If you’ve ever seen any one of Canadian welterweight prospect Sheldon Westcott’s seven pro fights, you might have a hard time believing that the MMA career of Westcott, who faces Ryan Jensen tonight at Aggression MMA 9, could be attributed to something along the lines of track and field.
However, the 5-1-1 prospect not only did track and field, but he also found an opening to pursue an MMA career when he got injured.
“I used to run track and field for Canada,” Westcott told Bleacher Report MMA recently, “and I got hurt, and I took a year off.”
When Sheldon returned home, he found work at a fitness gym, where he quickly learned that one of the personal trainers he worked with had somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 professional fights.
For a kid like Westcott, who was already watching MMA before he ever went into the sport, the persistent motivation to try his hand out in mixed martial arts was all he needed to make the choice to go full-time into MMA, and after four months, along came Victor Bachmann.
“After that, I couldn’t do ‘amateur anything,'” Westcott recalled.
Westcott remembers that fight for many reasons, but he especially remember three things about that fight.
Firstly, he remembers that the judges that scored the fight for Bachmann had Bachmann winning 29-28, while the judge that had Westcott winning had it 30-27 for Westcott.
Secondly, he remembers that fight because sometime after, Bachmann actually trained with Westcott.
Thirdly and lastly, he remembers the Bachmann fight because, as he put it, “I learned way more from that loss than I ever could’ve if I had won that fight.”
Since the loss to Bachmann, Westcott has won all but one of his pro fights, but if you ask him about his past two fights—a unanimous decision win and a split draw, both of which came against Thomas “Wildman” Denny—Westcott will tell you straight up that there is no way the first fight with Denny should have been a draw.
“I dominated the first round, could have been scored a 10-8,” Westcott said. “[In the] second round, I dropped him with strikes, fought off sub[mission] attempts, and …he landed one strike, and that was right before I dropped him…the third round, he took my back and held me there. In all honesty, it should’ve been a unanimous decision, 29-28, or even 27-29.”
The rematch with Denny would see Westcott get a point taken away but still walk out with the unanimous decision win, and that win leads him to tonight’s fight with Jay Jensen.
Now, when B/R MMA caught up with Westcott originally, he was scheduled to face Dave Cochran, who is “about 5’7″, but he just throws bombs,” according to Westcott.
Cochran’s fought in Strikeforce, King of the Cage, IFC and Shooto, but when he had to pull out of the fight, Westcott drew 7-6 Jay Jensen, who has four wins by some form of KO and three submission wins against two TKO losses, two submission losses, one unanimous decision loss and a split decision loss.
Despite the change in opponents, fans of Westcott can expect the same thing Westcott always delivers in fights: lots of action and zero relent from bell to bell.
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