | ||
| Anything can go wrong in that fight. | ||
| That's a very tactical fight. | ||
| Dana didn't say it was a boring fight. | ||
| What he said was, man, the way you let go of him in that period, you know, why don't you just do that every time? | ||
| I said, Dana, I said... | ||
| When I let go, it's because I see the opening. | ||
| When I see the opening, you always know me to go. | ||
| Tell me one time, I see an opening and not went, and I had somebody hurt, and I not try to finish them. | ||
| But don't you think that that's just frustration for someone who's not fighting, who says things that aren't logical to you, as a guy who's a champion, who is fighting? | ||
| These are things that people say that aren't logical. | ||
| But it's damaging when it's the president. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When the president says it, Especially when you got the cultish following, whatever he says is going to go. | ||
| If they say Damian Maia is boring, everybody... | ||
| And they're not even going to change the word. | ||
| If you say, Tyron Woodley and Damian Maia, oh my God, that fucking fight was boring. | ||
| Somebody's going to say, Tyron Woodley, Damian Maia, oh my God, that fucking fight is boring. | ||
| They're not even going to change the word. | ||
| That's what we have. | ||
| So as a champion, in a position of being... | ||
| Supposed to be being promoted... | ||
| At that pace, it becomes damaging. | ||
| So now, how are you going to come back and say, okay, Tyron's back. | ||
| His shoulder's fixed. | ||
| He's one of the fucking most devastating guys out there. | ||
| Knock your motherfucking head off. | ||
| But then five minutes ago, you just say he was born. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's very hard. | ||
| Okay, I see what you're saying. | ||
| We're talking about two different things. | ||
| What you're saying is you feel like the way they talked about you after the fight was damaging and disrespectful and also not... | ||
| Accurate in terms of the consequences of your actions in the fight. | ||
| Yeah, and nobody came through and was like, damn, you know what? | ||
| I have to find out this motherfucker Toria's goddamn labrum in the first round, and he still didn't give a one damn takedown, didn't hardly get touched at all in the entire fight, maybe punched two or three times total. | ||
| That's kind of clutch. | ||
| He must have got a strong mind. | ||
| That's what you would like to hear. | ||
| No, I don't want to hear anything because I want to fight. | ||
| But you're saying that. | ||
| I'm saying that it was a choice made to say one thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But Jadina flies off the cuff, right? | ||
| And it's always been the thing about him. | ||
| But it's also, you can also fly off the cuff in the other direction. | ||
| You can also say, hey, this person's the fucking next superstar. | ||
| Oh, my God, Ngannou is crazy. | ||
| Oh, my God, Cody Garbrandt is fucking the man. | ||
| Oh, my God, Paige Van Zandt this. | ||
| Oh, my man, Sage York at that. | ||
| You can say that. | ||
| And what's what happened? | ||
| Million followers. | ||
| Two million followers. | ||
| And that makes a big difference. | ||
| But that can happen to you at any moment. | ||
| You're frustrated by the reaction to three particular fights. | ||
| I'm not frustrated at all. | ||
| You're definitely frustrated. | ||
| You want me to be frustrated? | ||
| Settle down, fella. | ||
| I know what you are. | ||
| I want to tell you a secret. | ||
| I'm working like hell right now. | ||
| I know you are. | ||
| And I'm not frustrated. | ||
| I know you are. | ||
| I'm doing a lot of TV work. | ||
| But you're obviously unhappy with certain things. | ||
| And this unhappiness stems from the result of three fights. | ||
| But if you look at one fight before that, the Robbie Lawler fight, I mean, everybody was talking about you like you were the most devastating thing of all time. | ||
| The fact that you were able to do that to Robbie Lawler. | ||
| All you need is one or two more fights like that, and everybody forgets about Damian Maia. | ||
| That's what happens. | ||
| You want me to be frustrated so bad. | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Well, let me tell you this. | ||
| I definitely don't. | ||
| I'm really not frustrated, my man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Now you're playing a cool guy. | ||
| I see what's up. | ||
| I'm not frustrated. | ||
| I just know my deck of cards. | ||
| And I got a very thick layer of skin, and I'm very cautious of who I am and my brand. | ||
| Now, when you look at the division, right? | ||
| You're the champ. | ||
| You're at the top of the food chain. | ||
| What do you see in front of you? | ||
| Like, what threats, what fighters do you think present unique challenges? | ||
| None. | ||
| Well, what do you think is next for you? | ||
| If you just forget about the super fights with Bisping? | ||
| I think the deck needs to be shuffled. | ||
| I think when I come back, I think when I come back, I take that back. | ||
| Karl Usman is dope. | ||
| He's fighting this weekend too. | ||
| Kamar Usman is a bad man. | ||
| He's a bad man. | ||
| And he's a guy that a lot of people are not talking about for some strange reason. | ||
| For a lot of reasons. | ||
| And I'm okay to talk about it because, you know, I've always been honest. | ||
| He's very tough. | ||
| He's a good style matchup for me to present a lot of challenges. | ||
| He's a good wrestler. | ||
| He's very strong. | ||
| He's starting to come along with his hands. | ||
| And if I'm going to fight somebody, And on some number one contender shit, I want to fight somebody I respect. | ||
| Somebody like RDA, somebody like Usman, Till, Pontinevio. | ||
| These dudes are savages. | ||
| And, you know, not to sound cocky, but I think my toughest challenges are behind me. | ||
| I think Carlos Condit and Robbie Lawler, and at the time when Koscheck was almost a few fights away from fighting George. | ||
| And, you know, those guys at that moment... | ||
| Those guys presented a lot of problems. | ||
| Kaushik had the same overhand right, just a little bit different. | ||
| Wrestling, great chin, great condition, a lot of experience. | ||
| You know, it was a threat for me. | ||
| Robbie Lawler was a fighter of the year, back-to-back. | ||
| You know, had some of the craziest fights we've ever seen. | ||
| Fucking lip hanging open. | ||
| He's bleeding. | ||
| And that's the dude I had to walk in. | ||
| He was a boogeyman at the time. | ||
| So, for me to get bubble guts, don't nobody have that power that Nate Marker did when he knocked me the hell out. | ||
| I'll never be hit that hard again in my life. | ||
| You think Kobe Covington is going to punch me and make me wince and back up? | ||
| No. | ||
| Look at how he was punching Damian Maia. | ||
| Those are rabbit punches. | ||
| So if you don't have great wrestling, great wrestling defense, great conditioning, and power in your hand, you're just not going to give me butterflies. | ||
| Well, I think for sure you've accomplished some great things and fought some amazing fights against some very dangerous challenges. | ||
| I mean, there's no doubt about that. | ||
| No one could deny that. | ||
| And those fights that you did just talk about, Carlos Condit, particularly Robbie Lawler, Josh Koscheck in his prime, amazing fights. | ||
| Great results. | ||
| But when you talk about Usman, we talk about RDA, you talk about Darren Till, you're talking about also potential amazing fights. | ||
| You know, I think there's a lot of outstanding opportunity and I think your division is one of the most talent-rich divisions in the sport. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not discrediting that. | ||
| I think that I'm always a forward-thinking dude. | ||
| So the Till guy didn't sneak up on me. | ||
| You saw Till in advance? | ||
| I'm going to tell you how to do this. | ||
| At one point in time, it was Brandon Thatch, it was Eric Silva, it was Kelvin Gasselum, it was Steven Thompson. | ||
| Brandon Thatch, Eric Silva, kind of doing it away. | ||
| Gaslam went up and fought me. | ||
| Stephen Thompson went up. | ||
| So now, the Darren Till, the Usman, all those guys, they're in that same pool. | ||
| So I'm always thinking about training, always thinking about fighting these guys, always game planning for these guys before they even come up. | ||
| At some point, I don't have to fight everybody because they're going to cancel each other out. | ||
| If it's five studs, I might walk into three of them. | ||
| So I got to be ready. | ||
| Damian Maia wasn't a surprise. | ||
| I asked for Damian Maia I thought I fought Jake Shields. | ||
| Or somebody I fought. | ||
| And my manager was like, dude, why you want to fight Damian Maia, man? | ||
| He's such a beast. | ||
| And this, this, and this, and that. | ||
| I'm like, I know this. | ||
| On paper, Rory McDonald's my toughest matchup in the division right now. | ||
| Even when Ellenberger was a stud and was fucking wrecking people because of his power, his wrestling, and his condition, him and Johnny Hendricks also would have been a threat. | ||
| What guys were I trying to fight? | ||
| Let me get Johnny Hendricks, former champion. | ||
| So I was going up against the guys. | ||
| Carlos Conant, still today, might be my favorite fighter. | ||
| So when I watched his video, I was getting bought. | ||
| I'm like, this motherfucker's good. | ||
| I was stealing his techniques. | ||
| But what happened when I fought him? | ||
| Did he look like the same Carlos County? | ||
| No, I punched him. | ||
| He looked like a ratchet was snatching him across the octagon. | ||
| It wasn't like I just kicked him in the knee and, oh my God, he was going to win. | ||
| No, he was getting dominated in that fight because I did my homework. | ||
| I respect him that much that I took all his tools and I left him naked out there in the octagon. | ||
| And he had to deal with my speed. | ||
| He had to deal with my power. | ||
| That's what I do to everybody. | ||
| Nobody sees it. | ||
| They think I'm just a strong-ass fucking wrestler with a hard right hand. | ||
| But look at the way that Jordan Meehan looked against me. | ||
| Look at the way that Tarek Safedine, I outstruck Paul Daly. | ||
| Kelvin Gaslam has never looked like that against anybody else. | ||
| Same thing with Steven. | ||
| Same thing with Maya. | ||
| Same thing with Condit. | ||
| Same thing with Robbie. | ||
| It's not a surprise. | ||
| That's the way that Duke and Dean and I, we address what we... | ||
| If I'm fighting me... | ||
| Fight Tyron this way. | ||
| Take him to the late round. | ||
| Kick his leg. | ||
| Stay away from his power. | ||
| Circuit his way. | ||
| So now I'm going to formulate my game plan about what I think you think of me. | ||
| Then I think about every fucking thing that you do. | ||
| Every skill, every talent, every mannerism, what you do when you get tired, what you're going to go to, what's your bread and butter, and I get ready for those. | ||
| And sometimes it's like, Robbie took a long time. | ||
| It took up until the week of the fight for me to be like, I got this motherfucker. | ||
| What was it that was different? | ||
| He I think? | ||
| He will scramble any first shot. | ||
| If you shoot a shot, he'll scramble you hard. | ||
| You have to shoot two, three, four attempts to get him to the ground. | ||
| He had one butterfly that he used to sweep to get out the ground. | ||
| So we just knew all that. | ||
| And then at any point, he can play rope-a-dope and then he can come off swinging. | ||
| So that's a lot of things to think about. | ||
| And then he just can stand here like this and go, boom, and you're knocked out. | ||
| Not technique, not turning hips. | ||
| He just had heavy hands naturally. | ||
| So that's always a threat. | ||
| We've seen him in wars. | ||
| He's not going to go away. | ||
| So I had to formulate a game plan that I can get around all that. | ||
| Now when you saw the RDA-Robbie Lawler fight, you said that you weren't really impressed with that fight. | ||
| Because RDA had him against an octagon, and he was teeing off for 30,000 punches, and he didn't knock him down, and he didn't hurt him. | ||
| He was basically just punching the punch. | ||
| Anytime you punch the punch, you're wasting your energy. | ||
| Well, he's going up in weight, and he's more volume now than he was when he was fighting at 155. Yeah, I think he's fighting. | ||
| He's got more energy. | ||
| When you get here now, I mean, if you make the jump, you make the jump. | ||
| You can't be like, I was a lightweight, and... | ||
| No, he's a welterweight now. | ||
| Yeah, he's a welterweight now. | ||
| No doubt. | ||
| But I mean, his style is different than, especially a guy like you who throws one-shot bombs. | ||
| This is my thought on Robbie, okay? | ||
| A lot of people, I pick Robbie apart in the film room before I even fought him. | ||
| And the fight was over with before the fight started. | ||
| Robbie starts out the first 30 seconds extremely hard. | ||
| He ends the first 30 seconds extremely hard. | ||
| Second and fourth round are kind of close. | ||
| He's going forward, you're going forward. | ||
| He'll take something to give something, okay? | ||
| Third round, he usually takes off. | ||
| You ever notice that? | ||
| He gets against a cage. | ||
| He's confident in his defense. | ||
| He'll let you punch and he'll block you. | ||
| He won't waste a lot of energy so he can get into that second gear. | ||
| It's not that he's so well conditioned. | ||
| Watch his fight against Carlos. | ||
| Watch his fight against Rory. | ||
| Watch his fight against RDA. He spent that same moment against the Octagon where he allowed the opponent to punch at him. | ||
| The same thing with Johnny. | ||
| Then he came off trying to get through and burn themselves out. | ||
| He's very smart, but if everyone acts like he's just a marathon runner, he's not. | ||
| So when that happened, I said, okay, you got to get on Robbie Hart. | ||
| You got to get on Robbie quick. | ||
| He's been punched a lot. | ||
| Like I did all, every fucking stash. | ||
| You can think I had Reed Kuhn, the fightonomics guy, hit me up saying, Robbie has a flat face. | ||
| You punch his fat face, he's used to absorbing those punches. | ||
| Go around the side, punch him on the jawline. | ||
| What kind of crazy logic is that? | ||
| Man, I'll use everything. | ||
| I can tell you how many times he stepped to the fucking left during the fight, how many times he threw his right hand versus his left hand. | ||
| So, you know, I've been really secretive about a lot of this stuff because most people just see me as an athlete, they just punch hard, as a good wrestler. | ||
| That's tough and good game plan, but I really, overly get obsessed with studying my opponents to the point where when Masvidal was fighting Wonderboy, I'm like, he about to do this, he about to do that, he's throwing this, he's setting this up, look, told you, there you go. | ||
| Oh, he's about to do it. | ||
| And everybody's looking at him like, how the fuck do you know that? | ||
| I said, you motherfuckers watched that fight that I fought him and you thought it was so easy. | ||
| Get your ass in there and let Wonder Boy say, Wonder Boy's a G. And he can take a punch way better than I thought. | ||
| I hit his ass hard. | ||
| And he went down three or four times. | ||
| And he just had the mentality, I'm not going to lose today. | ||
| I'm not going to lose today. | ||
| And he was rewarded for that effort of just saying, you know what? | ||
| I'm gonna give it all I got and he'll forever have my respect. | ||
| But at the end of the day, you got to be able to be honest with yourself. | ||
| I'm honest with who I am, what I do well. | ||
| I'm not the best at elbows. | ||
| Can I throw elbows? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But am I gonna sit out there and act like I'm, you know, Matt Brown or somebody? | ||
| No, that's his deal. | ||
| Matt Brown ain't gonna storm you across the octagon like I will. | ||
| So once I see what I do well, And I, you know, I can hide my weaknesses behind my strengths. | ||
| I can allow my opponents never to put me in a spot where they're going to have the advantage. | ||
| Did Damian Maia ever put me in a position where he had me in his half guard? | ||
| No. | ||
| Never did it. | ||
| But you still, you didn't think that RDA's performance against Robbie Lawler was impressive? | ||
| Because he overwhelmed Robbie. | ||
| I mean, he... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think he might have. | ||
| I didn't hear anything about that. | ||
| From a tactical standpoint, I thought he had some really good successful low kicks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I thought he kind of abandoned that. | ||
| I was kind of surprised that he didn't do that. | ||
| And then I saw Robby do the rope-a-dope, but Robby never came off. | ||
| Normally, like I said, Robby will take some punches, then he'll come off storming you. | ||
| Never came off storming. | ||
| Maybe it's because he messed his leg up or whatever. | ||
| But just from two people that they want to say they're going to fight me next, let me fight somebody. | ||
| And it's a... | ||
| Did he turn? | ||
| Lawler fought RDA seriously injured. | ||
| Now those injuries have been revealed. | ||
| Let's see what we got here. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Meniscus. | ||
| Destroyed. | ||
| Blew his ACL and meniscus. | ||
| In the fight? | ||
| And every other thing that's in your knee out in the third round. | ||
| Sid wobbled over to the fence. | ||
| So it makes sense, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It makes sense because if Robbie is notoriously known for, you know, like, think about when Rory had him against the octagon. | ||
| When Kyle was kind of, then he comes out and he comes out blasting. | ||
| That makes a lot of sense. | ||
| It said he hurt himself before the fight, though? | ||
| Yeah, I had another article I was going to pull up, but I found that that said, yeah, he was injured going into the fight. | ||
| So he tore his ACL before the fight? | ||
| Or during the fight? | ||
| I didn't find that. | ||
| The title of that though, go back to that real quick, the title of it said who's seriously injured going into the fight, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That said injured and then the injuries have been revealed. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| I think that one said the third round, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is right where you were saying that he lays off. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| So he didn't come off... | ||
| You can't go to a thread on us, brother. | ||
| Yeah, that's why it's a forum posted, so I don't want to go with it. | ||
| That's it, sure. | ||
| You can't go to the thread on us. | ||
| We don't know where the hell that came from. | ||
| But yeah, you know, that would make sense because I'm used to Robbie coming off and getting those 30-second bursts. | ||
| Like, I don't know exactly... | ||
| I talked to Big John about this for a while, about the judging, right? | ||
| And, you know, damage being landed. | ||
| So some of those fights, or even if Robbie wasn't the more active one, he's damaging people more because he punched harder and looked more aggressive. | ||
| But how can Carlos Condit control the fact that he just don't punch as hard as Robbie? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Did you think he beat Robbie in a fight? | ||
| I'd have to go back and watch that again. | ||
| I thought it was a very, very close fight. | ||
| At that time, did you think it? | ||
| I don't think I did. | ||
| I think I thought that Robbie did just enough to win. | ||
| But I'd have to go back and watch it again. | ||
| See, I thought at that moment that Carlos won. | ||
| But I wasn't like, oh my god, I can't believe they gave us Robbie. | ||
| It was extremely close. | ||
| It was really close. | ||
| You could make an argument for either guy winning, I think. | ||
| But Robby, because he landed the more harder punch and it looked scarier, I think that's why he got the nod. | ||
| That means something though. | ||
| I mean, someone who hits harder, it has more damage, that damage should be accumulated. | ||
| I mean, that should be added up. | ||
| So someone throws punches and it looks like it's affecting a person more, even if the other person throws more and lands more, then the person that's landing the damage and punches you think should win. | ||
| I think damage should count for more than punches that don't damage. | ||
| Is that the way that they're supposed to score now, currently? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What's interesting is Nevada still doesn't accept the new rules. | ||
| They need to get the old ones right before they try to bring in the new ones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but what's also interesting is the scores are much wider now. | ||
| You see a lot more 10-8s now than you ever saw before, which I think is good. | ||
| I just think that our system, taking a system from boxing that only uses hands and applying that to takedowns, submission attempts, leg kicks, elbows. | ||
| You would almost have to know this guy is a jiu-jitsu world champion. | ||
| The fact that this guy swept him, he should score more because this guy, this is his warehouse, but no judge is going to have that insight. | ||
| I think it should be a much broader system. | ||
| I don't think it should be 10 points at all. | ||
| I think you're dealing with extreme amounts of variables. | ||
| It should be almost like a 100-point system. | ||
| The guy that refed my fight against the Wonder Boy the first time, the one that was one judge that gave a 10-8 the first round and a 10-9 the fourth round. | ||
| Fourth round was when I knocked him down three times. | ||
| Yeah, the 10-8 was when you almost got him in the guillotine. | ||
| Is that why he... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| I almost got him in the guillotine in the fourth round, yeah. | ||
| And he said, well... | ||
| I thought you... | ||
| Why did I think you almost got him in the guillotine in the first round? | ||
| In the first fight? | ||
| The first fight, the first round, I just ground the hell out of him. | ||
| I took him down and I just beat him up for the whole round. | ||
| He gave that round a 10-8. | ||
| So it was the fourth round where you got him in the guillotine? | ||
| The fourth round was when I knocked him down, I knocked him down again, I knocked him down again, and then I went for the guillotine. | ||
| So I knocked him down three times and then I went for the guillotine. | ||
| The judge told me, he said, you know, I thought it was a 10-8 round, but then you wasted a minute in a guillotine. | ||
| Wasted a minute. | ||
| He told me. | ||
| I had just got over this shit, right? | ||
| He really fucking said that? | ||
| He said that. | ||
| I had just got over the fact that I felt like it was some bullshit. | ||
| I got over that fact. | ||
| I said, you know what? | ||
| Whatever it is what it is, let's do it again. | ||
| This time I'm gonna fucking beat him. | ||
| This motherfucker walked up to me. | ||
| I don't even know who he is. | ||
| Say, hey, man, I just want to let you know I judged your fight. | ||
| And, you know, I'm the one that gave you the 10-8 in the first round and 10-8 in the fourth round. | ||
| And then all of a sudden my insides just start burning. | ||
| And he's like, you know, I just want to explain to you why, you know, because I don't have a problem with, you know, facing the fighters afterwards. | ||
| You know, you did well. | ||
| I was going to give you a 10-round, you know, it was crazy. | ||
| And, you know, but then you wasted a minute in the guillotine. | ||
| Oh, that's so crazy. | ||
| I said, sir, let me tell you something. | ||
| I said, the first round, if you would have said 10-9 on that, okay. | ||
| I ground a pound, I bloodied him up. | ||
| He didn't show no offense. | ||
| 10-8, 10-9, whatever you want to give it. | ||
| I'm cool with that. | ||
| And I said, the fourth round, I knocked him down three times. | ||
| And I said, I want to tell you, a guillotine choke is not a move that you can say I wasted time in. | ||
| It's a finishing move. | ||
| And it was tight. | ||
| That was a tight guillotine. | ||
| Had he fucking tapped out, the fight would have been over with. | ||
| So the fact that I tried to knock him out, Then his neck became available to my arms. | ||
| Then I grabbed his fucking neck. | ||
| Then I tried to choke him out. | ||
| Then he popped his head out. | ||
| Yes, he's tough for making it through that whole onslaught of me trying to kill him. | ||
| But does that give him an extra point? | ||
| He said, but then he threw some punches. | ||
| I said, go back and watch the fight. | ||
| I said, he threw a few punches from top. | ||
| How many landed? | ||
| He said, I don't know. | ||
| I said, sir. | ||
| I said, I'm over the fight. | ||
| I'm glad they didn't say I lost the fight. | ||
| But the only significant damage that was landed in the fight came from me. | ||
| The only knockdowns, the only blood drawn, the only jeopardy of the referee getting involved happened when I was on the end of it. | ||
| I just think the system sucks. | ||
| I really think the scoring system needs to be revamped. | ||
| Hey, just don't let it go to the judges. | ||
| That's ridiculous, right? | ||
| Because people are going and saying, you know what? | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Today, I'm going to let it go to the judges. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to let it go to the judges. | |
| I'm going to let it go to the judges. | ||
| Hey, you know what? | ||
| I'm not going to try to knock y'all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I trust them three right there look very trustworthy. | ||
| I'm going to leave it in their hands and all my kids and my family and my belt. | ||
| I'm going to just, you know, I'm going to leave it up to them. | ||
| I always hate that expression. | ||
| I hate it because it's so stupid. | ||
| Some guys don't want to be finished. | ||
| Most guys in Steven's case would have been over with. | ||
| Some guys are just tough. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to just be finished. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Nobody does. | ||
| It's a foolish way of looking at it. | ||
| The best way to fight is the best way to fight. | ||
| And if you see an opening, like you said, that's when you move. | ||
| The idea that you're supposed to just... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The fact that people don't know that and that people say things like that and they don't understand what they really shouldn't be talking about fighting. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Fighting is a complicated thing. | ||
| Fighting is a complicated thing. | ||
| And it's also it's one sport where it's like if the team doesn't run the ball well, they don't run the ball. | ||
| They pass. | ||
| So if this is Stephen Thompson, he doesn't have to wrestle. | ||
| He doesn't have to try to do jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He just have to stop you from doing it to him. | ||
| But he's got that style that's impossible to find anywhere else. | ||
| He's standing completely sideways. | ||
| He's throwing front leg kicks that can knock you out. | ||
| He's doing a lot of weird stuff. | ||
| And he bends at the waist like a snake. | ||
| He leads all those years of point karate. | ||
| He's really fast at it, too. | ||
| It's very good that you brought in Raymond Daniels, too. | ||
| Raymond Daniels, which is a pain in the ass. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Sage Northcutt, which actually, in my opinion, sparring-wise, was way harder than Wonderboy. | ||
| More MMA experience, for sure. | ||
| And also sidekicks. | ||
| Sage is his sidekicks. | ||
| I had to wear Taekwondo pad to spar Sage. | ||
| He kicked me through the fence. | ||
| Oh, my bad, Mr. Woodley. | ||
| I'm like, damn, this motherfucker is good. | ||
| That front leg sidekick's no joke. | ||
| It's no joke. | ||
| So he was good. | ||
| I had a kid named Chris Bang from the same background. | ||
| Then I had another guy named Michael Tang, who's the Taekwondo guy from the East Coast. | ||
| And then, actually, a lot of people don't know this. | ||
| Duke, actually, his original base was Taekwondo. | ||
| So having all those guys, it wasn't fun. | ||
| I mean, it was many rounds. | ||
| I did not win. | ||
| I mean, Sage North could have kicked my ass for a couple days because I couldn't figure out how the hell to get up on him without getting kicked in the sidekick. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then now you've got to think about it. | ||
| Like, damn, how close do I get to him before he kicked me in the side? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, it's a totally different style of movement, and Wonderboy's probably the best in the world at it. | ||
| Yeah, he's good. | ||
| It's a very complicated fight, and that's why it was interesting to me. | ||
| I almost had an MVP out, too, but his manager was trying to get too much money. | ||
| Say that again? | ||
| Michael Venomage. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I was going to bring him out, too. | ||
| He wanted to come out, but his manager wanted me to bring him, bring the manager, bring the friend, paid him all this money, get him all three different separate rental cars. | ||
| I said, I don't know if the hell y'all think I am what kind of money I got, but... | ||
| We're not doing that for three days. | ||
| You made a big change in your life when you started training with Duke, and a lot of people don't know that before that you really didn't have a main trainer, which is pretty impressive. | ||
| Dean's been with me for a long time, but as far as... | ||
| A coach coached every day. | ||
| I put myself through stuff. | ||
| That was all I was doing. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Before Duke, it was just me. | ||
| I had a gym. | ||
| I would say, hey guys, we're going to support this time. | ||
| We're going to do this. | ||
| I would try to address my weaknesses, and I've been really blessed to have the amount of success I had without having a full-time coach. | ||
| Then it just got to that point when I told Dean, I said, man... | ||
| Whatever it costs, man, whatever I gotta pay, I need you the whole time. | ||
| I said, because I can't do it. | ||
| I've been winging this shit. | ||
| I can't keep doing that. | ||
| But what was interesting, you told me that it was your son's idea. | ||
| Yeah, you got a good memory. | ||
| To go to Duke. | ||
| You been taking some notes. | ||
| No, I remember shit. | ||
| Yeah, my son, we was doing an embedded thing, and he was like, so where are we going tomorrow? | ||
| I was like, damn. | ||
| Like, either tomorrow, it's so on a humbug. | ||
| I'm like, we're either going to fly to Florida, me and Dean, or we're going to drive to Milwaukee. | ||
| And then my son, Darren, he said, I think you should go to Florida. | ||
| Go up there and train with Ben Askren and Anthony Pettis and those guys, and I think you should go up there. | ||
| You mean Milwaukee? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You said Florida. | |
| Sorry, Milwaukee, yeah. | ||
| So I said, we woke up that morning and I said, fuck it, we're going to Milwaukee. | ||
| So the embedded guys, they actually had to drive my car. | ||
| I was getting tired and falling asleep. | ||
| So the embedded guys was driving my truck up there and we went up there. | ||
| It was cold, negative 14 degrees. | ||
| I was like, man, if this sucks, I'm coming back home in a week. | ||
| I brought Eve out there who had never been in the cold in his life. | ||
| He was going to die. | ||
| But yeah, I went out there and then Duke has always invited me to come out. | ||
| He don't invite a lot of guys. | ||
| But Duke, from Ben, from Anthony, I always saw those guys killing southpaws. | ||
| And after I talked to Duke, now I understand. | ||
| Duke's brother was a southpaw. | ||
| So his main sparring partner, he learned all the tricks on how to defeat a southpaw. | ||
| So I'm like, how did Anthony and all these guys, every time they go against somebody in the opposite stance, they did great against him. | ||
| So if you do the math, everybody I fought, the last seven fights, had been southpawed. | ||
| Robby, Wonderboy, Maya, you gotta say Wonderboy again, Kelvin Gasolim, Dung Young Kim, all of them at Southpaw. | ||
| And all difficult guys at Southpaw. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Everybody else in front of me is Southpaw. | ||
| RDA, Robby with Southpaw, Kyra Kwefutin in Southpaw. | ||
| So you got all these guys that are Southpaw. | ||
| So it made sense for me. | ||
| Not only that, he made fighting fun again. | ||
| I wasn't having fun with it. | ||
| He made it fun to learn. | ||
| I felt like a kid again. | ||
| It was a great morale at the gym. | ||
| I felt very specific to what I was doing. | ||
| I felt like I wasn't doing any training. | ||
| Just pushing, slashing, flipping shit just to say I did it. | ||
| Everything had a function. | ||
| And I felt better. | ||
| And I looked better. | ||
| And, you know, I did all this training. | ||
| I was running my fucking self into the ground, doing all this, you know, three, four day trainings and looking all crazy. | ||
| And I got into the octagon and it never showed. | ||
| People were like, damn, man, Tyron got all those goddamn muscles. | ||
| You got all those muscles, then the motherfucker might get tired. | ||
| So I'm like, damn, I'm doing all this extra work. | ||
| But it ain't showing an octagon. | ||
| But then I started training with Duke and Dean and they forced me to say, Tyron, trust us. | ||
| You're doing too much. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| If your sparring is affected because of your strength and conditioning, it's no longer a supplement. | ||
| It's taking the primary and we're not in fucking CrossFit. | ||
| We're in fighting. | ||
| Your sparring is number one. | ||
| Anything it takes for your sparring to be the best, that's what we got to do. | ||
| So if we got to run more, do less stress conditioning, if we got to actually do none, just spar. | ||
| If we got to, like, there's been times I go in there and have a shitty sparring day. | ||
| And I said, I'll see you out in the morning. | ||
| We're doing this again. | ||
| And we're running back. | ||
| Because in the practice room, you can run it back. | ||
| In real life, you can't. | ||
| So I take advantage of, you know, the playground of everything in practice. | ||
| And I think now I just love fighting again. | ||
| I love training. | ||
| I love competing. | ||
| I love winning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I love that minute when you know you won. | ||
| Now, how much time do you spend in Milwaukee? | ||
| Do you just move your whole camp there? | ||
| Like, how do you do it? | ||
| Yeah, most of the time. | ||
| I had to spend some time in Florida because Damian Maia, I'll be a complete idiot if I didn't take part of the, you know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt at American Top Team. | ||
| It really depends on the fight. | ||
| I usually try to get at least four weeks with Duke. | ||
| The good thing about Duke, Duke doesn't have a huge ego, and he knows what he does well, but he works well with other coaches. | ||
| That's why him and Dean has been such a great duo. | ||
| If I need to bring in another striking coach or another training partner or somebody else, he opens up the door for that because at the end of the day, the goal is for me to be the champion, stay the champion, and reach my goal, being the greatest welterweight of all time. | ||
| Duke has a great attitude. | ||
| He's such a smart guy. | ||
| If it was not for that, then it would be a little bit difficult. | ||
| And also Dan Lambert, you got to realize, I've been an American top team since day one. | ||
| Dan Lambert has never been in the blue about where I'm training and where I'm going. | ||
| I've always called him. | ||
| And for him to give me the ability to go and get stuff from other coaches has also been very helpful. | ||
| No, he's another amazing guy, too. | ||
| He's such a valuable guy in MMA. You think about the amount of money that he spent on American Top Team before he made any money. | ||
| I mean, that guy poured money into mixed martial arts, poured it into it, and created one of the greatest facilities on the planet Earth for MMA, especially the new place. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| He's great, too. | ||
| I mean, but as a coach, what I really respect about Duke is not just the fact that he's got this incredible wealth of knowledge, but that he's so humble. | ||
| He's so, like, down-to-earth and chill. | ||
| Most of the Gs are. | ||
| The people that really just know it, they don't have to prove it. | ||
| Dean's like that. | ||
| Duke's like that. | ||
| Lambert's like that. | ||
| Some guys that overly want to show you and stuff, those are the people that are kind of insecure on where they're at as coaches. | ||
| Striking coaches. | ||
| I mean, you train with striking coaches. | ||
| Oh, why are you training with that guy? | ||
| They, like, get so sensitive. | ||
| I'm never I haven't seen it before. | ||
| So I just don't like to deal with it. | ||
| Yeah, it's unfortunate. | ||
| My Boston coach likes that too, Eric Brown from Wild Card. | ||
| I've been training with him since 2007, 2008. So he's the same way. | ||
| So now when you're out here, sometimes you're home. | ||
| And when you're home, what kind of stuff do you do if you're not injured, if you're not recovering from a surgery? | ||
| What stuff do you do at home? | ||
| I hang out with my kids. | ||
| Go to football practice, go to wrestling practice, take everybody to school, pick everybody up, play video games, chill out. | ||
| But what about training? | ||
| I don't train. | ||
| You don't train at home? | ||
| Sometimes, not much. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't do anything? | ||
| I do strength and conditioning with my guy, Derek Fairchild, and I got an up-and-coming featherweight that's really fast and good boxing, so I play around with him a little bit. | ||
| I might run, I might hit the bag, might do the versaclimber, but when it's camp time, I'm out. | ||
| When it's not camp time, I'm with the family. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So you're not constantly training? | ||
| No. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you feel like that gives you... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I used to. | |
| You used to. | ||
| Why'd you change that? | ||
| Because I stopped liking MMA. Oh, okay. | ||
| So now... | ||
| So you feel like you were kind of burnt out. | ||
| But I never stopped watching. | ||
| I'm always watching film. | ||
| I'm always... | ||
| I'm obviously working on Fox. | ||
| I got to break everybody down. | ||
| I wasn't burnt out. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I want to miss this shit. | ||
| I want to get back in there. | ||
| I want to hear somebody's name. | ||
| They're fighting me. | ||
| I want to get nervous a little bit. | ||
| Watch some film and see what they do well, and then let's get this together. | ||
| Let's write everything out. | ||
| Let's map out the training camp. | ||
| Let's get our partners. | ||
| Let's do what we need to do, and let's get after it. | ||
| And that takes away the pressure for me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, with this injury and the fact that three months in, you should be able to probably start training hard, when are you looking to defend the belt again? | ||
| You know, I can probably fight. | ||
| April will be kind of pushing it, but... | ||
| May, June, July is usually a big card. | ||
| The 4th, the big July 4th card. | ||
| I'll probably try to wait till then. | ||
| That's a good one. | ||
| Yeah, I'll probably wait till then. | ||
| And that's probably, like, more conservative. | ||
| Tyron Wilson, George St. Pierre fighting, main event, July, whatever the hell, weekend. | ||
| July 4th weekend. | ||
| It used to be an international fight, yeah. | ||
| That's the big one. | ||
| That would be, I mean, that's why I have the biggest chance to get a big fight. | ||
| That's what I want. | ||
| If I was your manager, that's what we got to do, Tyron. | ||
| So, July probably. | ||
| Hang in there. | ||
| I mean, there's no fight in between that that's going to make sense for me to do. | ||
| Has George said he's retired or he's not retired? | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| He just gave up the belt, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
George... | |
| I don't want to speak for George. | ||
| Because I like George. | ||
| I like him too. | ||
| So I don't want to speak for him. | ||
| But George is smart. | ||
| He plays the fact that he don't... | ||
| Oh, I don't really speak English. | ||
| That motherfucker's smart. | ||
| He know what he's doing. | ||
| Bisping was the right fight. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| Bisping, according to all the middleweights, wasn't really the best middleweight. | ||
| Everybody wanted to fight Bisping. | ||
| So if George is going to go up fighting for another belt, another legendary move, fight a guy that does not have the punching power, maybe cannot take him down, maybe cannot stop the takedown, and for once, George probably had a punching power advantage against Bisping. | ||
| So with that said... | ||
| It made a lot of sense for him to do that. | ||
| They also had a lot of history training together. | ||
| That was a big part of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In George's eyes. | ||
| He was very successful against him in training. | ||
| He was kind of worried about the size though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was like, hey, so how much do you think Bisping weigh? | ||
| I'm like, are you fucking serious? | ||
| Are you like really worried about that? | ||
| Well, there was talk about you fighting Bisping at one time. | ||
| I know you guys got back and forth. | ||
| I weigh like 205 right now. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm good to fight at middleweight. | ||
| I actually offered to fight George at middleweight And give up my belt at welterweight and just fight him. | ||
| If I lose the fucking middleweight title, then I lost my belt and now I'm fucking Sam Sausage. | ||
| I get thrown to the bottom of the deck. | ||
| But when you make that kind of ballsy, say, hey, I'll fight him at middleweight and I'll give my belt up. | ||
| If that fight doesn't happen at that point, I kind of feel like somebody might not want to fight. | ||
| Well, it's hard to say, right? | ||
| Because he only fought once in four years and there's no timetable in his return and no thought whatsoever. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness in this sport right now. | ||
| And so much rests on January 20th. | ||
| So much rests on Ngannou versus Stipe. | ||
| Because I think that fight is going to be gigantic for the sport. | ||
| It's going to be gigantic for the sport. | ||
| And then, you know, I think Stipe is used to overly working. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He had that spot where he was like, man, when am I ever going to get my shot? | ||
| And he finally got it, took advantage of it. | ||
| You know, I was in a similar situation. | ||
| I'm like, when am I going to get my shot? | ||
| Got it, took advantage of it. | ||
| And Gano has very scary... | ||
| He's so scary. | ||
| He don't knock you out regular. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| He don't hit you and you fall out. | ||
| He hits you and everybody, oh, shh. | ||
| They wondering if you're alive still. | ||
| And it's kind of like... | ||
| Like, when he hit, like, he hit Overeem. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Do you see the meme when it was, like, the Pez candy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And his head, his back of his head almost touched his spine. | ||
| That was an insane knockout. | ||
| Yeah, he knocked him the hell out. | ||
| He's freaky in his speed, his power, and his story is incredible. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about a story that's, like, right out of a movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A guy was homeless five years ago, and now all of a sudden, in two years of fighting in the UFC. He's so appreciative and so happy, you know. | ||
| Fucking hands are, like... | ||
| Two times the size of my hand. | ||
| You say you shake his hand before? | ||
| Yeah, they're huge. | ||
| It feels weird like you're shaking a loaf of bread. | ||
| I'm like, damn, this dude. | ||
| I told his boxing coach, I'm like, man, I do not envy you, man. | ||
| You get punched in that body protector. | ||
| I know that shit. | ||
| He said, no. | ||
| He said, you can put it on. | ||
| I said, no, I will not. | ||
| Hell to the, no. | ||
| I'm not about that life. | ||
| He's something special. | ||
| So what do you think will happen in that fight? | ||
| If I was Stipe, I would want to... | ||
| Take him down, but he ain't gonna do it. | ||
| Yeah, he's gonna try. | ||
| Stipe got a good chin, but I wouldn't test it against him. | ||
| No, don't test it. | ||
| I think he's gonna try to close the distance and grab him and try to drag him to the ground. | ||
| I think he should, but I don't think he is. | ||
| You don't think he's gonna be able to? | ||
| I think he wanna show everybody. | ||
| I stood up with Overeem. | ||
| I stood up with... | ||
| JDS. I stood over Fabricio. | ||
| I stood over all these guys. | ||
| Totally different thing. | ||
| Rory Nelson. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| Totally different thing. | ||
| But I ain't on his coaching staff. | ||
| I don't know what they're thinking. | ||
| I think he should punch the takedowns. | ||
| Take down the ground and pound. | ||
| Wear his arms out. | ||
| Make Ngannou fight him to stop getting takedowns and see if he can take some steam off them hands. | ||
| That's what I think too. | ||
| And I think that the clinch is going to be critical. | ||
| Overeem got the clinch on him but couldn't do anything with it. | ||
| And Stipe was a college wrestler. | ||
| Stipe has got good wrestling skills. | ||
| You know, he's known more as being an overall well-rounded MMA fighter, but I think he's got to get that clinch. | ||
| I think standing in front of Ngannou is just, you're just, you're playing Russian roulette. | ||
| One of those bullets is going to land. | ||
| I'm not standing in front of that man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Not even just in the... | ||
| Even if we do an appearance, I'm like, hey, you too close to me. | ||
| Move your big ass over there. | ||
| Big old dude. | ||
| Yeah, when he connects, it's just something different. | ||
| So people always ask me this. | ||
| Do you think they want Ngannou to win? | ||
| Do you think they're trying to set this up so he can win? | ||
| Do you think, as far as people ask that... | ||
| He's an amazing story. | ||
| If he was the champion, it would be very marketable. | ||
| And I don't think they want... | ||
| Even the firefighter with the raspy voice? | ||
| I think if Stipe can turn Francis back, that's very marketable too. | ||
| If he wins, he broke the record, right? | ||
| Yeah, he will break the record. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Two defenses. | ||
| I know, that's how crazy the heavyweight division is, and always has been. | ||
| The most anyone has ever done is Kane. | ||
| Kane's done two defenses, right? | ||
| Damn, that's crazy. | ||
| It's Kane, right? | ||
|
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I don't know if it's Kane or not. | |
| And poor Kane. | ||
| Kane has so many injuries, man. | ||
| He's just constantly injured. | ||
| The poor guy is constantly getting surgery. | ||
| Did he freaking... | ||
| I know my man over there. | ||
| He's checking. | ||
| I thought you had a St. Louis hat on. | ||
| You're about to get some stripes over there. | ||
| LA, LA. LA and from Ohio. | ||
| What part of Ohio? | ||
| Columbus. | ||
| Columbus, all right. | ||
| Cold as hell out there. | ||
| Fuck yeah, it is. | ||
| I was just out in Canton not too long ago. | ||
| My son played in the Hall of Fame. | ||
| Why no UFC champion has defended the belt more than twice? | ||
| Heavyweight champion. | ||
| So what does it say? | ||
| Does it say whether it's Kane? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, Kane. | |
| Yep, Kane Velasquez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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This was a while ago. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think Stipe is a version of Kane with less injuries. | ||
| Kane kicks a little bit more, but, you know, just pressure, punching. | ||
| Endurance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Stipe's a beast. | ||
| He's definitely a beast. | ||
| Look, this is going to be the toughest fight for sure in Ngannou's career, but what's... | ||
| I mean, if Stipe can win, it's amazing, and it solidifies his position as the baddest man on the planet, but there's something about Ngannou that is... | ||
| It's more enticing to people. | ||
| It's also the fact that Stipe has been in so many wars, and his chin has been touched a lot of times. | ||
| So he has a great chin, but you don't want to keep testing that, especially against a dude like Ngannou with awkward power. | ||
| Yeah, the five-round Junior Dos Santos fight was a crazy long fight. | ||
| He got knocked down. | ||
| It's a tough one. | ||
| But the thing is, we know so little about Ngannou's ground game. | ||
| We know so little about his ability to overcome adversity. | ||
| He's just been smashing people. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I said that the other day. | ||
| I think that Stipe's been in the tough fights. | ||
| He's been knocked down. | ||
| And he's on a five-fight KO streak as well. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And it's against tougher opponents than Nagano's knocked out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the sport is so exciting right now, man. | ||
| There's so much talent. | ||
| Who's your favorite fighter right now? | ||
| Tyron Woodley. | ||
| It wouldn't happen to be because I'm here. | ||
| I don't have a favorite fighter. | ||
| Max Holloway's smashing right now. | ||
| I love Max Holloway. | ||
| I like his style too because his style is, he overwhelms you. | ||
| He's not knocking anybody out with one shot. | ||
| He's just constantly overwhelming you with conditioning and intelligence and timing and distance. | ||
| And he can do everything. | ||
| He can strike. | ||
| He can take you to the ground. | ||
| He's got great defense. | ||
| His submissions are outstanding. | ||
| And I like that fight with him and Frankie Edgar. | ||
| That's an interesting fight. | ||
| I was just talking about this the other day, but Frankie Edgar has fought similar. | ||
| You know, Cup Swanson or Yair Rodriguez. | ||
| But Max hasn't really fought anybody like Frankie before. | ||
| Somebody that's sharp and compact that knows how to get close quick, knows how to get out quick. | ||
| He'll take you down. | ||
| Frankie don't give a hell. | ||
| He was taking down, who was that? | ||
| Charlie Oliveira. | ||
| He didn't give a hell how great he was on the ground. | ||
| He was in his guard punching. | ||
| And I think that can present some problems. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's a good fight. | ||
| That's a really good fight, yeah. | ||
| That's the March 3rd fight, and Max is a big, big favorite in that fight, which I thought was interesting. | ||
| He's fucking tall, too. | ||
| He looks like he's in my weight. | ||
| Yeah, he's tall. | ||
| Confident. | ||
| And in the Aldo fight, especially the second fight, man, you see that confidence just oozing out of him. | ||
| He's the champ. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| He's a beast. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think 55 is an amazing weight class right now. | ||
| We argue on Fox that they try to get under my skin and say, lightweight is the best division. | ||
| I said, don't play with me. | ||
|
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Walter Wade's the best division. | |
| Well, it's your division. | ||
| After Habib, Habib was a beast. | ||
| I haven't watched many of his fights. | ||
| I watched him and said, I need to go back to my math. | ||
| He fights like that every time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a monster. | ||
| You see the Michael Johnson fight? | ||
| He's telling Michael to give up. | ||
| Give up. | ||
| I must be chump. | ||
| Give up. | ||
| Smashing him. | ||
| His wrestling and his ground and pound is just so ferocious. | ||
| It's just on such another level. | ||
| And when he gets a hold of guys, he's getting a hold of guys that are really good and just ragdolling them. | ||
| Like what he did to RDA. Did you ever see that fight? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I haven't seen those fights. | ||
| I gotta go back and look. | ||
| Ragdolled RDA. He just beats the shit out of people. | ||
| Gets you to the ground. | ||
| I was a big fan after that. | ||
| I'm like, man. | ||
| He's something special. | ||
| This dude is crazy. | ||
| He's something special. | ||
| And the fact that he did that to Barboza, he wants to move up to 72. Shit, no he don't. | ||
| Metabolic meals, send my man Habib out a pack. | ||
| Nutritionists, anybody out there, I'm picking up the tab. | ||
| Stay your psycho ass down there at 55. I'm not trying to see no Habib right now. | ||
| Yeah, he's making 55 easy now though, so who knows? | ||
| I think what I believe is going to happen is, I think Conor's going to vacate. | ||
| I think they're going to strip him, because Conor's got $100 million in the bank, and I think he's having fun and talking shit, and he's going to keep training, and he's going to make a big fight in the future. | ||
| But I think Khabib versus Tony is the big fight, and fuck, they might even do that one in Russia. | ||
| They do that one. | ||
| They're talking about doing a big fight in Russia. | ||
| I heard that. | ||
| Yeah, if that happens, woo! | ||
| Man, that's a good fight. | ||
| I mean, everybody's been waiting to see that fight. | ||
| Fuck, yeah, that's a good fight. | ||
| And it's like, Tony Ferguson, very unorthodox. | ||
| How many wins he's got, like 9 or 10 in a row? | ||
| Yeah, he has the most ever in the lightweight division, and I think it's at 10. I think when he beat Kevin, it was at 10. Who did he lose to? | ||
| Michael Johnson? | ||
| He lost to... | ||
| Boy, you gotta go way back. | ||
| He lost in a long time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe it was Michael Johnson. | ||
| Was Michael? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Tony's so unorthodox and awkward. | ||
| He had a close one against Eve, too. | ||
| I'll corner you for that fight. | ||
| He was a close one against Eve, but man, yeah. | ||
| He just... | ||
| Nobody has told Tony that what he's doing is not... | ||
| Who's Jamie Tony? | ||
| He lost to Jamie Tony earlier in his career. | ||
| What is that from? | ||
| National Fight Alliance. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| At the Hyatt Regency. | ||
| Oh, Karen Darbidian. | ||
| That guy's a very good fucking submission artist. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, he done let nine, ten motherfuckers have it since then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Punch, choke, choke, choke, choke, choke. | |
| Yep. | ||
| And running over guys, too. | ||
| The Edson Barboza fight was fucking fantastic. | ||
| That was a fantastic fight. | ||
| He was losing that fight, too. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| That's the danger about Tony. | ||
| It don't really matter if he's losing that fight in the first or second round. | ||
| He keeps it together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the Dos Anjos fight was amazing, too. | ||
| Beat the shit out of Dos Anjos. | ||
| I mean, he's a bad man, Tony Ferguson. | ||
| You cannot sleep on Tony Ferguson. | ||
| That fight is amazing. | ||
| I used to be like, man, this dude striking don't look like it's something that should frighten you that much. | ||
| But when it's coming so often and so weird angles and then he's going for shots and he does the exact opposite of what you think you should do in grappling and then he's in the position. | ||
| And then we get there, now he's got like five or six moves from that position. | ||
| So he's like swishing it here and there and there before you know it, your ass choked out. | ||
| Yeah, he's something special. | ||
| He's a real deal. | ||
| That's an amazing fight. | ||
| I love that fight. | ||
| You know what I'm really interested in right now? | ||
| I'm really interested in T.J. Dillashaw versus Mighty Mouse. | ||
| There's so much talk about that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I want to see it, though. | ||
| Somebody's got to challenge Mighty Mouse. | ||
| I would have been more interested to see Garbrandt and Mighty Mouse. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know why. | ||
| It just looked on paper like a more interesting fight. | ||
| Dumb, man. | ||
| I disagree. | ||
| I think it's more interesting to see TJ because TJ's got more weapons. | ||
| TJ does more stuff. | ||
| He throws more kicks. | ||
| He's got more... | ||
| I mean, you saw in the Garbrandt fight. | ||
| That's where he hurt him. | ||
| He hurt him with the head kick. | ||
| I just like Cody's boxing in the pocket and his counters. | ||
| Anybody that's gonna deal with DJ Speed gotta make DJ miss and not very many people have been able to do it. | ||
| They both are gonna be tough fights. | ||
| I mean, it's gonna be tough for TJ. It's gonna be tough for Dillashaw. | ||
| Mighty Mouse, he just has very few holes. | ||
| He's like pouring water. | ||
| Just keep going. | ||
| He never stopped. | ||
| I'm like, damn, dude. | ||
| I watched him drill before his fight. | ||
| He did the same thing in the drill. | ||
| He just did it right in the fight. | ||
| I'm like, dang. | ||
| No, he's special. | ||
| He's special. | ||
| His ability and his ability to not get hit. | ||
| He's doing something that's on a completely different level. | ||
| He always thinks in dimensions. | ||
| So he was trying to take down Dodson, remember? | ||
| And Dodson wouldn't let him take a down. | ||
| And he said, forget it. | ||
| I'm going to grab the leg and I'm going to keep punching him in the face or elbowing him in the head. | ||
| And then finally he got the takedown. | ||
| If he thinks he's smart... | ||
| He's going to keep going. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| He's not going to get discouraged. | ||
| He's going to keep going for it. | ||
| If he was going against, who was the kid? | ||
| Tim Elliott. | ||
| They had him in those deep chokes. | ||
| I'm like, I was freaking out. | ||
| Because, you know, DJ Mahoney, I'm like, man, is he about to lose to this kid? | ||
| And he said, no, I'm good. | ||
| He had me in there deep. | ||
| Like, he just don't get rattled very hard. | ||
| No, he doesn't get rattled. | ||
| He's got the whole package. | ||
| He's got mental toughness. | ||
| He's intelligent. | ||
| His skill level's on another level. | ||
| I mean, his skill level's off the charts. | ||
| He does everything. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| He's the master of the stream basics. | ||
| You know, like that's lift up, return armbar, maybe one of the flashiest things we've ever seen him do. | ||
| But in general, if you think about it, He comes forward and he does great fast basics from this side. | ||
| He switch stands. | ||
| Great fast basics from this side. | ||
| Very traditional clinch. | ||
| Super active with it. | ||
| Hard to take down. | ||
| Gets up the regular way. | ||
| He mounts you. | ||
| He believes, like if a coach teaches you an armbar from the mount, in his mind, it's 100% chance it's going to work. | ||
| There's no way it can't work. | ||
| So when you see him go do a regular armbar on somebody and submit them like, you know, Horiguchi or Jamaraga, like, damn, how you hit him with that armbar? | ||
| Because he just don't believe in the fact that doubt in his techniques. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| No, it's a it's an amazing time. | ||
| Amazing time for the sport and I mean it's amazing time It's just amazing time for martial arts period I mean that I think martial arts right now is at the highest level that it's ever been in the history of people fighting each other. | ||
| You know, it's an exciting moment as well because now you got so many different hopefuls. | ||
| You know, we got six or seven people that they just need one more. | ||
| And I don't just need one more. | ||
| This person just need one more. | ||
| Then they jump off and, you know, they become superstars because we need more stars right now. | ||
| We got Conor, but when is Conor going to come back? | ||
| I think Ronda might do the WWE thing. | ||
| She's done, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I think the WWE thing is a good look. | ||
| I know she was at dinner with Triple H and her agent. | ||
| Slater. | ||
| So I hope she does that, man, because people can say whatever they want, but Ronda Rousey, she was that girl at one point. | ||
|
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She was. | |
| And she put us all on the map in a different way and had the old lady, the 75-year-old lady at the airport talking about MMA. Yep. | ||
| She's a G. She paid our due. | ||
| And I think if she want to gracefully walk into a different realm, WWE, film, I think she just produced some type of series that we should support her in that. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I agree 100%. | ||
| I really don't want to see her fight again. | ||
| If she wants to fight again, but what I would want to see is her move to a camp that could address the entire game of MMA in a much more comprehensive way. | ||
| And not tell her that she's great at something if she's really not. | ||
| I would want her to go to Matt Hume or someone like that. | ||
| But who would she actually fight? | ||
| She's too big of a name to fight somebody. | ||
| Who would she fight? | ||
| Fight someone who's coming up. | ||
| Fight someone. | ||
| Get a tune-up fight. | ||
| I don't even think she wants to fight. | ||
| I think at a certain point in time, you have enough money in the bank. | ||
| You have enough notoriety and fame. | ||
| She's got a lot of aspirations outside the sport. | ||
| She's married now. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| She might want to start a family. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Listen, all I want to see is George St. Pierre versus Tyron Woodley in July. | ||
| July 4th weekend. | ||
| I'd say that's my big prediction for 2018. Make it happen. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Big prediction for me is that I'll fight George St. Pierre in my first fight back. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'd like to see it. | |
| George, my shoulder's sore. | ||
| It hurts, right? | ||
| You can barely move. | ||
| George, I can't even punch. | ||
| How do you sleep? | ||
| I can't punch. | ||
| It's hard to sleep. | ||
| I mean, George, if you want to fight me, brother, this is the time, man. | ||
| This is the time, George. | ||
| You want to get me, George, right now. | ||
| Make that money, George. | ||
| Make that money. | ||
| And what a fight that would be in terms of just historical significance and how big it would be. | ||
| I mean, he's coming off of the win of his career, coming back four years off, beats Bisping, chokes him unconscious for the title, vacates the title, steps right in there, fights you at 170. He's a G. It'll be fun. | ||
| And he would exit the sport. | ||
| Nobody would give him that much stuff from losing to me. | ||
| Tyron Woodley, thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I'm glad we finally got in here. | ||
| We finally did it. | ||
| Tell people, what's your Twitter handle? | ||
| Check me out on Twitter. | ||
| T-W-O-O-D-L-E-Y. Same thing on Instagram. | ||
| And yeah, we are here. | ||
| The champ, ladies and gentlemen. |
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