Photo via UFC.com
For Canadian middleweight fighter, Jason ‘The Athlete’ MacDonald (25-15), his career has reached the point where he has already started thinking about other paths outside of fighting to make a living.
At the age of 36, and a second run in the UFC, MacDonald had been talking of returning to his previous career as a corrections officer leading up to last weekends UFC Fight Night 25 bout with Alan Belcher. Unfortunately for MacDonald, the fight did not end at all how he wanted it, with Belcher unleashing a vicious ground-and-pound early in the fight to force an end to the fight at 3:48 of the first.
It wasn’t at all the way the Canadian middleweight wanted to go out, and in his latest blog, MacDonald remained noncommittal on retirement, possibly hoping to end his career on a high note rather than on a loss.
Our gameplan was to close distance, get in range and work the clinch. But I missed my takedown and he ended up on top of me. In hindsight, I should have kicked him off when I had the chance because he was posturing up, but instead I thought, I’ll stay in this position for a minute or two and work on it and hope to get a submission.
But I quickly took a couple elbows – in fact, one really hard elbow behind the ear, and pretty much everything after that was a blur. It’s pretty obvious that that was the beginning of the end. And the rest is history.
I hung in a little longer, but I think it was basically that instinct takes over. You’re defending yourself, blocking shots and doing the best you can, but really you’re on autopilot. I was no longer thinking of escapes or sweeps or trying to get submissions, I was just thinking about survival. Once you get in that desperation mode, things tend to go wrong fast.
Even after the referee stopped the fight, I was on rubber legs and a bit cloudy. I wasn’t confused as to what happened, I was just a little foggy. The fighter in you wants to keep going, but deep down you know it was the right decision for the fight to be over.
There was some talk before the fight of me retiring. Right now, I’m not making that decision. It’s just 48 hours after the fight, and that’s not the time. I haven’t even had the opportunity to talk about it with my wife and my managers.
Check out the rest of MacDonald’s blog at Sportsnet.ca