Author: By Mike Straka

Stipe Miocic (9-0) is a man of few words. At six feet, four inches tall and 245 pounds, he never really needed to say much to get his point across. It’s understandable then, with a uniquely Croatian name and an icy Eastern European stare, that people often think he doesn’t speak English.

Even his fellow UFC fighters.

“I walked up to him in Houston after he fought Joey Beltran to get him to sign an autograph for a little kid,” says recently turned light heavyweight Chael Sonnen. “And there I am talking real slow, like ‘c o n g r a t u l a t i o n s, S t i p e,’ meanwhile I’m pronouncing it STIPE, not Stee-pay,” he says, laughing at the memory.

Miocic (pronounced My-Oh-Sitch) remembers the exchange.

“I was going to call him out on that the next time I saw him,” he says, laughing hysterically. “Yeah, he was talking really slow and I was getting checked out by the doctor after my fight and I just nodded and signed the autograph. Chael was one of the first UFC guys I ever met and it was really cool. He’s a great guy.”

As part of the main event attraction on UFC on FUEL TV 5 against heavyweight contender Stefan Struve (28-5) this weekend in Nottingham, England though, it’s safe to say people will know how to pronounce his name and that English is in fact, his first language.

The Cleveland born Croatian-American and two sport collegiate athlete (wrestling and baseball) and part-time firefighter is excited about headlining a UFC event on national television.

“I’m a little nervous, but if I just focus on my gameplan and on my coach’s voice in the corner I won’t get too anxious,” he says. “One thing about being a professional firefighter is learning patience. Sometimes you get calls, and sometimes you don’t. You just have to be comfortable with that or you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

Miocic has been on a tear in his MMA career, but he is in no way an overnight success. After college he took to the amateur circuit and won his first five fights, but then took a year and a half off to focus on boxing, where he won the Golden Gloves in Cleveland.

“I’m really happy for him,” says Team StrongStyle teammate Brian “The Predator” Rogers. “To see the past seven or eight years of hard work paying off is so great. Stipe is one of the nicest guys I know. To call him the Green Giant isn’t a stretch at all. He is always helping guys out in the gym,” he said.

Rogers thinks his friend is going to surprise Struve with not only his footwork and his hand combinations, but also on the ground.

“Stipe is very good at submissions,” he says. “He is unorthodox. Our trainer comes from more a catch wrestling background as opposed to straight jiu-jitsu, so I think Struve is going to be a bit confused on the ground.”

Stipe knows, however, that with Struve, he’s in for a tough night.

“Stefan’s a step up in competition,” he said. “He’s a super tough guy who is great at every aspect of the game and he loves fighting. He’s a guy who’s willing to throw down. I just can’t wait to go out to Nottingham and do this; it’s going to be a great card. I’m ecstatic for the opportunity.”

Miocic’s success in the Octagon has been impressive. He went the distance with the notoriously tough-as-nails Beltran in his UFC debut, taking a unanimous decision in the first fight of that night. There weren’t many people yet inside The Toyota Center in Houston, TX, but as I sat in press row, I noticed there were three very vocal fans supporting him in the stands – his cousins and his girlfriend.

“They come to all my fights,” he said. “They are the most supportive and can get loud. My mother is going to come to England but I know she won’t be able to watch. My father is coming from Croatia so I’m excited about him seeing me fight.”

At nearly seven feet tall, Struve poses unique challenges and is a hard person to emulate in camp, so Stipe visited a former UFC champion for some “height” training.

“I went out to train with Tim Sylvia,” he said. “Tim’s really big so it was good to get some time in with him. Struve is a very good kickboxer and his ground game is outstanding. He is really long and I’m small for heavyweight as it is, but being a heavyweight is fantastic. I love food so it’s great to not have to cut weight. I do eat clean now because about a year ago my coach had an intervention with me. I was enjoying it too much. I do think I need to put on weight, but I need to do it slowly. Sometimes if you gain weight too quickly it will backfire on your speed and conditioning. But I do think if I am going to continue to win at the highest level of the weight class, I’ll need a little more power.”

After taking Beltran to a decision, Miocic next faced Phil De Fries and knocked him out in just 43 seconds of the first round, and then impressively TKOd Shane Del Rosario at UFC 146.

“I’ve learned that I can’t wait too long before letting my hands go,” he said. “I have to get going a lot quicker than I did in my previous fights. These guys at heavyweight are usually twenty five pounds heavier than me and they can end the fight with one good punch, so I can’t wait too long out there.”

Stipe works part time as a firefighter and EMT at two different Cleveland stations, and he says the guys he works with aren’t impressed with his UFC career.

“They bust my balls pretty good,” he says. “They keep me grounded.”

Rogers says Stipe also gets it at the gym. “If he does anything stupid on TV we will destroy him,” says Rogers. “He’s so nice he laughs along. But being the biggest and fastest fighter in the gym, we don’t want him too mad at us.”

Miocic doesn’t need to get mad in order to fight well. In fact, to hear him tell it, it’s not really a big deal at all.

“I just have to out there and get the W. I don’t care if it’s a knockout, a submission or a decision. I need the W against Struve. I’m just going to go out there and do what I do.”

And oh yeah, he’s American folks. No need to speak s l o w l y.

It was October 2011 in Montreal’s Bell Centre and Canadian fighter Mitch Gagnon (8-2) was staring across the cage at David Harris, a fighter from Detroit, Michigan. Both fighters were riding win streaks of three or better and Harris was making a splash north of the border.

For Gagnon, who was making his bantamweight debut, it was the moment of truth.

“I fought mostly local talent up until Harris, who is American,” he said. “He was considered the Canadian Killer, and he was walking through the bantamweights here in Canada.”

The two fighters met in the center of the cage and Harris sent Gagnon stumbling backwards after glancing him with a head kick. Mitch answered with several inside leg kicks before Harris dove in for the takedown – his first and last mistake of the match – as Gagnon quickly secured a guillotine, forcing the tap at just 2:09 of the first round.

“I put a stop to that pretty quick,” Gagnon said. “It was really at that point that I felt like I deserved the shot in the UFC, but I always feared that unknown of how UFC fighters really are.”

Gagnon found out first hand at UFC 149 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he got the call up to the big leagues to take on a tough-as-nails Bryan Caraway.

“The minute I grabbed Bryan Caraway and the way my positioning on him was really great, I felt I belonged in there,” he says. “Even though I lost that bout, I feel like I can match up well with any fighter in the bantamweight division.”

Indeed, Gagnon has nothing to be ashamed about in suffering his first loss in over three years against Caraway. Their fight was a war of attrition, with both guys being dominant at several points during the fight, and Gagnon nearly finishing Caraway with vicious ground and pound in the first round. The two bantamweights eventually took Fight of the Night honors, earning them both an extra $60,000 for their crowd pleasing efforts.

“The experience was awesome,” says Gagnon. “I enjoyed it right up to the moment I lost. I really felt like I belonged. It was hard because I hadn’t suffered a loss in three years so I forgot how that felt. But it made me a better fighter. I got to look back to see what I did wrong and what I could have done better.”

Gagnon next faces Walel Watson (9-4) at UFC 152 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on September 22nd.  For this camp Mitch – who usually fights bigger guys at Sudbury, Ontario, Canada’s Team Shredder, where he has a personal fitness and training business – headed north to train with Antonio Carvalho, a fellow UFC bantamweight who himself made an impressive showing at UFC 149 with a knockout of Daniel Pineda.

“I felt like I needed to train with other bantamweights,” says Gagnon. “It’s different fighting 170 pounders and then fighting 135 pounders. They’re faster down at this weight so I needed to get time in with faster guys.”

In Watson, Gagnon faces a dynamic striker who is also very tricky on the ground.

“Walel is really tall,” says Gagnon. “He likes to throw head kicks and his length allows him to throw these weird angle submissions that most other guys just can’t. He throws these anaconda chokes at these really weird angles and you have to be aware of that and be cautious of that. I’m sure he’s working a lot on his wrestling. I’m thinking he’s going to try to stuff my takedowns, but I’ve got a really good game plan and I know what I have to do. I’ve been drilling and drilling a lot.”

Aside from drilling technique, Gagnon is also dieting better and approaching this weight cut a bit more scientifically then he did for the last two cuts to bantamweight.

“I cut 17 pounds during fight week last time and I think that’s too much for any bantamweight,” he said, adding that the tough cut might have contributed to what he considers a poor performance against Caraway.

“I think there was a point in that first round where I could have stopped hitting him while he was recovering,” he says. “My fighting style is really high paced and I thought I was conditioned enough to sustain that pace throughout three rounds, and leading up to the fight I think my weight cut was a little rough as well. That was only my second time fighting at 135 and the first time I did that I also had a hard cut but that fight only lasted two minutes. I didn’t really know how the weight cut was going to affect me over three rounds, so looking back on that fight, for this next fight I’m making sure my diet is good and that I’m leaner going into the cut so that it’s not too hard.”

For any fighter, the UFC is the biggest deal going, and Gagnon is taking his opportunity as seriously as one can get. He is focused full-time on his next fight, leaving his personal training clients to two colleagues in Sudbury so that he can train full time. He’s also left his fiancé back home.

“She’s never once told me to miss a training session or to not go away for camp,” he said. “She’s very supportive. I have a lot of support from my family, my sponsors and the local community, so that I can focus 100 percent on Walel Watson and nothing else.”

And while for most guys a Fight of the Night bonus might take away the sting of a loss, for Gagnon, he’s not in it for the money, although it does help.

“The bonuses in the UFC are great and if I’m smart with my money it will help me be better financially, but I’m a short-term goal setter. I like to set little goals and go out and meet them. Right now my goal is to get the W against Walel,” he said. “But I don’t want to just say I made it to the UFC. I want to make a good run at this. I feel like I can beat guys in the division and I can have a long career with Zuffa.”

The last time lightweight prospect Danny Castillo (14-4) was inside the Octagon, a New Jersey crowd was booing his effort against John Cholish, a full-time commodities broker and Renzo Gracie-trained fighter who’s fighting style pretty much nullified his own at UFC on FOX 3 in May.

“A part-time fighter who makes it into the UFC, that’s pretty impressive to me,” says Castillo of the All-American wrestler from Cornell. “A lot of people thought that was a boring fight, but that was a technical battle. I prepared well for him and I’m glad I did. John’s a good all-around guy. I try to not like my opponent as much possible, but he and I have a lot in common and it was hard not to like the guy.”

The Team Alpha Male fighter next faces Michael “The Menace” Johnson (12-6) at UFC on FX 5 on October 5th. It’s a little later than they expected, as the two were scheduled to meet on the now cancelled UFC 151 card on September 1st, but both guys are coming off victories and looking to creep up the ladder toward title contention in what is perhaps the deepest division in all of mixed martial arts.

“He’s a very athletic guy,” Castillo says of his Team Blackzilian opponent. “He’s fast and he’s got great hands. I see some holes in his game. I think his ground game is questionable.  I’ve been working on my ground game a lot lately. I’ve seen him break in a couple of fights. I’m looking to put the pressure on him, stay away from his big left hand, take him down and beat him up a little bit.”

Taking people down is what defines Castillo. Although he works his striking daily with Master Thong at Ultimate Fitness in Sacramento, California, wrestling is his base and is what got him into MMA in the first place.

“I lost my last wrestling match in college and it didn’t sit well with me,” said Castillo.
Like most smaller guys fighting out of Northern California, Urijah Faber was the catalyst for a career that not only keeps Danny in the gym, but has landed him on national television in commercials and on The Ultimate Fighter Live: Team Cruz vs Team Faber. Faber looked up his old high school buddy on MySpace and invited him to come home to train.

“After college I was working in sales, so I had money, but I was partying a bunch and the competition I had in the wrestling room was competition I took over to the bars, which was not such a good idea. At around that time my high school buddy Urijah Faber was doing big things. The WEC was starting to blow up, it was just getting on TV. He and I wrestled on the same traveling all-star team, and every summer we’d go up and down the west coast in an 18 passenger van wrestling other all-star teams in the area and we developed a friendship. I went out to visit him in Sacramento where he had a gym, three houses, he was on TV and he had money and I was like, ‘man I could live the same life I did in college with training all the time,’ and he said ‘It takes a certain kind of person to be a fighter and I think you have it.’ At the time it was hard to give up a good paying job, but the more and more I went to work the more I wasn’t happy. I was 28 years old and I just figured what the heck, so I quit my job, packed up a U-Haul and moved back to Sacramento and I haven’t looked back since.”

Castillo hasn’t lost since making his UFC debut against Jacob Volkmann a little over a year ago. Volkmann dominated that match and took a unanimous decision by controlling most of the ground game.

“I came home from that match, threw a gi on and worked my ground game with a vengeance,” he said.

Castillo made his WEC debut in 2008 after stepping in for an injured Richard Crunkilton to take on Cowboy Cerrone. He lost that bout, but it set the bar high for his expectations for his career. Now, with the WEC folded into the UFC, Castillo is hoping to have the same impact on the division as Cerrone has of late.

“That was an awesome fight,” Castillo says of Cerrone’s drubbing of former teammate Melvin Guillard at UFC 150. “He got Fight of the Night on a fight that lasted 76 seconds. Cowboy was my first loss in my first fight in the WEC. I lost in the first round by armbar and the rest is history.”

Castillo has fought at least three times a year since then, but he says he’d like to ramp it up to four times per year if he can stay healthy.

“My lifestyle is that I need the money every three months,” he says, laughing. “As long as I’m healthy I like to fight as much as possible. My hobbies revolve around fighting. I like to cycle, I like to run, and as long as those are my hobbies I’m always going to be in shape and always looking to take a fight on short notice. If the matchup is right I will do it. The money,” he says, “is always right.”

The last time lightweight prospect Danny Castillo (14-4) was inside the Octagon, a New Jersey crowd was booing his effort against John Cholish, a full-time commodities broker and Renzo Gracie-trained fighter who’s fighting style pretty much nullified his own at UFC on FOX 3 in May.

“A part-time fighter who makes it into the UFC, that’s pretty impressive to me,” says Castillo of the All-American wrestler from Cornell. “A lot of people thought that was a boring fight, but that was a technical battle. I prepared well for him and I’m glad I did. John’s a good all-around guy. I try to not like my opponent as much possible, but he and I have a lot in common and it was hard not to like the guy.”

The Team Alpha Male fighter next faces Michael “The Menace” Johnson (12-6) at UFC on FX 5 on October 5th. It’s a little later than they expected, as the two were scheduled to meet on the now cancelled UFC 151 card on September 1st, but both guys are coming off victories and looking to creep up the ladder toward title contention in what is perhaps the deepest division in all of mixed martial arts.

“He’s a very athletic guy,” Castillo says of his Team Blackzilian opponent. “He’s fast and he’s got great hands. I see some holes in his game. I think his ground game is questionable.  I’ve been working on my ground game a lot lately. I’ve seen him break in a couple of fights. I’m looking to put the pressure on him, stay away from his big left hand, take him down and beat him up a little bit.”

Taking people down is what defines Castillo. Although he works his striking daily with Master Thong at Ultimate Fitness in Sacramento, California, wrestling is his base and is what got him into MMA in the first place.

“I lost my last wrestling match in college and it didn’t sit well with me,” said Castillo.
Like most smaller guys fighting out of Northern California, Urijah Faber was the catalyst for a career that not only keeps Danny in the gym, but has landed him on national television in commercials and on The Ultimate Fighter Live: Team Cruz vs Team Faber. Faber looked up his old high school buddy on MySpace and invited him to come home to train.

“After college I was working in sales, so I had money, but I was partying a bunch and the competition I had in the wrestling room was competition I took over to the bars, which was not such a good idea. At around that time my high school buddy Urijah Faber was doing big things. The WEC was starting to blow up, it was just getting on TV. He and I wrestled on the same traveling all-star team, and every summer we’d go up and down the west coast in an 18 passenger van wrestling other all-star teams in the area and we developed a friendship. I went out to visit him in Sacramento where he had a gym, three houses, he was on TV and he had money and I was like, ‘man I could live the same life I did in college with training all the time,’ and he said ‘It takes a certain kind of person to be a fighter and I think you have it.’ At the time it was hard to give up a good paying job, but the more and more I went to work the more I wasn’t happy. I was 28 years old and I just figured what the heck, so I quit my job, packed up a U-Haul and moved back to Sacramento and I haven’t looked back since.”

Castillo hasn’t lost since making his UFC debut against Jacob Volkmann a little over a year ago. Volkmann dominated that match and took a unanimous decision by controlling most of the ground game.

“I came home from that match, threw a gi on and worked my ground game with a vengeance,” he said.

Castillo made his WEC debut in 2008 after stepping in for an injured Richard Crunkilton to take on Cowboy Cerrone. He lost that bout, but it set the bar high for his expectations for his career. Now, with the WEC folded into the UFC, Castillo is hoping to have the same impact on the division as Cerrone has of late.

“That was an awesome fight,” Castillo says of Cerrone’s drubbing of former teammate Melvin Guillard at UFC 150. “He got Fight of the Night on a fight that lasted 76 seconds. Cowboy was my first loss in my first fight in the WEC. I lost in the first round by armbar and the rest is history.”

Castillo has fought at least three times a year since then, but he says he’d like to ramp it up to four times per year if he can stay healthy.

“My lifestyle is that I need the money every three months,” he says, laughing. “As long as I’m healthy I like to fight as much as possible. My hobbies revolve around fighting. I like to cycle, I like to run, and as long as those are my hobbies I’m always going to be in shape and always looking to take a fight on short notice. If the matchup is right I will do it. The money,” he says, “is always right.”

The UFC featherweight division is known for its fast-paced, high-skilled bouts and the well-rounded skills of its participants, and now a high-profile, former 155-pound kingpin is heading to their ranks, immediately adding even more depth to the weight class.

Frankie Edgar (14-3-1), who has long heard the call from the UFC brass and many fans to drop a weight class, has decided cutting weight for the first time in his eight year professional fight career isn’t so bad after all.

“The fight at UFC 150 didn’t go my way,” said Edgar. “I’m not saying I’ll never fight 155 ever again but this is something different. (UFC president) Dana (White) wants me to go down and right now it’s the right time to do it.”

But Edgar got a little more incentive to drop to 145 after featherweight champion Jose Aldo told Tatame.com that he’d like to close the book on all the Edgar talk at his weight class.

“He said he wants to drop to featherweight so I’m hoping he does that to end this story,” Aldo said. “He’s welcome here so that we can shut him off and he goes to the lightweight or bantamweight classes.”

Edgar responded to those statements by immediately making up his mind to go to 145.

“That definitely helped me make my decision,” he said. “I’m a competitive person and when someone talks like that it makes me want to get in there and see what ‘45 is all about.”

Edgar dropped a controversial split decision to lightweight champ Benson Henderson in their rematch at UFC 150 earlier this month in Denver’s Pepsi Center. At the post fight press conference I asked Dana White if Frankie were to move down to 145, would he get an immediate shot at the title?

“I think Frankie would have to fight somebody at 145 (before getting a title shot),” White said. “We’ve got all these backed up titles right now…and if I know Frankie, he’s going to want to get in there right away.”

Edgar says he’d like to make an impressive debut in the division and take on someone who’s already established himself as a contender there.

“I think that’s kind of a given being where I’m at in my career, but ‘45 is a tough division, there are a lot of good guys down there. But I haven’t talked to Dana yet about who I might fight down there yet.”

Edgar had long shunned the notion of moving down to 145. When he first started fighting professionally, there was no 145-pound division in the UFC, and 155 was where Edgar made an impressive debut against Tyson Griffin – which earned him Fight Of The Night honors at UFC 67 in January of 2007 – despite being rejected for The Ultimate Fighter season five after he was thought to be too small for the division.

“Dana said ‘You’re a little small for ‘55 and I told him I once fought at 170,” said Edgar. “Either way they still called me and offered me Griffin, so whatever.”

A succession of tougher and tougher opponents presented the opportunity for the smaller fighter from Toms River, NJ to prove he belonged, and he did it in impressive fashion, dispatching the likes of Spencer Fisher, Mark Bocek, Hermes Franca, Sean Sherk and Matt Veach — dropping just one match along the way to Gray Maynard — before earning a shot at the title against BJ Penn at UFC 112 in Abu Dhabi.

Edgar shocked the world by taking a unanimous decision, and then did it again in an immediate rematch at UFC 118. A rematch with Gray Maynard ended in an exciting draw in January 2011 and Edgar won their third match with a fourth round knockout, becoming the first person to ever finish the tough Maynard at UFC 136.

Edgar then lost his belt at UFC 144 in Japan’s Saitama Super Arena to Henderson, and after losing the rematch earlier this month in a razor close split decision, he decided now is the right time to go down to 145.

“I told myself I wouldn’t make a decision until after the fight,” he said. “I wanted to give myself a week to figure it out. I don’t know if I would have felt differently if I did win the title back. You always have to give yourself some time because right after a fight emotions are always running high, win or lose.

White said Edgar would be a “monster” at 145, but Frankie is quick to point out that even at featherweight he’s still a small guy.

“For real I don’t think I will be the bigger guy,” he said. “I think these guys at ‘45 cut more weight than I will. I may not be dwarfed in size like some of the guys I’ve fought at lightweight but these ‘45 pounders present different challenges. By no means do I think that by going down to a different weight class I’m going to be successful right away. I think I’m still going to have solid opponents to fight.”

Aldo is scheduled to fight Eric Koch at UFC 153 in Rio in October. Should Edgar win in impressive fashion in his featherweight debut, he could very well see a chance at another belt sooner than later, especially if he wins against a name opponent like Chad Mendes.

“I am a fan of Chad,” says Edgar. “I like him as a person, as a fighter, but like I said, I don’t call anybody out. That was the nice thing about being the champion, you didn’t have to call anybody out, you fought the number one contender, that was one of the perks of being the champion. Being that I’m just in the mix now, I guess we’ll see who they put me with.”

Should Edgar be successful at another title run, he would be only the third fighter in UFC history to win belts in two different divisions, with legends BJ Penn and Randy Couture being the other two. As far as concessions go, that’s not bad company for Edgar to keep.

“That would be phenomenal,” he said. “That would be something you can look back on in later years and be proud of, but I can’t really look past this next fight. I don’t know what they envision about an immediate title shot or not. I know Dana said at the press conference that he wants to see me fight a guy first. I really don’t care, I just want to get back to my winning ways.”

It’s Father’s Day and Frankie “The Answer” Edgar (14-2-1) sits with his back against a padded wall on the third floor of the Renzo Gracie Academy in New York City. His shirt is drenched and stuck to his body while sweat drips down onto his face from his head.

The thing is, the guy isn’t even working out. Well, not really anyway. He’s being interviewed by a crew from Gaspari Nutrition, Edgar’s supplements sponsor, who are making a series about Frankie’s training camp for Henderson vs Edgar II at UFC 150 on Saturday in Denver, Colorado.

The series, called “155 Reasons,” tells the story of Edgar’s journey from high school wrestling standout to UFC lightweight champion and his climb back to the belt through interviews with his teammates, coaches, family members and journalists.

While most fathers on this day are out for breakfast at the local IHOP with the kids, Edgar’s spent the morning doing shadow boxing, flying knees and hitting pads for the cameras with his manager/training partner Ali Abdelaziz.

It is a complete about face from the first time I met Frankie back when I made him my fight analyst on Fox Fight Game during the summer of 2009. Back then, Edgar had an aversion to cameras. They made him uncomfortable and this was never more evident than in the lead-up to his lone loss at the time — suffered at the hands of Gray “The Bully” Maynard in their first fight at UFC Fight Night in April 2008 – as a crew from the MTV television show “Made” followed him throughout his training camp for the series.

Edgar didn’t blame “Made” for the loss, but he became superstitious about cameras during training camp. I remember his father Frank Annese and wife Renee would always give me a raised eyebrow whenever I showed up with my camera crew in tow at Ricardo Almeida’s academy in Hamilton, NJ.

Two years as the UFC champion however, cured him of that aversion — and between UF C Primetime, UFC Countdown and more and more media covering MMA — these days it’s rarer when there are no cameras following the 155 pound phenom around than when they are.

“I’m used to it,” he says of the constant presence of strange men and women lurking about carrying video and audio equipment. Like the way he got used to being the champion.

“When you taste being the champion, you like to be the one defending your belt, not trying to get it. When you have people calling you the champ, it has a nice ring to it.”

Indeed it does. Coupled with what some called a controversial decision loss against Benson Henderson at UFC 144 last February in Japan, and the fact that even UFC president Dana White thought he won the fight — Edgar shouted to anyone who would listen that he wanted an immediate rematch.

“There’s nothing personal for me, it’s the nature of competition,” says Edgar. “He took the belt from me and I want it back, that’s it.”

So what is Edgar going to do differently this time around?

“I don’t think about doing things differently, it’s about doing things better,” he says.

Frankie Edgar is no stranger to getting better. With each fight “The Answer” improves some part of his game. Perhaps the UFC did him a favor when they gave him Tyson Griffin for his debut fight. Fighting someone so good in his first UFC bout set the bar very high for the Toms River, NJ native.

But it was a fight against a former champion that set Edgar on the path he has blazed in his UFC career to date.

“I think it was the Sean Sherk fight. He was a former champion and I beat him. I think I had a good career progression,” he said. “I fought Spencer Fisher then I fought Hermes Franca who was a title contender, then a former champ in Sean Sherk. Every fight was a step up in competition and it made me believe I could be a champion.”

And while preparing for yet another rematch (he’s fought three in a row: BJ Penn, Gray Maynard and now Benson Henderson) – the elephant in the room is the 145 pound discussion that Edgar knows he will have to address sooner or later.

“Just because you go down a weight class doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful,” he says. “There are a lot of variables. Guys are faster, a little more athletic. Just because you lose the weight doesn’t mean you’re going to dominate. The media wants to talk about it. The fans want to talk about it. Even I do it — play fantasy matchmaker. I want to see Georges (St-Pierre) fight Anderson (Silva) or Anderson fight (Jon) Jones. Can I go ‘45? Yeah I can make the weight. In the future am I going to go down? Yeah, I challenged myself at ‘55 and I’ll probably challenge myself at ‘45.”

For boxing coach Mark Henry, the move down to 145 pounds for his protégé is inevitable, but Henry sees it as more of a necessary evil of the game than a limitation in Edgar’s fight skills.

“Frankie walks at 155,” says Henry. “Ben Henderson just had a jiu-jitsu tournament at 180 and I bet he cut a couple pounds for that too. Jiu-Jitsu he’s 180 but when you’re throwing hands he’s 155? I’d like to see Ben Henderson fight 185 against Anderson Silva because that’s what Frankie’s doing.  It’s no knock on anybody. It’s just what everybody’s doing in MMA and it just proves to me how unique a fighter Frankie is and how to me he’s the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world.”

But right now Henderson has the belt and before Edgar vacates the division he was on top of for two years and three successful title defenses (one was a draw but he retained the belt nonetheless), he’s got to figure out the Korean-American wunderkind.

“Ben’s tough, he’s hard to train for, a little unorthodox, a great athlete and he’s a big ‘55 pounder,” says Edgar. “He’s got a lot of skill and that’s why the fight was so tough the first time. Leading up to this one I have to make some adjustments, no doubt.”

Adjustments and improvements are what drives Edgar’s diehard attitude toward a sport he’s now seven years into, and why he’s constantly training.

“This sport is so new,” he says. “There are so many different disciplines, if you don’t spend time in the gym you’re going to get left behind.  But competition is the best way to learn. You can sit here in an academy and you’re going to get better, but you put yourself in the competitive world you’re going to get to another level.”

On Saturday, Edgar will test his theory that he’s gotten better with every fight. Win or lose however, Frankie will be forced to make a decision about going down to 145, but for now he’s only got one thing on his mind.

“Anytime you taste defeat you want a chance at redemption.”