“The Ultimate Fighter” season 1 middleweight winner Diego “Nightmare” Sanchez (21-4) wants to avoid a third straight loss after a disappointing return to the UFC welterweight division. Sanchez had dropped to lightweight, suffering a TKO to then champ BJ Penn, and had hoped to make a successful return to 170. He faced a younger John Hathaway, admitting now that he took his opponent too lightly, and paid the price dropping a unanimous decision to the fighter.
Looking back, Sanchez realizes his mistakes, something he doesn’t want to repeat when he faces Paulo Thiago this Saturday as part of UFC 121: Lesnar vs. Velasquez.
“I took him lightly,” said Sanchez. “I said I’m gonna dominate this guy, and knock him out on the feet or take him down. I just totally underestimated my opponent, made that mistake, never gonna make it again, and it was hard to come back from that (knee) because it forced me to become desperate. I was trying to force the knockout, force something to happen, and I couldn’t just find my flow and my rhythm. I had to really be desperate and try to come back and knock him out or find some way to win, and then it was too late.”
“I want to be the best and I want to continue to get better,” he said. “I’ve made some mistakes in my career, I’ve made some bad decisions, and there’s been multiple times where I was growing up and I got sucked into the limelight. But right now, I realized in my last fight that when it’s all said and done, it just comes down to earning the W. So my mentality now is, I’m just gonna earn it. I’m gonna earn the victory, work hard, and when I go in that gym, I want to be the hardest worker in there. That’s my whole new mindset on mixed martial arts and my career – be the hardest worker and earn the victory. John came in there, he worked harder than me, he earned the victory, he was more disciplined, and that’s the way it goes in MMA.”
Read the entire interview with Diego Sanchez at UFC.com.