(Photo via RaySefo.com)
By Elias Cepeda
I’ve been speaking with Ray Sefo for a few minutes now and it doesn’t seem like he understands my question. I asked the multiple time Muay Thai world champion and successful kickboxing and MMA coach why he ever felt the need to step out of his comfort zone and fight under MMA rules.
The former K-1 star, now in his early forties, has fought three times in MMA and will once more tonight on the World Series of Fighting 4 card in California. The striking legend is also the President of WSOF.
I asked Sefo the question and he began to tell me of how he was introduced to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and MMA by his friend Royce Gracie, the first ever UFC champion, back in 2000 in Japan where they were both competing at the time. He then went on to describe his next step into MMA, then his next, but I felt I had to politely interrupt and reiterate my initial question. I wasn’t asking for a step by step process of how he got into MMA but why he ever decided to.
He had made a name and good living from kickboxing. He transitioned into a full-time career coaching other elite fighters and now Sefo is a top executive at a major MMA organization.
He understands me quite well. Turns out that I was the one that didn’t understand Ray Sefo. “Listen, I’ve always fought,” he explains patiently.
“I’ve been boxing since I was a kid. I did Kung Fu for years. Back home when I started kickboxing my family all thought it wasn’t that big of a deal, they were suspicious of it because boxing was so big. But then they saw me fight and their minds changed. I love to learn and love to develop and challenge myself as a martial artist and fighter. MMA was the next natural step in that.”
I had been confused. To Ray Sefo, fighting isn’t a means of procuring and then protecting status at all costs. He wasn’t afraid of stepping out of his strength and comfort zone and fighting MMA. He isn’t afraid to continue to fight MMA now, in his forties and against younger opponents and risk losing.
For Ray Sefo, fighting is breathing. He fights, that’s it. The particular rules he does so under are incidental.
Even though Sefo always respected MMA enough to view it as a new and unique challenge, at first he says he underestimated certain elements of it.
“I always had respect for submissions because of my friend Royce Gracie but when I started training for MMA I honestly kind of dismissed wrestling at first. I thought that stuff was easy,” he says with a chuckle, acknowledging the profound ignorance of his old attitude.
“Then I met Randy [Couture] back in 2005 and started training with these guys in wrestling. Man, wrestling is one of the hardest workouts you can do. There’s so much skill involved in it.”
Sefo tells CagePotato that, heading into tonight, he’s gotten a full training camp behind him. He’s had a chance to work on just those skills and others needed to fight his opponent, twenty five fight veteran Dave Huckaba. He partially blames an abbreviated training camp for his 2011 Strikeforce loss to Valentijn Overeem.
Sefo says that the plan is for this bout to be the final fight of his career. He says a sense of finality has not permeated his training camp, however.
“This possibly being my last match isn’t something that I’ve been thinking about each day. It’s the same thing it always is,” Sefo says.
“I go into the gym and train with the guys each day like always. I do that when I’m not fighting, I do it now training for my own fight and even if this is my final fight, I’ll do it every day afterwards. I first put on a pair of boxing gloves when I was a kid. I put them on today and I’ll keep putting them on the rest of my life.”