Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC
Donald Cerrone explains why he can’t live without his extreme extra-curricular activities.
Donald Cerrone often lives up to his ‘Cowboy’ nickname. From wakeboarding during fight week to a cave diving mishap that nearly killed him, the 36-year-old MMA veteran is living on the edge.
And if he was forced to live the normal life of a fighter, of just training and competing, Cerrone says it would drive him up the wall.
“I’d be one miserable son of a b-tch if all I had to do was wake up and train,” Cerrone said in his Amazon documentary series “More Than a Cowboy” (transcript by MMA Fighting). “Go to bed, think about training, that would drive me through the roof. When you’re out on those mountain bikes, or you’re out playing paintball and we’re shooting the guys and we’re riding the horses, riding the snowmobiles, it’s just a release.
“You just let everything else go and you just focus on that one moment or that thing that you’re doing, then we come back and we train and we keep playing harder.”
Cerrone says he is contractually barred from engaging in such activities. But he is able to continue do so because he always showed up to fight.
“There are clauses [in my contract] like I can’t ride horses, but I ride horses all the time,” Cerrone explained. “There’s a bunch of things in the clause – you can’t ride motorcycles, can’t jump mountain bikes – but I have never not shown up to a fight in my life.
“I’ve never missed weight. I’ve never been injured and not made it. I’ve been injured and still fought, of course. But I’ve never called and said, ‘Oh I can’t make it,’ or you call me with an opponent and [I] say, ‘Man, I just don’t know if that guy’s really going to work for me right now.’
“The answer’s always yes, and we show up and we fight, so I think they just let ‘Cowboy’ be ‘Cowboy,’ because I’m f—ng coming no matter what,” he added.
Cerrone will headline UFC 246 against the returning Conor McGregor on January 18 in Las Vegas.