The biggest fight of Dave Jansen’s career awaits him Friday in the form of a Bellator lightweight title shot.
Taking on current 155-pound champ Will Brooks at Bellator 136 in Irvine, California, Jansen should perhaps feel jitters and nervousness.
Instead, he’s calm and introspective.
He clawed his way out of metaphorical hell to earn this chance, and he doesn’t intend to squander it. While he is a heavy betting underdog against Brooks, Jansen feels he knows something others don’t, and this knowledge brings him supreme confidence.
“He [Brooks] has strong striking, strong wrestling and he’s super confident in himself,” Jansen told Bleacher Report. “These are all virtues I feel I possess even more so than him. I see holes in his game I’m looking to exploit—mentally and physically—and I just have the right people around me. I feel like I am the right person to get this job done and take the belt back to Portland with me.”
A quick glance at Jansen’s resume will tell you he owns the experience and the talent necessary to earn a victory Friday evening. He’s 20-2—losing only to UFC veterans—and he’s currently enjoying a seven-fight winning streak inside the Bellator cage.
That ride, however, has been anything but smooth.
After winning the Bellator Season Seven Lightweight Tournament in March of 2013, Jansen earned a shot at then-lightweight champ Michael Chandler’s strap. He’d conquered mental and physical challenges alike on his road to this moment, and his time had come.
He was ready for the spotlight. And then he blew out his knee.
Opportunity vanished.
After an 18-month layoff spent recovering and preparing to fight another day, Jansen returned to the cage at Bellator 130, defeating Rick Hawn via unanimous decision.
“For me, it [the layoff] was just a little speed bump,” Jansen said. “I didn’t have to fight Rick Hawn. They offered me the fight, and I jumped right on it because I thought it’d be a great opportunity to get myself right back into contention. I just looked at it as a way to step my game up. I’m a better fighter for preparing for Rick Hawn.”
Jansen’s performance did not suffer upon his return, and he credits his success to his friends, trainers, family and teammates. They’re a tight-knit bunch—“We’re one organism,” as he tells it—and they would not let him fail.
Beyond that triumph, though, there’s more to the Jansen story.
After a successful high school wrestling career that saw him win the Oregon state championship in 1997, Jansen went to college at the University of Oregon with a sweet scholarship in hand. His collegiate career was set: He’d wrestle, he’d get his degree and he’d begin his life.
In two years, instead of rising to national contention in the wrestling scene, he was out of school altogether.
“I hurt myself on a skateboard [in college],” Jansen said. “From that point on, I was in a mental funk. I just got into a self-sabotaging thought process.”
After years of mental anguish working as a short-order cook, Jansen found his sanctuary some six years later in MMA. A co-worker, UFC veteran Chris Wilson, told Jansen about the sport, suggesting it as a way to vent and to fill the combat void left by his abrupt departure from wrestling.
Upon seeing Wilson compete in an International Fight League event on TV, Jansen was sold.
“That’s when I noticed, ‘Oh, Portland has its own professional MMA team. I want to be on that!'” Jansen said. “And I knew nothing about fighting. I just figured I’d go in there and just, ‘Who is this Ryan Schultz? I can take him.’ I go out to Team Quest and I learned, ‘Oh, I need to learn how to fight.’ That’s when guys like Ian Loveland, Matt Horwich, Ed Herman and Robert Follis really helped me out on so many levels.”
Jansen got off to a blazing 13-0 start as a professional before dropping back-to-back bouts under the World Extreme Cagefighting banner to Kamal Shalorus and Ricardo Lamas, but his fate was already sealed.
He found what he needed. Fighting gave him the drive and the will to make something better of himself, and he was committed for life.
“I could’ve gone one of two ways,” Jansen said. “I could’ve just been a miserable short-order cook smoking cigarettes and drinking after work. I could’ve gone that route. But thankfully I chose the other route, which was just to better myself and make conscious decisions that move myself forward and hopefully humanity at the same time.”
At Bellator 136, Jansen looks to take the next step on this journey, and the whole experience is as much inward as it is outward for him. His emotions were at war, and he conquered them.
Now he moves on to the outward battle against Brooks, where he will have the chance to turn his achievements into something more tangible, something more easily displayed and presented to the world: a shiny golden belt.
“It’s going to help me, [and] it’s going to help a lot of people in my life,” Jansen said. “I think success is a good thing, and I’m ready to accept it.”
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