Filed under: UFCTo Brendan Schaub, it was just an off-hand remark in answer to a common question. While in Los Angeles to talk about the UFC Undisputed video game, he gave an interview where he was asked who he’d like to fight next after his loss to An…
To Brendan Schaub, it was just an off-hand remark in answer to a common question. While in Los Angeles to talk about the UFC Undisputed video game, he gave an interview where he was asked who he’d like to fight next after his loss to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira at UFC 134 in Brazil.
“They kept talking about the Strikeforce [heavyweights], the heavyweight division, and I just mentioned that I thought there were bunch of good fights for me,” Schaub told MMA Fighting on Tuesday. “And I said, you know, I think [Fabricio] Werdum would be a fight that the UFC fans might like to see, but who knows?”
That was all it took for Werdum, who apparently saw the interview and was quick to jump on his Twitter to tell Schaub: “I’m ready for you, anytime, anywhere!”
It made for a surprising morning for Schaub, who said he wasn’t expecting such a response from the Brazilian heavyweight.
“I wasn’t calling him out, but man, he got word of that and I guess he just ran with it. I woke up this morning to all these Twitter mentions and text messages and I thought, what’s going on? Sure enough, I come to find out that he’s saying, ‘I’m ready to fight Brendan.’ Hey, I’m all for it, man.”
Ideally, Schaub said, he’d like to get back in the cage in late January or February. He recently got back to training after his knockout loss in Rio, and has been touring different gyms in search of sparring partners and new looks.
Tossing out Werdum’s name in an interview wasn’t an attempt at specifically calling him out, he said, but if Werdum wants to take it that way, Schaub has no objections.
“I don’t really care. To fight a guy like Werdum would be great. Me mentioning his name is nothing disrespectful at all. I’ve got nothing but respect for him. I think he’s ranked number five in the world and he’s one of the biggest names out there. That’s why I brought his name up, and I think he’d be one hell of a challenge for me. Tell me where to sign.”
As for whether the fight could realistically happen in the near future, that’s a different question. There have been all sort of rumors about Werdum negotiating with the UFC for a return to the Octagon, and he certainly wouldn’t be the first Strikeforce heavyweight to make the jump now that the Strikeforce World Heavyweight Grand Prix is down to two remaining finalists.
Werdum may not be back in the fold just yet, but Schaub is optimistic that a little heat behind this match-up could expedite the process.
“I definitely think it’s feasible. The only relevant fight left in Strikeforce as far as the heavyweights go is [Daniel] Cormier and [Josh] Barnett. The rest of them, it seems like they are coming over. I have no idea what kind of situation Werdum’s in with the UFC, but maybe this will kind of speed things up and they can make that happen.”
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find two men with guns in your house — men who obviously arrived there with a plan, and one which may or may not involve leaving living witnesses to their crime — and right then your whole world has been altered in ways you can’t fully comprehend just yet.
“To this day, I’m still paranoid,” said MMA trainer Lloyd Irvin, who, along with his wife and young son, as well as UFC light heavyweight Brandon Vera, lived this nightmare just a little over three years ago. “It changed our whole lives, how we think about life, about our families, about security and how we stay safe — everything.”
For Vera, it also changed the way he thinks about his MMA career, and not necessarily in any way that’s helpful for a man who makes his living fighting other men inside a cage on Saturday nights. Lately, he’s begun to realize that what happened in Irvin’s house that night didn’t truly end there, and maybe it has more to do with what’s happened to him ever since than he originally allowed himself to believe.
The story, which is now practically a part of MMA lore, goes like this: Lloyd Irvin woke up in the pre-dawn hours of October 4, 2008 to find that two armed men had broken into his suburban Maryland home and were standing over him as he slept. They instructed him to get up and join them as they rounded up the home’s other occupants, which included Irvin’s wife and son, who was then just four years old, as well as Vera, who was staying with Irvin while he did his pre-fight training camp at Irvin’s gym.
While one of the men held Vera and Irvin’s family at gunpoint, the other led Irvin into a back bedroom. That’s when Irvin saw his opening and took it, grabbing for the gun, ejecting the ammunition clip, and wrestling the weapon away from the gunman. Disarmed, the man shouted out a warning to his accomplice and they both fled the house, leaving Irvin, his family, and Vera all unharmed, but badly shaken.
“My son is still traumatized to this day,” said Irvin, who added that both he and his family sought professional psychiatric help after the incident. “We just got him back sleeping in his own room about four or five months ago. About two years ago we got him back in his room for about 30 days, and then one incident where these deer set off the alarm outside the house, after that it went downhill again.”
For Vera, the damage was slightly more subtle. He and Irvin flew to England for the fight with Jardine as scheduled, and he tried his best to carry on as if nothing had happened. He lost the fight via split decision, but that was only the beginning.
“I remember after that fight, going in to train would suck,” Vera said. “I’d be looking at the clock, waiting to leave. Sometimes I didn’t want to go two or three-a-days. I’d be arguing with my coaches or slacking off. I honestly think that it had to do with that home invasion.”
It wasn’t just that he was emotionally traumatized, Vera said, though of course he was. But it was more that, once he realized how easily and suddenly his life could have ended, spending hours in a gym every day didn’t seem like such a good use of his time.
“After that, I don’t think MMA was number one in my life anymore,” said Vera. “After that home invasion, I was like, hey, I could have been dead today, and there’s still so much I want to do. There’s so much I want to experience, so much I want to do with my wife. MMA just wasn’t the number one priority in my life anymore. Without me knowing, my life rearranged itself.”
In theory, this isn’t such a bad revelation. If this were a movie script, it might be just the kind of catalyst that forces the main character to examine his priorities and put the right things first in life. He starts leaving the office early to take long walks in the park. He calls his mother. Everything works out in the end.
In real life, it didn’t happen that way for Vera. Instead of reveling in the impermanence of life, he grew paranoid. As Irvin put it, “[Vera] got really into guns and security and stuff.”
Not that Irvin was exactly ready to give himself over to the worst impulses of his fellow man, either.
“I did some really crazy stuff at the house for home protection,” he said. That included not only a security system that would present a challenge to the Mission: Impossible team, but also a permit to carry a concealed handgun, which isn’t easy to get in Maryland. “For a while I had a protection company follow my wife around,” Irvin added. “It was crazy times.”
As Vera put it, what bothered him most was that he’d left himself so vulnerable, and he never wanted to make the same mistake again.
“They were professionals,” he said. “It was this feeling that I’d been caught out there, no weapon in my hand, no dogs, no gun. I just got caught slipping.”
But as Vera grew more concerned with his own safety and struggled to put his new list of priorities in perspective, his career inside the cage suffered. He won two straight after the Jardine loss, then dropped fights to Randy Couture and Jon Jones before being dominated by Thiago Silva and getting cut by the UFC following his third loss in a row.
As Vera explained, that’s when he knew he’d lost “it.”
“People keep asking me what it is,” he said. “But if you’ve never lost it, there’s no way I can explain what it is.”
Following his dismissal from the UFC, Vera embarked on a road trip across the U.S., teaching seminars at gyms along the way, he said. He drove 8,500 miles in all, and “somewhere along those 8,500 miles is where I found it again.”
“Watching an 11-year-old kid take an adult seminar and do better than the adults because he was so serious and so hungry to learn, it made me happy again,” he said. “It brought me back to that place.”
Vera was also aided by some delayed, though no less satisfying justice. Police arrested a suspect in the home invasion case that they believed was linked to multiple murders in similar situations — a man the local police chief deemed a “serial killer” — who will now spend the rest of his life in prison following sentencing, Irvin said.
On one hand, it shook Vera to know that, had his longtime coach not disarmed the man, they would almost certainly have been killed that night. On the other, Vera said, “I think maybe it was something in my life that I couldn’t get past until those guys got caught.”
Vera got a reprieve in his professional life as well when, nearly three months after the loss to Silva, the Nevada State Athletic Commission revealed that Silva had submitted a sample for testing that was “inconsistent with human urine.” Silva would later cop to steroid use and Vera’s loss would be changed to a no contest. The UFC would also opt to give him another chance in light of this information, welcoming him back to face Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 in Las Vegas this Saturday night.
“It’s not a new chapter; it’s a whole new book,” said Vera. “The path I was on before, I don’t know where I was going or where I got lost. Somewhere I made a left when I should have made a right. I don’t know, but I lost it, and now I’ve found it.”
The change is apparent to Irvin, too, who has had Vera back in his gym in Maryland for a full training camp for the first time since the home invasion incident in 2008. Vera never came out and told him that he’d been hesitant to return because of what happened that night in his house, Irvin said, “but I had a good sense of that. I personally didn’t really want to be in my own house sometimes because of it, so I understood.”
Now Vera is not only back training with him, Irvin said, but he’s actually doing the work because he wants to, rather than simply going through the motions because he has to.
“He’s in the gym 40 minutes or an hour before his training time is supposed to start. He’s putting the time in and enjoying it more,” said Irvin. “It used to be that if he had a bad training day or a bad day in the gym he’d just keep going forward or whatever. Now he’ll text you at midnight asking, ‘The half-guard sweep didn’t work, is my hand in the wrong position?'”
If there was anybody who could understand Vera’s lack of motivation after the home invasion, it was Irvin. The same trauma had touched his life, and still lurks there somewhere under the surface, he said.
“The reality that we could have been dead right then, it makes you think all sorts of things about life and what it means and what you haven’t done yet. When we were being held hostage…you ever see the movies where a guy will go through this montage of his whole life and everything he’s done? That really happened in my mind.”
Now that Vera has worked through some of his issues and is back to training like the man he used to be in the gym, Irvin is “one hundred percent” confident of victory against Marshall, he said.
“If Brandon follows the game plan and does what he’s supposed to do, Eliot’s going to know in the first round, this is wrong, that something’s not right, because this is not where he’s supposed to be. Then he’ll be forced to do some things that we’re anticipating, and Brandon will get the victory. I have no doubt in my mind about that.”
For Vera, the weight of the expectations on him is something that he feels, but insists he isn’t laboring under. This return to the UFC could easily be a one-shot deal, more of an audition for his old spot rather than a guaranteed second chance.
“I’m supposed to win this fight,” he said. “I’m supposed to go in here and hurt Eliot bad. It’s different. It’s not added pressure, it’s just that this is what I was supposed to be doing the whole time. It feels weird. I don’t feel nervous anymore. I just feel like I’m supposed to go in here and whoop his ass.”
Now, just a shade over three years since the incident that made him re-organize his entire life, Vera insists that he’s back to doing the sport because he wants to, and not because he has to.
It’s fitting then that he prepared for this return alongside the man who probably saved his life that night, and who knows all too well what he’s struggled with ever since.
“Brandon’s been with me for a long time, since before he got to the UFC and before everybody knew who he was,” said Irvin. “He’s not just a fighter to me, he’s like a son and a student, and I love him. I just look forward to seeing him rise back up to the top.”
Filed under: UFCIf things go very, very well for Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 — which is to say, if he not only beats Brandon Vera, but also earns one of the UFC’s bonus awards for the best submission, knockout, or fight of the night — it will be a prof…
If things go very, very well for Eliot Marshall at UFC 137 — which is to say, if he not only beats Brandon Vera, but also earns one of the UFC’s bonus awards for the best submission, knockout, or fight of the night — it will be a profitable night in the Octagon for the Colorado-based light heavyweight.
But if he merely wins without collecting a big bonus, he told MMA Fighting, he’ll probably just break even in the end.
“That’s how much I’ve put into this [training] camp, financially,” said Marshall. “Spending money to travel, go here and do this, do that, it’s not cheap. I’m a hundred percent committed.”
At this point, he pretty much has to be. That’s because Marshal knows he’s likely just one loss away from being cut by the UFC for a second time in two years. And if that happens, Marshall said, he plans to hang up the gloves and call it a career.
His thinking on the matter is simple, he explained. He’s already been cut from the organization once, and had to volunteer for a short-notice fight with Luiz Cane at UFC 128 just to get back in. He lost that one via first-round TKO, but his willingness to step up when the UFC needed someone was apparently enough to earn him this second chance.
If he gets beat by Vera this Saturday night, he’ll drop to 0-2 in his current UFC run and will almost certainly get his walking papers as a result. If that happens, he’s not sure what the point would be of continuing on with his fighting career.
“How many guys do you know who get brought back for a third time?” he pointed out.
That’s why, at least to hear Marshall tell it now, this could very well be it for him. He knows he’ll be the underdog heading into the bout with Vera, and if things go the way oddsmakers expect them to the 31-year-old Marshall might be on his way to retirement this time next week.
Maybe that helps to explain why he’s invested so much time and money into this training camp. With so much at stake, he wanted to make sure he was as well prepared as possible, he said, which meant multiple trips down to Greg Jackson’s gym in Albuquerque, N.M., as well as driving all around Colorado to get in the gym with as many different sparring partners as he could find.
“That way you don’t get used to anybody’s style,” he explained. “Sometimes you get used to what guy A does or guy B does, and then when you get in the cage to really fight, the guy you’re fighting doesn’t do what guy A or B does and you have to adapt. I’ve had to adapt every sparring session. My mind and my body is used to it, so it’s not so much about what they’re going to do, it’s what I’m going to do.”
But against an opponent like Vera, figuring out a path to victory isn’t so easy, as Marshall has learned from hours of watching film.
“He’s very, very tough,” Marshall said. “Even when he’s losing, he takes it. Thiago Silva whooped his ass, and he wasn’t close to being stopped. He switches stances well. Obviously, he kicks hard. I guess on paper he should be the champ of the world, right?”
So why isn’t he? Instead of being champ of the world, why is Vera winless in his last three fights, and just barely holding on to a spot in the UFC himself?
“I just don’t think he wants it that bad,” said Marshall, who added that, in the end, that’s what he believes will make all the difference.
“What’s going to decide the fight is who wants it more. I don’t think any one skill-set is going to decide this fight. It’s going to be, who’s willing to get beat up? Who’s willing to suffer to win this fight?”
The way Marshall sees it, that person is him. That’s because he has to win this fight. If he doesn’t, his stay in the UFC — and, so he says, his career in MMA — will both come to an end.
That explains why he’s invested so much in his own training and preparation, he said. There’s no reason not to go all-in now and see what happens. At this point in his career, there might not be a next time.
Filed under: UFCAsk Roy Nelson how he’s been preparing for his fight against Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic at UFC 137, and you’ll find that “Big Country’s” sense of humor is still very much intact after two straight losses.
Ask Roy Nelson how he’s been preparing for his fight against Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic at UFC 137, and you’ll find that “Big Country’s” sense of humor is still very much intact after two straight losses.
“I’ve just been working out in the cemetery a lot,” he told MMA Fighting recently. “I’ve got to get ready for the left kick. I want to see what it’s like.”
It’s a typical Roy Nelson answer, which is to say slightly absurd and said with a straight face, as if to daring you to say, ‘No, seriously.’ But these aren’t joking times for Nelson. After coming up short against Junior dos Santos and then Frank Mir, Nelson is facing a potentially dire situation.
Don’t tell him that, of course.
“All fights are dire,” Nelson said. “I’ve seen guys get cut after one. I’ve seen guys lose three or four and still have a job. In this business, there’s no rhyme or reason. It’s MMA. It’s like when you go into the Octagon: anything can happen.”
If Nelson didn’t already know that, he got a quick education in his fight against Mir. He knew he was getting sick before the bout, he said. He’d been shaking hands at a recent UFC Fan Expo and “I must have touched some dirty people and didn’t wash my hands enough.”
Even when he realized he was coming down with something, he refused to take antibiotics because he worried about the effect they might have on his cardio, Nelson said. Then again, not taking them didn’t do much to help him either.
“In that fight, I just hit a wall. And I hit a wall fast. I hit the wall, like, the first minute. I think it kind of showed on my face in the fight. But I pushed through it, gave a hundred percent of what I had, and just came out on the losing end.”
The Tuesday after the fight, Nelson would stagger into the emergency room and find out that he had walking pneumonia. Even with a course of antibiotics, he’d spend the next month or so trying to kick the illness. He’d also end up questioning whether taking a fight against a former UFC heavyweight champion in this state was really the best career move.
“The one thing that I definitely learned from this one is, I’m always a fighter first and a businessman second, and that one taught me to be a businessman before a fighter. When you’re injured or sick, the thing is, you’ve still got to provide for your family. I hadn’t fought for ten months before that, and I’m just trying to put food on the table and take care of my bills. It was one of those things, plus it was an awesome opportunity. You beat Frank and you’re right back in the mix.”
Since Nelson couldn’t beat ’em, however, he decided to join ’em. He’s been working out with his old foe Mir in preparation for the bout with Filipovic. He and Mir don’t talk about their fight, Nelson said, because “it’s in the past.”
Nelson’s future lies in the cage with Cro Cop. If he doesn’t come out on the winning end of that one, it will bring his losing streak to three, which is often the magic number that brings the ax down on a fighter’s UFC contract. Since Cro Cop has also lost two straight — and since he’s in the last fight of his current deal — the loser in this fight could very well end up out of a job.
“It’s so cliche, you know. You have to beat a legend to be a legend. But I think just to fight Cro Cop, period, is something that, as a fighter, you just want to do,” Nelson said. “You want to be able to say, hey, I competed with some of the best of the world.”
You want to be able to say it eventually, when you’re looking back at a long successful career. But if Nelson doesn’t find a way to beat Filipovic, he’s in danger of reaching that point sooner than he wants to.
Maybe “anything can happen” in the Octagon, but one thing that can’t happen is coming out on the losing end and remaining employed indefinitely. You can bet that a businessman-fighter like Nelson knows that as well as anyone. Now he just has to fight accordingly.
It might go down as one of the shortest retirements in the history of the sport. One month ago, after losing a decision to late replacement Dakota Cochrane at a Titan Fighting Championships event, Jamie Varner took to his Twitter to tell fans that he’d…
It might go down as one of the shortest retirements in the history of the sport. One month ago, after losing a decision to late replacement Dakota Cochrane at a Titan Fighting Championships event, Jamie Varner took to his Twitter to tell fans that he’d had enough.
“I gave fighting another shot I need 2 thank u guys 4 ur support! But I just don’t have it anymore. Love u all but ull never c me fight again,” Varner wrote.
A short time later, that message was removed. Shortly after that, Varner was back in the gym, preparing to have another go at it Friday night at an XFC event on HDNet. Maybe it just goes to show that you should never say never, even on Twitter.
“I think, honestly, I just made an emotional decision and an emotional remark,” Varner told MMA Fighting this week. “I feel like I didn’t perform very well in that last fight. The guy just overpowered me. He wasn’t very good. I was much better than the guy, but I just got controlled. I didn’t like that feeling, and I just thought maybe it was time for me to hang it up.”
Of course, the former WEC lightweight champ didn’t hold that opinion for very long. Once he started to think about it, Varner decided that maybe his passion for the sport hadn’t evaporated after all. Maybe he’d just been hit with a few bad breaks, one right after another.
For starters, he said, his original opponent was pulled from the lineup just a few days before the bout. Then the replacement, Dakota Cochrane, couldn’t make the lightweight limit, so Varner had to fight at welterweight despite the fact that he’d already completed the bulk of his weight cut to get down to 155 pounds.
After getting overpowered by a bigger opponent, Varner said, frustration briefly got the better of him. Hence the tweet.
“Then I took a week off, came home to talk to my trainers, and they were like, ‘You shouldn’t have even taken that fight.’ It wasn’t in my weight class, and too many factors played into that. Maybe I was a little overtrained, too. Who knows? But I prepared for one guy, got a completely different guy, and then it wasn’t even in my weight class. I’m a lightweight. I have no business fighting a welterweight.”
But it wasn’t just a sober analysis of the need for weight classes that got Varner back in the cage so fast. Before the loss to Cochrane, he’d already signed to fight Nate Jolly on tonight’s XFC event, so retiring would mean backing out of his contract, which he wasn’t prepared to do, he said.
“XFC has been doing a lot of marketing, been doing a lot of social networking promoting this fight. The show must go on. Whether I have a good day or a bad day, the show must go on. I made a commitment, and I’m a man of my word.”
If that sounds like a man who’s feeling a little worn down, that’s not too far off. Two fights in the span of a month will take a toll on anyone, especially when one of those fights is a surprise move up in weight that you never planned on making. But for Varner, the retracted retirement proclamation was also at least partially driven by a general sense of fight fatigue.
“I’ve been doing this sport for ten years,” Varner explained. “I started training when I was 17, had my first fight when I was a senior in high school. I’ve been at it a long time. I started wrestling when I was 14, started boxing when I was 11. That’s a long time — 13 or 16 years — of competition and cuts and all that.”
At 27 years old, an age when most people are still working on getting established in a career, Varner is feeling the effects of his. Once the fight with Jolly is in the books, win or lose, he plans to take some time away and re-evaluate things. Maybe he’ll take a couple pro boxing matches, he said, or do some grappling tournaments just to get the competitive juices flowing again.
Not only has his recent run of fights had him feeling like he’s been “non-stop dieting,” it’s also left him “a little burnt out,” he said. But against Jolly he sees a good opportunity to get the taste of that last defeat out of his mouth, so at least he can take some time off with a win under his belt.
“I know this guy is a very, very beatable guy. I’m bigger, I’m faster, I’m better in every position. I’m not too worried about what he brings to the table. If I go in there and perform to even half what I’m capable of, I should walk away with the W.”
Whether he decides to stick around in the sport or just keep on walking afterwards, we’ll have to wait and see.
Filed under: UFCMirko Filipovic is convinced that his career nearly came to an end on Thursday morning. Forget the fights. Forget the bloody battles he’s been in, the knockouts he’s suffered, the countless training sessions he’s suffered through. This …
Mirko Filipovic is convinced that his career nearly came to an end on Thursday morning. Forget the fights. Forget the bloody battles he’s been in, the knockouts he’s suffered, the countless training sessions he’s suffered through. This was serious.
The Croatian heavyweight, the Pride legend and veteran of nearly 40 MMA bouts, the great “Cro Cop” was nearly done in by a couple of stairs.
In his defense, the stairs were wet. It was raining out and he was headed off to training, but as he bounded down the stairs his foot hit a wet spot and he almost went down hard.
“I can’t believe I didn’t fall. I cannot remember when I was so scared,” he said. “I could have broken my spine just like that. My foot slipped on the stairs because it was wet, and I was shaking for five minutes because I was so close, and I was so happy.”
For Filipovic, the lesson in all this was clear right away. He’s known his whole career that, in this sport, it could all be over in an instant. But it’s one thing to know it intellectually or theoretically, and another to feel that fluttering fear that comes when your feet slide out from under you — that irrational, trembling panic. He got the message: you’re on borrowed time, pal.
For the 37-year-old Cro Cop, it won’t necessarily take a freak injury to push him the rest of the way out of the sport. It could be as simple as getting beat by Roy Nelson at UFC 137 next Saturday night, and he knows it.
On this subject, Filipovic does not mince words. “I must win this fight,” he said over and over again. “…I will have to beat him, and I will do it. I trained six months for this fight. I will do it.”
But it’s not because, if he loses a third straight fight in the Octagon, he almost certainly will not get a new contract with the UFC. Even if he wins, that contract isn’t guaranteed since, as he put it, “First I have to beat Roy Nelson. And second, we have to make a deal.”
It’s not just his UFC future that’s at stake, however. And it’s not all about money, though, sure, he likes the money and, like any fighter, would prefer to make as much as possible before the ride ends for good. But for the man who has accomplished just about everything a person can in this sport, the stakes are different now.
“Some people, many people, buried me alive because I lost twice in a row,” he said. “I just want to prove to everybody that I’m still Cro Cop. …I want to raise from the grave. That’s what I want to prove to everybody. That’s my motivation.”
But say he beats Nelson. Then what?
For starters, Filipovic said, there are all the wonderful little moments that come with a victory, moments he’s learned to savor like the last few bites of a great meal.
“I want to feel that feeling when the referee raises my hand. I want to take that shower — it’s a special moment for me, taking that shower after my victory, and I’m so happy. I go back to the hotel and the next day I’m so happy. I don’t even think about [money] until the UFC bookkeeper calls me a few days later to transfer the money.”
But it’s not just the temporary joy or the glory he’s chasing, he said. He’s also in search of a fitting end to a great career, whatever that would look like at this point.
“I want to retire as the old Cro Cop. I don’t know if I will be able to do it, but I will die trying. Nothing is hard for me. I will die trying.”
It’s a long way from the reasons he started this in the first place. Back in 1996, two years after his father died and “and left me and my mother all alone without a dollar in our pocket,” the 21-year-old Filipovic got his start in K-1 kickboxing tournaments.
“It was the only way to drag me and my mother out of misery. That’s how I started. I wanted to beat people because I wanted to get more and more money to ensure financial independence for me and for my family. That’s all.”
The fame? The attention? He never wanted any of that. In his perfect world, he could fight and get paid without anyone knowing him once he left the cage.
“If somebody recognize me on the street or they don’t recognize me, I don’t care. I would prefer that they don’t recognize me. Unfortunately, in my country, everybody recognize me. I cannot hide, but it’s hard to live without privacy.”
The fame came as a consequence of his success shortly after he moved from kickboxing into MMA and went on to become one of the sport’s most iconic heavyweights. From Japan to the U.S., Cro Cop was a known man. But as time passed and his contemporaries got picked off one by one, Filipovic saw for himself how this sport can use up and discard a person — even the great ones.
“Look at Fedor [Emelianenko],” he said. “Fedor was untouchable until one year ago, and today nobody’s talking about him. He lost three times in a row. He was a great champion, great fighter, but he lost three times in a row and nobody talks about him. Only the fans who followed him his whole career respect what he did with his career, but that’s the name of the game. I don’t want it to happen to me.”
In Filipovic’s mind, at least, beating Nelson on October 29 is the only way to avoid the same fate as his old rival Fedor. That’s why he put everything he had into preparing for this fight, he said, even bringing out another former opponent — fellow UFC heavyweight Pat Barry — to give him some quality sparring sessions.
“And believe me,” he said, “it was wild sparring.”
But no matter what he’s done in the weeks leading up to this fight, he can’t guarantee the outcome. He can’t simply will his way to a victory that will keep his career and his name in the sport alive.
Losing remains a distinct possibility, and if it happens, he said, all he can do is “say to people, ‘I apologize, and I’m sorry I waste[d] your time.’ That’s all I can say and that’s exactly what I will say. I will disappear from the UFC and I will apologize, first to the headquarters of the UFC, because I was treated like a king, I was paid well, and unfortunately I didn’t justify the treatment. I didn’t justify the treatment. I don’t want live on an old glory. That’s why, believe me, I trained really hard for this fight.”
Will it be enough to win? Better yet, if he does win, if “the old Cro Cop” comes back even for just one night in October, will that be enough?
Once you’re reminded how great victory feels, and once you’ve proven that you’re still capable of achieving it, how do you stop chasing it? How do you simultaneously become the person you used to be, yet not continue doing what he would have done? And who was that person, anyway? And where did he go?
To Brendan Schaub, it was just an off-hand remark in answer to a common question. While in Los Angeles to talk about the UFC Undisputed video game, he gave an interview where he was asked who he’d like to fight next after his loss to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira at UFC 134 in Brazil.
Something like this, maybe you never really get over it. Maybe you’re not supposed to.
If things go very, very well for 
Ask 
It might go down as one of the shortest retirements in the history of the sport. One month ago, after losing a decision to late replacement Dakota Cochrane at a Titan Fighting Championships event, 