Author: By Thomas Gerbasi

Saturday night’s first UFC on FOX card in Anaheim has been called the most important event in the history of mixed martial arts, but for featherweight Cub Swanson, it’s even bigger than that.

“People keep talking to me about the significance of the show and how big it is, and I can really appreciate that,” he said. “This is something I’m gonna look back on and I’ll be really proud of myself for being a part of this show. But for now, I’m just so excited about overcoming what I’ve gone through that this is a bonus for me. I get to go out there and I’m just focused on this one dude, and I’m gonna fight my heart out.”

It’s not the first time the Palm Springs native is competing in an MMA fight. No, when Swanson walks into the Octagon, it will be the 20th time he’s made that trip to compete against another fighter trained to beat him. But this time, it will mark both his first UFC bout and his first fight in a year and a day, a harrowing 366 days in which a serious sparring injury had him questioning whether fighting was even worth it anymore.

“It goes through my mind every once in a while,” said Swanson when asked if he ever thought about packing it in. “But I put these goals on myself and I haven’t reached them yet. If the doctor tells me I can’t fight and I have to retire, he could suggest it, but if he says you can fight, you’ll be okay, then why not? I haven’t met those goals and haven’t met those standards for myself. If I retired now, I would be disappointed in myself.”

Yet while it was bad enough to see the gash on his forehead that ended his 2009 bout with current UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo, hearing about the effects of the shot he took while training for a July bout with Erik Koch could make even the most hardened fight veteran cringe.

Suffering orbital, nasal, and cheek fractures, in addition to a broken upper jaw in which all of the teeth on the upper left side of his mouth got pushed in, Swanson could have walked away from the game and no one would have blamed him. But that’s not how fighters are built, especially a fighter like Swanson.

“I just took three days off after surgery,” said Swanson of his rest period before returning to the gym. “People think that when they don’t see me, then I’m not in the gym. I’m not one of those guys. I’m not a guy who goes and parties and takes time off and does all that. I’m not satisfied until I win, and I haven’t won since November of last year. So I’ve been in the gym.”

And when he’s not in his own gym back home in California, he’s in Albuquerque with his comrades at the Jackson’s MMA gym, a place where he has found not only good training, and training partners, but a family.

“We all come from different places, but we’re all just one big happy family when we’re around each other,” said Swanson. “It’s a gym that happens to have good coaching, good vibes, and some of the best fighters in the world. And then to add that high altitude, that’s a bonus.”

Another bonus is having a strong support system on fight week, something fairly new to the 28-year old.

“When I used to train throughout California, I was just there by myself and I hung out in my room and hardly came out,” he said. “I cooked in my room and was very to myself. Now I’ve got a training partner on every card, this time I’m fortunate enough to be fighting on the same card as Clay Guida, and we’ll be hanging out and he’ll have his buddies coming to help and I’ll have mine, so when we get to Anaheim, we’ll have six solid coaches and four great training partners with us. It can be a huge advantage.”

Now all he’ll have to do is avoid any last minute mishaps. UFC bantamweight Brad Pickett, who returned to the Octagon after a long injury-induced layoff last weekend, told of family and friends threatening to wrap him in bubble wrap until fight time. Is Swanson following that same course of action?

“In a sense,” he chuckles. “Everyone’s got their jokes, so it’s not like I can run from those. But I learned to train a lot smarter. Before I would always be like ‘whatever, whatever,’ but my main concern was getting to one hundred percent without doing something stupid. I changed the way I did some of my rounds and I changed a lot of my training. I’m smarter and I gotta say I’ve never felt better. I feel strong, I feel explosive, my cardio’s crazy, my skills are all there, so I feel great.”

One of the top US featherweights of recent years, Swanson was a WEC standout from 2007 until the promotion merged with the UFC in late-2010. 5-3 in the blue cage, with his only losses coming to Aldo, Chad Mendes, and Jens Pulver, Swanson will get a stiff test in his Octagon debut against Ricardo Lamas, a fighter he has a great deal of respect for.

“The kid’s a stud,” said Swanson. “He’s had a couple tough losses as well as I have, but he’s very explosive. Obviously coming down from ’55, he’s a bigger dude, and I know he’s really developed as a fighter as well as I have. But I really believe that I train with better people consistently, and I think that’s my one edge, because he’s a damn good athlete.”

He’s also a fellow WEC vet, a badge of honor Swanson and his peers wear as they continue to introduce UFC fans to the lighter weight classes.

“I’ve been excited for all the WEC guys,” said Swanson. “We’re like our own little club and I cheer for them all the time.”

This weekend, the Californian will be the last member of the graduating class of WEC fighters to make his UFC debut. For those who have followed his career, it’s a welcome return. For those who have never seen him before, well, he’s not promising a new Cub Swanson. Instead, he expects to bring back the old one, the one who showed up against for a Fight of the Night win over Mackens Semerzier a year ago.

“The fight with Mackens, my manager told me ‘watch some old footage of yourself and remember what it used to be like,’” he recalled. “I remember that it used to be me being mean. I just wanted to rip through the dude. And that’s all I could think about. So I remember walking out there and looking across the cage and it was do or die for him. We locked eyes and I could see the same fight in him, and that’s why we got Fight of the Night. Both of us had that fire, and neither one wanted to back down. That’s kinda what I went back to so I could really get myself in the zone.”

On Saturday, Cub Swanson’s bringing it.

Dustin Poirier missed the cut for a spot on The Ultimate Fighter. He also lost his WEC debut in 2010 to Danny Castillo. If he fell short in his second Zuffa bout against Zack Micklewright three months after the Castillo fight, he was likely on his way out of the organization.

Where would your head be at if you were Poirier, just 21, a local star on the Louisiana fight scene looking to break into the big time, but finding that the door to the next level was a little sturdier than you expected? Now you just had one more shot to get it right.

“I had worked so hard to get here, I sacrificed so much to get my shot in the WEC, I came in and Danny Castillo spoiled it,” recalled Poirier. “He beat me and it was the first loss in my pro career. I knew that if I went in there and lost against Micklewright, it’s gonna be a long road back to Louisiana, a long road back to the big lights.”

What followed on fight night at The Palms in Las Vegas on November 11, 2010, was a furious 53 second assault in which Poirier forgot that he was a professional mixed martial artist. In less than a minute, he reminded the world that for all the skill and technique involved in this sport, when necessary you have to be able to call on an inner reserve and make it a fight.

That night, Poirier won the biggest fight of his career.

“I went back to my roots and what won me all my amateur fights and all the fights in the beginning of my pro career, and that was just tucking my chin and brawling and just going in there and fighting,” he said. “That’s in my heart, and you can’t teach that and I haven’t learned that. I was born with that aggression and that instinct to fight. So that’s all I did, and I knew I was gonna have to do it.”

Subsequent wins in the UFC over Josh Grispi and Jason Young have taken Poirier, now 22, off the bubble and into the featherweight contenders mix, and while he still brings out glimpses of the furious brawler that showed up against Micklewright, he’s also well aware that too much of that may be a bad thing for his career longevity.

“It can put me in bad places,” he said. “I’m lucky I didn’t wake up looking up at the lights when I did that to Micklewright, because just as quickly as it happened to him, it could have happened to me. So as I grow as a fighter, I’m getting away from that, and I’m learning to balance it with my technique and my aggression, and when I do find that perfect balance, a lot of guys are gonna be in trouble.”

The next one in the crosshairs for Poirier is fellow 145-pound prospect Pablo Garza, who has been just as impressive in his short UFC stint, nabbing post-fight bonuses for his knockout of Fredson Paixao and submission of Yves Jabouin. So when the two meet up this Saturday in Anaheim, a three round waltz isn’t on the menu, and considering that both are talented rising stars, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to think that this may not be the last time they’ll fight each other. Then again, Poirier doesn’t believe that to be the case.

“He’s not gonna want to fight me again after this,” states “The Diamond,” who nonetheless does admit that the lanky Garza does pose some interesting stylistic issues.

“He seems like a puzzle,” said Poirier of Garza. “I’ve only seen him fight briefly because the fights that he had were real quick, but he’s real awkward, he’s unpredictable, he’s long, and he has a weird rhythm. He’s just an awkward fighter and he fights with a weird timing, so we’ll see.”

Having UFC middleweight Tim Credeur manning his corner and working with him in the gym does make prep for the 6-foot-1 Garza a little easier though.

“My head trainer is Tim Credeur down here in Louisiana, and Tim’s 6-3, probably 200 pounds, a black belt in jiu-jitsu and has good striking, so preparing for a guy like Pablo Garza, who’s long, good off his back, and who has unorthodox striking, I have the perfect guy to train with,” said Poirier. “He (Credeur) is stronger and better than Pablo Garza, so I’ve got that, and I also have a group of guys down here who are good wrestlers and good kickboxers, so I got everything I need for this fight.”

The only thing the Lafayette native doesn’t have is time, as he’s been on a whirlwind run since signing for the Grispi fight, which took place on New Year’s Day.

“It started off full-steam,” he said. “I got the quick call at the end of November to fight Josh Grispi, so it started coming together before January was even here. It started off with that and it just hasn’t slowed down. It’s been crazy.”

What’s made his 2011 even more hectic is that between and after the bouts with Grispi and Young, Poirier has been in the public eye as the focal point of the critically-acclaimed documentary “Fightville.” The positive response to the film caught Poirier off guard, but he’s not complaining.

“That was another one of those things that kinda snowballed when it happened,” he said. The guy (Michael Tucker) would show up with the camera, we would record, and being in an MMA gym, you see that stuff a lot – guys with cameras trying to record stuff and saying they’re gonna do this or that. But as he kept showing up, day after day, I was like ‘wow, this might be kinda serious.’ And then he started talking and he was like ‘man, this isn’t some backyard-shot film. This is gonna be a big deal.’ Then it went to the film festivals and it just took off. And it was cool because I didn’t have to do anything other than be myself and it was an awesome time in my life. It started at the end of some of my amateur fights, so just to have those moments caught on tape and to be able to share it with the world is great.”

“People who know nothing about MMA go into the theater and watch it and come out as fans of the sport, simply because they see that the guys fighting are normal guys,” Poirier continues. “Sometimes MMA gets this bad image, so when they see normal guys with families, jobs, and responsibilities outside the cage fighting, they feel like they’ve connected with them, and I think it helps the sport.”

In addition, “Fightville” shows the world just what fighting means to Poirier, and even today, despite being established as one of the top young fighters in the biggest MMA organization in the world, there is no hint of him being jaded by success or him being at the point where this is simply something he does to pick up a paycheck. Fighting is more to him than that – a lot more.

“Fighting has brought me an anchor,” said Poirier, whose UFC bio has him claiming a Doctorate from the School of Hard Knocks. “It’s something I fell in love with, something that grounds me. It’s all I want to do, it’s what I want to be the best at, and it’s my passion. I live, breathe and sleep fighting, and being the best fighter that I can be. I know a lot of guys probably say that stuff, but I’m genuine when I say it. I really enjoy getting in there and I enjoy the ups and the downs, everything. I enjoy the journey. I just love this so much and I feel like I’m gonna be the best in the world someday, I really do. I feel like every day I’m growing as a fighter and as a person, and fighting has helped me. It’s improved my life so much, not only as a job, but by teaching me responsibility and respect, and all the stuff that the old school martial arts teach. I’m still new myself, but I hope the new guys coming in don’t ever get away from that. When I first started, I was in a dojo on indoor / outdoor carpet, shadowboxing in a mirror and listening to my sensei, and he had a gi on with cutoff sleeves. I hope it never loses that real martial arts feeling.”

You would be excused if you forget that he’s just 22 years old, but it’s funny what coming up the hard way will do for your maturity once you reach a certain level of success. Poirier, despite his youth, has proven himself to be a consummate pro in and out of the Octagon, and he realizes that he has no other choice when it comes to the way he conducts himself if he wants to one day achieve all his goals in the sport.

“Nothing was given to me, so you just learn how to make things work more smoothly and how to better yourself,” he said. “I’ve been working since I was 15 years old, I moved out when I was 17, and it’s just been a crazy ride. But the maturity comes because this is my business, I want to be the best at it, and that’s a part of it. It’s an entertainment business, it’s a fighting business, and you have to be professional. This is my job, and I look at it as a job, and I know that being as professional as I can be will open more doors.”

Being able to punch them down if he has to doesn’t hurt either. But he’ll save that for the Octagon, a place he truly calls home.

“I’m always excited to fight,” he said.

He means it too.

Here’s a little secret, though once you look at Phil De Fries’ unbeaten 7-0 (1 NC) record and see that he ended all of his wins by submission, it won’t be much of a secret anymore.

But here goes anyway – De Fries is not your typical British heavyweight. If you’re wondering, the typical British heavyweight is a brawler who either likes to stand and trade or finish matters on the mat with a steady diet of ground strikes. Add in being tough as nails, and you probably have the picture.

De Fries has the tough as nails part down, but as for the rest, he would rather choke you than knock you out, and if submissions are his business, well, business is booming these days. So why travel the less weathered path?

“I’ve trained BJJ for years and years before MMA,” said De Fries, a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. “I saw the UFCs and saw Royce (Gracie) fighting in the gi and I thought I’ll try that because I loved the skill involved. I ended up fighting in a lot of jiu-jitsu competitions and I won a lot of them in England. In my heart, I always loved doing jiu-jitsu, and then I turned my hand to MMA and I love them both equally now.”

Turning pro in 2009, the 6-foot-4 Sunderland native has sailed through all his pro fights, with the only blemish a 2010 no contest with Dave Wilson which was ruled as such when Wilson couldn’t continue after a punch to the back of the head. It was a minor hiccup, and when De Fries defeated UFC vet Colin Robinson and fellow prospect Stav Economou in 2011, it was the last push he needed to get the call from the UFC.

Yet when he was signed to compete against fellow Brit Oli Thompson at UFC 138, his buddy (and UFC vet) Ross Pearson told him that to compete at the elite level, he needed to supplement his home training with a little traveling – to San Diego’s Alliance Training Center to be exact.

“My friend Ross Pearson is over here, and he said it’s hard work and what you need to do if you want to make it in the UFC,” said De Fries. “So I came over, and it is hard work – it was an eye opener – but I’m glad I did it. All the guys are great, I was living in the gym, and Eric (Del Fierro) is a fantastic coach and fantastic gameplan maker.”

It was in San Diego that the 25-year old De Fries got word that Thompson had injured himself in training and was withdrawing from the bout. In stepped another Brit, the Wolfslair’s Rob Broughton, a fighter all British heavyweights have had their eye on.

“He’s been the number one UK heavyweight for years, and he’s always been the guy to watch,” said De Fries. “He’s tough, he comes forward, and he doesn’t give up. But I think it’s a good fight for us.”

Changing opponents on short notice is never easy; doing it as you prepare for your first UFC bout has to be even more nerve-racking, but De Fries seems to be taking it all in stride.

“It changed the gameplan a little, but it could have been a lot worse,” he said. “People like Neil Wain got matched up with Shane Carwin, didn’t he? It (De Fries vs. Broughton) is a domestic match that was gonna happen sooner or later anyway, and it’s probably a harder fight than Thompson, but it’s not a really, really hard fight. I’m very confident I’m gonna win it.”

If he does, and does it with one of his trademark submissions, he may join unbeaten lightweight groundfighting guru Paul Sass in paving the way for other jiu-jitsu based fighters from the UK, which De Fries admits is “a big boxing nation.” But whether it’s knockouts or tap outs, everybody loves a perfect record and they love a finisher even more. De Fries has both ends covered.

“I really, really don’t like losing,” he said. “I always like to win and I don’t like to give an inch. I finished all my fights before the third round, so I’m very confident, I’m a finisher, and I’m just gonna go and do my thing against Broughton. Hopefully, the fans will see some excitement and a good submission, hopefully Submission of the Night.”

You can admit it – it’s always been nice to think of Chris Leben as the guy who missed his cab to the airport, sprinted to the gate, got on the plane to his fight, ran off that plane, and then showed up in just enough time to put his gloves on and scrap.

But he’s not that guy. In fact, he never was, but there was always the idea that The Ultimate Fighter season one cast member didn’t put too much thought behind the other parts of being a professional athlete, that he was all about the fight, and nothing else, and from that end of things, he rarely disappointed.

But these days (and maybe before as well, but he’s finally going on record about it), Leben makes it clear that to be successful in this sport, being tough ain’t enough.

Take his trip to England for this Saturday’s UFC 138 main event against Mark Munoz for example. Stuck with a hellacious trip from Hawaii to Birmingham, Leben made it a point to get on site last Thursday to make his final preparations for the fight, a key decision for a number of reasons.

“One is your sleep schedule,” said Leben. “That’s a big one, so we came over a little bit early to get acclimated. Two, when you’re dealing with such a long flight and so much travel time, especially when you get on that plane after training hard, the blood settles down in your legs and your feet swell up a bit, so getting your body moving and getting it back to normal after the travel, that’s another one. And three, the food is a little different than it is in Hawaii, so we had to make the proper adjustments to my diet plan, figuring out what we were gonna have access to and what we needed to bring with us. You have to make all those different calculations.”

Yeah, this is the same Chris Leben we all know and love. So let’s just call it a refined version of “The Crippler,” one who has learned that to make the most out of his career, he had to look at himself and be honest in his subsequent assessment.

“You have to know yourself, and one thing I know is just how much to trust myself and just how much I can’t trust myself, and that’s part of the reason I bring coaches out now for over a month before my fight, and it’s also part of the reason I leave a little early,” he said. “I get out and get my head cleared and get ready to go to battle.”

Against Munoz, he will be in for a battle, and one scheduled for five rounds, the first time ever in the UFC for a non-title bout. And while most expect the bout to end far before 25 minutes are up, given the styles and knockout power both men possess, in this sport anything is possible, so Leben has made sure to prepare to go the distance, which is yet another wrinkle added to his training camp that has forced him to prepare not only physically, but mentally.

“The day before I left (for Birmingham), I did five fives with fresh guys, and it takes a lot more to get ready for,” he said. “The hardest part is that you’re training and conditioning as hard as you possibly can and then they say, ‘get ready for ten more minutes,’ what do you do differently? So there has been some gameplan restructure and some changes in my diet to help bring my cardio up another notch and help me maintain a consistent pace through a 25 minute bout.”

Thankfully, Leben has had a full training camp for this bout, which follows his 27 second knockout of one his fighting heroes, Wanderlei Silva, in July. Given the method of victory and his admiration of Silva, the win was an emotional one, which makes you wonder whether it was difficult for him to recharge the batteries for Munoz.

“It hasn’t been hard because I’ve been real motivated,” he said. “Especially after a good win streak and then a tough loss against Brian Stann, winning against Wanderlei reminds me what I can accomplish if I put my mind to it, and how dangerous it is to let your guard down in this sport. I did that a little bit against Stann and I paid for it, so with Munoz, we’ve definitely been training harder than ever, we’re coming out here early to get prepared, and the nice thing about coming out here early is that it gets me away from my life. It’s just me, my team, and we’re here to fight, so I have nothing from now until fight day but to focus on that 25 minute bout.”

And getting back into the Octagon for the third time this year was an important thing for Leben, who was 2010’s Comeback Fighter of the Year for snapping a 3-5 stretch with three straight wins over Jay Silva, Aaron Simpson, and Yoshihiro Akiyama, the latter two bouts coming within two weeks of each other. This year, he is currently 1-1, and looking to make it 2-1 this weekend. And when it comes to preparation, he has no complaints.

“I wanted to make sure I had proper time to prepare for my next fight,” said Leben of the time following the Silva victory. “I didn’t want to jump right into something and I definitely didn’t want to have another Akiyama situation come up. But at the same time, it’s important for me to stay active; otherwise I would have let myself go too far.”

Every little bit counts against a fighter like Munoz, a former NCAA Division I wrestling champion who has developed a sound striking game that makes him dangerous wherever the fight goes. But when you’re talking about Leben, he’ll only go to the ground if necessary.

“He’s a tough wrestler,” said Leben of Munoz. “His hands are coming along. In the WEC he was more of a wrestler, and now we’re seeing more of a martial artist. But I think he’s still probably got a little bit of a ways to go, and I hope to exploit some of those holes in his game. But the biggest thing about Munoz is his heart and determination. I’ve seen him get rocked and I’ve seen him stay in it and come back from being close to out and win those fights. I know that he’s gonna refuse to lose, so I’m gonna have to put him away.”

Now that’s the old Chris Leben talking, and for all his attention to detail in the lead-up to this important battle, he is still that guy who grits his teeth, puts his chin down and swings for the fences when the bell rings. The only difference is that he knows that the more times he can walk out of the Octagon with his hand raised, the more he will establish himself as a contender and not just as an entertaining gatekeeper. And if he has his way, this fight just may be the one to do the trick.

“The UFC sometimes viewed me in the role of the gatekeeper, and I hate that,” he said. “I’d like them to view me in the role of a number one contender, especially after taking this first five round (non-title) fight. If I go out there and win in decisive fashion, that’s five (wins) out of six (bouts), and I feel I definitely should be the number one contender. And if they give me that fight, I’d be pretty happy about it for sure.”

UFC 138 is headlined by the five round non-title middleweight bout between Chris Leben and Mark Munoz, and the bantamweight showdown between Brad Pickett and Renan Barao. For viewing info, go to www.ufc.com/event/UFC138/watch

MAIN EVENT
Mark Munoz (186) VS Chris Leben (186)

MAIN CARD
Renan Barao (136) VS Brad Pickett (134)  
Papy Abedi (170) VS Thiago Alves (171*)
Edward Faaloloto (155) VS Terry Etim (156)
Anthony Perosh (205) VS Cyrille Diabate (206)

ONLINE FIGHTS
Justin Edwards (170) VS John Maguire (170)
Jason Young (145) VS Michihiro Omigawa (145)  
Phil De Fries (243) VS Rob Broughton (258)
Che Mills (169) VS Chris Cope (170)
Vaughan Lee (135) VS Chris Cariaso (135)

*Alves made weight on his second attempt after initially weighing in at 172 pounds

Every second counts. Not just in the Octagon, where lightweight Edward Faaloloto will be looking for his first UFC win on Saturday against Terry Etim, but in life, where the Hawaiian has earned a black belt in the art of time management.

See, while other fighters used the long plane ride to Birmingham, England to catch up on their rest before this weekend’s UFC 138 card, Faaloloto took the opportunity to catch up on his homework, as the full-time mixed martial artist is also a full-time student at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, a juggling act he says he manages “The best I can.”

“It’s not easy,” he continues, “but thankfully, I’ve got an awesome gym and awesome professors, so they understand that I’m fighting right now and trying to squeeze everything in between. During this camp, I had to leave to San Diego to train at Alliance Gym for three weeks, so I told the professors and they knew what was going on, so they let me hold all my work until I got back.”

And after knocking out what work he can while traveling the friendly skies, the English major will then focus on knocking out returning Terry Etim this weekend in a main card bout that will put the spotlight on Faaloloto like never before. It’s just another moment in a whirlwind year that has taken the 27-year old’s life on a crazy new turn.

Finishing up his service with the United States Navy last year, Faaloloto got a late notice call to face Anthony Njokuani in a November 2010 WEC bout, and suddenly everything changed for him.

“To be honest, MMA started off as just my hobby,” he said. “I was always a student; I was in the military, and I fought a little bit while I was there, but it could only be my hobby then because my job was full-time. But I decided to get out, and then the opportunity for the WEC popped up and I jumped on it. It’s been a dream.”

The hard-hitting Njokuani shook Faaloloto out of that dream for a moment with a second round knockout, but given his lack of experience and the short notice of the fight, it was an explainable loss, not that Faaloloto is looking for excuses.

“I don’t want to make excuses or take anything away from Njokuani, he’s an awesome fighter, and the fact is, he won that fight, so I want to make that clear,” he said. “If I were to honestly look at it, I just got out of the military and that (getting the fight) was a surprise. It was kinda short notice, and at the time there were a lot of things that weren’t going right. But ultimately, I just blame my inexperience. As bad as I want it and as hard as I’m working, I’m still behind the bar when it comes down to putting in the hours in the cage, and I think that’s been the biggest factor in my fighting. I can improve my standup, ground, cardio, and mind the best I can, but ultimately, I still have to clock in those hours.”

Faaloloto (5-2) suffered a second straight defeat when Ultimate Fighter 12 finalist Michael Johnson stopped him in the first round of their June UFC live bout, but like all Hawaiian fighters, he’s not going away without a fight.

“I wouldn’t train as hard as I am, and I wouldn’t put myself through this if I really didn’t want to fight in the UFC,” he said. “I really, really want this, and I do want to pursue MMA, and my hobby is my life now. So I have every intention of getting better and working my way up there. My goal is to go in there, make a statement and move on up.”

It’s a tough mountain to climb, especially when he’s giving up a significant amount of experience to the talented Etim, but with one punch stopping power and the grit that comes with a life spent fighting for every inch you got, Faaloloto has the intangibles that make him a live underdog against anyone he faces.

“During training, when I have to write that 10 page paper that’s due tomorrow morning and still have to go to the gym and put in three hours of work, that’s what I think about,” said Faaloloto, who was raised by his grandparents and hanging with the wrong crowd before discovering martial arts as a teenager. “I look back at my past and see where I’m at now when I feel like complaining or feel like taking time off. I can’t stay still, I can’t be stagnant, because life will pass me by. And it’s in those moments that I look back.”

He also wants to set an example for his daughter.

“I want her to know that if you really, really want something, regardless of how hard it may be or all the circumstances that may come your way, you have to go get it, and that’s what it comes down to.”

That kind of motivation can make a fighter very dangerous when the bell rings, and Faaloloto expects to bring it to Etim on Saturday.

“I have every intention of making this a very exciting fight,” he said. “Terry Etim has been out for over a year, but I don’t expect him to be rusty at all. I do plan on giving him a nice big welcome though. And my gameplan when I come at Terry Etim is to make more of a statement to reestablish myself to everyone else.”

And with a resounding win on the UFC 138 main card that will be seen around the world, Faaloloto can erase the memory of his two losses in 15 minutes or less. That’s precisely the idea, he says.

“Everything is working out in such a way that this is the culmination of it. I had no idea I was gonna fight in England, and now I’m on the main card. The universe is speaking, and I have something to say.”