When Bubba Jenkins and Georgi Karakhanyan tangle inside Bellator’s circular cage this Friday night, it won’t be the first time the two have been willing dance partners. Actually, far from it. A decorated NCAA champion wrestler, Jenkins served as one of Karakhanyan’s primary sparring partners ahead of Karakhanyan’s WSOF title challenge against fellow wrestler Lance Palmer in late-2013, and Jenkins thinks the time the two featherweights spent together could very well come into play at Bellator 132.
“We got together for about four or five weeks, I helped him with his takedown defense,” Jenkins told MMAFighting.com. “In hindsight, probably shouldn’t have done it. But it definitely let’s me know that he’s absolutely petrified of wrestlers. He doesn’t like fighting wrestlers. He’s won and he’s done very well with them, but the mentally, the mindset he’s in when he’s preparing for a wrestler is different than I would say preparing for anybody else.
“He seemed to be, for the Lance Palmer fight, absolutely petrified of what Palmer could do to him after he took him down. And me knowing that I wrestled Palmer nine times and I’m 8-1 against Palmer, he knows that I’m a better wrestler and a better fighter than Palmer is, and he’s probably even more psychologically psyched out about that because I knew his mindset during those times during that camp, and it’s something I’ll prey on.”
For Jenkins, an athletically gifted 26-year-old who’s racked up an impressive 8-1 record to kick off his mixed martial arts career over the past four years, Bellator 132 effectively serves as an entry into the upper ranks of the 145-pound landscape. After being slowly groomed for stardom, a win over Karakhanyan would finally propel Jenkins into the Bellator title picture. Though that’s easier said than done.
Karakhanyan only recently saw his nine-fight win streak snapped, and carries in his arsenal a nasty submission game augmented by a slick guillotine choke that sealed his last two wins, including his third-round upset over Palmer to claim WSOF’s inaugural featherweight title. Karakhanyan has gone as far as predicting a similar finish against Jenkins in speaking with several media outlets over the past few weeks, but in that regard, Jenkins’ response is simple.
“My response is he’s training for the wrong person and the wrong fight,” Jenkins said. “He thinks that I’m going to be trying to wrestle him the whole time, that he’s going to be kneeing me and uppercutting me, and then eventually I take his leg, and he submits me with a guillotine. At that point I’m bleeding and I’m praying, I can’t get out, and oh my gosh. Nah. I don’t give damn about none of that s**t he’s talking. There ain’t going to be a point where he’s going to guillotine me.
“I’ve never been guillotined by the best guys and I train at ATT. Not in practice, not in the room. You can ask anybody from here to Timbuktu. It ain’t happened. It won’t happen. I’m not the type to just go out on a guillotine, especially with my family watching and tons of money on the line, the biggest check that I’ve ever had on the line. So I’m definitely going into this fight knowing who I am and what I want to achieve, knowing that I can take this fight wherever I want to take it. He thinks that I’m going to come out and try to NCAA wrestle his ass. And I am going to be trying to Hulk Hogan slam his ass, but also I can knock his ass out.”