("There goes my number of Twitter followers down the tubes.")
Former UFC light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida finds himself in the unfamiliar position of having his back against the wall coming off of two consecutive UFC losses. Aware that he needs to win his next bout or risk having his head on the UFC’s chopping block, "The Dragon," who was previously undefeated in his career before losing to Mauricio "Shogun" Rua and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson in his last two bouts says that the biggest adjustment he had to make as a loser was getting used to fans turning their backs on him.
“People sometimes want something that is not possible. St. Pierre for instance, plays by the rules, once you lose people don’t want to know about you anymore," Machida told Tatame in a recent interview. "It’s great to make a good show, if you can do both things, great, but you can’t always. Each day that goes by you keep seeing it as a sequence of losses because you keep distancing yourself to the title, so it’s harder for you to fight a top guy, like Rashad, who’s on the line for the belt. I have to seek another fight d o what I want, but when you’re in the middle of the ranking you never know what can happen to you. Vitor (Belfort), for instance, fought once and will dispute the title, because of his background, so it’s hard to say. But in my weight class I know there’re other people before me on the line; it happens."
As far as his last loss — a decision that many feel shouldn’t have gone to Rampage — Machida says he is done dwelling on what should have or could have happened.
"Until these days I hear everybody telling me, ‘they steal from you,’ but I don’t like to keep saying it because it ain’t change anything, maybe it make things worse because I’ll keep thinking about it. Now I’ll do my own game, win without leaving any doubts. These are things we learn on the road."