Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY Sports
Trevin Giles offers an honest assessment about his skills and explains how his lives as MMA fighter and police officer intertwine.
Trevin Giles is the first to admit he has a visible hole in his game that needs patching up.
Giles (11-2) heads into a fight with Antonio Arroyo (9-3) following two consecutive third-round guillotine choke losses. He tapped out to Zak Cummings at UFC Rochester and was choked unconscious by Gerald Meerschaert at UFC Newark.
“It’s a hole, that’s what it is,” he told Bloody Elbow. “Anyone who would say that would be right. It’s the only way I’ve ever lost. I don’t think there is any other way to put that. It’s just me getting in the gym and training it and being prepared for those situations. Obviously, I’m sticking my head in the wrong spot. It’s just a part of learning. It’s no big deal to me. I think the issue would be if I did not know what the problem was.”
“I wouldn’t say either of them were hard to handle. There were just some mental things I had to take care of. They kind of tie together in a way. After the first one, I feel like I was in my head mentally about grappling more when that really wasn’t the issue,” Giles elaborated. “I figured if I had grappled a little more I could have mixed it up a bit and get the knockout… I brought that into my second fight and from there it turned into a straight up grappling match. Meerschaert is pretty good with his grappling. I feel like I fared well but it probably shouldn’t have been the way I was fighting.”
His solution: “When I go out there to fight, I just need to be me. That’s what had me undefeated in the first place.”
When Giles is not fighting his fellow athletes in the Octagon, he is fighting crime as a police officer. When asked about how martial arts has influenced his duties as an officer, Giles was clear that he isn’t looking to flex on felons.
“It’d be a cool story to say one time I had to do a single on somebody or whatever. I’m sure that’d be a fun story to have, but what a lot of people don’t understand from the outside looking in is that on the street it’s different. People have knives on them, people have syringes and stuff like that. You go out there and try to start getting into grappling match and get stuck with a dirty needle, you’re not going to care about that cool thing that you pulled off,” he said. “My biggest thing is being able to talk to people and not having to go hands-on with people. That way I can stay healthy and fight as well.”
UFC 247 takes place in Houston, Texas on Saturday, Feb. 8. The event is headlined by a light-heavyweight title fight between Jon Jones and Dominick Reyes with the co-main featuring flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko and challenger Katlyn Chookagian.