Joaquin Buckley certainly caused a stir last week ahead of his Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Vegas 48 clash with Abdul Razak Alhassan. Why? Well, because he called upon the aid of the internet-famous Detroit Urban Survival Training (D.U.S.T.) commander Dale Brown who cornered him during the fight.
The results ultimately were positive as Brown can now say UFC fighters are undefeated when he’s assisted them.
“We just started brainstorming, what if I put this man in my corner?” Buckley said on The MMA Hour. “What type of impact would that make? After that, history was made on Feb. 19 (2022).
“When everything started blowing up the way that it did, I reached out to him and was like, ‘Hey, would you be cool being in my corner?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I think we’ll pretty much blow up the internet,’ which we did. It went crazy.
“He was down from the get-go,” Buckley continued. “Shout out to Dale Brown. He’s a cool dude, he gets a lot of negativity about the things that he’s doing but he’s legit in the self-defense and security game [for] like 26 years. He was a military paratrooper, he knows what he’s talking about. He’s been in the game for a minute.”
Prior to making the offer, Buckley and Brown already had familiarity as “New Mansa” visited and met Brown in person.
What was expected to be an action-packed affair came down to the wire as Buckley defeated Alhassan via split decision in their 185-pound Middleweight affair. While many have doubted and continue to doubt the effectiveness of Brown’s teachings, Buckley suggests that it’s best to just go and see for oneself.
“His gym is open for anyone that wants to come in,” Buckley explained. “He doesn’t turn away anybody. There’s a lot of fighters talking about how they want to beat him up, they want to test these tactics. You all can go see him. Just go down there. Go to Detroit, you got to have that money, though. Can’t go in there for free.
“You can definitely use these [moves] on streets. Whatever it takes, whatever you got to do to get yourself out of a certain situation — eye gouge, elbows, joint manipulation — those things will work in an actual fight, definitely when you’re talking about someone who has never trained in combat.”
The Alhassan win got Buckley back on a winning streak after his Jan. 2021 upset loss to Alessio Di Chirico. The 27-year-old is now 4-1 inside the Octagon (14-4 overall) and has only seen the judges’ scorecards on this singular occasion, whether in victory or defeat, since he last fought for Bellator in 2018.